The post UCSF says it will ‘retain and grow’ services at two local hospitals … appeared first on 48 hills.
]]>When it was his turn to speak, Jones had an ominous message:
“When UCSF took over [Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland] in 2014, they hollowed it out from within. We cannot let this happen at Saint Francis and St. Mary’s,” Jones warned.
Other nurses at the rally of around 30 people—some from UCSF like Jones, many from St. Mary’s and Saint Francis, and a handful from the Children’s Hospital—remember when CHO lost specialty services like the Tuberous Sclerosis Clinic in 2020, which saw patients move to the Stanford hospital system or lose access to care entirely.
Like CHO, St. Mary’s and Saint Francis also offer highly specialized medical facilities, including St. Mary’s Adolescent Psychiatric Services and the Bothin Burn Center at Saint Francis, which is the largest burn center in Northern California.
They also currently serve some of the city’s most vulnerable communities, including residents in the Tenderloin, unhoused people, and those with severe psychiatric and mental health needs.
Combined, the hospitals offer about 50 percent of San Francisco’s emergency psychiatric services, 42 percent of inpatient rehab services, and invest more than $11 million a year into charitable care available to low-income patients.
So what exactly will happen to St. Mary’s and Saint Francis hospitals when UCSF absorbs them at the end of June this year?
Despite constant requests to UCSF for information, the nurses say they’ve been met with total silence.
“My first question to UCSF: What are you hiding? What are you afraid of telling us?” demanded a St. Mary’s nurse who identified herself only as April.
The nurses were about to get some answers: An hour after the rally, the group, all wearing CNA red, filed up the grand staircase of City Hall and into a meeting room, where District 11 Supervisor Ahsha Safaí had called a hearing of the Rules Committee to address the nurses’ worries.
Shay Strachan, UCSF Health’s chief partnership and growth officer, approached the podium and addressed one of the nurses’ most pressing concerns: No mass layoffs were on the horizon.
“No nurses, no staff—period—will lose their jobs as a result of this transaction,” Strachan said.
Strachan went on to detail out UCSF Health’s plan to “retain and grow” both staff and services at the two soon-to-be-acquired hospitals. She also briefly addressed how the organization would be structured post-acquisition, which was a vocal concern of Amy Preble, an RN and chief nurse representative at St. Mary’s.
Preble said that she’d heard UCSF will become the owners, while the two community hospitals will technically remain separate entities. Preble said she believes this only serves to further disenfranchise both the employees and patients, which should be “as alarming to the community as it is to the staff.”
According to Strachan’s presentation, St. Mary’s and Saint Francis will both become “licensed hospitals” under UCSF Health and will be renamed to UCSF Health St. Mary’s Hospital and UCSF Health Saint Francis Hospital. How exactly this will impact the distribution of funds, facilities, and services is still unclear.
Strachan also underscored the anticipated growth of reproductive and gender-affirming healthcare services, since a UCSF acquisition means St. Mary’s and Saint Francis will no longer be officially Catholic organizations.
But the nurses say, while that’s all well and good, they’re not totally convinced UCSF will put their money where their mouth is when the time comes to “retain and grow” current services, let alone implement new ones. Nurse Rachel Cohen Cepeda, who has worked in UCSF’s psychiatric unit since 1998, said UCSF only recently came off its second hiring freeze since 2020 due to what the administration told the nurses were financial constraints.
“We’re short-staffed every day, below legal guidelines, and UCSF says they can’t afford to hire new nurses. But then they go and buy two whole hospitals? It just doesn’t add up,” Cepeda said.
Cepeda said she doesn’t think UCSF is a victim of the nursing shortage—she thinks it’s responsible for it. She says that, in short, UCSF buys hospitals, eliminates vital nursing positions, and then goes on hiring freezes so there’s no chance to fill even the positions that remain.
“The system is trying to profit off of patients’ suffering, and we’re suffering with them.”
Cepeda admits she’s cynical, but she’s certainly not alone.
“I mean, it’s a business, it’s a corporation. There’s just no way they’re doing this without an ulterior motive,” said Yvette Bassett, a registered nurse at Saint Francis. “Basically, Stanford wants a monopoly in the South Bay, and UCSF wants the North.”
But the northern part of the Bay Area, let alone San Francisco, is no medical monolith. Throughout the hearing, Safaí and the public commenters from the CNA rally emphasized that even if all the services currently offered by Saint Francis and St. Mary’s are indeed maintained, moving facilities around the city to places where patients in need might not be able to access them would hurt the populations they serve now.
Safaí dug into the issue of equity, using the CHO acquisition as a chilling example, when examining the UCSF rep.
“I don’t need to tell anyone in the room that the population these hospitals serve is overwhelmingly BIPOC,” Safaí said. “What do you say to the feelings of systemic racism in that [CHO] acquisition?”
“I can’t speak to any reports of systemic racism, but I can speak to UCSF’s values,” Strachan replied. “We take diversity, equity, and inclusion very seriously.”
Safaí also pressed for a city-run plan to ensure the “UC takeover” didn’t end up damaging to the vulnerable populations St. Mary’s and Saint Francis serve. Claire Altman, the senior health program planner from the Office of Policy and Planning at the Department of Public Health, said that her office will gather reports on the impact of the acquisition every six months. But if those reports do show detrimental results? How the city would respond is an open question.
After the hearing, Cepeda called the whole testimony nothing but “lip service.”
“In terms of boots on the ground, I didn’t get the answers I needed.”
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]]>The post Finally, Native American land returned to Native Americans in Berkeley appeared first on 48 hills.
]]>Patriarchy builds Shopping Malls & everything Matriarchy Does NOT
Patriarchy drops bombs on Palestine
And builds Prisons instead of skools on Turtle Island
Patriarchy kills mamas while they hold their babies
Patriarhcy shoots children and when we fight back shoots us and calls us Crazy
Patriarchy is violent
But Matriarchy is a sacred, healing mama trident
Matriarchy weaves palabra and quilts, prayer smoke and warming gifts,
Matriarchy lifts Up love into sky spirit – calling down Grandmother Moon and Mama Ocean
Matriarchy begins with the womb -offerring life always even in the face of violent brutal strife
Matriarchy protects water, and ancestors and air
Matriarchy threads liberation into our hair
No colonizers you can’t define our herstories. We are RIGHT HERE
We will continue to come with un-ending prayer,
You can’t stop the mamas, the grandmommas, the babies, the uncles and the fathers
The liberation mamas and the LandBack Suns and daughters
#WestBerkeleySHellMoundIsFREEEEE
MamaEarth Is NOT for SALE – in perpetuity
Steam rises from the broken concrete. Krapitalism buzzes in the distance. A train roars its approach.
