Street crime in San Francisco is getting out of hand, a thread: 1/ A deranged man has bear-sprayed eight strangers on the street: 2/
missionlocal.org/2023/04/don-ca…

Local journalist here, with a thread on why you should *absolutely not* do what this headline writer did, and treat the recall of Chesa Boudin as a referendum of national significance on criminal justice reform. 1/ 1. All the *other* elections yesterday.
Ride BART one stop to Oakland (where the homicide rate is 4x SF's) and you're in a county where a progressive reformer took first place in the DA primary and the law-and-order Sheriff barely made it to a runoff...
oaklandside.org/2022/06/07/ala…

Would you believe 88% of California does not live in San Francisco or LA?
You can hop on a commuter train in San Francisco and reach two more-populous counties where progressive reformers are trouncing tough-on-crime DA candidates RN. @EskSF , prescient as always, points out the tough-on-crime DA who challenged California's progressive Attorney General looks set to finish with single digit support on the same ballot.

Hola! My eyes are still popping at the report by the SF Budget and Legislative Analyst's Office showing that in the country's highest-rent city, *one out of ten* housing units are vacant. I'm gonna thread some charts and commentary. Source here: 1/ sfgov.legistar.com/View.ashx?M=F&… Really stunning: the trendline in this chart. You see vacant units plummet for a few years as the foreclosure crisis resolves.
But then vacancy rates *rise steadily* over a period in which rents are skyrocketing.

Hello to everyone suddenly paying attention to the orange skies of the west coast!
Local journalist here, fresh off weeks of interviewing weather, climate, forest, and fire experts to give you . . . a #CaliforniaFires explainer thread: 1. Our sky looks crazy because the sunlight is filtering through up to 50,000 feet of smoke and ash to reach the ground.

https://twitter.com/Weather_West/status/1303710477696946177?s=20

Hello from smoke-choked California!
Since our wildfires are starting to crack into national news, here's a quick quick primer on forests and fires here and what you need to make sense of the headlines 1/ FIRST:
Burned does not equal killed. In redwoods, for instance:
-high tannins retard flame
-thick bark insulates living tree-flesh
-high crowns stay clear of low flames
Early reports suggest a lot of the redwoods inside Big Basin will survive.
2/
mercurynews.com/2020/08/20/his…

Hey let's go over some of the weapons police are using on protesters, and where they came from: 1. Rubber bullets:
-Developed by the British to suppress Irish nationalists during The Troubles
-Kill roughly 3% of the people they're used on
-The UK stopped using them decades ago khn.org/news/police-us…

It's sad the California Capitol press corps has been hollowed out by years of newspaper cuts, b/c we could really use a well-sourced ticktock on wtf is going on inside the Newsom administration's COVID-19 response. Like, he repeatedly issues executive orders whose text is at odds with how he describes those same executive orders in his press briefings. Why? What's going on inside his operation?

Berkeleyites just got mailed a glossy newsletter-looking thing published anonymously "by neighbors, for neighbors." Let's check some assertions, and look into the publisher 1/ There's an entire page devoted to an un-sourced argument that homeless people in Berkeley are moving here from out of state because our homeless services "can't be beat."
This ... would surprise actual homeless people in Berkeley. 2/

Let's review the things that happened since BART's ridership started dropping in 2014 that have nothing to do with homeless people riding the train: 1/

https://twitter.com/rachelswan/status/1227624619391078400

1. BART's raised minimum fares a cumulative 19%. (Chart from @danbrekke article here:)kqed.org/news/11793325/…

Hi!
Apropos of a rent bad tweet I'll not amplify here, a reminder that the *most* government-subsidized form of housing in the US is... <drumroll>
.
.
.
the owner-occupied suburban single-family home!

Here's a thread: 1/ The government spends ~2x as much through the Mortgage Interest Deduction as it does subsidizing low-income renters through Section 8.*
*(These figures predate the Trump tax bill, which slightly lowered the MID cap)
apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/im…

If you're watching news of California's #KincadeFire from a safe place, here's what you should know, A THREAD: 1. It's looking like the fire was started by a malfunctioning jumper on a Pacific Gas and Electric transmission line.

https://twitter.com/thejdmorris/status/1187504380360065024?s=19

A BRIEF TOUR THROUGH HOUSING THEORY VS. PRACTICE:
So, a week from tomorrow Berkeley Council is going to vote on forcing ~200 existing homes out of the city....
eastbaytimes.com/2019/03/08/eve… ..two of three councilmembers who got endorsed by the local YIMBY group (@eb4everyone ) in the 2018 election voted for this on first reading. 2/

Hi! I have to research, condense, and explain all the California ballot initiatives for my job. Here is a tweet-per-prop thread-guide (finance snips all from ballotpedia): Prop 1: Borrow $4 billion to build more affordable housing.
DID YOU KNOW: By the state's estimate, we actually have a SURPLUS of housing affordable to high-income people, but massive shortages of housing for everyone else. (The market only tends to build for the top.)

Fun facts about what prop 13's contributed to our housing crisis, as Republicans celebrate its 40th anniversary (1/6)

https://twitter.com/dillonliam/status/1002605914954739712

1. It capped property taxes so low (at 1%) that it made building more housing a money-losing proposition for most local governments (because the taxes from the housing don't cover the services required by its residents)