Following yet another year of brutal heatwaves and devastating wildfires, Californians have the chance to tell elected officials they support urgent climate action by voting for a $10 billion climate resilience bond on the November ballot.

During an unprecedented budget surplus two years ago, California earmarked $54 billion to forge “an oil-free future” and protect residents from the extreme effects of climate change. That surplus morphed into a multibillion-dollar deficit within a year, after rosy projections of rising revenues from income taxes failed to materialize, forcing Gov. Gavin Newsom and state lawmakers to cut and defer billions from their ambitious climate spending plans.

California’s budget problems will likely continue, analysts say, as will the climate change-fueled disasters that have battered the state. To provide a stable source of funding for urgently needed climate action, legislators passed a bill in July that seeks voters’ approval to authorize the state to borrow $10 billion to underwrite climate resiliency projects. Newsom signed it the same day. 

Now scientists, policymakers, climate experts and environmental justice advocates are among those urging voters to support the Safe Drinking Water, Wildfire Prevention, Drought Preparedness and Clean Air Bond Act of 2024, on the ballot as Proposition 4. 

“Multiple excellent studies show that paying now will save lives and save dollars,” said Ellie Cohen, CEO of The Climate Center, a nonprofit dedicated to reducing climate pollution, and a member of the Yes on 4 campaign. “Even a short-term delay in adopting strong climate policies dramatically increases the cost of decarbonization and risks irreversible ecological impacts,” she said.

A warmer climate is likely to permanently alter ecosystems, trigger a wave of species extinctions and reduce crop yields through more frequent heat waves and drier soil, a 2021 report by the nonpartisan think tank Energy Innovation Policy & Technology warned. 

Failing to prepare for catastrophic wildfires, drought, extreme heat and other extreme events could cost the state an estimated $113 billion in damages a year by 2050, according to California’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment. Most of the costs come from lives lost, impacts from drought and damage to coastal properties and inland regions hit by the type of weeks-long flooding that killed thousands and bankrupted the state during the 1861-1862 megaflood. 

Yet $113 billion a year is likely an underestimate. The assessment did not account for the costs of several other climate-related disasters, including health harms and property damage from wildfires, illness and death from extreme heat and impacts of drought on water quality, wildlife and ecosystems. Damages from the calamitous 2018 wildfires cost nearly $150 billion, a peer-reviewed study found. 

Investing in resilience pays

Responding to climate disasters costs exponentially more than investing in resilience, experts say. Every dollar spent on climate preparedness saves $6 on disaster relief, according to Federal Emergency Management Agency estimates. That means investing $10 billion in climate resiliency now could avoid a $60 billion cleanup and recovery bill down the road.

If voters approve Prop. 4, state officials will immediately start funding projects to improve access to safe drinking water, reduce risks from wildfire and drought, make food systems more resilient, restore habitats and protect communities, farmland and ecosystems from climate risks. 

“Bond funds are an appropriate and very effective way to fund many of the climate change-adaptation actions that many cities and counties are planning right now but don’t have local revenue sources to support,” said Laura Engeman, an environmental scientist at the University of California, San Diego. “A lot needs to be done around coastal resilience, in terms of environmental restoration as well as the connection between restoration and public infrastructure. These bonds provide a way to plan a lot of that.”

For example, many jurisdictions are looking at restoring sand dunes, wetlands and other ecosystems to protect infrastructure like roads and water systems, Engeman said.

“We saw a lot of degradation and erosion at our beaches over these last two years, which were big storm years,” she said. “You’re seeing a number of different cities right now that are looking at immediate needs for repair, recovery and building what we call ‘a coastal resilience buffer’ into the beach and shoreline landscape to buy a little bit of time to figure out how to actually adapt.”

Other projects include wetlands restoration, which involves upgrading bridges to expand the space for water to move and drain during floods, and retooling watersheds that channel polluted floodwaters into public spaces. “The bond is a good use of public dollars because there are a lot of benefits to the broader community,” Engeman said. “We’re saving money on the back end by spending money up front.”

Prop. 4 would support loans and grants to local governments, Native American tribes, nonprofit organizations and businesses to reduce the risks and impacts of a warming world. 

The largest share would go to safeguarding drinking water and dwindling groundwater supplies, and protecting rivers and streams from toxic pollution ($3.8 billion), followed by investments in wildfire prevention and extreme heat mitigation ($1.95 billion), protection of natural lands, parks and wildlife ($1.9 billion), protection of coastal lands, bays and oceans ($1.2 billion), transitioning to clean energy ($850 million) and supporting climate-smart agriculture ($300 million). 

Advancing climate justice 

Prop. 4 ensures that at least 40 percent of funds go to projects that benefit vulnerable and disadvantaged communities, in keeping with the Biden administration’s Justice40 Initiative. 

“A significant part of this bond prioritizes the frontline communities that bear the brunt of climate change impacts and impacts from the fossil fuel industry,” said The Climate Center’s Cohen.

California officials released an updated plan to protect communities from extreme heat in 2022, noting that “every corner” of the state will be affected by higher average temperatures and more frequent and severe heat waves. Farmworkers are increasingly vulnerable to heat-related illness and death, particularly in regions with chronically bad air, as Inside Climate News reported last year. Prop. 4 would allocate $450 million to help primarily disadvantaged communities and vulnerable populations adapt to extreme heat.

Access to safe drinking water has been a human right in the Golden State since 2012, yet close to 400 public water systems fail to meet drinking water standards. Nearly a million residents, primarily in low-income communities and communities of color, lack clean water in their homes, according to the state water board. Another 1.5 million people rely on water systems at risk of failing. 

The bond earmarks $610 million to provide safe, affordable, reliable sources of drinking water, including to tribal communities, and to develop drought-contingency plans and monitor for contaminants like PFAS “forever chemicals,” which have been detected in supplies serving more than 25 million people, the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council recently reported.

Some of California’s most endangered resources would also benefit. The bond allocates $170 million to improving air quality, public health and habitat around the beleaguered Salton Sea, which supports more than 120,000 migrating shorebirds, several species of concern and hundreds of other bird species southeast of Palm Springs. Another $50 million would go to restoring the state’s critically endangered salmon populations.

The proposition has broad support from environmental groups, environmental justice advocates, labor unions, water agencies and renewable energy companies. Opposition includes the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, which called it “reckless to use borrowed money” and Republican legislators led by the minority leader of the state Senate, Brian Jones (R-San Diego), who believes bond debt will only worsen California’s budget crisis. 

Repaying the amount borrowed with interest is likely to cost taxpayers $400 million a year over 40 years, a state legislative analyst said, ultimately costing $16 billion.

It’s not certain voters will accept more debt. Despite California’s liberal reputation, voters tend to be conservative when it comes to bond measures, survey expert Mark Baldassare of the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California recently reported. Even so, 65 percent of likely voters said they would vote yes on Prop. 4 in a survey PPIC released this week.

The Climate Center’s Cohen acknowledged that many don’t like paying more to support government action. “But the bottom line is, our fossil fuel economy has resulted in a climate crisis that I liken to a runaway train,” she said. “We’re all standing on the track, it’s accelerating towards us and we are not doing enough to slow it down.”

She sees Prop. 4 as just one step in the right direction to help California weather the challenges ahead. “The climate crisis is escalating every day, and we have to start taking bold actions,” Cohen said. “And that means bold investments to make a difference for our health and well being and the future of our children.”

The post California Ballot Asks Voters to Invest in Climate Solutions appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

The constant dust upset him. It also triggered his asthma, which he has had since he was a kid. 

“It’s hard to breathe,” he said. “But I haven’t really been feeling like that for the last month, basically since I got the air purifier.”

Britt was one of 50 low-income tenants to receive free air purifiers through a government-funded pilot program in July and August, the result of efforts by local organizations to cut red tape and make it easier to distribute the devices. Most recipients have respiratory conditions and live in single-room occupancy hotels, commonly called SROs. The initiative aims to ameliorate and help prevent health problems — early results are promising — and if enough people benefit then the government could keep funding the work, putting more devices in the hands of tenants who need them.

For Britt, the purifier is welcome relief in his home at the Clementina Towers, a building run by the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation for low-income and disabled seniors. 

“TNDC is pleased that Mr. Britt has been able to take advantage of the air purifier distribution program and that its use has helped ease his asthma,” said Edmund Campos, senior communications manager for the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation, in an emailed statement. He added that Britt had never reported excessive dust to the property manager, which Britt confirmed.

Structural causes of bad air

Britt’s portable air purifier cost about $100, which is out of reach for many SRO tenants. A 2021 Brightline Defense survey found that only about 18% of SRO residents could afford one. 