But here in a parking lot on 4th street in West Berkeley… it is so quiet. Only the murmur of a wind…. And then if you listen very carefully, you hear it. A 5,700 hundred-year-old whisper. It swirls above the asphalt and the painted lines of metal and rubber and plastic. Sacred Shellmounds buried deep below click together in unison. If you listen carefully you hear the ancestors. They whisper together until it becomes a song #LandBack….LandBack…
“Over the last eight years thousands of people came together and said YES at the same time to the Lisjan ancestors,” said Tribal chair of the confederated villages of Lisjan Corrina Gould. “We collectively prayed, sang, danced and created art together. As the Confederated Villages of Lisjan Nation joined in a six year long legal battle alongside the City of Berkeley to protect a shellmound and village site more than 5,800 years old.”
Under an agreement worked out by the City of Berkeley, a Native American burial site will now be returned to the indigenous people who once occupied what we now call the East Bay.
It is important to recognize that Corrina and all of us have been fighting for something that should have already happened. We have been praying, fighting, marching for something that is repair and return. Return and repair because something has been deeply broken.
A centuries old sacred burial ground should have been revered and protected, loved and honored by all people. Not just the descendants of the ancestors there. Just like cemeteries and mortuaries are.
Instead, for decades it was a parking lot for a seafood restaurant. This is not an accident. This was not a mistake or an error in planning. This is violent colonization in a trajectory of other violent colonization that deemed indigenous bodies inhuman and therefore not deserving of life, land or respect, much less burial grounds, sacred spaces, or lands of origin.
“I am so thrilled that I get to see this in my lifetime, we have all fought and worked for so long and this is truly beautiful,” said Ruth Orta, an 89-year-old elder Ohlone mama and grandmomma and daughter of a survivor of the colonial boarding schools.
Imagine the cemetery where your family is buried being turned into a parking lot.
“This was long past due, to correct this historic harm to Ohone peoples of the Bay, said Melissa K. Nelson, president of the Board of Sogorea Te Land Trust. “Let this be an example for other cities, other towns, and states across the country, to address the historic injustices that have been perpetrated against Native American People on our ancestral lands.”
As Melissa spoke, the ancestors rose up, quietly, steadfastly, standing alongside the Youth and elder Ohlone/Lisjan family of warrior mamas and auntys and daughters and sons and uncles that lead the Sogorea Te Land Trust and the allies and accomplices that circled around them. They were right there. Heads held high into the healing smoke that rose into the morning.
“It was important for us to contribute and support Sogorea Te Land trust at the same scale that is commiserate with the hurt and harm that they have experienced for centuries,” said Nwamaka, CEO of Kataly Foundation, whose foundation radically redistributed $20 million dollars, which in addition to $1.7 million of the City of Berkeley contributed, made this possible.
“It was also important for us to pay Shummi land tax as our organization and our staff is located in the bay and it’s not up to us to decide how the resources were used, but rather to be in solidarity with Sogorea Te Land Trust, trusting that they will use the funds in the way that is most impactful,” said Nwamaka.
This powerful movement of indigenous land return is the intersection of many things. It’s about the colonial violence of having to buy back your ancestors resting place, your sacred spaces where our ancestors are buried, which all humans deserve.
It is about the violence of krapitalist greed and the lie of private property causing the casual (yet intentional) genocide of erasure, removal, and desecration of not only a burial ground but a sacred site that is thousands of Gregorian years old.
And finally, it’s the settler violence of greed, hoarding and accumulation that would put an insane, almost unimaginable “price” on Mama Earth to charge the peoples whose lands of origins this land belongs to, whose lands we are all standing, sitting, dreaming, thinking, buying and selling billions of blood-stained colonial dollars just to get it back.
This moment is also about the resistance moves of Kataly foundation, which clearly overstands, like we poor and houseless peoples teach at PeopleSkool, that their immense wealth does not “belong” to them, but rather is also stolen, “made” on the broken backs of Black, Brown, Indigenous and 1st Nations peoples and lands.
That this system is built for extraction, and the only solution is radical or what I’m now calling logical redistribution of these stolen resources and stolen land, rooted in love and repair, back into the thousands of places and spaces like this small part of Lisjan Land, in so-called West Berkeley, so we can all heal.
“We owe this victory to the ancestors and every single person who stood beside us in this fight, we did it!” said Deja Gould, mama, organizer/leader with Sogorea Te Land Trust and daughter of Corrina Gould.
This moment is about all of the settlers who stood, marched, prayed, screamed alongside Ohlone/Lisjan relatives. Knowing clearly that 1st peoples are not gone. That colonization didn’t work. That the human spirit is strong and together we can heal from this colonial hell with our voices, our humility and our actions.
And for all the confused settlers reading this, LandBack does not mean re-making the same settler violence that was perpetrated on First Peoples of scarcity and removal and incarceration and death. This moment is a testament to the deep structures of ancestors who never believed Mama Earth was for sale. Who never saw her as a commodity to be extracted from and desecrated. Who were never rooted in the violence of scarcity but rather the solutions of sharing and interdependence.
If one relative has a job or food to eat, everyone eats. If one person has water, everyone drinks. If one family has a roof, as we do at Homefulness, as many people as possible are housed for free. For life.
“We made Herstory today, said Cheyanne Zepeda, mama and auntie, Ohlone/Lisjan leader at Sogorea Te Land Trust and daughter of Corrina Gould.
This not a time to become scared or scarce. This is a calling in, not a calling out, we have all been lied to in krapitalism and we are all dying from it.
As Melissa said, let this be an example. Let us all learn more and live into more radical return, logical redistribution and most important, love for Mama Earth and all of us, so we can all be ok. So we can all heal. Together.
“I’m so happy today, because this land is free,” said an Ohlone nine-year-old youth povertySkola student from DeeColonize Academy and granddaughter of Corrina Gould.
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]]>The post Screen Grabs: The revelatory, overwhelming, and a little scary world of Luther Price appeared first on 48 hills.
