San Francisco Public Press (https://www.sfpublicpress.org/2020/11/)
Public transportation has been transformed by the coronavirus pandemic. San Francisco’s Muni light rail system has been shut for months, and buses are running on core service lines only — though the focus on core lines, according to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s Director Jeffrey Tumlin, has actually resulted in service improvements in some areas. » Read more
Seventy-six years ago, the San Francisco Ballet introduced “The Nutcracker” to America. This year, the company will introduce the “Nutcracker Online” — a virtual holiday experience for the era of COVID-19.
With help from Blueprint Studios, a Bay Area-based event design firm, S.F. » Read more
In California, a sanctuary state — where local law enforcement is barred from collaborating with immigration enforcement — people who have completed prison sentences have been handed off to immigration detention. State prisons can and do, however, comply with requests from Immigration and Customs Enforcement for people considered deportable. » Read more
San Francisco remains on track to move out of California’s COVID-19 red zone into the most restrictive purple zone within a matter of days, forcing new rollbacks on businesses and a late night curfew.
“The city will be required to roll back or reduce capacity of several activities within 24 hours,” said Joaquin Torres, director of San Francisco’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, at a press conference Tuesday. » Read more
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. » Read more
As the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing scrambles to find placements for the more than 2,300 residents of its shelter-in-place hotels, little attention has been paid to the people who work at those sites. Nonprofit organizations that run the hotels are working diligently not just to identify exits for residents, but to keep their staff, many of whom have worked at these nonprofits for decades. When COVID-19 hit, San Francisco closed its shelters and navigation centers to prevent the coronavirus from spreading. Many residents from those facilities were relocated to shelter-in-place hotels — and the shelter staff went with them. But now that the city has declared that the hotels must close, and with shelters operating at a fraction of their original capacity, there’s nowhere for staff to go.
Thousands of lawsuits have been filed against the maker of a weedkiller alleging that it causes cancer. Research is mixed on that, as the results of various studies are split on whether glyphosate, the active ingredient in the weedkiller Roundup, is linked to cancer or other health concerns. » Read more
The number of new COVID-19 cases in the city has quadrupled since Oct. 12 amid the city’s worst surge in infections since the pandemic began, San Francisco Department of Public Health Director Dr. Grant Colfax announced Friday afternoon.
San Francisco is in the state’s red tier, the third least restrictive, after being in the lowest yellow tier just three weeks ago. » Read more
Photojournalist Yesica Prado has been documenting the lives of people living in their cars, vans, RVs and campers — including, at times, turning the lens on herself as she shelters in place in her own RV. Earlier this year, the San Francisco Public Press, in collaboration with the Bay Area visual storytelling nonprofit CatchLight, published Prado’s photos and writing in a special series of multimedia reports called “Driving Home: Surviving the Housing Crisis.” » Read more
Earlier this year, the San Francisco Public Press featured Gregory Nelson in “Driving Home: Surviving the Housing Crisis,” a photojournalism project by Yesica Prado documenting the experiences of people living in vehicles in the Bay Area. Prado followed up with Nelson to find out how his life has changed during the pandemic. » Read more