Latest news with #SanFranciscans
New York Post
14 hours ago
- Politics
- New York Post
Warning to NY: Don't make the mistake we did in San Francisco by electing Zohran Mamdani
Take heed, New Yorkers, and learn from San Francisco's mistakes: The City by the Bay has discovered to its sorrow that charismatic leaders like Zohran Mamdani can dazzle — but their decisions can be disastrous. Just a few years ago San Franciscans, too, supported magnetic populists, then watched as their neighborhoods fell off a livability cliff. Advertisement Regrets, we have more than a few — and many we want to mention. In 2017 London Breed, a brash and captivating city supervisor from the projects, became acting mayor when the mild-mannered Mayor Ed Lee died. With big promises of housing creation, downtown revitalization and racial equity — as well as her hard-partying charm — she whipped up the crowds, winning the mayoralty outright in a special election. Advertisement But during her tenure, San Francisco went from thriving to diving. Massive tent encampments took over large swaths of the city thanks to her lax policies, and the financial district and retail centers hollowed out. 'I am the mayor, but I'm a black woman first,' she shouted in a 2020 speech, as violence spiraled nationwide after the death of George Floyd. 'I am angry.' Advertisement That same day, looters and vandals were running roughshod over Union Square stores and small businesses in Chinatown. Far-left public defender Chesa Boudin one-upped Breed's progressive leanings when he joined her in city government. Boudin thrilled local social-justice activists when he ran for district attorney in 2019, as opposition to President Donald Trump and the Black Lives Matter movement gained steam. He quickly eliminated cash bail, reduced incarceration and put pressure on law enforcement instead of on criminals. Advertisement Soon Honduran cartels and dealers flooded Fog City with fentanyl, and drug tourists arrived from all over the country to overstay their welcome on our permissive streets. Overdoses spiked, and property crimes like shoplifting, looting and car smash-and-grabs became the norm. Jennifer Friedenbach, the firebrand executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, spearheaded the push to pass a 2018 'tax-the-rich' ballot proposition that promised to raise hundreds of millions for affordable housing. Her influence was enough to persuade Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff to back the measure. Prop C passed but did nothing to solve the exploding homelessness problem. Instead, high net-worth companies like Stripe and PayPal, which contributed heavily to the city's tax revenues and provided vital jobs, simply packed up and left. Life in San Francisco got ugly, fast. The police force shrank from nearly 2,000 officers in 2020 to under 1,500 in 2024. Businesses fled and tourism dwindled. Advertisement An online 'poop map' made our filthy streets a national punch line. A city that was once so vibrant and full of civic pride became an embarrassing warning to the rest of the country: Do not do what we they are doing. Now, San Francisco is in intense repair mode. Voters ousted Boudin in 2022, and his replacement, Brooke Jenkins, has focused on increasing arrests and convictions. Advertisement In 2024, the calm and measured political outsider Daniel Lurie defeated the bombastic Breed in her bid for a second term. His 100-day progress report heralded a drop in crime, the removal of tent cities and an uptick in visitors. As for Friedenbach, her coalition's sway is sagging. Calls for her dismissal from the oversight committee that controls the Prop C funds are intensifying. San Franciscans are allowing themselves to feel cautious optimism about their future: 43% of residents now believe the city is on the right track, nearly double what it was a year ago. Advertisement Pessimism persists, and it's warranted, but green shoots of hope are taking root. That's why so many San Franciscans watched New York City's Democratic primary election with both fascination and despair. They know too well that electing compelling characters like Mamdani can have dire consequences. Our merry band of socialists here are celebrating Mamdani's win, but the majority of San Francisco residents, workers and business owners send this warning: The politics and policies he espouses can turn a flawed but marvelous city into one that is unrecognizably horrifying. Advertisement So be careful, New York. It's easy to fall for simple-sounding solutions delivered by a smooth talker in seductive speeches. But once that person takes the reins, and the pie-in-the-sky promises become dangerous reality, the process to remove him is long and arduous — and fixing the wreckage is even harder. Erica Sandberg is a freelance journalist and host of the San Francisco Beat.
Axios
15 hours ago
- Business
- Axios
Oakland's airport is changing its name — again
After a year of legal disputes, officials at the Port of Oakland announced Friday that they will rename the city's airport — again — to Oakland San Francisco Bay Airport. Why it matters: San Francisco sued over trademark infringement after Oakland International Airport changed its name to San Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport in a bid to attract more passengers. The lawsuit resulted in a temporary court order blocking the plan. The latest: In a letter to SFO officials, Port of Oakland aviation director Craig Simon maintained that their initial proposal does not infringe on the trademark for SFO and that their goal is to "bring more awareness that OAK is located on the San Francisco Bay." "Research had uncovered a lack of awareness about OAK's geographic location ... as contributing to a depressed flight route demand," Simon wrote. The new name, a response to the court order, will be adopted "while we wait for final legal resolution," the letter reads. Reality check: Widely criticized by San Franciscans, the initial name change led to "evidence of confusion that we have not seen before," SFO spokesperson Doug Yakel told SFGATE last September, a few months after the Oakland airport rebrand. Reports included passengers showing up at SFO with tickets flying out of OAK. City attorney David Chiu argued in San Francisco's lawsuit that the renaming "would be particularly challenging for international travelers who may not speak or read English — an important segment of SFO's customer base."