But they might be the San Franciscans who most need the devices. Adults living in SROs face asthma hospitalization rates that are twice the citywide average, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease rates that are three times higher, according to a 2017 Department of Public Health report. 

That’s due in large part to the aging structures they live in. SRO buildings tend to be old, poorly maintained and lack modern heating and air conditioning systems, as well as effective ventilation. When tenants shower, humidity can build up and cause toxic black mold to grow. If unaddressed, the mold penetrates the surrounding wood and becomes a long-term problem.

Airborne pollutants from cat litter, candles and gas stoves can all accumulate indoors. Some tenants smoke methamphetamine and fentanyl in their rooms, and the exhaled, harmful chemicals linger in the air, said Sheyenne White, a community organizer with the Central City SRO Collaborative. 

SRO buildings are concentrated in the Tenderloin and other downtown areas that are dense with vehicles, which give off exhaust. Often, an SRO unit has a single window that opens to the street or is right above a ground-floor restaurant’s kitchen, which can produce smoke from cooking. Tenants face a difficult choice: Keep the window closed and let the indoor air fester, or open it and let other pollutants in. 

In a way, the choice is easier during hotter seasons — though the health consequences remain. SRO tenants throughout the Tenderloin have to open their windows to find relief, and their sills gradually blacken with soot, said Stephen Tennis, another organizer with the collaborative.

“Otherwise they would roast,” Tennis said.

Red tape hampered aid

Tennis and other members of the collaborative, as well as staff at local nonprofit La Voz Latina, are working with environmental justice organization Brightline Defense to carry out the pilot program.

The groups have spent years trying to put air filtration devices in tenants’ hands. At first, the work suffered from bureaucratic hurdles, said Carolina Correa, air quality program manager at Brightline Defense. 

Government funding paid for the purifiers but, to be eligible, recipients needed to attend two video interviews and obtain notes from doctors attesting to their respiratory conditions. Many people were too poor to seek regular medical care, so they didn’t have diagnoses. Others had limited physical mobility or no access to a car, so they couldn’t easily visit their doctors in person.

“It was a major barrier to get the paperwork in order,” said Peter Rauch, a tenant organizer at the collaborative. “It discouraged a lot of people and they didn’t follow through.” 

In 2021, roughly half the residents Brightline Defense helped apply for air purifiers ultimately did not receive one because they couldn’t meet the requirements, Correa said.

Members of the collaborative pushed to cut the red tape. In July 2023, a half-dozen tenant organizers made their case at the headquarters of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, the regional government agency responsible for regulating air pollution and the funder of the air purifiers. The organizers persuaded the agency to test what would happen if it loosened requirements. 

For that pilot project, which began in October 2023, the organizers personally scoured the government-subsidized housing community to identify the best potential recipients. In their outreach, they prioritized people who said they had respiratory conditions, even if they lacked documentation. And to make things even easier, organizers had participants fill out just one survey about the purifiers’ impacts on air quality, rather than the two previously required. 

“It just made it much easier to get purifiers to people who need it, and that to me is the most important thing,” Tennis said.

Finding relief

Early surveys show that the purifiers are working. When asked to rate their homes’ air quality on a scale of one to 10, people who rated it “3-4” before receiving the devices are now rating it “8-10,” Rauch said. Residents report that they are coughing less, sleeping better and are less winded when walking up and down stairs, White said. People have noticed less soot in their rooms and that their allergies have subsided, added Correa of Brightline Defense. 

Once all surveys are completed, the results will inform the Bay Area Air Quality Management District’s decision on whether to continue funding the pilot program next year. 

The air purifiers are a crucial mitigation tool, but they don’t address the underlying causes of air pollution. To do that, big policy changes are needed, including widespread retrofits of San Francisco buildings, said Jacob Linde, Brightline Defense’s air quality organizer. The renovations, which local groups are trying in multi-unit apartment buildings, would help ventilate SRO buildings while reducing their carbon footprints, he said. 

Back in his SoMa studio, Britt no longer has to wage war against the dust in his apartment. He runs his air purifier 24 hours a day. His asthma symptoms feel milder. He only has to dust once a week now. 

Those small wins are deeply gratifying to Rauch, who wants his neighbors to be able to breathe safely in their homes. 

“Air is as precious as water. It’s what we humans rely on,” Rauch said.

The post Local Groups Cut Red Tape to Give Low-Income Tenants Clean Air appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Christopher Luxon, New Zealand’s prime minister, stepped up to the podium and addressed attendees: “Marine electrification is the new frontier,” he said. “We’re moving the world forward by doing this.” 

Luxon, other officials and executives were in San Francisco that morning to sign plans to transition the Angel Island-Tiburon Ferry company’s fleet of three vessels to electric power. That deal put the ferry service on track to be the first in California to fully electrify, as part of a statewide push to satisfy green-energy mandates. The project, which involves a New Zealand company, will create jobs for Latino San Rafael residents who might otherwise struggle to break into similar work. 

“Latinos don’t have equal access to clean-energy jobs, and any electrification effort we make should be inclusive,” said Graham Balch, chief executive officer of ZeroMar, a San Rafael company that is overseeing the project. 

Maggie McDonogh, the fifth-generation owner of the ferry company, echoed the sentiment: “What’s the point of doing something like this without lifting everybody up?”

The freshly penned work agreement tasks New Zealand-based company EV Maritime with constructing a new plug-in hybrid catamaran that can run entirely on electricity for short trips. 

The company will also replace the hulls of two vessels, formerly powered by diesel engines, to make them lighter so that their new, weaker electric motors can propel them. The redesigns will reduce drag for the boats by raising them 25% out of the water. 

“To go all-electric you need maximum efficiency per pound,” Balch said.

EV Maritime aims to convert the two boats by the end of 2025, a company representative told the San Francisco Public Press, which is California’s zero-emissions deadline for ferries that travel fewer than three nautical miles in a single run. The new hybrid catamaran, which does not fall under the mandate, is scheduled to be built by 2027. The company’s ferries shuttle approximately 100,000 passengers each year, and once they shift to electric power they will spare the North Bay 150 tons of greenhouse gasses annually. 

Compared with other forms of transit, electrified ferries offer the greatest potential to reduce emissions, said Michael Eaglen, co-founder and chief executive officer of EV Maritime. 

“People assume ferries are efficient because they’re public transit, but they’re not. Ferry emissions are many times higher than buses,” Eaglen said. “It’s really important to decarbonize them.” 

Zero-emissions vessels spare the earth’s atmosphere not only greenhouse gasses, but also particulate matter, which pollutes the air people breathe, and nitrogen oxide, which contributes to smog, said Steven Cliff, executive officer of the California Air Resources Board, which is funding the electrification project with a $24 million grant.

In addition to buying new charging and grid infrastructure on shore, the grant will fund a program to train and employ Latino San Rafael residents in marine electrification, work in the clean-energy field that is seeing growing demand. The two-year apprenticeship, which ZeroMar will manage with social services organization Canal Alliance, also based in San Rafael, aims to redress imbalanced hiring practices that have kept people of color out of green jobs. Nationally, 16.5% of the clean-energy workforce is Latino, compared with 18% of the workforce across all sectors, according to an analysis by Third Derivative, a climate technology company incubator. 

ZeroMar will select two apprentices later this month from graduates of another Canal Alliance workforce development course, which trains immigrants from Guatemala and other Latin American countries with limited resources who are new to the job landscape, said Fabiola Wilcox, who is overseeing the program as Canal Alliance’s workforce target supervisor. 

Apprentices will earn $35 per hour to learn on the job from experienced technicians and take supplemental coursework at Santa Rosa Junior College. After completing their training, which will include work on the Angel Island-Tiburon Ferry vessels, they will get marine mechanic positions at ZeroMar with annual salaries of $100,000. 

If they were working in other fields, like construction, it would likely be harder for them to earn at that level so early in their careers, Wilcox noted.

The program’s applicants were excited to learn about this opportunity, she said.

“It empowered them because they felt a part of it. It’s big for the community,” Wilcox said.

The post Bay Area Ferry Electrification Will Also Be Jobs Program for Local Latinos appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

From a single blade of eelgrass, life overflows. Amphipods build tiny hollow tube-homes on it, while marine snails eat it, and nudibranchs travel its length in search of prey. Small eelgrass sea hares graze epiphytes attached to the blades and lay their yellow eggs inside transparent jelly-like blobs on the thick green of the grass. Amid the meadows, pipefish hide and graceful rock crabs scavenge, and in the fall and spring, giant schools of silvery Pacific herring enter the San Francisco Bay, the end point of their weeks-long annual migration. On the eelgrass, they deposit clumpy beads of yellow roe on the order of hundreds of millions, like underwater honey drops. Or the eggs must taste that way to the thousands of birds that join the melee of feasting. Cormorants and loons dive after flashes of fish. Gulls circle above. Rafts of scaups, buffleheads, and more stretch across the water feeding on roe. During a spawn event, which can last for a few hours or several days, herring milt turns Bay waters a lighter hue.

