The Drake is among city’s sober hotels

Prioritize Sober Hotels, Filling Vacancies

San Francisco’s homeless crisis continues despite vastly more permanent supportive housing. I helped shape San Francisco’s master leasing program and overall Housing First strategy. Our high housing cost city has done much better providing exits from homelessness than many realize.

But the status quo isn’t working. New city homeless policies are urgently needed. Here are some that can happen soon.

Expand Sober Hotels

Until the demand among the unhoused is met, every property San Francisco acquires with Prop C funds should be a sober home. Current homeless policies make sober living too hard to obtain for the unhoused.

City officials say overdoses. Reducing overdoses requires San Francisco to primarily if not exclusively fund new hotels where residents voluntarily agree to not use drugs or alcohol.

Why is San Francisco not already doing this? Supervisor Ahsha Safai has championed sober housing. Mayor Breed has arranged funding for some sites. But its way too small scale and underfunded.

San Francisco needs to go big on recovery and sobriety.

This means using future city acquisitions to further the recovery agenda.

All of the existing HSH-funded permanent supportive housing properties will remain non-sober. So those who want to use alcohol and drugs will have ample opportunities for housing that allows this. But given the current scarcity of sober hotels, future acquisitions should mandate a clean and sober environment

Sober hotels also cut down the drug market for nearby dealers.

Resume Step-Up Housing

In addition to adding exits from homelessness the city should resume its step up housing program. This moves formerly homeless residents of SROs who lack private bathrooms into high quality all private bath hotels like the Abigail and Bristol. Step up housing can also provide sober hotel options for those currently living in permanent supportive housing.

Step-up housing adds to the overall affordable housing supply by using smaller properties that don’t work for full service SROs. Since those moving into step-up housing create vacancies in their former rooms, the strategy further increases capacity for the unhoused. Step-up housing is also far more cost effective because tenants do not require the level of on-site services.

Fill Affordable Vacancies

Permanent supportive housing

When I last checked the city’s permanent supportive housing supply had 600 rooms ready to rent but sitting vacant. That’s unacceptable. With so many people lacking homes we can’t have 600 vacancies (and this does not count rooms vacant due to disrepair).

I explained why SRO permanent supportive housing vacancies “exploded” in 2019 (“San Francisco’s Failed Homeless Strategy,” February 23, 2021). HSH has not fixed this vacancy crisis. I suggest a Board of Supervisors committee require HSH to provide bi-weekly reports on filling these vacancies as this will bring attention to the crisis.

Affordable BMR units

I heard from a landlord last week about the large number of vacant BMR units in their building—which have been vacant for a year! The city has epic waiting lists for affordable housing and the Mayor’s Office of Housing (MOH) can’t figure out how to fill vacancies?

Nonprofits dependent on MOH action report similar delays. Why does San Francisco have a dysfunctional operation for filling affordable housing units? How about pre-qualifying those on waiting lists so they can occupy vacant units within a month?

This is another area where a Supervisors Committee must take ownership. This problem precedes Mayor Breed but her administration is perpetuating it. San Francisco can pass a vacant unit tax but what about all the vacant BMR units that everyone wants filled but stay vacant due to city inaction?

Housing for High Needs Residents

Nonprofit providers and advocates have long pushed for the city to acquire facilities for those unable to function effectively in the standard permanent. Instead, San Francisco sends people to traditional sites where the tenant then causes harm to themselves and others.

The problem has worsened as the unhoused population has become more challenging. These problem tenants make life miserable for those around them and the staff that tries to help; yet the city does not want to spend the money to appropriately house this population. The city also figures (correctly) that the media will blame the nonprofit service provider for any problems these high need tenants cause.

I can’t think of a single media story about the need for San Francisco city government to stop sending very troubled people to housing not suitable for them. Reporters find it easier to blame the housing provider.

Prop C gives San Francisco enough money to provide suitable homes for the high-service need unhoused. Our streets tell the story of the city’s failure to serve this population.

The problem is not outreach

San Francisco must stop making believe that most people are on the street due to a lack of outreach. In fact, there’s so much overlapping outreach that services have been offered to people time and again and most aren’t interested.

So why do we promote the outreach fiction? Because it enables us to avoid the real challenge: how can San Francisco deal with unhoused people who reject housing or shelter? People who don’t want to pay rent?