San Francisco Chronicle
a day ago
- Business
- San Francisco Chronicle
Recology's San Francisco garbage rates are about to go up
San Francisco waste hauler Recology will charge city residents nearly 25% more to collect their trash in the coming years under new rates approved this week at City Hall. The decision Wednesday by San Francisco's Refuse Rate Board applies to the rates Recology charges to pick up trash at single-family homes and other residential properties around town. The monthly cost of Recology's standard three-bin service for homes will increase from $47 this year to $52.75 in 2026, $56.52 in 2027 and $58.46 in 2028. While significant, the 24.4% rate hike over three years is less than proposed by both Recology and the city's garbage rate watchdog. Recology had sought a nearly 32% increase over the same period, while the city's refuse rates administrator recommended an almost 28% hike. Recology's proposal would have increased the cost of its three-bin service to $62.03 by 2028. The rate hikes are the culmination of a process that began in January, when Recology argued that it needed to raise its rates because of rising operating costs due to inflation and the city's slower than expected economic recovery from the pandemic. Recology said that its residential refuse rates had remained flat for two years and were lower than other Bay Area cities. 'At the end of the day, San Francisco's rate for standard residential service remains less than Oakland, San Jose and Los Angeles,' Recology spokesperson Robert Reed said in an email. Refuse Rates Administrator Jay Liao said the approved rates are 'in line with, or lower than, peer cities and will provide for the level of service residents need.' 'This was a process where we've scrutinized every dollar in Recology's proposal to bring down rates as much as possible because San Franciscans should receive dependable service at a reasonable cost,' Liao said in a statement. The decision represents a test of the reforms voters made three years ago to the city's process for setting garbage rates after federal prosecutors charged former public works head Mohammed Nuru and several Recology companies and executives in a corruption scandal. Prosecutors said Recology funneled money into a nonprofit 'slush fund' that Nuru controlled because he held sway over their garbage rates and the firm wanted to keep him happy. The rate hikes were approved by the Refuse Rate Board, a three-member panel that includes City Administrator Carmen Chu, San Francisco Public Utilities Commission General Manager Dennis Herrera and Steve Bowdry, who is serving as ratepayer representative. Aaron Peskin, a former city supervisor who authored the reforms and gathered an unusual coalition of tenants and landlords to oppose Recology's proposed hikes, was satisfied with the outcome. 'It's not everything we wanted,' Peskin said. 'But it shows that the system is working and that the public and the city have meaningful oversight.'
San Francisco Chronicle
2 days ago
- General
- San Francisco Chronicle
S.F. Pride weekend: What to know about street closures and transit impacts
San Franciscans and revelers coming to the city for this year's Pride weekend will need to grapple with an array of closed streets, rerouted Muni lines and BART schedule adjustments. Like past years, the annual celebration is expected to draw a crowd of 1 million to San Francisco, one of the largest pride celebrations in the country. San Francisco Police Department officials said Thursday that they were coordinating with other agencies to ensure they have enough personnel on site to protect attendees. The city's official celebration will last from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday and from noon to 6 p.m. on Sunday in Civil Center Plaza. The Pride Parade, which will begin at 10:30 a.m Sunday, will lead to street closures from Market Street to 9th Street. All intersections will be closed. Muni lines that operate on Market Street will also be rerouted to Mission Street, in addition to other transportation changes. Here is what to know about traffic and transit during San Francisco's celebration this weekend. Several streets will be closed all day Saturday and Sunday, according to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. Other streets will close Sunday between 12 a.m. and 5 p.m.: Leavenworth between McAllister and Market Sutter between Sansome and Market Sansome, northbound lanes, between Sutter and Bush And some streets will be closed Sunday from 6 a.m. to 5 p.m.: S.F. Pride Parade Route The parade will begin at 10:30 Sunday at Market and Beale streets and will end on 8th Street near Civic Center Plaza. All intersections on Market will be closed to cross traffic during the Parade. Organizers said the easiest way to get to the parade is via the Market Street subway. Several streets and Muni stops, meanwhile, will be closed and rerouted. Muni Services Over Pride Weekend, many Muni services will be rerouted to Mission Street. Organizers said that Muni trains will stop at Civic Center station for the weekend's celebration and parade, as well as at Powell and Montgomery stations. More information can be found at or at In the morning, from 9:30 a.m. to 11 a.m., trains running downtown will come from Millbrae and Pleasant Hill. After 9 p.m., BART will run a three-line service. BART officials warned that riders should expect crowds at Embarcadero Station before 10 a.m. and all day at Civic Center Station. They advised riders to instead use the Montgomery Street and Powell Street stations.