]]>When San Francisco Cinematheque hosted “Ritual Obsessions: Three Nights of Luther Price” in mid-2000, the impact was revelatory, overwhelming, and a little scary. Price—a pseudonym, and not his first or last—invited you into a world so private that its sharing seemed almost obscene. It was duly said that he refused to duplicate his films, preferring to tinker with them until the prints gave out. They mapped a psychological space redolent of early David Lynch, Jerome Caja, and Diane Arbus, for starters—the stuff of home and family rendered surreal, threatening, poetical, demented.
Their abstractions wove home movies and other primarily “found” footage into visual PTSD haikus, using repetition like a tacit indictment. It is hard to convey the singular imprint on one’s brain made by something like the notorious Super-8 Sodom (1989), which turns fragmented old gay porn loops into kind of purgatorial limbo, or the prior year’s Warm Broth, whose 34 minutes (set to a battery-warped talking doll’s stock phrases) transform a series of archival images into something akin to a psychotic break.
The unmistakable musk of autobiography was somehow present in every frame; the implicit themes onscreen were apparently borne out by the artist’s offscreen reality, which encompassed no lack of eros, battery, and masochism. (He died in 2020 at age 58 from health issues complicated by bad reactions to antibiotics taken after he’d been bitten by one of the near-feral cats he kept in his tiny inherited Boston-area home. He’d also suffered through much of the preceding 35 years, due to lasting effects of a bullet wound incurred in 1985 in Nicaragua.)
It was riveting and unsettling enough just to see these films in advance of their public screenings. I wasn’t sure I wanted to experience the man himself, who accompanied those screenings—as he had some prior ones in SF, then again in 2012. His live performances sounded grotesque and harrowing. In the 21-page Cinematheque-Canyon Cinema publication Luther Price in San Francisco: A Remembrance, one is described thus: “The space began to resemble the disturbed and private boudoir of a very exacting drag clown.” In the book-length New Utopia and Light Fracture (VSW Press), also new, it is recounted that a week-long workshop on handmade film he held as a visiting artist in 2017 Rochester, NY was “viscerally affecting,” with participants bursting into tears and screams, some refusing to discuss the experience afterward.
But in Price’s pain there was beauty, and vice versa. The aforementioned tome preserves slides (his apparent medium of choice in later years) that are the psychedelic result of collage, emulsion, decay, even burying film in soil. They are gorgeous—and, natch, haunting. Those two titular original projection shows will be shown at a first Cinematheque show this Sun/24 at CounterPulse in the Tenderloin (more info here), along with the aforementioned Sodom and a second short, (what else but) Clown. The second half of two-part Remembering Luther Price will take place on Thurs/28 at Oakland’s Shapeshifters Cinema (more info here), featuring 2005’s Dipping Sause (sic) and two works he made under the name Tom Rhoads. The new print publications will be available for purchase at both events.
If Luther Price’s indelible art often felt like a channeling of demons, the work of the director (though she also worked in other media) spotlighted by a BAMPFA series starting this week by contrast seemed primarily to celebrate life, creativity, and other people. ”Viva Varda!” provides a substantial if incomplete overview of screen endeavors by Agnes Varda, who died in 2019 at age 90.
It begins this Sat/23 with Pierre Henri-Gilbert’s new documentary, also entitled Viva Varda!—the first such career stock-taking not made by the late Brussels-born, Paris-based lady herself. She was, indeed, much inclined towards such public self-reflection, although never of a pompously egotistical kind. The documentaries that occupied her later decades probed the past (including that of late husband Jacques Demy) to preserve it, but also roamed in endless playful search of local color, youth, and new collaborators (like artist JR in 2017’s Faces Places, which ends this series on May 5).
While the star auteurs of the nouvelle vague were almost entirely a male roster, Varda arguably commenced the entire movement with 1955’s La Pointe Courte (playing this Sun/24), an inventive micro-budget feature that preceded famous 400 Blows, Breathless, and Hiroshima Mon Amour by several years. (Alain Resnais was one of its editors.) It has Silvia Monfort and Philippe Noiret as a long-distance couple pondering whether to separate or further commit during a long day’s wander around a port town. Their relationship drama is intercut with glimpses of local nonprofessionals playing themselves—mostly fishermen and their families, frequently at odds with law-enforcing game wardens who’d take the bread from their mouths.
Varda made numerous shorts, collected in two programs here (on March 31 and April 20), but not another narrative feature until 1962’s Cleo From 5 to 7—another quasi-nonfiction construct meant to unfold in something like “real time.” Chronicling a tense interlude in the life of a pop star (Corinne Marchand), as she waits for a medical diagnosis, it was an innovative, widely seen success. The BAMPFA series has two later such efforts: 1965’s Le bonheur, a highly stylized critique of gender norms and marriage; and from two decades later Vagabond, a head-on portrait of a woman vagrant (Sandrine Bonnaire) who vehemently refuses all such social conformities.
On May 5 there’s a double bill of much lesser-seen features from a stint living in Los Angeles, the freewheeling cultural crosssection Murs Murs (1980), and fictive Documenteur, in which real-life son Mathieu Demy plays the offspring of her onscreen alter ego (Sabine Mamou). These relatively angsty titles are very much personal statements. Yet they gave little indication of the surprising direction Varda’s career and life would eventually take. In nostalgic yet busy widowhood, she’d treat nonfiction cinema as a source of increasing delight so infectious her later movies (and puckish celebrity presence in them) like The Gleaners and I achieved a kind of arthouse personality cult, even as the international arthouse world itself was dying off. For the entire “Viva Varda!” series schedule, go here.
There’s a connective thread (if no outright influence, at least that I know of) between Varda’s work and that of Nicolas Pereda, a Mexican-Canadian filmmaker in his forties whose films also view the line between documentary and narrative cinema as somewhat porous. We reviewed his provocative 2020 feature Fauna here; BAMPFA will show a program of his shorts on April 6. But that’s within a series starting this Wed/20, “Nicolas Pereda Selects: Recent Films From Mexico,” in which the current Professor of Film and Media at UC Berkeley highlights others’ work, the represented peers mostly in attendance.