San Francisco has long preferred avoiding this question. We instead talk about the vast majority who want housing. But those rejecting services block sidewalks with tents and make life more difficult for those living in lower-income neighborhoods.

It’s time for San Francisco politicians to honestly address how the city should respond to people who reject all services. As with the other ideas raised above, San Francisco’s homeless strategy needs to get off auto-pilot—sticking primarily with the status quo will not make the necessary progress.

Randy Shaw

Randy Shaw is the Editor of Beyond Chron and the Director of San Francisco’s Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which publishes Beyond Chron. Shaw’s latest book is Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America. He is the author of four prior books on activism, including The Activist’s Handbook: Winning Social Change in the 21st Century, and Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century. He is also the author of The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco

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Monday night though, San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin was on the offensive. He was the feature speaker at a town hall meeting at Manny’s in the Mission District of San Francisco.

Boudin addressed a crowd of nearly 200 San Franciscans as his recall election on June 7 is now less than three months away.

“I’m proud of the fact that in my two years in office we’ve increased our charging rate for sexual assault, we’ve increased our conviction rate for homicide cases, and we filed more than 10,000 new criminal cases,” said Boudin .

VIDEO: Bay Area DA’s meet with crime survivors to find solutions, better ways to support victims

The crowd inside at Manny’s was there to ask Boudin questions, but a pro-recall crowd of two dozen people were outside, making it known they aren’t happy with the district attorney. In fact we even saw drama between someone appearing to be a Boudin supporter, and another person in favor of the recall.

“This DA, his policies have failed!” said a recall supporter.

“How do you know if his policies have failed? If he hasn’t had a chance to do that and the police have been sabotaging him!” said a Boudin supporter.

“I haven’t really had a chance to govern properly. I’m not making excuses, I’m just stating facts here but I took office in January 2020, less than two months later I was told by the Department of Public Health that I and my staff couldn’t go into our office,” said Boudin.

RELATED: Anger among San Francisco’s Asian American voters may influence DA Boudin recall, report says

But over the course of the last two year’s San Franciscans have seen vehicle theft property crimes continue to plague the city and thefts continue to hurt businesses.

Boudin though refusing to answer our questions about that as he left Monday’s town hall.

“I’m really late for another event. Happy to talk about it, really late for another event,” said the district attorney as he walked away from our camera.

Homelessness was a main focus at the town hall along with diversion programs instead of incarceration in certain cases. Boudin making reference to a successful program in Eugene, Oregon where social workers respond to calls instead of police.

“I think if we’re serious about reducing violence, reducing the police clearance rate, about building public safety, then we’ve got to invest in programs like that one,” said Boudin.

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A self-proclaimed’ old-school junkie’ who moved from Texas to San Francisco because ‘it’s f*****g easy’ to be homeless there claims he’s being paid by the city government to be homeless on the streets, getting $620 in cash per month and hundreds of food stamps while he sells Narcan and enjoys Amazon Prime and Netflix on his phone.

‘This right now is literally by choice, literally by choice. If we’re going to be realistic, they pay you to be homeless here,’ James, a homeless man with face tattoos who has been living in San Francisco since June, told Michael Shellenberger, author of San Fransicko, a book about how the city’s progressive leaders are accused of worsening homelessness, inequality and crime.

James said it only took one phone call to receive government assistance, including hundreds in cash and food stamps worth approximately $100, and notes the ‘free money’ is motivation to remain homeless.

‘F*****g phone call bro, a f*****g phone call. Two hundred food stamps and $620 cash a month. Forget about it. Why wouldn’t I do it? You know, it’s f*****g free money dude,’ he explained. ‘Why would I want to pay rent? I’m not doing s**t. I’ve got a f*****g cell phone that I have Amazon Prime and Netflix on.’

James said the drug crisis in San Francisco has become incredibly ‘disgusting,’ with dealers providing impure substances to users who then overdose because they take drugs alone.

He also blamed the cops for failing to arrest foreign-born dealers, alleging the police are ‘getting paid with fentanyl.’

‘I’ve talked to the cops here. “I’m literally 10 feet away from the drug dealers talking to you guys, why don’t you go arrest them right now?” he said. ”And they’re like, “arrest them for what?… San Francisco is a sanctuary city. We arrest the Hondurans and we put them in jail, they’re out two days later.”’

‘If they’re f*****g letting the Hondurans deal on the corner every day, somebody getting paid with fentanyl,’ James added.

