San Francisco is compelling far fewer mentally ill people into mandated treatment. Columnist Heather Knight and City Hall reporter Dominic Fracassa discuss the rise in clearly untreated mental illness on the city's sidewalks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
As his name implies, Broke-Ass Stuart's whole shtick is living a big life with little cash. But that's become harder than ever in San Francisco. The city character explains how he does it and offers tips for others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
If San Francisco experienced a major fire or earthquake and thousands of residents were suddenly homeless, would the city form task forces and appoint an expert to study the problem? Kara Zordel, CEO of Community Assessment and Treatment Services, says it's time we treat homelessness like a real emergency too. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
As director of San Francisco's cannabis office, it's former prosecutor Marisa Rodriguez's job to grow the city's legal pot economy. One of her top priorities? Ensuring victims of the War on Drugs get the first chance to benefit as business-owners now that cannabis is legal in California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In talking to friends and colleagues who’ve done their own recent traveling, it’s clear to columnist Heather Knight that many cities around the world and the U.S. maintain a better quality of life for residents of all income levels, as well as create a better experience for visitors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
How does a city with a $12 billion budget still have so many problems? City Hall reporters Dominic Fracassa and Trisha Thadani break down how the $12 billion budget isn't actually as much as it seems. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Everyone agrees San Francisco must address its homelessness problem, but the fierce debate over the Embarcadero navigation center highlights how hard that is to do. Trisha Thadani and Dominic Fracassa on the city's struggle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
For the past two years, San Francisco's Financial Justice Project has been working to eliminate government fees and fines that are particularly painful, and in some cases, ruinous, to the city's poorest. Anne Stuhldreher, who leads the project, sat down with Chronicle reporter Dominic Fracassa to talk about her team's accomplishments and how to keep the government from enriching itself on the backs of its most vulnerable. For more on the project: https://sftreasurer.org/financialjustice. Learn m...
The mayor and a few members of the Board of Supervisors are battling over the best way to build more affordable and teacher housing. Both sides have proposals for the November ballot. We try to untangle the issues. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Should San Francisco raise taxes on prosperous companies to help pay for the city's most gripping problems? Between a tax on IPO's, Uber and Lyft and exorbitantly paid CEO's voters will have plenty of options to choose from in November. We break down the three business tax proposals headed to November's ballot, focusing on the most recent one that would raise money for a new mental health care system. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Daniel Lurie is the CEO and founder of Tipping Point, an anti-poverty nonprofit in San Francisco. He tells Heather Knight that the solution to homelessness is homes, but also that we can all help the homeless by simply treating them as people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
A crossover episode of The Big Event and San Francisco City Insider podcasts, recorded live on May 16, 2019, at the Betabrand Podcast Theater in the Mission District. San Francisco Chronicle pop culture critic Peter Hartlaub and San Francisco columnist Heather Knight interview BFF.fm online radio founder Amanda Guest, The Nocturnists podcast host Dr. Emily Silverman and Muni Diaries co-hosts Tara Ramroop and Eugenia Chien. Produced by Peter Hartlaub. Music is "The Tide Will Rise" by the Sunset S...
When 33-year-old Jeffrey Choate’s parents saw their son, homeless and addicted to heroin and meth, in Heather Knight's San Francisco Chronicle column, they wanted to tell her about how he ended up that way. We also hear from Choate, now in jail. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Joe D’Allesandro, director of S.F. Travel, took City Hall to task a year ago for doing so little to improve safety and quality-of-life on the city’s streets. Between poop, needles, tent camps and car break-ins, tourists are often shocked and disgusted and vow to never return. And that’s a problem for a city that relies on tourism. We’re talking to him again to see what, if anything, has changed and what tourists are saying now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
We're sharing this episode of the Chronicle's flagship Fifth & Mission podcast about the expiring “Twitter tax break,” created by San Francisco in 2011 to draw companies to the downtrodden Mid-Market neighborhood. Reporters Trisha Thadani, J.K. Dineen and Roland Li discuss its impact and effects, both good and bad. Subscribe to Fifth & Mission wherever you get San Francisco City Insider. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Five years ago, city officials vowed to eliminate all traffic deaths in 10 years in a safe streets program dubbed Vision Zero. Halfway through those 10 years, San Francisco is making no progress in eliminating traffic fatalities. Already this year, 12 people have died in traffic including seven pedestrians, a bicyclist, a skateboarder and three people in cars. Jodie Medeiros, director of the pedestrian advocacy nonprofit Walk San Francisco, talks about why San Francisco can’t seem to get a handl...