First up are two by another documentarian turned sometime dramatist, Tatiana Huezo. The opening night selection is last year’s The Echo, a verite portrait of a several families in the Mexican highlands; and (on Fri/22) her Prayers for the Stolen, based on Jennifer Clement’s novel about female adolescence in a village plagued by cartel violence. We covered that impressive first narrative feature here. Ditto Lila Aviles’ more recent Totem, another tale of premature childhood acquaintance with mortality. Natalia Almada’s 2016 Everything Else, a bleakly incisive Mexico City character study; and Juan Pablo Gonzalez’s 2022 Dos Estaciones , a minimalist melodrama of repression in rural Jalisco.
Ending the series on May 2 is Yulene Olaizola’s 2021 period piece Tragic Jungle, described as a “Herzogian epic” of colonialist greed and possibly-supernatural vengeance. Pereda says all these films “exemplify a kind of Mexican cinema committed to subtle formal experimentation, crafting distinctive structures and rhythms that remain unaffected by the restraints of commercial cinema.” For full program and schedule info on “Recent Films from Mexico,” go here.
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]]>The post Watch: What’s up in electronic music? Shawn Reynaldo’s on the case with Music Book Club appeared first on 48 hills.
]]>The post Watch: What’s up in electronic music? Shawn Reynaldo’s on the case with Music Book Club appeared first on 48 hills.
]]>The post Chan, Fielder kick off supe campaigns with large weekend rallies appeared first on 48 hills.
]]>I counted more than 200 people at the rally to re-elect D1 Sup. Connie Chan in the Richmond Saturday. Campaign organizers confirmed that number based on the people signing in.
It was a broad coalition, with several major labor unions joining neighborhood leaders, Asian organizers, tenant activists, and several of Chan’s colleagues on the board.
On Sunday, at least 100 gathered at Precita Park to work for Jackie Fielder for D9 supe.
Both candidates will face a massive amount of money from right-wing groups funded by billionaires who want to take over San Francisco politics and promote an agenda that works for nobody except the rich.
Mike Casey, a longtime labor leader, told the crowd that the unions see Chan as an ally: “Connie walks the line with us, and we know Connie speaks for us, and Connie delivers for us.”
Sup. Aaron Peskin delivered a speech that was dramatic and blunt—and aimed directly at Mayor London Breed and her allies.
“We are seeing things we used to see in the US South,” he said, talking about blatant gerrymandering that the mayor “got away with.
“We have never seen the billionaire plutocrat money” that coming into the city now, he said. “We are used to biased press, but we have never seen anyone buy a press for political purposes,” a comment clearly about tech investor Michael Moritz, who has funded the SF Standard.
He challenged “a mayor who is trying to get rid of the only Chinese American on the Board of Supervisors” and said that even former Mayor Willie Brown, who was not at all happy with the Class of 2000 district supes, recognized four years later that experienced legislators we valuable to the city.
Chan has been in public service for decades, working in Rec-Park, in the DA’s Office, as a legislative aide, and as a supervisor.
Chan also took on the mayor and her allies:
“We will hold the mayor accountable for spending,” Chan, who chairs the Budget and Finance Committee, said. “The billionaires don’t like it. They would like us to sit down, but we will fight back.”
Everyone knows that the billionaires want to make this fall’s election about public safety, and Chan’s main opponent, Marjan Philhour, has been attacking the incumbent over crime in the district. Chan said that public safety is not just about the police; it’s about a wide range of services that need to be funded.
Former Sup. Tom Ammiano took the stage at Precita Park Sunday to support Fielder.
He started off challenging the media narrative that the “moderates” had a good election March 5. “They are not moderate,” he said. “They are right wing.”
In a nod to St. Patrick’s Day, he said that Fielder “will cast the snakes out of City Hall.”
Among the people who came to the rally were tenant and labor activists, neighborhood leaders, and a large number of young people, many of whom walked precincts for Fielder after the event.
Fielder immediately took on the so-called moderate agenda, saying that she will work for a city “that is equitable, where the wealthiest pay their fair share of taxes.”
In a direct comment on the neoliberal leadership in the Mayor’s Office, she said: “Do we want to go backward to the failed policies that got us here?”
She talked about taking a housing-first approach to homelessness, and about crime prevention, not just more police, and a city “that is not just prosperous but equitable.”
Sup. Dean Preston will launch his re-election bid next week.
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]]>The post Don’t wake up from SF Ballet’s ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ too soon appeared first on 48 hills.
]]>Not only that, but the ballet, set to the classic score by Felix Mendelssohn, is plot-heavy in the front, not the back. Anyone familiar with the Shakespearean rom-com (which is currently getting a traditional-ish production via Shotgun Players) will instantly recognize all the characters and plot points: the fairy king and queen, the mischievous imp, the loving young couple, the other couple in pursuit of the first, the flowers, the mix-ups, the donkey head, the hijinks, the resolution. All of this happens in the first-half.
The only things that aren’t in the first half are the wedding (which starts off Act Two with Mendelssohn’s now-standard “Wedding March”) and the reception performance by Bottom and his fellow players (which is excised altogether). When so many people know the same story, they tend take their cues from the scripts in their heads.
Of course, familiarity with Midsummer is no reason to dismiss it. As with all revived classics, one of the most important questions is what can be added to it, if need be, or how can one put their personal stamp on it. For this production, that answer first comes in the form of costume work by world-renowned designer Christian Lacroix. The 5th Avenue superstar clearly had fun crafting threads that both catch the eye and help advance the story.
He puts young couple Hermia and Lysander (Katherine Barkman and Myles Thatcher, respectively) in soft blues, whilst their counterparts Helena and Demetrius (Elizabeth Mateer and Steven Morse) are both adorned in deep reds. Oberon (Esteban Hernández) is decked out in gold, befitting his high opinion of himself, while Titania (Sasha de Sola) is adorned in cotton candy-pink. Lacroix also designed the sets, which have a layered feeling that makes them seem like pages of a child’s pop-up book. All of them lovely to look at.
Then, of course, there are the dancers themselves. Much like fellow Ballet member Ricardo Bustamante, Esteban Hernández has a habit of stealing scenes through a pure electric energy that’s palpable even from the audience seats. He’s well-matched with Sasha de Sola’s Titania (a role one could imagine the recently-retired Sarah van Patten taking on). Through a number of gravity-defying pirouettes, de Sola’s Titania is less concerned with matching egos with her husband so much as being the affectionate Earth-mother to the many fairies and wood sprites played by the Ballet’s youngest members. Through flexibility and grace, she commands every scene she’s in—which says a lot when your most notable co-star is a man with a donkey’s head.