The interview comes as the city’s homelessness and drug problems have worsened as the national opioid crisis escalated over the course of the pandemic, an issue that both local and federal leaders say they’re aiming to tackle.

To limit infections and fatalities among drug users, the Biden administration created a $30 million grant program to reduce substance abuse to underserved communities.

A new ‘linkage center’ aimed at connecting homeless street addicts with drug rehab facilities opened in San Francisco last month, but distressing images show an open air illicit drug consumption site that is now littered with needles and crowded with addicts shooting up in broad daylight.

The center, which opened on January 18, is part of the San Francisco Mayor London Breed’s Tenderloin Emergency Intervention plan introduced last year, which aims to crackdown on open air drug use and drug dealing in the crime-ravaged downtown neighborhood. When declaring the state of emergency, Breed also pushed San Francisco officers to get aggressive and ‘less tolerant of all the bulls*** that has destroyed our city’.

James, self-proclaimed’ old-school junkie’ who moved from Texas to San Francisco because ‘it’s f*****g easy’ to be homeless there, claims he’s being paid by the city government to be homeless on the streets, getting $620 in cash per month and hundreds of food stamps while he sells Narcan and enjoys Amazon Prime and Netflix on his phone

James shared firsthand how the drug crisis in San Francisco is worsening amid the fentanyl-fueled opioid epidemic.

‘I can take you to a dead body right now,’ he told Shellenberger.

‘People are stupid out here. They f*****g use alone. They’ll f*****g get a big bag of fentanyl and they’ll get a different batch and they’re by themselves and …. Nobody’s going to fucking find you for days.’ 

He added: ‘I saved six people’s lives last week. We hadn’t even met before.’

The addict explained that he issues to Narcan to people who are overdosing and after he saves their lives, he cleans out the vials and sells them for $65 each.

He also recollected how recently two teens, aged 15 and 16, approached him on the street in search of oxycontin and explained how they wouldn’t find that particular opioid on the streets. 

Because he ‘needed the money,’ he instead sold the teens fentanyl and taught them how to administer Narcan – an emergency treatment that is injected into an overdose victim – ‘in case they died’.

‘These two kids came up and they’re like: “Hey do you guys know where to get any oxycontin?”’ James told Shellenberger. ‘And I’m like, “look dude, I’mma tell you right now, you’re not going to get oxycontin out here on the street.”’

James said the teens had $40 to spend on drugs, which he used to purchase fentanyl for them. 

‘I said: “Ok, this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to take your money” and I went and I got them fentanyl,’ he recalled.

‘I f*****g brought it back and I set it down in front of them and I said “This is a gram of fentanyl. It is enough to kill six people who have never used it.”‘

James shared firsthand how the drug crisis in San Francisco is worsening amid the fentanyl-fueled opioid epidemic. He said he recently helped teens purchase fentanyl and taught them how to inject themselves with Narcan in case they overdosed

James showed the teens how much fentanyl he takes to get high and then provided a Narcan tutorial, citing how he knew they were going to continue to use drugs regardless of whether or not he helped them get high.

‘I was like “I’m keeping your money and now I’m going to teach you how to save each others’ lives because you’re not gonna f*****g stop. I can’t steer you away from doing it, but the best thing I can do for you now is give you real drugs and show you how to do it properly and show you how to save your friend’s life,”‘ he said.

‘And I showed them how to pull up Narcan and how to inject each other with the Narcan needle in case they died.’

He added: ‘I needed the money. Let’s be honest.’ 

James also explained how the police are no longer acting as authority figures but have instead become more like neighbors.

‘We used to battle with the cops, now it’s like the cops are – it’s like they’re your neighbor, you know?’ he said.

‘The cops told us this morning like: “Oh, it’d be easier if you guys packed up in the morning. We wouldn’t have to come out here.”’

‘And I’m like “What are you talking about?” He’s like “Pack up you’re s**t in the morning” and I’m like “why?” He’s like “oh, ok” and went on.’

San Francisco is grappling with lawlessness that has seen the city overrun with crime over the past two years. Across the entire city last November, there were 3,375 reports of larceny theft, the majority being car break-ins, with SFPD’s Central District seeing the most car smash-and-grabs, at a total of 876. 

