Finding common ground during this contentious campaign season isn’t easy. Yet here in San Francisco, people are coming together around Proposition C, a Housing Preservation Bond that will create permanent affordable housing and prevent displacement.   

Proposition C is an innovative measure that frees up $261 million in funding that is left over from a 1992 seismic safety bond.  Voters approved that measure after the Loma Prieta Earthquake as a source of funding to reinforce the City’s masonry buildings.

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Is tech helping communities?

Yes.

I wish I could just answer that question in one word and leave it at that without further qualification. But recent developments in San Francisco have painted the tech community in a sour light. We are evidently responsible for the complete disintegration of communities and the oncoming robot apocalypse. Or, as the Luddites would have you believe. Just so we’re clear, a Luddite is someone who thinks technology is something to be feared and suspicious of.

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Proposition Q is an ordinance prohibiting the placement of tent encampments on public sidewalks, justified in part by Section 169 of the San Francisco Police Code, that attempts to argue that a solution to alleviating homelessness is offering temporary housing and redistribution outside of San Francisco.

The San Francisco City Controller, Ben Rosenfield, in his letter to John Arntz of the Department of Elections analyzing Prop Q, and Section 169 of The San Francisco Police Code contains significant discrepancies regarding homeless housing and rehabilitation in society.

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A new police beat with officers responding to homelessness in San Francisco could be created if a question on the November ballot passes.

It’s the last thing that is needed, according to law enforcement professionals and experts.

Proposition R, the Neighborhood Crimes Unit ordinance, would mandate the San Francisco Police Department into dedicating at least 60 officers citywide to these units.

Officers assigned to the units would handle crimes such as property theft,

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Today, when skyrocketing rents result in ever increasing homelessness and force residents to leave the city, most of the decisions regarding affordable housing as well as commercial development projects are made by a small group of people without independent review or public supervision. One measure on the November ballot, Proposition M, aims to tackle this issue by increasing accountability and transparency in development. Prop M would create a seven-member Housing and Development Commission that would oversee the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Economic and Workforce Development.

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The Homeless People’s Popular Assembly, newly created by the Coalition on Homelessness in June, is a space for people who are living in encampments in San Francisco to voice their opinions about homelessness and the treatment of encampments. The Assembly was birthed from the organization’s Human Rights Workgroup, which saw that people living in tent encampments were not being heard. The assemblies occur once every other week, and have already occurred in the Best Buy,

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My name is Ehb Teng, Co-Founder of Diginido Labs LLC. I am a proud Bay Area native. technologist, and social entrepreneur, and I have been beleaguered as of late by my own tech startup community.

I had the privilege of growing up during a time of great innovation as I witnessed the entire advent of the digital age and the growth of Silicon Valley. I remember living during a moment in time when I made play dates over a rotary phone,

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A report by the nine organizations of the Western Regional Advocacy Project: Denver Homeless Out Loud, Los Angeles Community Action Network, St. Mary’s Center, Street Spirit, San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness, Sacramento Homeless Organizing Committee, Street Roots, Sisters of the Road and Right2Survive.

It is easy to forget that homelessness was supposed to be temporary. As homeless states of emergency continue to pop up all over the U.S.,

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Often times, when members of the public think about homeless people, they often picture an elderly white man. Sometimes they may think of a man of color, but rarely do they picture a woman. While women may very well experience homelessness at the same rate as men—meaning just as many have no place of their own to call home, they are often invisible. They often don’t appear homeless to passersby, and don’t even show up in our annual counts of homeless people (which is one of the reasons why estimates of the number of homeless people are inaccurate and undercounted).

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This November’s election in San Francisco is the most crowded in memory, with 25 local ballot measures in addition to almost a dozen candidate races. Nearly half of those ballot measures affect the arts and low-income housing in one way or another, making Housing and Arts the dominant topics of this political season.

Proposition S—restoring specific allocations from the City’s Hotel Tax to the arts and to a new Ending Family Homelessness Fund—is the most well-known of the arts measures this fall,

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