The city's plan to build a homeless shelter on the Embarcadero faces a legal challenge. Jeff Kositsky, director of San Francisco’s homelessness department, talks about the need to balance an emphasis on short-term shelters with permanent housing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Something isn’t working within San Francisco’s behavioral health care system, but city officials don't exactly know how to fix it yet. City Hall reporter Trisha Thadani breaks down why it's so complicated, and what San Francisco is doing to add more coordination, focus and accountability to the system. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
A tribute to the Richmond District, recorded at the historic Balboa Theatre, before a #TotalSF screening of "So I Married an Axe Murderer." San Francisco columnist Heather Knight and The Big Event podcast host Peter Hartlaub interview Supervisor Sandra Fewer, former Green Apple Books co-owner Kevin Hunsanger, Balboa owner Adam Bergeron, Richmond resident and affordable housing analyst Sophie Hayward and Chronicle editor-in-chief Audrey Cooper. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm...
A chat with Michael Lambert, San Francisco’s new city librarian. The title sounds pretty old-school, but the city’s libraries are anything but. They’re about to become fine free. They host drag queen storytimes. They were among the first to add social workers to the staff since libraries are also makeshift homeless shelters. And last year San Francisco was named the nation’s best library system. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Shirin Oloumi is known as the Queen of Car Break-ins. She doesn't break into cars. She prosecutes the people who do. Every car break-in that leads to an arrest in San Francisco crosses her desk, and she not only makes the charging decisions about them but appears in court to argue to Superior Court judges that the city’s property crime epidemic needs to be taken more seriously. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Now that San Francisco General Hospital’s sketchy billing practice—in which privately insured patients are personally on the hook for their bills—have been revealed, there’s a central question: Why are the bills so high? From $34,000 bumps and bruises to $92,000 appendectomies, these amounts are outrageous because of the ever-inflated hospital “chargemaster.” That’s the list of rates, which is approved each year, no questions asked, by the mayor and the Board of Supervisors, who admit they had n...
Rachel Rodriguez, a social worker in San Francisco General Hospital’s psychiatric emergency room, is incensed at the way some people are painting the move toward conserving more mentally ill people. She’s in favor of the changes and explains why — and why the current system is so broken. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
From her insistence she wasn’t elected president of the Board of Supervisors because of sexist ideas about her being “difficult” to her drive to build more homeless navigation centers and shelters in her district despite neighbors’ resistance, Ronen isn’t afraid to say what she thinks. She’s the firebrand of the board — and she loves that reputation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Assemblyman David Chiu has heard the stories - of regular San Franciscans going to S.F. General with appendicitis, broken bones and migraines and getting stuck with a bill for tens of thousands of dollars. Even though they have private insurance. Chiu is teaming with State Sen. Scott Wiener to propose a state ban on all balance billing and cap what hospitals can charge for services at either 150 percent of Medicare’s rates or the average cost of insurance contracts. It would be a big hit to the ...
Miracle Messages uses social media to try to connect homeless people in San Francisco with long-lost love ones in hopes of getting them back home with someone who cares about them. They’ve matched nearly 200 pairs, but founder Kevin Adler says the city could do more to help. Heather Knight interviews Adler and joins him downtown as he and his fellow "ambassadors" talk to people living on the streets. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Columnist Heather Knight and Hall of Justice reporter Evan Sernoffsky discuss the already crowded field to replace San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon. For the first time in about a century, there will be no incumbent in the race - meaning the field is wide open and several impressive candidates are already raising big money and gathering key endorsements. Who has the upper hand? What do San Franciscans want in their next DA? Get the inside scoop here. Learn more about your ad choices....
Official discussions about how to divvy up San Francisco's $185 million windfall were set to begin at Wednesday's Budget and Finance committee meeting. These discussions have become about a lot more than just which city budgets should get a boost. They're about what kind of city San Francisco wants to be. Trisha Thadani reports from City Hall. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
San Francisco voters have recently approved major tax increases to fund homeless services, teacher pay raises and childcare, but the money’s being kept under theoretical lock and key until the courts weigh in. At issue is whether these measures really needed two-thirds voter support versus the simply majority they received. City Attorney Dennis Herrera’s controversial advice that they only needed a majority is what set off this hullabaloo. Columnist Heather Knight interviews him about it, as wel...
Stephen Torres-Esquer, an award-winning special education teacher at Lowell High, talks about how hard it is to make it in one of the world’s most expensive cities on such a paltry salary. As San Francisco politicians fight over how to spend a surprise windfall of more than $184 million, he tells Heather Knight he’s likely to return soon to his hometown of Stockton, where he could buy a house and even open a savings account. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
