Free Republic

First, police fatally shot two minority suspects carrying knives. Then transcripts surfaced showing officers using racial slurs in text messages. Finally, a young black woman was shot dead as police tried to pull her from a stolen car. The woman's shooting death Thursday was the tipping point for San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, who forced Police Chief Greg Suhr to step down after months of mounting pressure. The new chief inherits the daunting task of turning around a troubled department in a city deeply divided by race — and doing it fast. "Reforms, reforms, reforms," acting Police Chief Toney Chaplin...

According to Census estimates, the number of blacks [in San Francisco] shrank from 13.4% of the population in 1970 to just 6.5% in 2005 — the biggest percentage decline in any major American city.

San Francisco’s Affordable Housing Shell Game $28 million affordable housing program in city where 44% are low income persons and average housing cost is $402 per month by Wayne Lusvardi - The Pasadena Pundit April 21,2007 A shell game is an urban form of street gambling where a person hides a small object underneath one of three nutshells, thimbles or cups and then by sleight of hand shuffles them about while spectators try to guess the final location of the object. The success of the trick by the con man is to keep his mark focused on conspicuous actions to...

Anne Bakstad and Ed Cohen are starting to feel as if their family of four is an endangered species in San Francisco. Since the couple bought a house five years ago, more than a dozen families in their social circle have left the city for cheaper housing, better schools or both. The goodbyes are so frequent that Carina, age 4 1/2, wants to know when she is going to move, too. Eric, 2 1/2, misses Gus, his playmate from across the street. "When we get to know people through our kids, we think to ourselves, `Are they renters or owners?...

Nearly half the families in San Francisco with preschool children stated in a newly released survey their intent to move out of the city in the next three years, citing the lack of affordable housing, concern over public safety and the state of the public schools as their primary motivators. The survey findings, contained in a report issued Friday by the mayor's office that looks at the declining population of children in San Francisco, confirms what many have known for a long time: The city has had a hard time attracting and retaining young families. People under the age of...

We already knew the rent was too damn high, even before we published a report this February showing not only that the median for a one bedroom apartment in the city had jumped to $3,460, but that even formerly cheaper neighborhoods were now among the pricey. Apparently though, they weren’t high enough. According to Zillow, the new median rent in San Francisco is $4,225 a month. Zillow’s data compose the “Zillow Rental Index” (ZRI). This index shows rents up 16% year-over-year (YOY) this April, and take into account all types of rentals in San Francisco proper, from single family homes...

San Francisco -- Rebuilding San Francisco after a major earthquake would change its human face, hastening gentrification and driving out poor and elderly residents, experts and city officials warn. Experts say there's a 62 percent chance a quake with a magnitude of 6.7 or higher will hit the San Francisco Bay area within several decades — or tomorrow. Thousands of homes would be rendered uninhabitable, displacing up to 300,000 residents, almost half the city's population, according to some projections. A major issue would be creating replacement housing for the poor in one of the nation's most expensive markets. About 16,000...

Author, founder of Salon.com, and Bernal Heights resident David Talbot recently made a speech at Stanford which was then published in 48HillsOnline.com decrying “Stanford douchebags”, gentrification, and Mayor Ed Lee. Talbot’s strong words for Stanford students have struck a chord up north in San Francisco, and his speech is rapidly going viral.

If you’re out on the left coast and heading out for some tasty Chipotle goodness tonight, be prepared to dig a little deeper when you pay the check. Prices are going up and it’s not just because of the cost of beef. (From the Chicago Tribune) In its weekly survey of 10 Chipotle markets, Chicago-based William Blair found that Chipotle raised prices in half of the markets that the investment firm surveyed — San Francisco, Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis and Orlando. In most markets, the price increases occurred due to the rising cost of beef.The city by the bay, however,...

California's high taxes and obsession with elitist political correctness have made the state so expensive that a fourth of residents are thinking about moving to a more reasonable state. As greedy cities, counties and other governmental bodies restrict property rights and development in the name of environmentalism, housing has become prohibitively overpriced. The young are especially hard hit. A study released today by Public Policy Institute of California found that: 60 percent of respondents worried that their children would not be able to buy homes nearby. Only one in five who want to buy a house someday think they will...