Even when the herring aren’t running, the eelgrass beds teem with food. Paige Fernandez remembers kayaking just off the shore of Sausalito. She was paddling over an eelgrass bed, likely brimming with slugs and tiny crustaceans—which were, from the surface, invisible to her. But she could see the harbor seals. And one in particular kept bobbing its head up over the waves, closer and closer. Now a program manager at Richardson Bay Audubon Center, Fernandez says it was “definitely one of the coolest encounters I’ve had in the Bay.” The surfacing seal’s forwardness surprised her, but in retrospect it made sense: she was above a bed of eelgrass. “That’s where they can find little snacks to munch on.” They go where the eelgrass goes—and so does a host of other marine life. 

To give shelter and food to the species that rely on it, eelgrass needs to thrive. And in Richardson Bay, which lies between Sausalito and Tiburon in Marin County, dozens of acres of eelgrass are tangled in with the anchor chains of dozens of boats that often float just five feet above the meadows. When tides shift, the ground tackle—that is, any equipment used to anchor the boat, usually a long and heavy chain—is yanked by the pull of the vessel. In circular, sweeping motions, the chain slices the eelgrass rhizomes, the lateral tubes from which the shoots and roots grow. The chains and ground tackle erode the sediment, creating a depression in the substrate. After years of scraping, a dead zone forms, cleared of eelgrass, where shoots don’t take root. From above, boats hover over what look like ghostly crop circles, some half an acre in size, called mooring scars. There are almost 80 acres of scarring in Richardson Bay.

In the spring and early summer of 2024, researchers from San Francisco State University’s Estuary and Ocean Science Center, restoration workers with environmental consulting firm Merkel & Associates, and Audubon volunteers and staff—including Fernandez—began replanting eelgrass in the Richardson Bay mooring scars thanks to a $2.8 million grant from the Environmental Protection Agency’s San Francisco Bay Water Quality Improvement Fund; the grant is part of an EPA program funded by the federal Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Over the course of four years, the project aims to restore 15 acres of eelgrass, each acre allowing more life to bloom. But for workers to restore eelgrass in these scars, the anchors causing them must also be removed. “It is well demonstrated that eelgrass and anchoring are incompatible throughout the world,” says Rebecca Schwartz Lesberg, president of Coastal Policy Solutions and a contract project manager for the agency awarded the EPA grant. “Richardson Bay was really behind the times in terms of how to manage this natural resource conflict.”

In Richardson Bay, these long, heavy anchor chains are often attached to boats with people living on them—the so-called “anchor-outs,” people who have spent decades building their lives on the water, on their boats, and on the premise of free anchorage. Born of the ’60s counterculture, the community began with artists and young people who were drawn to the scrap left by World War II’s Marinship shipyard, material they salvaged for boats and homes. It quickly grew into an on-the-shoreline, and on the margins, way of life that has included famous artists, like Shel Silverstein and Allen Ginsberg, but mostly those who are unknown, like Lisa McCracken, once a silk-mache artist, and her friend Peter, who she says snaps daily portraits of the Bay fog and cloudscape. 

The lifestyle has been called many names: anchoring out, being a live-aboard, or, in  McCracken’s younger days, living “on hook.” It comes with a degree of precarity, where a single storm or a faulty anchor might sink a vessel. Many anchor-outs drown, or their boats come loose and crash into shore or other boats. McCracken says about her life on the Bay for 30-plus years, surrounded by water, marine creatures, and in community with artists, “It’s a privilege and a blessing.” And for many who took to the Bay’s waters, then and now, the alternative to life on their boats is homelessness. 

But after six decades, the anchor-out era is coming to an end, in part to protect eelgrass habitat from mooring scars. The number of anchor-out vessels in Richardson Bay has dropped from over 200 in 2018 to about 32 today. The authorities that regulate Richardson Bay and the entirety of the San Francisco Bay began in 2019 to focus on upholding ordinances that have long been on the books but were rarely enforced. As a result, anchor-outs have been evicted and left homeless and unoccupied boats crushed. The last of them have been ordered to leave the zone where eelgrass grows by this October and the water entirely by 2026. Authorities are offering housing to some as an incentive to meet the deadline.  

To McCracken, and other anchor-outs, eelgrass restoration is the latest excuse employed by authorities in their long-standing campaign to rid the water of her community. And her opinion is partly well-founded. There are examples and studies of eelgrass thriving when the mooring scar-causing chains are replaced with “conservation moorings.” These moorings, used around the world, are affixed to the seafloor, eliminating the dragging chain that creates mooring scars. Despite a 2019 feasibility study recommending eelgrass-friendly moorings in Richardson Bay, environmental groups, regulatory agencies, and cities pursued a more stringent option: remove all anchored-out vessels from Richardson Bay eelgrass beds, in perpetuity.

But during public meetings in the years following the feasibility study, local residents voiced concerns—they felt environmental restoration was clashing with the needs of the region’s most vulnerable. “This will have huge effects,” reads a public comment by “Elias” in 2020. “What about the young children who will learn of this and not feel comfortable working with nature organizations because of their relationship with poor people?” He equated it with “forced migration perpetuated by environmentalism.” David Schonbrunn, a Sausalito resident, commented in a 2021 meeting that opting to remove anchoring instead of choosing mooring systems that would let the anchor-out community and eelgrass coexist was “a question of policy, not science.” 

Restoring eelgrass

It’s a bright windy day in March, and Jordan Volker is steering a motorboat into Richardson Bay. He’s a field operations manager for Merkel & Associates, which has published articles and field reports on eelgrass for 30 years and run eelgrass surveys in the area for decades.

The company’s 2014 survey found a massive die-off in Bay eelgrass caused by a marine heat wave. To repair the loss, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) funded a 75-acre eelgrass restoration project that’s ongoing and aligns with the Bay Area’s Subtidal Habitat Goals. The 2010 goals, in an ambitious 208-page document, lay out a vision to study, protect, and restore an array of subtidal habitats, including eelgrass and oyster reefs. The regional effort brought together the California State Coastal Conservancy, the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC), San Francisco Estuary Partnership, the California Ocean Protection Council, and NOAA, giving them a common framework to achieve a healthier Bay. 

Collectively, the agencies set a goal of restoring up to 8,000 acres of eelgrass by 2060—latest counts say there’s a maximum of 5,000 acres in the Bay. Any added acres would mean more habitat for herring and birds, at a time when waterbird data has grown grim. Scoters, for one, saw a 50 percent decline around the second half of the 20th century, according to a Sea Duck Joint Venture report. And that’s for their populations across the whole Pacific Flyway—local numbers are worse. Both greater and lesser scaup have declined by a similar amount, and horned grebes and buffleheads, two beloved Bay Area visitors, have also suffered. “It’s all part of one big food web,” says Casey Skinner, program director at Richardson Bay Audubon. “And if we lose eelgrass, we lose everything.” 

Eelgrass’s benefits go beyond ecology. The beds act as sentinels of the Bay, trapping sediment, storing greenhouse gases, and protecting against wave action. Threats to eelgrass, too, are multifold. In 2005, for example, sediment that broke loose smothered nearby eelgrass beds, causing a die-off in subsequent years. Built-out marinas, ports, and wharves are potential stressors, too. They can shade out the eelgrass underneath, preventing meadows from growing. And, in addition to mooring scars, anchor-out vessels can damage the water quality if occupants mismanage waste—although 2018 reports show water quality has been improving overall in Richardson Bay. “Submerged habitats truly need ongoing championing because it is so easy to ignore. They’re out of sight out of mind,” says Marilyn Latta, a project manager at the California State Coastal Conservancy, who helped develop the goals for eelgrass restoration.

Keith Merkel, the principal consultant of Merkel & Associates, has been (often literally) knee-deep in eelgrass since restoration efforts began in the Bay Area, conducting Bay-wide surveys of eelgrass on three separate occasions. And the one thing he’s learned? Richardson Bay is vital for eelgrass. It contains the second-largest eelgrass bed in San Francisco Bay and is the single most important spawning area for Pacific herring in the estuary. “Richardson Bay is protected against many of the things that fluctuate quite a bit,” Merkel says. 