Crime in San Francisco has been a serious issue in the past year. Throughout January, the city recorded three homicides – up from two in the same period in 2021. Meanwhile, overall crime so far this month has decreased by 21.8% compared to the same time period last year

Throughout January, there was a 50 percent increase in homicides with three reported between January 1 and January 23, compared to only two during the same time frame last year, but overall crime has decreased by 21.8 percent, according to crime statistics released by the San Francisco Police Department.

Assault in the city has decreased by more than 10 percent from 151 cases last year at this time to 135.  

Larceny theft cases have also decreased about 15 percent with cases so far this month at 1,282, which are down from 1,517 from the same time last year.   

Robbery cases decreased about 24 percent and rape cases decreased 22 percent. 

A high percentage of an estimated 8,000 homeless people in San Francisco – many of whom pitch tents in the Tenderloin – are struggling with chronic addiction or severe mental illness, often both. Some people rant in the streets, nude and in need of medical help. Last year, 712 people died of drug overdoses, compared with 257 people who died of COVID-19.  

Homelessness in the Bay Area has become such a problem people are being urged to give their spare rooms over to the homeless.

Some charities have urged local families – who are sick of seeing the homeless crisis on their doorsteps – to do something about it personally by taking unhoused people into their own homes and spare rooms – and some schemes have little to no compensation.  

Homelessness in the Bay Area has become such a problem people are being urged to give their spare rooms over to the homeless

Homeless people are seen on the streets of San Francisco on January 23, as the mayor declares a state of emergency and a crop of new schemes to provide housing are promoted

A tent encampment is seen in the Tenderloin section of San Francisco on January 23

Drone footage shows lines of people sitting outside a shelter in San Francisco on January 18

Since 2017, nonprofit Safe Time has made more than 60 placements. There are an estimated 30,000 homeless in the five-county Bay Area – which are comprised of the East Bay, North Bay, South Bay, Peninsula and the city of San Francisco regions.  

The mayor of the Richmond, located in the East Bay county of Contra Costa about 20 miles from downtown San Francisco, has set up a program to match homeless people with local landlords who have empty apartments. 

Funded by private donations, it will pay the landlords a year’s rent up front to encourage them to forgo the usual credit, employment and background checks for tenants. 

In another move to combat to help those living on the streets, San Francisco opened a center for homeless addicts last month. The supervised drug consumption area is an outdoor fenced section of the linkage center – just blocks away from the city’s court house, San Francisco City Hall and the Civic Center. 

However, disturbing images taken by DailyMail.com last month highlight how little significant the addiction crisis is in the city.

Photos show a woman slumped over in a wheelchair, her pants down around her ankles, preparing to inject a needle into her thigh. The woman sitting on the ground next to her has a needle to her neck.  

Many others are sitting on the ground among trash, empty food containers and dirty blankets, as they fumble in with drug paraphernalia in the cold weather.  

A woman is slumped over in a wheelchair, preparing to inject a needle into her thigh, at a new ‘linkage center’ that opened in San Francisco last month, aimed at connecting homeless street addicts with drug rehab facilities

The center, which opened January 18, is aimed at helping connect people to services, but distressing images depict an illicit drug consumption site that is now littered with needles and and crowded with addicts shooting up in broad daylight

Drone images show the site with dozens of people openly dealing, smoking and injecting drugs on the plaza. A San Francisco police cruiser rolled past but did nothing

The linkage center is located at 1172 Market Street, in the United Nations Plaza, the city’s largest open air drug market. The supervised drug consumption area is an outdoor fenced section of the linkage center, where many people were seen fumbling with drug paraphernalia

The center is equipped to serve up to 100 people at a time who are suffering from drug use and mental health issues, connecting with long-term and short-term services like health care and housing

The plan came in the midst of a local, state, and national debate over whether the city should open a ‘supervised drug consumption’ site as a tactic for reducing drug overdose deaths

A high percentage of an estimated 8,000 homeless people in San Francisco – many of whom pitch tents in the Tenderloin – are struggling with chronic addiction or severe mental illness, often both

The center is equipped to serve up to 100 people at a time who are suffering from drug use and mental health issues, connecting with long-term and short-term services like health care and housing

Meanwhile, President Biden’s Health and Human Services department (HHS) is finalizing funding to dole out crack pipes to drug addicts as part of its ‘Harm Reduction Plan.’

The $30 million grant program, which accepted applications until Monday and will begin doling out money in May, intends to provide funds to nonprofits and local governments to make drug use safer, to advance ‘racial equity.’