The poorest Americans, who can’t afford to buy property, are increasingly priced out of rentals. There were only 28 adequate and available to rent homes for every 100 extremely low-income renters in 2013, down from 37 in 2000, according to the Urban Institute, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization that focuses on social and economic policy. “This gap between supply and demand leaves 72% of the country’s poorest families burdened by the high cost of housing,” it found. Extremely low-income renters are households with incomes at or below 30% of the median income in that region. Not one county in the...

Struggling to live in America's $1M city: Photographer captures lives of ordinary San Francisco residents who have been forced to live in cars, trailers, garages and tents following the tech boom Photographer Wenxin Zhang moved to San Francisco in 2011 Discovered a group of people online that had been forced to find alternative means of accommodation 'I visited them alone with mutual trust,' she said The subsequent photo essay is called Goodnight Stories A recent report said that a family needs about $200,000 a year to live comfortably in San Francisco, so long as their children go to public school....

<p>Home prices have soared so high that affording housing is a problem not just for the poor but for middle-class families as well, experts say.</p> <p>"The run-up in single-family home prices is crowding out solidly middle-class households from buying," says Bruce Katz, director of the Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy at the Brookings Institution.</p>

San Francisco In my apartment building people of various income levels are stacked on top of each other. The architect and the teacher occupy one-bedroom apartments on the floor above me. They are considered middle-class and, for that matter, so am I. An affluent, well-traveled couple lives in a two-bedroom apartment on the top floor. A poor Chinese immigrant family of five is crammed into the converted storage room where half a dozen bicycles were once kept, their children often turning the foyer into a makeshift playground strewn with plastic toys. This is typical of the way we live in...

In urban centers around the country, rental prices are soaring. Cities like San Francisco, Seattle, and New York City routinely report double-digit increases that make it nearly impossible for residents to make ends meet. But it’s not just dwellers of those metropolitan areas who are having a hard time paying the rent. According to a report out this week from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, more than half of renters in America are considered to be financially burdened by their rent, meaning that they spend more than 30 percent of their income just on where they live. High...

San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone’s effort to ensure that Catholic schools are Catholic has led one-hundred San Franciscans who describe themselves as “committed Catholics inspired by Vatican II,” to take out a full page ad in the San Francisco Chronicle asking Pope Francis to force Cordileone's resignation and appoint in his place an archbishop committed to “our values and your teachings.” It is worth asking to what extent those “values” and “teachings” align. Francis, who has spoken strongly in the past against gay marriage and transgender ideology, has also called for a church that is “poor and for the poor.”...

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) — There’s no one at this new San Francisco vegetarian restaurant to take your lunch order or tell you when its ready. Instead, you’ll depend on machines for a fully automated dining experience straight out of an episode of The Jetsons. Welcome to Eatsa, a new futuristic fast food chain opening Monday in the Embarcadero (121 Spear Street) offering quick, healthy food for about $7 — a deal compared to other lunch time options in San Francisco. Customers tap their meal selections on an iPad or their smartphone and pay electronically. No cash is taken here....

If you're interested in whether rent control makes rent prices go down or not -- and plenty of people think it actually makes them go up -- then stop what you're doing right now and watch this video on San Francisco's real estate war, by my colleague Andrew Stern. The video features a heart-breaking interview with artist David Brenkus, who has lived in a rent-controlled apartment on Walter Street for 34 years. His building has been bought and now he is being evicted so that the new landlord can move in. Brenkus's rent is $735 month for a two-bedroom apartment,...

If you're interested in whether rent control makes rent prices go down — and plenty of people think it actually makes them go up — then stop what you're doing and watch this video on San Francisco's real-estate war, by my colleague Andrew Stern. The video features a heartbreaking interview with artist David Brenkus, who has lived in a rent-controlled apartment on Walter Street for 34 years.

San Francisco's homeless population plummeted by more than a quarter in the past two years, the city reported Monday, a dramatic change Mayor Gavin Newsom says is a credit to his policies of cutting cash assistance to street people and aggressively moving them into housing with counseling services. San Francisco's new figures are based on a one-night homeless count, taken between 8 p.m. Jan. 26 and about 8 a.m. the next morning. It showed the city now has 6,248 homeless people living on the streets or in jails, shelters, rehabilitation centers or other emergency facilities -- a 28 percent decline...