In the South Bay and Oakland, that factor is turbidity—too-dark waters, without enough sunlight. In the North Bay, too much fresh water discharges from the Delta. And around the Pacific Coast, the wind blows east, so eelgrass seeds fail to disperse. Yet Richardson Bay has “so much eelgrass that we never lose 100 percent of the eelgrass in [it],” he adds. The “core eelgrass bed”—areas that lie at the ideal depths for the plant to thrive and should support close to 100 percent eelgrass cover—include the mooring scars. If restored, Merkel says, this area will consistently flourish. It’s the kind of priority restoration area that the Subtidal Habitat Goals have highlighted.

It took research to prove restoration in the anchor scars was even possible. NOAA funded the first small-scale project to test the potential in 2021. Even this 2.5-acre effort, Merkel says, got off the ground only after many anchored-out vessels had been removed. NOAA won’t fund more restoration, he says, unless authorities can demonstrate there’s little risk of anchors being dropped again. 

Back inside the motorboat’s cabin, where Jordan Volker works, things are dark, and he has both hands on the wheel to navigate the churning, unruly water. On the monitors above, he shoots glances at two screens that give readings from the Bay underneath. The boat pumps a sonic signal into the waves below—and returns a spiky, pulsing graph. Because eelgrass blades store oxygen in their cells, they are less dense than the surrounding water, so they return a telltale “bump” to Volker’s machine, locating the meadows. 

Volker has been restoring eelgrass in Richardson Bay for Merkel for so long that he can recognize some of the beds he’s planted just from the dots on the graph. “It always brings a big smile on my face when I drive over and go, ‘Ho! Look at all that grass.’” Now he is dropping markers on a digital map, locating anchored-out boats and mooring scars, data that will inform where to plant next. 

Once they choose a spot, Volker and others plant during low tides—restoration crews up to their hips in Bay water, the boats of the anchor-outs looming behind. Volker says folks on the water and those from the land used to meet at some kind of a shore-y middle ground. An anchor-out near a cluster of volunteers might say hello from their deck and play music. “While we’re planting a mooring scar, people that are nearby say, ‘What radio station do you want to listen to?’ and [start] cranking their radio up,” he says. Often, they’d be smiling, waving, and curious about the restoration effort going on in their backyard waters. “Some of the anchor-outs understand, ‘oh yeah, eelgrass is an important thing. I don’t want to harm eelgrass. I just want to live,’” Volker says. 

But things are different now that people know their lifestyle is under threat. There are fewer friendly faces when he cruises the water. “Some of the anchor-outs, I think, see a survey vessel, or see a bunch of college kids coming in with grass in their hands, as a threat.” As if on cue, our tiny survey vehicle weaves in close to an anchored-out boat, with a gray-haired man on his deck. Outside, Scott Borsum, Volker’s assistant for the day, greets the stranger. He returns our “hi” with a “hello,” but, when asked for a picture, tosses his hands to the air, turns away, and shakes his head no.

Borsum’s new to restoration work—this project is his first field job since getting his PhD. Already, though, he feels like he’s watching a “microcosm” of the housing crisis in the San Francisco Bay Area unfold, wherein people are pushed out into alternate lifestyles by the cost of living or decades’ worth of other factors, then become the object of long and drawn-out political debate over who can use public spaces and for what. “It becomes a user-rights issue,” he says. “Who gets the right to the Bay?” 

Volker says he’s glad he’s not the one deciding. Unlike the “policy side of things,” he says, the eelgrass restoration is a peaceful, straightforward task. And the housing and what comes after is for other, more policy-savvy folks to decide. “It’s the side of the issue that I would not want to deal with,” Volker says. Borsum agrees: “Our job doesn’t constitute us solving that problem. It just constitutes us understanding the grass.”

Similar sentiments are echoed by project managers at Audubon, another of the EPA grant beneficiaries, who say their “area of expertise” is the eelgrass, though noting that they favor fair housing. The researchers at SFSU involved in the long-term monitoring of the grass also declined to comment on the anchor-outs. On the water, the restoration crew’s survey boat and the anchor-outs are two ships that, both metaphorically and practically, pass each other by—leaving an uneasy silence rippling in their wake. 

Living on the water

It’s an unusually calm day—no wind, great sun—when we set out in a kayak. We paddle across a boating channel, the thick on-the-water “highway” used by cargo vessels and traveling houseboats alike, to the waters where the last anchor-outs hold on.

We weave in between vessels, passing signs of life everywhere: on one boat, scuba gear hangs out to dry on a clothesline on deck; on another, smoke escapes a moka pot visible through a cabin window. Names like Irish Misty and Levity are hand-painted on the sides of boats big and small. Some are 15-foot sailboats with little to nothing in the way of rain shelter for their occupants. Others, like the mighty Evolution, a 50-foot powerboat, tower above our kayak.

But the captain on its deck is Lisa McCracken, who is anything but forbidding. Her sand-brown hair is turning white against the sun, and she wears mismatched work gloves and a friendly, if squinting, smile. She greets us, but is too busy to chat long—there are always chores to be done on the anchorage, whether it’s changing oil in a generator or fixing a solar panel. When we come back another day, it’s 4 p.m. and McCracken’s still working—her friends are visiting, their presence evident by the skiffs tied to the back of her own. They’re trying to get a motor up and running, when she welcomes us aboard.

A flimsy white ladder is the only way up. And landing zones are scarce in between the piles of decommissioned engines, old anchors, empty diesel cans, dusty life vests, tubes and piping, et  cetera. McCracken, though, steps on and over them with ease—at times nimbly jumping up and sitting on railings to let us pass. “I tend to this place,” she says. Many of the objects aren’t hers—they’re things she’s rescued from the Bay. She points to an anchor, coiled up in its own chain, that sits in a corner. “That tends to disturb the bottom—these are anchors. These we have pulled up.”

McCracken, now 61, says she’d want to learn more about the eelgrass, if she could, and had a mind to send in samples to someone. “If you notice it, it’s getting gray,” she explains. “I want to understand the characteristics of it, the features.” She says she sees, studies, and notices things—like the pigeons and gulls that have made a nest on the boat’s roof. Or, occasionally, a dying bird adrift, which she’ll try to call in to local authorities. She doesn’t believe her boat does harm to eelgrass (and, given that it’s on a six-point mooring and not a block-and-chain anchor, it likely does less damage than others), or that the harm she does is greater than the waste generated by the city or the propellants of high-speed yachts and other boats that dock in Sausalito Yacht Harbor or any of the dozens of other harbors nearby. “To say that we are a problem, then every boat here is a problem.”

As we talk, the boat turns gently with the wind, a planet spinning, the sun hitting the inside from each angle in turn. Maybe, McCracken admits, she’s selfish for not wanting to give it up—a panoramic view of the Bay, who would? But more than the view, it’s the community she can’t bear to part with. It was fellow anchor-outs who taught her how to live on the water. She recalls, laughing, when her first boat lost footing and slammed into a barge, and how the owner taught her the ropes of being a mariner. By now, she’s more than returned the favor: jumping in to help friends pull someone who was having health problems out of a boat. Or standing by the hospital bed of Craig, a longtime friend who, in gratitude and in passing, gifted her and her friend Steve Evolution.

These days, she wakes up and takes off in her skiff—looking for others on the anchorage who might need a hand, or a battery, or something she can offer. “I’ve held fast to anchor. I can’t even imagine being condemned to a room,” she says. “I don’t know what I would make of my day.” Besides, she doesn’t qualify for the housing and cash deal offered by local authorities, since she doesn’t own Evolution. Steve owns it, and according to reporting by the Pacific Sun, the program provides one housing voucher per boat.

“I don’t want the money,” she says, of the cash offer: $150 per foot of the boat. “I want to be left alone—you can build your paradise around me, okay?” Her voice rises as she speaks. “I’ll figure out some way to put a mirror up, so you don’t have to look at me if you don’t want to.”

In five months, however, she’ll have to leave the anchorage. Evolution doesn’t qualify for the Safe and Seaworthy program that would have allowed the boat to stay two years longer. McCracken says a caseworker is advocating for both her and Steve to be housed, but she isn’t sure where she’ll be five months from now, or if she’ll even want to go.

The policy fight

Before 1985, no single agency existed to guide the use and conservation of Richardson Bay’s waters, so cities on its shores created and adopted a “special area plan” that stated, among many things, that “all anchor-outs should be removed from Richardson Bay.” Even then, nearby authorities felt the number of boats anchored offshore was growing.

