Civic

Researchers at the Urban Institute have been looking into how effective various responses to homelessness are. In a series of blog posts, they issue a warning against a punitive response to homelessness and recommend other ways to respond to homelessness, especially in the context of the coronavirus pandemic that threatens millions of people’s livelihoods and housing stability. Samantha Batko, a senior research associate in the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute, said a “housing-first” approach, which prioritizes giving homeless people stable housing before other interventions, is the most effective.

In October, the US government began implementing an expansion of rapid deportations, in which undocumented immigrants may be removed from the country without a hearing before an immigration judge. While such deportations have been conducted for decades, the new policy expands who might be affected, including undocumented immigrants anywhere in the U.S. who cannot prove they have been in the country for two years or more. Priya Patel, an immigration attorney at Centro Legal de la Raza, said that while she has not seen Bay Area residents affected by the policy, its implementation only serves to exacerbate existing fears of crackdowns among immigrants.

San Francisco voters have approved a crucial bond measure and several tax measures by wide margins and voted in favor of propositions removing a mandatory minimum staffing level for the police department and adding oversight for the sheriff’s department. Votes remain to be tallied, however, and some contests are close, including a measure that would give 16- and 17-year-olds the right to vote in municipal elections. Lila LaHood, publisher of the San Francisco Public Press, and Laura Wenus, host of the radio show and podcast “Civic,” discuss the results and what they mean for the city.

Activist groups have been hosting trainings and developing plans to mobilize residents, elected leaders and businesses to demand the results of the November 3 presidential election be recognized. Demonstrations calling for every vote nationwide to be counted are already planned for Nov. 4 in cities around the Bay Area, including San Francisco and Oakland. The activist network Bay Resistance has been calling on residents to get ready to defend democracy. We talk with Zachary Norris, director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, about what exactly that means and how people can hold government officials to account.

San Francisco has faced many scandals in which public officials abused their power for personal, political or organizational gain. On the November, 2020 ballot, Proposition B has been proposed as a way to limit the scope of alleged corruption in the sprawling Department of Public Works, but what other measures could voters use in the future to keep elected and appointed officials accountable in San Francisco?

The San Francisco Mime Troupe has been performing socially conscious and often very funny productions in Bay Area parks since 1959 but the COVID-19 pandemic forced them to take their plays to the air with a series of ten radio plays. Now that the last episode of the season has aired we wanted to find out how the experiment in going from live to virtual has worked.

During the pandemic, nurses have been given a lot of praise for the vital, frontline work they do, but some nurses working for San Francisco’s Department of Public Health would like to be paid the overtime they have put in.

Proposition 14 asks California voters to approve a $5.5 billion bond to allow the institute to continue to provide grants for stem cell research. Jeff Sheehy has been the lonely voice on the board of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, where he stands in opposition to the state ballot measure that would fund the organization for years to come.