(And no, I haven’t overlooked Alexis Francisco Valdes as Bottom. Under Sandra Jennings’ direction, Valdes gets some of the best visual sight gags: turning to the audience as he tries to wrap his now-donkey-head around Titania’s affections; and later when she leads him in on what can only be called a “flowery BDSM leash.”)
Also comforting is the feeling of safety one has, even when they’re one-of-the-few masked patrons in attendance. Surrounded as I was by bare faces (one of the reasons I always sit on the aisle), I continue to be amazed by the effectiveness of the War Memorial’s HVAC system—both the century-old “mushroom” vents under the seats (installed after the 1918 Influenza pandemic) and the state-of-the-art system they now have. Over the course of the two-hour show, my Aranet4’s CO² readings never got any higher than 633ppm, and that was with a packed house, minus the few who disappeared during intermission.
As is typical at an SF Ballet performance, the mid-lobby table was decorated to be a photo-op on-theme with the production. This time saw a colorful wood-like set up, with a few ushers selling Spanish-made flower crowns. Before the show, there were a few parents taking photos of kids in complicated ballet poses in front of the set up. I asked one of parents if the kids were part of the Ballet’s youth corps; they told me that they weren’t, simply that the kids are ballet students from a different school.
That’s why a frequent story like Midsummer continues to be performed: Centuries after its first production, it never gets old. The kids who watched it that night probably imagine themselves one day gracing the War Memorial stage in similarly-decadent costumes (I imagine Lacroix’s designs would be expensive to license). Shakespeare wrote his piece to be an escapist fantasy. At just over two hours, SF Ballet’s lavish production flies by as nimbly its dancers leap across the stage. With Spring now upon us, there are few better ways to ring in the sunny season.
Just remember to stay for both acts.
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM runs through March 23 at the War Memorial Opera House, SF. Tickets and further info here.
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]]>The post Dry Cleaning: ‘It’s unusual how democratically we write our songs’ appeared first on 48 hills.
]]>Still, the members of the South London post-punk band—known for sparse instrumentation, observational lyrics, and poker-faced spoken-word delivery—can’t easily cast their minds back to the early days when so much has transpired since.
“It’s five years ago that all this happened, but it feels like a completely different world,” says drummer Nick Buxton. “It’s hard for me to return to that point because we were so far away from where we are now.”
Here are just a few of their milestones. They signed to 4AD, released two critically acclaimed albums—New Long Leg (2021) and Stumpwork (2022)—issued two additional EPs, and sold out shows worldwide. Pavement, Duran Duran, and Grace Jones have become ardent fans.
After the whirlwind of success, they are taking a beat to reflect on their journey and honor their roots with the rerelease of Sweet Princess and Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks on one single vinyl pressing—and accompanying tour.
I spoke to Buxton and singer Florence Shaw about the group’s formative years, how the songs on their seminal six-track EPs came together, and the sage advice they received from Simon Le Bon.
48 HILLS You are reissuing and touring your first two EPs. What do you remember about producing them?
NICK BUXTON We’d never played a show as a band. Tom, Lewis, and I did a lot of shows with other bands, and Flo had never done a show as a front person. Recording felt like another step forward.
It felt like a soft way to tick another thing off the box of the things bands do. You write songs together, hang out, and then you might record them and play a show. It was a way to document what we were doing because, after that point, we had to discuss whether we would even play shows at all.
48 HILLS “Magic of Meghan,” on your second EP, focuses on royal outsider Meghan Markle. What was it about her that captivated you?
FLORENCE SHAW She interested me because I could see she would have difficulties. I felt a certain amount of shame about that because I knew what transpired was predictable in a sad way.
48 HILLS The story is that you wrote this song when you suffered a breakup just as Meghan and Harry announced their engagement.
FLORENCE SHAW It was a sense of escapism because of how the BBC reports on anything royal in this rolling way. There was much to consume about it, and I clung to it.
It was self-deprecating as well—a feeling of embarrassment at my humiliation for my relationship ending. Being into this fairy-tale celebrity thing felt exciting, but it was a cringeworthy combination with my shame about not being able to make a relationship work. Rather than that being a serious feeling, I saw the humor in those two things side by side.
48 HILLS How did you develop Dry Cleaning’s signature sound?
NICK BUXTON It wasn’t planned. Everyone’s influences are different, and there’s a large crossover in the middle. A lot of times, playing music together is about compromise. You might bring things to the project, but they’re not all workable. So you spend a lot of time listening, responding, and collectively making it something you’re all happy with.
FLORENCE SHAW It’s unusual how democratically we write the songs.
But as Nick was saying, we all have different references. We’re pulling in various directions, which produces what we sound like.
48 HILLS What were your expectations when working on these projects, and were they met?
NICK BUXTON We recorded the first EP and put it on Bandcamp, hoping someone would find it. We didn’t have a manager. There were no labels. We hadn’t played any shows.
But we started receiving correspondence on Bandcamp from people all over the world. A publicist heard it on Bandcamp within a couple of weeks and got in touch with Lewis—and he does our PR now. That’s never happened to me with any musical project.
FLORENCE SHAW Events overtook us. We had time off from playing shows, and it’s probably the first time I’ve had to try to take in the success because it was such a shock. It’s almost like I returned to my flat, and all of my things were like a time capsule to somewhere in the middle of 2019.
From that point onward, we were so busy that I moved house and didn’t unpack. It’s strange how these years have passed when things went wild. It’s taken a minute to compute it, and I only got around to doing that recently.
48 HILLS How do these two EPs fit into Dry Cleaning’s oeuvre?
FLORENCE SHAW With hindsight, they feel like a document of our first rehearsals. In 2018 we did a laughably small number because we had full-time jobs. Then we played our first show somewhere in there as well. So they feel like a first attempt at something.
We wrote them quickly and instinctively. Many include things like YouTube comments I used in my lyrics because I had no idea how to generate words. I’d always collected bits of writing I liked on my phone. But I never sat down as a writer to write.
It’s so odd because what we were doing was experimental. We got together in a room without knowing what would happen. It’s crazy that it ended up being rereleased by 4AD.