To execute the plan, the Richardson Bay Regional Agency (RBRA) was formed, via a Joint Powers Agreement among Marin County and the cities of Mill Valley, Tiburon, Belvedere—and, formerly, Sausalito. The agency quickly passed an ordinance allowing transient vessels, such as cruisers from outside the Bay, to drop their anchors in designated areas for less than 72 hours. One section hugged the Sausalito shoreline; the other spanned the anchor-out area. It also states that permanently “living aboard” any vessel in the water is illegal—permits could be granted for 30 days, and potentially longer, if the harbormaster “determined that no permanent residential use is intended.” 

But enforcement proved difficult. The harbormaster at the time, Bill Price, spent 24 years trying to manage the growing number of anchor-out boats, says Tim Henry, a longtime sailor and Sausalito local. “He had no budget. He had to use volunteers. He had to fill out all the grants. They just never wanted to spend the money to deal with it.” 

And then, in the wake of 2008’s Great Recession, things changed. The number of transient boats dropping anchor and largely staying put swelled to about 230 boats by 2015. In an interview with the Sausalito Historical Society, Price said he wondered if Richardson Bay’s free anchorage, which he loved, would have to shut down due to the sheer density of boats. Soon after, the City of Sausalito, fed up with the lack of enforcement, left the RBRA. 

Finally, in 2019, the State of California audited the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC), and its  “failure to perform key responsibilities” was laid bare. Mooring scars in Richardson Bay were a central issue, according to the audit, which referenced details from an Audubon report. The state, concerned with how “violators,” like anchor-outs, were damaging the Bay, ordered BCDC to fix the problem. The audit discussed possible amnesty for those violators and ways to better enforce the law to prevent new damages.

BCDC, in turn, put pressure on RBRA, triggering a flurry of actions: the agency commissioned Merkel & Associates to conduct the mooring feasibility study; commissioned Coastal Policy Solutions, Rebecca Schwartz Lesberg’s restoration company, to draft an eelgrass protection plan; and started negotiating an agreement to satisfy the enforcement needs of the BCDC.

But the RBRA had already been pursuing stricter enforcement. Before the audit, it had hired a new harbormaster, Curtis Havel. He reduced the total number of boats to about 71 in just two months. “It was terrorist tactics to start with,” says Drew Warner, an ex-anchor-out of 23 years, about Havel. Authorities would find an unoccupied boat, board it, tug it, and deliver it to the shipyard to be crushed. The harbormaster or the sheriff’s department would wait patiently for anchor-outs to leave their homes, Warner says, so that going ashore on grocery runs or for medicine might mean the destruction of an anchor-out’s property. The anchor-outs fought back, sometimes by filing restraining orders, sometimes throwing eggs at officers who got too close. “I was notorious for doing that,” Warner says.

At the same time, a homeless encampment formed on the waterfront in Sausalito; called Camp Cormorant, it became a rallying point for the anchor-out community and their supporters. McCracken’s friends sought shelter on Evolution after their boats were seized, and the belongings of evicted anchor-outs, like generators and power tools, began to pile up on the vessel. 

Hostilities increased on the water. And while people’s boats were being seized and crushed at a nearby Army Corp yard—frequent spectacles that sometimes came down to clashes between police and anchor-outs—RBRA bimonthly meetings continued. In virtual Zoom rooms, amid a growing pandemic, RBRA board members, concerned citizens, and environmental activists deliberated over what to do next.

Initially, RBRA suggested removing anchor-outs over a span of 10 or 20 years, but Audubon California, Marin Audubon Society, and BCDC pushed back. They wanted the anchor-outs gone by a set deadline—Marin Audubon, in particular, argued for five years.

Merkel & Associates’ 2019 mooring feasibility study greenlit the idea that conservation moorings, in clusters called mooring fields, could coexist with eelgrass. Because they are drilled into the seafloor and have a buoy attached to a floating cord, thus reducing their damage to marine life, conservation moorings (sometimes called eco-moorings) have been deployed worldwide, in waters from Tasmania to Massachusetts, with the aim of protecting marine habitat. In Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts, such moorings were installed in areas with scars just like Richardson Bay’s. Though it was in a smaller restoration project, eelgrass was successfully replanted on 0.2 acres. In Moreton Bay, Australia, 16 acres were restored. Merkel & Associates suggested several locations—away from thicker eelgrass beds and with shelter from storms—for conservation moorings, one boat per mooring.  

At public meetings, Marin Audubon Society opposed the idea, rejecting any mooring field, temporary or permanent, and regardless of the type of moorings. It also objected to any boat occupying space for too long. “It is obvious that anchor-outs are covering open water habitat,” reads a letter written by Barbara Salzman, then co-chair of the conservation committee of Marin Audubon. “Such use is considered fill by BCDC”—meaning boats confer an adverse impact on the public and wildlife by occupying space on the Bay, much the way development that extends the shoreline into the Bay is often considered fill. 

For Marin Audubon, the safety of diving birds was paramount. Birds would contend with boats while foraging, risking injury and losing access to food, Audubon said. The Merkel study pointed to anecdotal videos of herring runs, showing birds foraging successfully in between the boats. The study conceded, however, that bird behavior with regard to moorings and boats was complicated: it would all depend on the size of herring spawns, the species at hand, the wave patterns, wind conditions, and more. Still, the survey authors believed the effects on birds would be minimal—after all, the report noted, Audubon’s sanctuary waters, a section of Richardson Bay closed to all boats during migration season, were right next to the proposed moorings.  

It wasn’t enough. Marin Audubon solicited a study by Point Blue Conservation Science, an organization based in Marin, to survey the proposed mooring areas for birds, and wrote in a public letter presented at an April 2021 meeting that “the recommendation of Point Blue is that mooring not occur in any of the survey areas.” While Point Blue researchers documented 23 different species in the waters, the study did not investigate the potential impact of boats on the birds’ ability to forage. “We purposefully didn’t weigh in on the policy,” says Julian Wood, the lead researcher. “Supporting one policy or scenario over another was beyond the scope of that study.” Yet the study does make such a recommendation.

At the same time, Schwartz Lesberg was developing an eelgrass protection and management plan that eventually proposed a “protection zone” that would encompass 90 percent of all eelgrass beds and not allow moorings. This reduced the potential mooring space to just one-third of Richardson Bay’s historic anchorage acreage. 

Finally, in August 2021, the BCDC and RBRA arrived at an agreement: all anchor-outs would be removed from Richardson Bay by 2026, an ambitious, five-year goal. Those with “safe and seaworthy vessel” status—boats that were up to code—could stay until then, but others, like Evolution, would need to leave earlier, by October 2024. BCDC still wanted a mooring field, as long as it was temporary and for moving boats away from the eelgrass sooner. 

But when Sausalito residents concluded the hypothetical mooring field put boats too close to their businesses, they argued to nix the entire idea in the interest of public safety. “The attitude from the start was always just to kick the can down the road,” says Henry. No one wanted to deal with the problem, he says. It would require a lot of planning and willingness to embrace the anchor-out population. “My experience with cities is that they tend to be reactive instead of proactive.”

Henry’s also a longtime staff writer at Latitude 38, a Bay Area publication by and for sailors. The magazine’s founders dreamed of a 100-boat mooring field in Richardson Bay. “They looked at other places in California and they said, ‘Well, they have mooring fields. Why can’t we have one?’” The idea has circulated for the past 40 years, but never went anywhere. It was always difficult to answer the questions: who would fund it, who would oversee it, who would be liable.

After three years of discussion, on July 27, 2022, RBRA formally requested that BCDC drop the mooring field requirement—the cost, about $30,000 per mooring, was cited as a main reason, along with the claim that only a few of the anchor-outs’ boats had the required equipment to moor on such facilities in the first place. BCDC granted the request, and money meant for moorings went to pay anchor-outs to give up their vessels, among other goals. 

A bit before then, harbormaster Curtis Havel retired. In 2022, the City of Sausalito paid a $540,000 settlement to 30 homeless people in the anchor-outs’ waterfront camp—about $18,000 each—to get them to disperse. 

After the mooring plan was dropped, and years of boat seizures, RBRA introduced its housing voucher program for the several dozen remaining anchor-outs in 2023. To date they’ve housed 11 people, with several more in the pipeline.

The housing deal

The housing offer is generous. RBRA received $3 million in state funds, secured by state senator Mike McGuire, whose district includes Marin County. For anchor-outs who own and give up their vessels, RBRA will “buy back” their boats at $150 per foot and help them navigate a housing process that grants them one year of housing on land. Eventually, the goal is to transition them to Section 8, a federal housing voucher program.