Atlantic
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
Revenge of the Wrap
Wraps are awful. At best, they ruin perfectly serviceable fillings by bundling them up in a gummy, cold tortilla. At worst, they do this with less-than-serviceable fillings. They're like a salad, but less refreshing, or like a sandwich, but less filling—a worst-of-all-worlds Frankenstein's monster, an indistinguishable food slurry wrapped in edible cardboard, like the world's rudest present. They're desperation food—'the stuff,' Lesley Suter wrote a few years ago in the food publication Eater, 'of refrigerated airport deli cases, conference center lunch trays, and the dark side of a Subway menu.' Every single part of them is the wrong texture. And yet: This month, McDonald's announced that it would be bringing back its chicken Snack Wrap, after nearly 19,000 people signed a petition arguing that it was ' easily the best thing' on the chain's menu. The announcement came a day after Popeyes introduced three new chicken wraps. TikTok is now filled with wrap-recipe cook-alongs and clips of attractive young people hunting for the best chicken-Caesar wrap in their given city. If you are over 40, this might sound a bit familiar. Wraps were one of the biggest eating fads of the 1990s, after a group of enterprising friends decided to put Peking duck inside a tortilla and see if San Franciscans would buy it. They would, and they did, and then so did the rest of the country. Soon enough, the nation's leading newspapers were running careful, anthropological explainers about wraps, as though a sandwich were a newly discovered animal species. (The Washington Post, 1996: 'They're called wraps—big, fat, tortilla-wrapped bundles similar to burritos but with a wild choice of international fillings.' The Post again, six months later: 'It looks like a giant egg roll.') Tavern on the Green, which had at that point been selling down-the-middle American classics in New York City's Central Park for two generations, introduced a pork-and-potato wrap. Around the country, as The New York Times wrote in 1998, 'tiny stores selling wraps sprang up like weeds.' Wraps, like garbage cans, can hold anything; for this reason, they aligned perfectly with the '90s fascination with so-called fusion food, which combines dishes from different culinary traditions. But more important, they were a vessel for the era's body anxieties. Extreme thinness was trending; Dr. Richard Atkins had recently reissued his diet guide, one of the best-selling books in history. Wraps were—in marketing, if not always in reality —lower-calorie and lower-carb than normal sandwiches, all that pillowy, delicious bread having been replaced with a utilitarian tortilla forgery that tasted and looked virtuous, especially when it was flecked with spinach or tomato. If traditional sandwiches were greasy and chaotic, the province of children and cartoon slobs, wraps were tidy and sensible, the province of working women with slim hips and pin-straight hair. They were fuel more than food, practicality more than pleasure. The fact that they didn't taste good was maybe even part of the point. A couple of weeks ago, I was talking with a woman about this story at a party, and she mentioned that she used to eat a lot of wraps. I was incredulous—until she explained, breezily, that she had had an eating disorder for many years. Trends are pendulums. Wraps and extreme thinness eventually became less fashionable, but not because they were a terrible waste of time and imagination—they became less fashionable simply because new orthodoxy about how to eat and how to look replaced them. Bowls became the dominant healthy-ish working lunch, and a curvier silhouette—less ruler, more Jessica Rabbit; less Kate Moss, more Kim Kardashian—became the aspirational female body type. Third-wave feminism and its attendant media turned dieting (or at least talking about it) into something archaic and deeply uncool. But America's golden age of body positivity had its limitations: People were still expected to fall within a narrow band of acceptable sizes and shapes, and they were expected to have a particular body by accident, without effort or deprivation or shame or depressing sandwiches. For a while, the feminine ideal was a beautiful woman with a tiny waist, a giant butt, and a hamburger in hand, meat juice spilling down her forearm. But recently, the mood has shifted again. Hip bones are jutting out once more from above low-rise jeans. The Kardashian sisters have been talking about their ' weight-loss journeys.' Estimates suggest that up to one in eight American adults have taken Ozempic or similar drugs since they were introduced. In the extreme, influencers are building social-media empires by bullying women into cutting calories and exercising for hours a day. Everywhere I look, the aesthetic values of the '90s have returned, even if the vocabulary has changed: Low-carb has been replaced with high-protein; dieting has been replaced with wellness; starvation has been replaced with fasting. Diet culture is being revived, repackaged, and resold for a new era, and so are the foods that fed it. Two decades ago, when Subway launched a new line of wraps, they were advertised as a 'carb-controlled' option compatible with the Atkins diet. In 2024, when Subway launched a new line of wraps, a company press release foregrounded their protein content and promised to 'fuel you up without weighing you down.' The Snack Wrap petition explicitly cites the wrap's calorie count, which is typically below 300. On TikTok, fitness bros are bragging about the 'macros' on their 'XL Grinder Salad Wraps,' and women are posting recipes for 300-calorie buffalo-chicken wraps to a chorus of comments such as 'YALL THIS IS SOOOOO FILLING. I LOVE HIGH VOLUME LOW CAL EATING 🔥🔥🔥.' A thinness-obsessed nation is turning once again toward joyless tubes of functional slop, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
