On Thursday June  2, 2016,, I joined dozens of people who live or work in San Francisco’s Mission District at the San Francisco Planning Commission to speak up against yet another huge luxury housing development proposed for the neighborhood. The activist-dubbed “Beast on Bryant” adds 196 more luxury units to a neighborhood already built out way in excess of the Eastern Neighborhoods Plan, and removes tens of thousands of square feet of badly needed light industrial space. The project was opposed by the San Francisco Labor Council and the Building Trades Council.

While the Planning Commission’s tendency to rubber stamp housing projects is infamous and nobody really expected the project would go down to defeat, the surprising part of the day and evening spent at City Hall was the full court press of the San Francisco Sheriff’s department. Why were the sheriffs intervening in Planning Commission decisions? Was this on someone’s order? Continue reading Fighting the Beast on Bryant at City Hall →