But it’s hard to pin down who qualifies. A service agreement between RBRA and Marin County states that only anchor-outs who were counted during a June 2022 survey (and an April 2023 follow-up) will get housing. The Pacific Sun reported that only the owner of the boat gets a voucher, and co-occupants need to be married to receive joint housing, leaving some, like McCracken, to fall through the cracks. 

Brad Gross, the executive director of RBRA, sees the removal of anchor-outs as inevitable: it’s up to either him or BCDC. The anchor-outs who participate in the housing program now, he says, will “get out with some dignity”—but if the RBRA’s offered deal doesn’t clear the Bay, the state will likely step in to finish the job. “And the state’s got much bigger pockets, [a] much bigger group of attorneys,” Gross says. “And they’re up in Sacramento—they’re not going to have the same concerns and the same compassion and consideration.”

Drew Warner took Gross up on the deal, becoming one of the first anchor-outs to be housed. He remembers contacting the RBRA month after month and going through yearlong paperwork, finally deciding—“It’s time to get off the water, man,” Warner says. The anchor-out era, for him, was over. Winter storms were getting worse, and he wanted to be safe.

For Schwartz Lesberg, the combination of housing and restoration is a historic feat, especially for a small agency like RBRA. “This is a really thoughtful approach. And it looks like it’s working—people are getting housed and the environment is improving. And nobody else has done this.” The EPA grant application requests applicants provide matching funds. In RBRA’s application for eelgrass restoration money, the lion’s share of its match came from the state for housing and vessel removal.

Now, Warner lives in the Marin Headlands, in a loft-style one-bedroom apartment, with tons of natural light and in-unit washing and drying. “I sat on the stairwell for three days,” he says. “In just awe, with my cat.” When he tries to show me photos of his new place, though, his callused hands make swiping on the screen of the smartphone difficult. Thick white layers pile over his knuckles and fingertips, scars from the lifestyle he left behind—his hands remind me of McCracken’s. His convictions, though, differ: he believes he made the right choice. He’s even been encouraging his friends on the anchorage to take the deal.

McCracken, who doesn’t qualify, mourns the slow loss of the anchor-outs. “We were a community,” she says. “And now I notice the stress of being forced to go somewhere else, to break those bonds.”

Sitting in front of the visitor center in Sausalito and staring out at the anchorage that used to be his home, even Warner feels bittersweet. Eelgrass is far from his mind. Instead, he’s focused on what’s above the water: a wooden marker poking its head above the waves. “I stayed just beyond that,” he says. “For 23 years.” There are two boats to either side—the unused space in the middle now looks like a picture of an empty lot where an old house used to be. Soon enough, blades of eelgrass and life—the kind we have allowed there—will blossom underneath.

The post In the Name of Eelgrass appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

While these kinds of disasters wreak havoc across all populations, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency warns that some people, including older adults, are at heightened risk due to pre-existing conditions, weakened immune systems, restricted mobility and other health challenges.

San Francisco has already seen extreme weather conditions threaten the well-being of older residents, especially in neighborhoods like Chinatown, which city analysis has shown is particularly vulnerable to these threats.

In the past several years, smoke from wildfires and rainstorms have caused health and other problems for Chinatown’s older residents. Community organizations worry that the systems in place in the neighborhood are not enough to protect older populations, in part because of the challenges of accessing climate-resiliency funding.

“Climate change definitely affects our seniors’ quality of life as well as their health,” said Anni Chung, president and chief executive officer of Self-Help for the Elderly, a nonprofit providing an array of services for older adults in Chinatown and beyond since 1966.

Shao Ao Situ, an 81-year-old tenant of a single-room occupancy building in Chinatown, said he experienced eye irritation, fatigue and coughing when smoke from wildfires that raged across California and the Pacific Northwest in 2020 drifted through his neighborhood.

As COVID-19 was taking a disproportionate toll on older adults that year, the skies above the western United States turned an eerie orange, and the air filled with ash and toxic particles.

“I was severely affected,” said Situ, who speaks Taishanese and Cantonese.

Residential rooms in Situ’s building are dense and compact, measuring about 8 by 10 feet. A bunk bed, a table, a dresser and shelves take up most of Situ’s space, leaving little room to walk. His clothes hang over a single, long window. When smoke covered San Francisco that year, he said, he drew the window almost all the way down, allowing a small gap for ventilation.

“When the smoke concentration from the wildfires was high, I felt discomfort in my throat when breathing,” he said. Situ said his cough made it difficult for him to sleep at night. He looked for resources to cope with the situation. 

“I heard on TV that N-95 masks are the best at preventing dust and pollution particles, so we bought two boxes at that time,” Situ said, adding that government and community groups should provide more direct education to older people on how to stay safe.

He said his health problems persisted even after the smoke subsided.

[See photo essay: “For Chinatown’s Older Residents in SROs, Climate Disasters Pose Greater Risks”]

There are around 193,800 residents in San Francisco who are 60 and older. From 2010 to 2060, the city expects to see a 159% surge in its 60-plus population, according to the California Department of Aging. Meanwhile, the frequency and intensity of climate change-driven weather disasters are expected to increase.

Climate and health hardships that older residents like Situ in Chinatown and those in other parts of the city have confronted and will encounter in years to come have been on the city’s radar for over a decade.

In 2010, San Francisco’s Department of Public Health, with funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was one of the first agencies in the nation to launch a program to investigate climate change’s effects on the health of residents and draw up contingency plans.

Since then, detailed assessments conducted by the department in collaboration with other agencies have outlined numerous health impacts San Francisco neighborhoods could face from air pollution, heatwaves, wildfire smoke, flooding and other hazards. Those reports noted that besides Chinatown, Bayview-Hunters Point, South of Market, Civic Center and Visitacion Valley could bear the brunt of the climate crisis.

In a system the department developed to gauge each neighborhood’s climate resiliency, Chinatown received the lowest overall score. “The elderly residents of Chinatown are especially at risk due to the neighborhood’s high residential density, overcrowded living conditions, and urban heat island vulnerability,” the department’s environmental health experts wrote in a report published in 2014.

The climate resiliency scorecard for Chinatown developed by San Francisco’s Department of Public Health.

Hidden health harms

Kinchiu Fung, 65, lives in a single-room occupancy building in Chinatown. Fung said his breathing was affected when wildfire smoke cloaked San Francisco in 2020. He said he was able to manage on his own. But some of his older neighbors expressed concerns about leaving the building during extreme weather, he said.

“The government should help the elderly if it has resources,” said Fung, who speaks Taishanese and Cantonese. He said more volunteers are needed to help older tenants with limited mobility during rainstorms.

Bifang Kuang, 84, who lives in a single-room occupancy unit in Chinatown, said she stayed in her room during torrential rainfall that pelted the Bay Area last January. “I did not get my medicine when it was raining,” said Kuang, who primarily speaks Taishanese.

Supplementing the city’s research into how climate change impacts health, universities across the Bay Area are examining both obvious and subtle impacts of extreme weather.

During heavy rainfall, older adults could break a hip or long bone if they slip on sidewalks, and the steep slopes of Chinatown and other hilly neighborhoods could worsen the impact, said Dr. Andrew Chang, a cardiologist and fellow at the University of California San Francisco’s Advanced Echocardiography program.

Extreme weather events can also affect diet. Some older adults who live alone and cannot obtain fresh fruits and vegetables during severe weather might turn to pantry staples or frozen foods that are high in salt, fat, oil and processed sugar, Chang said. Because older adults tend to have pre-existing conditions that make their bodies sensitive to sodium load, consuming salt-heavy products could trigger heart failure, high blood pressure or fluid retention, he said. 

Weihong Wu, 53, lives with her husband in a single-room occupancy building in Chinatown. During the 2020 wildfire season, she said, if she opened the window, she didn’t feel well, and if she didn’t open the window, the room became too stuffy. “It’s like, we can’t breathe,” said Wu, who speaks Taishanese and Cantonese.

“No one knocked on our door and asked if we are OK,” she said.

Wu said that during the rainstorms earlier this year, she couldn’t go out, so she didn’t have any food in her home. She said her older neighbors in the building “really needed someone to deliver groceries to them because they are unable to go grocery shopping themselves.”

Inclement weather can also deter people from seeking medical care. “Not only people who are getting sick from air pollution, but also people who probably normally should be seeing the doctor or getting medical care for certain conditions are choosing not to go be seen because they don’t want to go out when it looks so frightful outside,” Chang said.

Another concern in single-room occupancy residences and other older buildings is accessibility.

In 2022, San Francisco’s Aging and Disability Affordable Housing Needs Assessment highlighted accessibility problems like steep stairs and malfunctioning elevators in the city’s publicly funded single-room occupancy housing stock.