48 HILLS How do you balance experimentation and accessibility in your music?
FLORENCE SHAW What helps is, while we have out-there tastes, we all listen to different kinds of music. We all like accessible music. There’s never a sense we’re dumbing down what we like so other people will like it. And because the vocal style is so particular, maybe there isn’t a need to make something difficult to get into because there’s already this slightly unusual vocal thing.
48 HILLS Florence, from where do you draw inspiration for your lyrics?
FLORENCE SHAW The common denominator is having as empty a mind as possible. I often have a lot of thoughts or ideas I want to turn into lyrics. When I’m on the bus or the train, in the bath or bed with my eyes closed but not asleep yet—those empty times.
I’ve got a lot of detritus in my brain—anxious thoughts about too many different subjects. I’m farming all of that.
It’s trying to preserve stuff I know would go if I don’t write it down. And I don’t plan things; things wind up on a theme. And then, when I sift through all the stuff, it so happens to fit into these four subjects. Then, those are four songs.
48 HILLS What’s it like singing your early songs today?
FLORENCE SHAW It’s not easy. You tend to think about what you would change about them. On the other hand, I feel a sense of pride about how I’ve gotten to grips with writing since we recorded those EPs because things happen so fast, and it’s hard to track your evolution.
It’s easy for me to hear the difference in the writing—which has its appeal—but it’s different from how I write now. Also, it’s easier to tell what the songs are about in hindsight. Sometimes it’s emotional. I picture myself at that low time, certainly much lower than now. It’s like a little window into the past and how I felt. I sometimes feel empathy for that person.
48 HILLS I imagine that over the years, you’ve met some of your heroes at gigs and festivals. Have any admitted to being fans?
FLORENCE SHAW We met Pavement when we played at the Bluedot Festival last year, and they were complimentary. We played before them on a big stage, and they gave us a shout-out.
We supported Duran Duran at a big gig at a stately home in Yorkshire. Because Simon Le Bon is a fan of our band, he invited us to play with them. We were the only support. I was starstruck. Some of their records were in my house when I was a kid, and I used to play them, so it was a surreal moment. He was so kind. He took time to chat with us and gave us advice. He made us feel confident again.
48 HILLS What advice did he give you?
FLORENCE SHAW His number-one piece of advice was to demand you have a break. He said, “They’ll schedule you until your eyes pop out, and if you politely request, you won’t get it. You’ll keep going until your vocal cords will stop working. That’s what happened to me. So you have to be firm about getting time off from touring.” It was great advice.
NICK BUXTON He said, “You have to be able to sleep as much as you can. You have to adapt and learn how to sleep in any situation. If you have 15 minutes, try to sleep for at least five of them.”
We haven’t met Grace Jones, but we did play London’s Meltdown Festival when she curated it. It felt gratifying to be asked and have that seal of approval.
48 HILLS Your San Francisco shows regularly sell out in minutes. What is it about playing in this city that excites you?
FLORENCE SHAW It’s impossible not to mention the extreme street life in San Francisco. On one hand, you’ve got the Tenderloin with driverless cars driving through it. We’ve never seen anything that represents the great divide as much as that in our travels.
NICK BUXTON San Francisco is a place I’m keen to see more of. Like Flo says, it’s a very disparate city, which I find intriguing. But then, San Francisco is beautiful and instantly recognizable. I would love to go to Alcatraz, Golden Gate Bridge, and Golden Gate Park.
FLORENCE SHAW I want to go to Creative Growth in Oakland, a center where adults with various learning disabilities make art. It’s a world-famous studio where people are empowered to create sculptures, drawings, and paintings. I’ve known about it for years but have never managed to visit.
48 HILLS What’s next for the band?
NICK BUXTON We’re chomping at the bit to dig into our next album and create something we love. It’s exciting because we’ve never had this much context as a band behind us. There’s never been as much thought and creative space around what’s coming next.
DRY CLEANING Thu/21-Fri/22, The Independent, SF. $30. Tickets and more info here.
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]]>The post National magazine takes on the case against Yimby housing policies appeared first on 48 hills.
]]>But that’s what The New Republic just did, and the article, which you can read here, is fascinating.
The reporter, Michael Friedrich, quoted Sonja Trauss at the most recent Yimbytown conference, and spoke about the politics of the movement:
The policy that unites YIMBYs—from orthodox free-marketeers to grassroots social housing boosters—is “upzoning,” in which cities reform local land-use policy to allow for more, and bigger, development. This change, YIMBYs argue, drives developers to fill cities with “abundant housing,” spurring competition and putting “downward pressure” on prices. The appeal is obvious: a “one weird trick” to solve the housing crisis—without upsetting the market.
If only it worked. A decade since the YIMBY movement launched, there’s little serious evidence that its policies are the magic supply-increasing bullet that proponents claim, nor that they meaningfully decrease rents for working families. The YIMBY agenda can’t solve the housing crisis. But there are solutions: ones that provide the homes we need without ceding power to the profiteers who rigged the system.
What’s certain is that YIMBY policies satisfied elite consensus, promising workforce housing for tech-sector donors while scratching a deregulatory itch that libertarians had long been trying to reach.
He points out what I have always found most disturbing about the market-based approach:
But evidence undermines this simple story, as even the sunniest supply-side forecasts show very modest impacts. One 2019 study of New York City found that every 10 percent increase in housing stock yields a 1 percent decrease in rents nearby. For YIMBYs like Trauss and Resnikoff, such research presents important proof that, on the margins, building moves rents in the right direction. (“Adding more reduces prices,” Trauss told me, “so adding even more reduces prices more.”) But as a practical matter, marginal changes don’t add up to affordability for most. Even if developers somehow built 50 percent more housing in New York City, the median one-bedroom unit would still rent for $3,548 per month (if applying the study’s findings to today’s market).
Reducing rents by one percent, or even 10 percent, or 20 percent, in cities like San Francisco is nowhere near enough. Rents, and purchase prices, need to be half of what they are today for the current workforce to afford to live here. (And housing the existing workforce is the critical need: I agree with the Yimbys that it’s bad for the environment, and for society, if people have to commute two hours or more just to get to work.)
The largest employment sectors in San Francisco right now are government, hospitality, and health care. Some of those jobs pay a decent, union wage. Many of them still don’t pay enough for the workers to afford to live in this city, in adequate housing, and pay no more than 30 percent of their income for rent.
