The developer of 8 Washington finally threw in the towel the other day, ending a dramatic chapter of San Francisco politics that may have helped Aaron Peskin regain a seat on the Board of Supervisors and almost certainly changed the way the city approaches development on the waterfront.
A lawyer for Simon Snellgrove, the head of San Francisco Waterfront Partners, which wanted to build the most expensive luxury condos in the city right along the Embarcadero, wrote to the Port March 2 to say that the company now longer wanted to proceed with any project on the site.
Seven years after Snellgrove entered into an exclusive negotiating agreement with the port, and after he poured millions of dollars into a terrible project that he thought he could muscle through because he had allies in City Hall, the people, as they say, have spoken.
A ballot initiative that was one of the key factors bringing Peskin back into the political fray, then another one that limited development on the waterfront, both passed overwhelmingly. There was no way for Snellgrove to move forward.
The ballot measure that would have approved 8 Washington lost not just in North Beach and Telegraph Hill, where people worried about the views, and traffic, and general waterfront mess. It lost all over the city — a sign that the voters were getting fed up with the notion that all of the housing we are building is aimed at the very, very rich.
A critical moment in local history, and now it’s finally over.
Some of the land that 8 Washington was going to be built on is Port (that is, public) land. We have to be able to figure out a better way to use it than as a playground for billionaires.
The second week of the Alex Nieto trial begins Monday/7, and the plaintiffs’ case will be winding down. By Tuesday, I suspect, the city will be presenting its defense.
I don’t know what the looks like, I really don’t. The key witnesses have already testified – the cops who shot Nieto, the one other eyewitness who saw the shooting, the coroner who examined the body …. All of the folks who can say something directly about what happened have had their say.
Tomorrow, Monday/7, Refugio and Elvira Nieto, the parents of Alex, will likely testify, and talk about their son and the loss they experienced. After that, the city attorney will start in on a long and detailed discussion of the timing chip on the Taser that was in the young man’s possession when he was shot and killed.
The relevance? Well, the cops are saying that Nieto aimed the weapon at them, and that it had a laser sight that looked like the sight on a high-end handgun, and they feared for their lives so they had to fire 58 rounds at him and continue firing after he was on the ground.
The key defense witness says Nieto never pulled his Taser out and died with his hands in his pockets.
So now there’s this issue of whether, and when, the Taser was discharged. In theory, if they defense can prove that Nieto’s Taser was fired around the same time that the cops were shooting, it would bolster their claim that the fired in self-defense.
(Of course, it turns out they weren’t really threatened – the Taser’s range is only a few feet, and it can only be fired once. But the cops say they thought it was a firearm, and if the city can demonstrate that was a reasonable fear, the officers can try to claim it was a legitimate shooting.)
The evidence so far suggests that if Nieto’s taser was fired, it was four minutes before he was shot and killed. The city has gone to great lengths to get an expert in Tasers to figure out that the time chip inside the device is slow, and that it slows down at a consistent rate, and that if you synch it with Greenwich Mean Time and work it back, the Taser discharge might have happened at the same time that the officers opened fire.
That’s assuming that it was really necessary to fire 58 shots at Nieto, including when he was on the ground. And it assumes that the light from the Taser was on before, during, and after the discharge. And it assumes that Nieto aimed and fired first – not after he had been hit by a volley of bullets.
And it assumes that the cops had the right to keep shooting at Nieto when they later admitted they heard and saw no evidence that Nieto was actually shooting anything at them.
(Remember: The darts on a civilian Taser only go a few yards, and the cops were much further away than that.)
So I don’t know how much difference it makes what the forensic experts say about a computer chip and its relationship to Greenwhich Mean Time inside the Taser that Nieto was carrying.
The jury is likely to get the case by the end of the week.
Just in case the mayor of San Francisco wants to continue to brag about his housing policies, let’s look at an interesting statistic: San Francisco is now the most profitable place in the nation to buy and flip houses – in other worse, much of the activity in the real-estate market isn’t about getting anyone a place to live, it’s about making a profit averaging $145,000 a pop by speculating and driving up housing prices (oh, and evicting people along the way.)
This is what the mayor’s tech-at-all-costs “jobs agenda” has wrought.