Compromised access intensifies risks for older residents in those buildings. For example, tenants experiencing exhaustion or other symptoms from excess heat or wildfire smoke might struggle to walk down several flights of steep stairs to reach a cooling or air respite center.

Housing experts say people who experience such health or mobility challenges should have a say in what would help them most.

“I think you need to engage the seniors themselves,” said Leslie Moldow, a principal at Perkins Eastman architectural firm, where she specializes in senior living design, and an adjunct professor at the University of San Francisco. “Have them be part of the solution for what they want.”

Financial barriers

In 2021, Mayor London Breed released the latest iteration of the city’s Climate Action Plan with an overarching goal for San Francisco to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2040. While the plan focuses on emission reductions, it also emphasizes related health benefits, noting that walking and biking boost physical well-being, green spaces improve air quality and eradicating fossil fuel use in buildings protects against chronic ailments like asthma.

Breed this year announced $2 million in grants for organizations working on removal of greenhouse gas emissions from buildings, waste prevention and environmental justice. But many of the plan’s long-term goals come with sky-high costs, and officials say San Francisco can’t go it alone.

“External support, from state and federal governments, is needed more than ever,” city officials wrote in the Climate Action Plan.

A funding analysis for the Climate Action Plan by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, estimated that the overall cost of reducing emissions across sectors that the plan targets ­could reach $22 billion.

The financial analysis of San Francisco’s Climate Action Plan prepared by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.

That analysis is used “to make a case that much more funding will be needed in the future to fully implement the plan” said Richard Chien, senior environmental specialist at the San Francisco Department of the Environment.

Louise Bedsworth, the executive director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, is one of the authors of the funding analysis. Bedsworth said her team is exploring the barriers to moving projects from planning to implementation.

“I think funding remains the biggest challenge,” she said, partly because the way funds for climate adaptation are distributed is compartmentalized.

“People don’t live in silos, and communities don’t operate in silos,” she said. “But that tends to be how our funding is still rolled out.”

In July, San Francisco released a Heat and Air Quality Resilience Plan, which proposed pathways for city agencies, community groups and other stakeholders to help San Franciscans cope with extreme heat and wildfire smoke.

Officials noted in the report that $12.1 billion in federal funding is available for home energy efficiency and weatherization projects through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. And $444 million is devoted in California’s budget this year to extreme heat mitigation initiatives. This is in addition to funding available from other government and private grants and programs.

Bedsworth said one of the challenges for small nonprofits in accessing funds from state programs and the federal Inflation Reduction Act is the complex and competitive nature of these initiatives.

The Chinatown Community Development Center, which owns and manages single-room occupancy buildings and other affordable housing, faces such hurdles. Nearly 1,900 seniors live in properties managed by the organization.

For years, the nonprofit, which also engages in tenant advocacy, youth leadership and other community work, has tried to improve the sustainability of its buildings and the Chinatown neighborhood. It has worked with local nonprofits to provide some tenants with climate-resiliency tools such as air filtration devices.

Malcolm Yeung, the center’s executive director, said the resources in Chinatown are “absolutely not” sufficient to support older adults in single-room occupancy housing during extreme weather events, adding, “But it’s not to say that there aren’t efforts underway.”

In 2017, the organization, in collaboration with San Francisco’s Department of the Environment, Planning Department and philanthropic groups, published a comprehensive assessment called “Sustainable Chinatown” that laid out strategies for improving sustainability and climate-resiliency while maintaining housing affordability.

Yeung called it a “mixed success.” Some goals were met, but others stalled for lack of funding, he said. The organization has explored creative approaches to make sustainability improvements that are less resource-intensive.

For example, when it was taking over public housing from the city’s Housing Authority to rehab and operate as affordable housing, staffers saw that tenants had installed unauthorized, energy-draining washing machines and clothes dryers, because they feared robberies and violence in communal laundromats in their building. The nonprofit removed the appliances, bolstered security and implemented community policing in collaboration with the San Francisco Police Department to alleviate residents’ concerns, he said.

That was “the single largest sustainability improvement in that building, and it was primarily because of operating changes,” Yeung said.

Yeung said whenever his organization is rehabilitating or constructing a building, it works with sustainability consultants to identify ways to improve operating efficiency and climate resiliency. However, finding funding for those upgrades, he said, is a hit-and-miss process.

The Chinatown Community Development Center sees the Inflation Reduction Act as a potential funding source to complete upgrades systematically. “We have not secured funds, but the initial process is rolling,” Yeung wrote in an email.

A number of large affordable housing and climate justice intermediary organizations are submitting applications to distribute funds through the act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, Yeung said. The Chinatown Community Development Center has shared its sustainable rehabilitation recommendations with three of those applicants.

Yeung echoed Bedsworth’s earlier point that smaller organizations struggle with navigating the complexities associated with applying for this kind of federal funding.

“Communities of color typically don’t have anchor organizations that have the resources to kind of engage on that level,” Yeung said.

Policies determining funding

San Francisco has 110 publicly funded single-room occupancy buildings. Many others are operated by private owners or other entities. There are at least 19,000 rooms for tenants overall. Residents typically share a kitchen, living area, bathrooms and laundry facilities.

Many of the buildings don’t have cooling systems, adequate insulation and ventilation, or other mechanisms to cope with extreme weather.

The Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development oversees 1,021 affordable housing units in Chinatown that are managed by three organizations, including the Chinatown Community Development Center. Data for 942 households supplied to the agency revealed that 519, or 55%, have at least one senior tenant, the department reported.

“Seniors and SRO families are probably the two populations I worry a ton about because the vulnerabilities are very unique for each,” said Eddie Ahn, executive director of Brightline Defense, an environmental justice nonprofit.

Brightline Defense, in collaboration with its community partners, surveyed residents of single-room occupancy buildings in the city in 2020 and 2021. Of the 255 people across 54 buildings who responded, around 79% did not have access to N-95 masks and 73% did not have air filtration systems in their rooms. More than half the respondents said they had respiratory or other health effects during the wildfires.

Ahn, who is also president of San Francisco’s Commission on the Environment, said Brightline Defense worked with the Chinatown Community Development Center a few years ago to distribute about 100 air filtration units in Chinatown, the Tenderloin and other neighborhoods.

“But it only goes so far,” he said. “Part of the reason why our nonprofit exists is to affect policy change. It’s not just about, you know, 50 units here, 100 units there; it’s hopefully trying to increase access to thousands of units at a time.”

One policy the organization is focusing on involves CalEnviroScreen, a mapping tool that uses environment, health, socioeconomic and other data to determine which census tracts are most affected by pollution and other environmental hazards, and classifies those areas as “disadvantaged communities.” The California Environmental Protection Agency and other entities use it to determine where to implement programs and target investment. According to the tool’s standards, Chinatown is not designated as a “disadvantaged community,” which Ahn considers an incorrect assessment.

“It’s very clear that there’s a history of incidents in Chinatown and in the Mission District to have racial discrimination, disinvestment,” he said. “And overall, there are unique environmental injustices that are being suffered in each community, too.”

Ahn said his organization filed an advocacy letter with other community organizations, calling for improvements to the CalEnviroScreen tool.

“Population characteristics including poverty, housing burden, education and especially linguistic isolation exceed the 99th percentile in all of Chinatown’s census tracts,” wrote the letter’s signers. “Chinatown also suffers from serious pollution burdens.”

Letter sent by a coalition of nonprofits, calling for Chinatown to be recognized as a community needing investment by the CalEnviroScreen mapping tool.

Brightline Defense has installed monitoring sensors to gather neighborhood-level data on air pollution.

“So, if you have massive climate change events like wildfires, for instance, that are pouring smoke into cities, our most vulnerable are low-income households and families that can’t afford an air filtration unit,” Ahn said. “And that is typically an SRO tenant, for instance, or an SRO family. So, that’s the kind of targeting I think we need to demand of our environmental justice mapping tools.”

Community response

One nonprofit at the forefront of disaster preparedness for Chinatown residents, including older adults, is the NICOS Chinese Health Coalition.

Michael Liao, director of programs, said NICOS coordinates with community organizations to do periodic resource inventories to assess which groups can offer cooking facilities, emergency shelters, communication tools, transportation supplies and other resources during climate-related emergencies and other catastrophes.

“Over the years, we’ve also developed emergency communication protocols with multiple layers of redundancies, so that we could communicate with each other before the city is able to effectively and adequately respond to all of our needs,” he said.