Fox News host Tucker Carlson slammed the administration over the program, claiming the government would be giving out ‘free crack pipes to black people.’ 

Although the administration has clarified that they’re distributing safe smoking kits, not crack pipes, Carlson doubled down on his claims Tuesday night. 

‘The Biden administration is promoting drug addiction,’ he said. ‘They’ve been caught doing it and now they’re denying it.’   

A spokesperson for Health and Human Services told the Washington Free Beacon that included in these kits could be pipes for users to smoke substances like crack cocaine and crystal methamphetamine, or ‘any illicit substance.’ 

HHS said that the kits will serve to limit the risk of infection – typically users smoke out of glass pipes which can lead to cuts and sores that become infected with diseases like Hepatitis-C. 

The kits include a rubber mouthpiece to prevent cuts and burns, brass screens to filter contaminants and disinfectant wipes. 

Applicants for the program get priority if they serve ‘underserved communities,’ such as African Americans or Native Americans, or LGBTQ people.

The grant program lasts three years and includes 25 awards of up to $400,000.  

Tucker Carlson mocked the Biden administration’s plan to distribute safe smoking kits to underserved communities on his show Tuesday night

Joe Biden’s Health and Human Services Department said that the kits will serve to limit the risk of infection drug users face and will prioritize underserved communities

U.S. Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters on Wednesday that the Beacon’s story was inaccurate and that crack pipes were never involved in the government’s kits. 

It came after Carlson mocked the idea on Tuesday night.  

‘You may recall that on his first day in office more than a year ago, the new president explained that equity will require determination and creativity,’ Carlson told his viewers.

‘This week he proved that is true. Joe Biden’s latest idea is to pay black people to smoke more crack.’

The Fox News host said that progressive groups, many of them funded by George Soros’s institutions, were encouraging Biden’s plan, and joked that the president’s 52-year-old son – who had a highly-publicized crack addiction – exemplified the ‘crack gap’. 

Carlson also took aim at San Francisco’s open heroin market on Tuesday, bashing the Democratic city for facilitating an area where addicts could openly buy and use drugs in a safe location. 

He interviewed local mother Jacqui Berlinn, of Mothers Against Drug Deaths, who told him that such a facility would only keep addicts liker son ‘chained to addiction.’ 

‘[Mayor London] Breed’s policies and the policies in San Francisco give him everything that he needs to stay addicted,’ she told Carlson. 

‘They give him the plastic needles and give him the foil…'[M]y hopes were dashed and even talking to my son, he said it just looks like more of the same, kind of makes him feel hopeless.’

There were an estimated 100,306 drug overdose deaths in the 12-month period ending in April 2021, according to the CDC, a 28.5 per cent increase from just the year prior. Three-quarters of those deaths involved opioids, many of them being synthetic opioids, such as methamphetamine or fentanyl.   

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Last month, San Francisco Mayor London Breed said she made an emergency request to the city’s Board of Supervisors for more money to help support a police crackdown on crime, including open air drug dealing, car break-ins and retail theft.

“I’m proud this city believes in giving people second chances,” said Breed. “Nevertheless, we also need there to be accountability when someone does break the law. . . I was raised by my grandmother to believe in ‘tough love,’ in keeping your house in order, and we need that, now more than ever.”

But a few days later, San Francisco’s progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin denounced her plan as “knee-jerk” and “short-sighted,” thereby throwing a monkey wrench in her plans. Boudin called for San Francisco to “shift our focus to . . . addressing root causes of crime.” Without Boudin’s participation, Breed will struggle to achieve her goal of shutting down open-air drug use and dealing, and rising property crimes.

San Fran’s Mayor London Breed (right) is struggling to clean up the city but DA Boudin is standing in her way.AP (2)

To be sure, there is still a lot that Breed can do without Boudin. On Christmas Eve, after a 12-hour meeting, the city’s Board of Supervisors voted to support their declaration of a state of emergency in the Tenderloin neighborhood, where open-air drug use is widespread. This puts the city’s emergency management department in charge of responding to the drug overdose crisis, which kills about two people a day, and will allow the city to open a “linkage center” capable of referring addicts to housing and rehab.

