San Francisco Public Press (https://www.sfpublicpress.org/2015/02/page/2/)
San Francisco’s new Navigation Center, opening in March, will give chronically homeless people round-the-clock access to living quarters and other amenities while center staff help them find permanent housing.
This detailed map shows how all the buildings of the former Phoenix Continuation High School in the Mission District probably will be used. » Read more
By Craig Miller, KQED Science/The California Report
This month, Congressman Mike Thompson (D-St. Helena) introduced — for at least the third time — a bill to set aside more than 350,000 acres north of the Bay Area as California’s newest national monument. Only this time, the footprint of the proposed Berryessa-Snow Mountain National Monument is minus Lake Berryessa, the man-made reservoir northeast of Napa which opponents say does not merit special protections. At the same time, environmentalists in California are pressing President Obama to use his own authority to protect hundreds of thousands of acres of federal lands from development by designating them as new national monuments. Read the complete story at KQED Science/The California Report.
Bicyclists and pedestrians beware: San Francisco’s major commercial corridors are lethal.
Surprised? Probably not. But now you can espy that reality in startling detail on the city’s interactive maps, which show exactly where thousands of unfortunate souls were hurt or killed when they were hit by cars. » Read more
Two years into operation, the city’s seismic retrofit program is finding some success: Almost all of the targeted buildings’ owners have had them inspected. Only 18 scofflaws remain.
But even for most of the compliant owners the hard part is yet to come: They will need to retrofit their “soft-story,” wood-frame buildings. » Read more
By Leslie Griffy/KALW Crosscurrents
The gravel edge of the railroad tracks that backs on to a warehouse was not the end of the line for Marshawn Lewis and his neighbors. In fact, they have already scattered. But in mid-January, about 50 people had lived there for nearly three months. They slept in tents and makeshift shelters of tarps and cardboard boxes. The land became home after they were kicked out of a creekside San Jose homeless encampment known as the Jungle.
By John Myers, KQED News/Faultlines
For a state whose political leaders pride themselves on being focused on the future, California’s 2014 elections seem to have decidedly been driven by its past — as in, its older voters. Or put another way: It was the Year of the Grandparents. Read the complete story at KQED News/Faultlines
By Dan Brekke, The California Report
Update, Feb. 9, 2015: As expected, the big rains that have fallen in the northern half of California have boosted storage at the state’s principal reservoirs. So now we are confronted with a glass half-full/half-empty proposition when we appraise how they are looking. Case in point: The federal Central Valley Project’s Shasta Lake, the state’s biggest reservoir, which has risen to almost precisely 50 percent capacity as of Monday. About 9.5 inches of rain have fallen at Shasta Dam in the past week, typical of the heavy precipitation that’s fallen in the 6,700-square-mile watershed that feeds the lake.
By Jane Meredith Adams, EdSource
With huge numbers of California children still uninsured, schools are beginning to take the lead in letting families know that affordable health care coverage is available. In school libraries and courtyards from Sacramento to Los Angeles and beyond, trained enrollment counselors have been invited to set up folding tables, commandeer desk space and corral parents before the Feb. 15 sign-up deadline for Covered California, the state’s online health insurance marketplace created under the federal Affordable Care Act. Read the complete story at EdSource.
By Marisa Lagos, KQED News Fix
It has been more than two decades since Congress passed the so-called Motor Voter Act requiring state DMVs to let residents register to vote at their offices — but the ACLU of California says the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles is falling asleep at the wheel, and it is threatening to sue. The civil rights organization is filing a complaint Thursday with Secretary of State Alex Padilla on behalf of three Californians as well as four organizations: the League of Women Voters of California, the National Council of La Raza, California Common Cause and the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment. Read the complete story at KQED News Fix.
By 2005, when a federal judge lifted the most recent desegregation orders, San Francisco Unified School District had been trying for more than three decades to make its schools more racially and socioeconomically diverse, starting in 1971 with forced busing.
San Francisco schools no longer exhibit the level of racial isolation they once did, but they are now resegregating, as are many others across the country. » Read more