While the pandemic is changing the way people work and socialize and has resulted in economic downturn, acquiring land and building remain expensive, and the Bay Area has long fallen short of its housing goals. Sarah Karlinsky, senior adviser at the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association, a public policy think tank better known as SPUR, has published reports indicating that Bay Area municipalities should be constructing 45,000 units of housing per year. A paradigm shift to considering housing a human right and treating it like infrastructure would help achieve that goal, she said.

Jamille Cabacungan, a nurse who works in an acute care unit at UCSF Medical Center that cares for COVID-19 patients, says while the availability of personal protective equipment like N-95 masks has improved, nurses are feeling overwhelmed and would be better able to provide care with a bigger staff. For patients, she says, the experience of being hospitalized with COVID-19 is one of isolation. Even nurses limit their interactions with these patients to prevent getting infected, performing their tasks quickly.

The San Francisco-Marin Food Bank has roughly doubled the number of people it serves since before the pandemic. For many, says Tina Gonzalez, director of community partnerships for the food bank, what they receive isn’t just supplemental to what they can afford on their own — they depend on it. The high need is likely to persist into the new year, and Gonzalez says the food bank will likely remain in high gear even after case rates have lowered and lockdown restrictions lifted.

In 2005, a group of advocacy groups working on homelessness formed a coalition to collaborate across cities and states and advance national policy. They called it WRAP, the Western Regional Advocacy Project. Its director, Paul Boden, joined “Civic” to look back on 15 years of organizing and ensuring that people experiencing homelessness themselves inform research and policy.

In November, voters in Oakland approved Measure QQ, which gives 16- and 17-year-olds the right to vote in school board elections. Meanwhile, voters in San Francisco rejected Proposition G, which would have lowered the voting age for municipal elections to 16. Statewide, a measure to allow residents as young as 16 to vote in primaries also failed. Ixchel Arista, a 15-year-old organizer with Oakland Kids First, and Sarah Cheung, a 17-year-old San Francisco Youth Commissioner, said they encountered voters in their phone banking campaigns who doubted young peoples’ ability to make sound decisions — an attitude they described as “adultist.”

Public transportation has been transformed by the coronavirus pandemic. Light rail is shut down, and bus service is concentrated on core lines. While the indefinitely extended shelter-in-place order and restrictions that fluctuate with case rates have resulted in service changes, work on major improvement projects is ongoing. For the system as a whole, low ridership means low fare revenues and serious budget considerations — which could mean layoffs. The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s Director Jeffrey Tumlin and Julie Kirschbaum, the agency’s Director of Transit, explain how Muni has adapted to the pandemic and some of the changes ahead.

San Francisco’s office of the public defender has a unit dedicated to defending immigrants in court. In most states, they often have no representation because there is no right to counsel in immigration cases. Francisco Ugarte, managing attorney of this unit, talked with “Civic” about how handoffs between agencies work and what happens to someone who is arrested by immigration enforcement in San Francisco, as well as a class action suit the unit helped litigate over COVID-19 outbreaks in detention facilities.

Every odd-numbered San Francisco supervisorial district had an election in November. One race was extremely close and several were targeted by big independent expenditure money. But Joe Eskenazi, managing editor at Mission Local, reports that money was apparently ineffective, failing to propel candidates to victory and failing to dissuade voters from passing new tax measures.