But Boudin’s opposition, along with that of progressives on the Board of Supervisors, was enough for Breed to pull back from her promise to increase funding for the police and arrest people for using drugs in public. And without the active participation of Boudin, the arrests that are made are unlikely to result in prosecution — so dealers and other criminals are likely to just return to the street.

On Christmas Eve, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors voted to support the mayor’s declaration of a state of emergency in the Tenderloin neighborhood.ZUMAPRESS.com

Why is Boudin so opposed to Breed’s actions? According to the DA, “Affordable housing, quality education, access to health care and addiction services can provide the stability that empirical evidence has shown actually deters criminal activity.” But the “empirical evidence” Boudin pointed to simply found that, in 12 cities where more than 10% of the population received welfare benefits, “more crime occurs when more time has passed since welfare payments occurred.” It did not explore the role of any factors he cited.

Like other progressive prosecutors around the US, Boudin is a former public defender, and in office has acted as one, undermining the natural checks and balances that our fundamentally antagonistic criminal-justice system creates between public defenders and DAs. Unlike other DAs, Boudin grew up with his parents in prison, something he made a central selling point of his campaign.

Boudin routinely expresses animosity toward the police. At his election-night party, a supporter led the crowd in a chant against the Police Officers’ Association: “F–k the POA! F-k the POA!” Today, the San Francisco Police Department is short 400 officers and demoralized.

DA Boudin’s parents, Katherine Boudin and David Gilbert, both went to prison for their role in the Brink’s robbery of 1981.AP (2)

When he ran for office in 2018, Boudin announced, “We will not prosecute cases involving quality-of-life crimes. Crimes such as public camping, offering or soliciting sex, public urination, blocking a sidewalk, etc., should not and will not be prosecuted.

Boudin has explicitly claimed that some laws shouldn’t be enforced because doing so supposedly increases victimization. “Jails do nothing to treat the root cause of crime,” he claimed. Boudin called “open-air drug use and drug sales . . . technically victimless crimes.” When Boudin announced that he was not going to prosecute street-level drugs, he said it was dealers because they are “themselves victims of human trafficking.”

In fact, there is little evidence to support Boudin’s claim that the fentanyl dealers in San Francisco are dealing drugs against their will. Tom Wolf, a member of San Francisco’s Drug Dealing Task Force, who was once a homeless fentanyl addict himself for several months, knows several dealers. “These guys would show me pictures of the houses they were building back home in Honduras,” Wolf told me.

Today, San Francisco Police Department is short 400 officers and demoralized, leaving the city to fall further into chaos.ZUMAPRESS.com

Boudin and other progressive criminal-justice reformers, such as Manhattan’s new DA, Alvin Bragg, oppose enforcing laws when addicts and mentally-ill people break them because they believe our system is fundamentally unfair and racist. This explains why Boudin and his ilk are narrowly focused on emptying jails and prisons.

“The challenge going forward,” said Boudin in 2019, “is how do we close a jail?”

The results speak for themselves. In 2019, Boudin reduced San Francisco’s jail population by 73%, to 766 from 2,850 in 2019, despite the fact that more than half of all offenders, and three-quarters of the most violent ones who are released from jail before trial, commit new crimes. The charging rate for theft by Boudin’s office declined from 62 percent in 2019 to 46 percent in 2021 and for petty theft declined from 58 percent to 35 percent.

Car break-ins were 75 percent higher in May 2021 than in 2019, before the pandemic, and reached an astonishing 3,000 last month. Meanwhile, many business owners and residents tell me they stopped bothering to report crime long ago.

Boudin made emptying San Francisco jails a cornerstone of his time as DA, reducing the city’s jail population by 73 percent in 2019. AP

As Breed seeks support for her crackdown, Boudin is fighting for his political life. A recall election has been scheduled for June, and many people believe San Francisco’s progressive voters will elect to remove him from office, eliminating one obstacle to the mayor’s efforts.

The recall of Boudin — and the success of Breed — may signal a rebalancing in America’s attitudes toward drugs and crime. The US went too far in the 1980s and 1990s in terms of incarceration but then too far in the other direction over the last 20 years. Breed knows that many so-called “victimless” crimes have real victims, including her sister, who died of an overdose, and her brother, who is in prison for pushing an accomplice, who later died, out of a robbery getaway car.

Breed’s grandmother was right about “tough love.” Hopefully, in the face of rising crime, San Franciscans, and progressives nationwide, will finally start to deliver some.