Remember, in the post-War era, when working-class people could still buy a house, it was in large part because of federal subsidies. Veterans Administration low-interest loans, the mortgage-interest tax break, and in the case of urban housing, direct federal money, played a huge role.
So did a lack of the sort of economic inequality we see today, which is the major reason for the housing crisis.:
An increase in market-rate housing in San Francisco might make things a little easier for young professionals with relatively high incomes who now have to compete for rentals. There might be more choice for those folks. But that, the evidence shows, won’t cause prices to drop enough to make existing housing sufficiently affordable.
In the end:
YIMBYism was always “a promise that we didn’t need to redistribute anything,” said Alexander Ferrer, a planner and researcher at Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, a Los Angeles tenant advocacy organization. “We could just make more property.”
That’s just it. Any solution to this, and most other social problems, requires the rich to accept, or be forced to accept, that they will have to give up some of their income and wealth. As I have said repeatedly, if we as a society can’t solve that, we can’t solve anything.
Many of the San Francisco Yimbys support affordable housing. They worked to pass Prop. A. They like to say “both/and,” meaning let’s have lots of affordable housing and market-rate housing too.
But the majority of their their efforts so far have been to push upzoning and limits on reviews and CEQA and mandates for more market-rate housing, which has translated into legislation by Yimby hero state Sen. Scott Wiener.
I wonder what would have happened if all of that time, money, and organizing effort went instead to demanding that Rep. Nancy Pelosi bring SF the kind of billions for housing that she got us for the Central Subway, which is at best a modest improvement in local transportation. I wonder what would have happened if Gov. Gavin Newson, Wiener and their allies put as much focus on getting state money for affordable housing as they did on upzoning and “constraint reduction” for the private market.
What if they worked as hard on repealing the Ellis Act and Costa Hawkins as they did on higher RHNA goals?
I have a feeling that would have done, and would continue to do, a lot more for real affordability.
The Board of Supes Rules Committee will hold a hearing Monday/18 on UCSF’s recent takeover of St. Mary’s Medical Center and St. Francis Memorial Hospital.
The California Nurses Association has serious concerns about the deal—in part, the union says, because:
UCSF Medical Center acquired Children’s Hospital Oakland in 2014, and nurses at both facilities say many services at the Oakland facility have, disturbingly, been eliminated or consolidated across the Bay Area, making care much less accessible for Children’s Hospital patients, especially those from lower-income families who rely on public insurance and public transportation.
The concern is that the giant research institution will cut some services at St. Mary’s, which serves the Western Addition, and St. Francis, which serves the Tenderloin area, and consolidate them with the UC campus in Parnassus Heights, which is planning for a major expansion:
These two hospitals are critical institutions within the city’s health care infrastructure and currently provide a significant portion of needed services to the city’s most vulnerable patients, including unhoused, psychiatric, rehab, intensive care unit, burn, emergency services, and low-income patients. CNA represents nurses at all these facilities.
“So far UCSF has refused to reply to our requests for information regarding the acquisition of Saint Francis and St. Mary’s,” said Amy Preble, RN and chief nurse representative at St. Mary’s. “We’re very concerned about the lack of transparency regarding the safety and care of our patients, coworkers, and community. UCSF needs to step up and take accountability for this acquisition. They need to talk to us and hear us.”
That hearing starts at 10am. The nurses will rally on the steps of City Hall starting at 9am.
From the press release:
“We are here to hold UCSF accountable,” said Shelley Pepper, a UCSF registered nurse. “We know that all of our facilities are key players in the entire San Francisco hospital network to serve the people of San Francisco and the entire Bay Area. We cannot let UCSF wreak havoc on that in pursuit of market share, power, and revenue. We want UC to know that we are watching and we will fight back.”
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]]>The post Cat Power plugged into Dylan’s electric shocker with pitch-perfect tribute appeared first on 48 hills.
]]>Known by the moniker Cat Power, the 52-year-old singer-songwriter has long relished incorporating reworked cuts from peers and predecessors, such as this achingly gorgeous take on Phil Phillips’ “Sea of Love,” into her output.
In 2022, Covers marked her third full-length release devoted to the craft, joining 2000’s The Covers Record and 2008’s Jukebox. All three showcased Marshall’s talent for eloquent, sparse rearrangements, though she’s taking a far more faithful approach with her latest undertaking: a full-length recreation of Bob Dylan’s infamous 1966 “Royal Albert Hall” concert.
Spotlighting a seminal night during the period when Dylan “went electric” — in this case, by switching from a solo acoustic set to an electric one backed by a full band midway through the night — the hallowed bootleg recording of this show is, in truth, a mislabeled tape of a May 17 show that occurred at Manchester Free Trade Hall the same year. Leaning into taper’s lore, Marshall stuck with Royal Albert Hall, where she debuted her performance of Dylan’s set to much acclaim back in 2022, followed by the release of a companion live album last fall.
Last Friday night, a sold-out crowd at San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre was treated to an encore performance of Marshall’s deeply reverential ode to the voice of a generation. Scheduled near the end of two-month North American tour devoted to her Dylan set, it was a privilege to witness Marshall channel one of her idols at such a pivotal early moment in the latter’s career.
The first half of the night was, admittedly, a slow burn. Kicking off with Marshall at the microphone and two bandmates on an acoustic guitar and a harmonica, respectively, early highlights of the evening included impassioned takes of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” and “Desolation Row.”
Though gorgeous, the promise of amplified delights to come coated the show’s first half with a thick air of anticipation. Far from the utter shock it was proven to be for some portion of Dylan’s original audiences—you can hear someone scream “Judas!” on the original tape after Dylan plugs in back in 1966—the drum kit, organ, and electric guitars spread across the stage during the acoustic portion of Marshall’s show served mostly as the musical equivalent of Chekov’s gun.
Nonetheless, over the course of the show’s first half, Marshall’s marvelous voice made wonders of insightful lyrics that continue to resonate today. Possibly fighting an illness of some kind, she gamely gave it her all amid many gulps of tea as she guided the night to its seminal mid-set pivot following “Mr. Tambourine Man.”
It took only a brief blackout for the rest of Marshall’s band to join her and kick off the evening’s high-wattage second act.