Michael Shellenberger is the author of “San Fransicko: Why Progressive Ruin Cities.”

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While planning to return for face-to-face meetings, South San Francisco school officials agreed that the district should continue to broadcast meetings online in hopes of maintaining the community’s increased engagement during the pandemic.

The Board of Trustees of the South San Francisco Unified School District unanimously agreed to keep broadcasts of online meetings on Thursday, May 27th, as they prepare to do so, Thursday, June 24th, for the first time in more than one Year to begin face-to-face meetings.

But while the Trustees shared the belief that online broadcasts should continue even after members of the school community were invited back to meetings, questions remained as to whether remote public comments would be allowed.

Trustee John Baker advocated remote attendance, claiming that this lowers the barrier to entry for those interested in giving their opinion on matters to the board but not having the flexibility to attend meetings.

“It has produced a lot more democracy, it has produced a lot more participation from members of the community,” he said.

However, he measured this perspective by noting that although he preferred to keep public comments from a distance, the more critical issue was the board continuing to broadcast meetings online for community members to watch from home can.

Trustee Pat Murray claimed otherwise, suggesting that public comment should only be allowed when a person is attending a meeting – as soon as public health conditions permit.

Claiming that context is lost when a person comments remotely, Murray said she believed it was preferable for a person to speak to the board so that officials could better grasp their position.

“I think it’s really important that we have these nuances when trying to understand our community,” she said. “That they are there and talk to us.”

Board chairwoman Daina Lujan said she felt the same, but for different reasons.

After months of conducting online meetings, Lujan found that it can be difficult to moderate meetings, especially those with large groups of people who want to talk about key issues.

Personally, she said that time management for meetings is easier as the moderator is better able to read the room and to the best of his ability to ensure that the meetings are not late at night.

But online, Lujan said, it is harder to tell how many people will be interested in speaking, and this reduces their ability to conduct meetings efficiently.

She also added that she felt that personal comments had a greater resonance than virtual ones.

“It’s something to be said that you are actually able to make eye contact and hear sound,” she said.

The problem is one that school districts and local governments are grappling with as public health conditions improve, gatherings are allowed again, and meetings in boardrooms and town halls forced online by the pandemic resume.

Proponents of online meetings and public commentary generally advocate relying on technology to expand access, and point to an increase in participation over the past year from community members who take advantage of the flexibility of remote agreements.

However, critics often note that the increase in participation has lengthened the length of meetings, leading to many meetings lasting late into the night and raising concerns about the wisdom of sometimes making political decisions after midnight.

Currently, those wishing to attend meetings of the South San Francisco School Committee are encouraged to email their comments to the board in advance of the meeting or attend live via a remote public comment. Looking ahead, officials expressed an interest in continuing to accept the statements sent via email, but remote public comments could be eliminated once members of the community can again attend meetings.

No final decision has been made on this issue and further decisions will be made at a later meeting. But Baker said if officials attempt to ban public commenting remotely, they should consider broadcasting the sessions on YouTube and moving away from Zoom to save on administrative costs.

With a view to the meeting on June 24th, the board members can hold personal meetings in the district office and finally return to the boardroom of the Baden High School as soon as the parishioners can attend.

Lujan noted, however, that the board’s decision could ultimately be overshadowed by any orders from Governor Gavin Newsom, who is expected to provide clearer guidance on such issues once the state moves away from its tiered color system in a few weeks’ time.

On similar matters, the board agreed to read a statement at the beginning of each board meeting that the meeting was taking place on land originally inhabited by indigenous peoples.

Baker suggested the recognition to signal the board’s commitment to social justice.

“It’s a way to formally acknowledge and reflect on what was essentially an extermination of the indigenous people and the trauma they suffered under colonialism,” he said.

Baker said he had noticed similar recognition is being made at other public gatherings across the state, and he felt that adoption in South San Francisco would be in line with a variety of similar initiatives by his school board.

To that end, the board is considering changing the name of Junipero Serra Elementary School based on the missionary’s treatment of Native Americans, and recently changed the South San Francisco High School mascot to abandon the Native American imagery.

The rest of his colleagues supported the proposal, and Superintendent Shawnterra Moore said officials will return using the proposed language at the next board meeting so that the board can review the official adoption.

Baker said the recognition was the least the board could do to honor the history of the region.

“It’s better than what we’re doing now,” he said.

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