Doing their best impression of Dylan’s backing group, the Band (nee the Hawks), they ripped through classics like “Ballad of a Thin Man” and the 1966 live tour exclusive “Tell Me, Momma.” Proving to be the well-oiled machine you’d expect of a Marshall-led band with this many dates already under their belts, the sextet included exceptional work from keyboardist Jordan Summers. As he rotated between a Hammond B-3 organ and a Wurlitzer, it felt as though a half-century of music history was folding in upon itself as Summers coaxed decadent squeals and scintillating solos from his instruments.
Contextualized in a format that included no opener and no encore, the experience was, all things considered, an inspired success as an exercise in musical immersion.
At a time when people seem willing to spend absurd sums of money on tickets to don headsets and view virtual renderings of famous paintings, the prospect of seeing one genius musician perform a tribute to another seems an infinitely better return on one’s investment. That was certainly the feeling at the Herbst, where Marshall was met with a standing ovation prior to playing the last song of her set.
“I don’t think I made him mad,” Marshall allowed, once the clapping finally died down. Ever humble in assessing her performance through Dylan’s eyes, she couldn’t help but add: “Well… at least this time.”
Who can say what a mind as impenetrable as Bob Dylan’s would think? Fortunately, it’s a moot point.
Though Marshall’s affinity for Dylan is absolute, Friday night’s performance wasn’t about a set a man played in England nearly 60 years ago. Instead, it felt far more like an opportunity for the artist known as Cat Power to express herself by means beyond her own notes and words. In less capable hands, such an exercise could easily be construed as a mere side-project or one-off fancy. But on Friday night, the featured voice was unmistakable.
Following her brief remarks, someone in the Herbst gamely shouted “Judas!”
With that, Marshall and company kicked into the classic opening notes of closer “Like a Rolling Stone.” How did it feel? Sublime.
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]]>The post The mayor’s upzoning plans will deeply damage SF’s neighborhoods appeared first on 48 hills.
]]>“Some who are fortunate to have communities still do fight to keep them, but they have seldom prevailed. While people possess a community, they usually understand that they can’t afford to lose it, but after it is lost, gradually even the memory of what was lost is lost.” —Jane Jacobs
“If we wish to rebuild our cities, we must first rebuild our neighborhoods.” —Harvey Milk
The massive citywide rezoning proposed by the mayor and under consideration at the Planning Commission will have disastrous impacts on San Francisco and directly threatens our neighborhoods.
The state mandated Housing Element of the General Plan calls for removing all density controls on lots in much of the western and central parts of the city, and dramatically increasing heights from between 65 feet to, in some cases, as high as 240 feet. These proposed height increases are concentrated in neighborhood commercial corridors. There are 167 official legacy business in the affected area.
The plan appears to be a contemporary version of redevelopment programs. It envisions massive demolitions, without regard to what is being lost in the process. There is no consideration of the loss of a sense of community and an understanding that we are not isolated individuals but part of something larger.
The proponents have failed to learn from the history of redevelopment programs in San Francisco, particularly in the Western Addition and Fillmore. Thousands of people lost their homes and businesses. A vibrant African American culture was lost and has never recovered. Efforts to bring back what was lost have all failed.
The negative impacts of this upzoning will be felt long before the first new unit is constructed. The adoption of the plan will immediately result in increases in land values. Landlords will be motivated to rid their property of tenants to maximize that value. Renewals of expired commercial leases will likely be threatened, impacting the survival of small and neighborhood businesses. Landlords in residential buildings will have an incentive to keep their buildings unoccupied.
The Planning Department acknowledges that it has yet to develop plans to protect displaced local and neighborhood businesses. The planners assume that such businesses will be able to relocate to the new buildings. There has been no analysis of the feasibility of such relocations, especially after the passage of years before the new buildings are constructed. How would such businesses survive until they are relocated and how could they be protected from huge rent increases? The history of the Western Addition and South-of-Market redevelopment areas has a clear message: The small businesses do not survive.
There appears to be no real plan to protect vulnerable residential tenants from displacement. The Planning Department acknowledges that current ideas are inadequate and more extensive measures need to be developed. Developing these measures will be of little value after the fact.
This proposal anticipates a substantial increase in population. The Planning Department acknowledges that there is no current analysis or plan to deal with the provision of needed infrastructure for the increased population. There has been no study of the financial feasibility of providing these services, everything from sewer and electrical capacity to the need for parks and open space.
What will be the impact on schools, local businesses as well as the availability of grocery stores, childcare facilities, and playgrounds? The plan is designed to be transit intensive and the new buildings will have little or no parking. Yet, there has been no consideration of either the practicality of or financial feasibility of making the required improvements to the transportation system.
The assumption of a dramatic increase in population is not supported by recent data. Since the 2020 census, the population of San Francisco has fallen not increased. The 2020 census found 873,965 residents; the census bureau’s estimate as of July 1, 2022 is 808,427, a decline of 7.5 percent. Is there any solid reason to project a significant population increase?
Though the city’s population increased by 38 percent since 1940, the number of housing units increased by 79 percent—and yet, in the early 2020s, the city was experiencing a housing shortage, understandable only because the average housing unit in 1940 held three people, and the average housing unit in 2020 held two.
Although the proposed upzoning is couched in terms of creating housing opportunities for low and moderate-income households, families, seniors, people with disabilities, essential workers, by far the most extensive impact would be to create large amounts of market rate housing, and there is limited evidence to justify such an expansion of market-rate housing.
The state mandated 2023-2030 Regional Housing Needs Assessment Needs Allocation requires San Francisco to approve more than 82,000 units over a period of seven years. Of these, 35,400 units are “affordable housing” units ranging from those affordable to extremely low-income households to those affordable to moderate income households. The cost of building such affordable housing over the next seven years is about $19 billion.
The bond measure on the March ballot in the amount of $300 million is only 1.5 percent of that.
The only solution that this up zoning offers is based on the neoliberal theory that markets will solve our problems. This has never worked and won’t work this time.
The massive rezoning is a blunt instrument applied throughout large swaths of the city without an examination of the differences between neighborhoods and how the impacts would vary from area to area. For example, there are numerous areas with substantial historic resources included in the rezoned areas, yet there are only vague and unconvincing answers as to how those areas can be protected. This issue is being left for future analysis.
San Francisco has about two years before it is required to respond to State demands. A thorough economic analysis of potential impacts should be conducted before any up zoning is adopted. The city should take advantage of that time to develop a carefully crafted program that recognizes our most important values, including the value of community.
Dennis Antenore is a former member of the SF Planning Commission.
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