In the past, the disaster preparedness initiative’s funding has come mostly from private foundations, like the Fritz Institute and the Walter and Elise Haas Fund, Liao wrote in an email. During his 18 years at NICOS, he said, the initiative has received government funding from San Francisco once and from California once. Apart from those times, it has continued either unfunded or covered through the organization’s unrestricted funds, he said.

“Although the government regularly touts us — Chinatown — as a neighborhood, that is one of the most prepared, there hasn’t been a lot of investment, in terms of financial investment, to kind of help make that happen,” Liao said. “It really came from a lot of sweat, blood and tears from volunteers of the community who were able to put in their time and resources.”

Liao said the neighborhood’s support systems were weakened during the pandemic. “Funding is always an issue, and now even more so than before,” he said.

Self-Help for the Elderly is also pursuing climate-resiliency interventions for older residents. This year, through the city’s Extreme Weather Resilience Program, an initiative by the Department of Emergency Management, the nonprofit and other groups will receive devices like air filters and portable air conditioners. “That’s really good news,” said Chung, who leads Self-Help for the Elderly, noting that her nonprofit will use the items in its senior centers.

But more systemic solutions are needed, Chung said: “We’re doing only a patch-up here, like a band-aid right now.”

On Lok, which pioneered the Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly, also provides medical and social services to low-income older adults in Chinatown and beyond. It offers comprehensive services by combining primary health care and long-term care, so members with chronic illnesses or other conditions who might otherwise have to move to a nursing home can remain at home, said Dr. Ben Lui, the organization’s chief medical officer.

When climate disasters happen, Lui said, On Lok can activate its network of social workers, drivers and others to check in on its members. On Lok also helps operate federally funded housing for older residents.

For residents in those housing units, “we can actually do even closer monitoring, so we can even have our caregivers check on them to make sure they have the windows open during hot weather,” he said. “We can make sure that they are hydrated.”

Lui said the organization groups members by health risk, “so that when disasters or these extreme weather events happen, we can start with the highest-priority,” he said. 

City response

Various city departments have initiated programs, sometimes working with community-based groups, to support older adults and other vulnerable populations during extreme weather.

“I think that we are more prepared now than we were in 2020,” said Adrienne Bechelli, the deputy director of San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Management. “In 2020, we were more prepared then than we were in 2017, when we had our first major heatwave over that Labor Day weekend.”

San Francisco considers anything above 85 degrees to be an extreme heat event, and during Labor Day weekend in 2017, temperatures soared to 106, which likely led to the deaths of three older residents.

Even before the 2017 heat wave, there were indications that San Franciscans could be particularly susceptible to this threat. A study examining a 2006 California heat wave found that emergency department visits and hospitalizations rose across the state. Researchers noted that children up to 4 years of age and people 65 and older were at highest risk.

“This pattern suggests an important role for acclimatization and for factors related to the built environment,” researchers wrote in Environmental Health Perspectives. “In San Francisco, for example, housing stock is less likely to have central air conditioning both because of its age and because of the cooler climate.”

Bechelli said the city will face challenges in any kind of emergency response.

“I think that anyone who says, ‘We’re fully prepared and we’re ready to take on this hazard, no problem,’ is probably, unfortunately, mistaken,” she said.

The San Francisco Human Services Agency’s Department of Disability and Aging Services also manages care coordination for older adults, and during extreme weather events, staffers call high-risk residents to check for symptoms of dehydration, heat stroke and other medical emergencies, Joe Molica, the agency’s senior communications manager, wrote in an email. The department also shares safety information with community centers to broaden its reach, he added. 

The San Francisco Department of Public Health’s Emergency Preparedness and Response team has worked with NICOS to offer trainings in English and Cantonese at health fairs in the Richmond neighborhood, Tal Quetone, the agency’s public relations officer, wrote in an email.

In the past four years, the team has worked with companies that manage single-room occupancy buildings in the South of Market neighborhood to offer training on climate change, he added. In one instance, it collaborated with other departments to research the impact of heat for a building managed by the John Stewart Co., which prompted the owner to buy air conditioners for all 98 units, Quetone wrote.

But these programs don’t cover all older adults who face health risks during extreme weather, and city officials said social isolation is a challenge. The Department of Public Health is exploring how to work on emergency preparedness messaging with specialists and organizations that support older adults.

“One of the things we’re looking at right now in the Heat and Air Quality Resilience project is how can we identify first points of contact for vulnerable populations,” which might include clinicians, residential caregivers and building managers, said Matt Wolff, the department’s Climate and Health Program manager.

Emotional ramifications

While researchers continue to study the consequences of extreme weather on the physical health of older adults, they are also looking into how it affects mental health. Clinicians with the Climate Psychiatry Alliance, a network of mental health professionals, say they have noticed post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and other mental health conditions among older adults, especially those whose lives have been upended by disasters like wildfires and floods.

For some older residents of Chinatown, the anti-Asian hate crimes that occurred concurrently with extreme weather and health emergencies intensified their emotional anguish.

“We were particularly concerned during the pandemic of this kind of triple-whammy effect for our Chinatown seniors with not only the pandemic but also a lot of the climate change-related issues such as extreme heat and air quality issues,” said NICOS’ Liao. “On top of that, a lot of seniors were afraid to go out because of the rise in anti-Asian hate.”

Liao said fears about anti-Asian hate crimes remain.

“As we come out of the pandemic into endemic for COVID, there’s still a lot of the lingering isolation, mental health and loneliness issues that our seniors struggle with,” he said.

Liao said NICOS conducted a focus group, part of a study funded by the National Institutes of Health, in partnership with the University of California, San Francisco, with Chinese seniors in single-room occupancy buildings to understand what might contribute to resilience. The organization found that some older residents were doing due diligence when it came to verifying health information they received on WeChat and other platforms. This also could be a critical step in protecting themselves during climate disasters when misinformation and disinformation can be rampant.

“I know a lot of times we focus on more of the negative aspects — what are some of the deficits and the needs — but I think it’s also important to highlight that within the Chinese community, there’s a lot of resilience,” Liao said.

Yesica Prado edited the photos for this story. Zhe Wu translated the interviews with residents in single-room occupancy housing in Chinatown who spoke Taishanese and Cantonese.

About the Project

Older adults are among those most at risk during climate change-driven weather disasters. This series examines the physical and mental health effects of these events on older people and explores how these challenges are unfolding in San Francisco’s Chinatown, a neighborhood considered by the city as particularly vulnerable to the hazards of climate change.

• Q&A with Dr. Andrew Chang on the physical toll of climate change on older adults
• Q&A with Dr. Robin Cooper on the emotional toll of climate change on older adults
• Q&A with Eddie Ahn on how Brightline Defense takes on air pollution and environmental justice concerns
• Long-form story: Protecting Chinatown’s Older Adults From Climate Change Disasters Requires More Funding, Nonprofits Say
• Photo essay: For Chinatown’s Older Residents in Single-Room Occupancy Buildings, Climate Disasters Pose Greater Risks

This project was produced with the support of a journalism fellowship from the Gerontological Society of America, the Journalists Network on Generations and the Archstone Foundation.

The post Protecting Chinatown’s Older Adults From Climate Disasters Requires More Funding, Nonprofits Say appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

“The air was very stuffy during wildfire season,” Weihong Wu, who lives with her husband in a single-room occupancy building in the neighborhood, said in Cantonese. “If I opened the window, I didn’t feel well, but if I didn’t open the window and let the fresh air in, it felt so stuffy. It’s like we can’t breathe.” Wu said her throat was dry and painful.

As climate change exacerbates droughts, wildfires, floods, storms and other catastrophes, community organizations in the city are racing to put systems in place to both measure its impacts on residents and to provide the tools they need to support themselves during disasters.

Eddie Ahn, executive director of Brightline Defense, an environmental justice nonprofit in San Francisco, is on the frontlines of this work. He serves on several city commissions, including as president of San Francisco’s Commission on the Environment.

In multiple interviews with the San Francisco Public Press, Ahn described how Brightline and its partners engage in environment policy actions, highlight disparities in air quality data, provide air filtration devices to residents, and pursue other climate justice and sustainability work.

Below are excerpts from interviews with Ahn, which have been edited for length and clarity.

What personally inspired you to join Brightline Defense and pursue environmental justice work?

I have a background working in social justice issues. This was as a law student — I originally worked at the Assembly Judiciary Committee as an extern and got to work on a wide variety of legal issues associated with the environment and civil justice.

I like environmental justice work specifically because of the field’s interaction with a lot of different communities. I’m able to work with diverse communities and how they relate to the environment. Diversity is a lot of different things — it can be by income, race, cultural history or geographic experience. So, being able to experience all of that while working on such an overwhelming problem like climate change has been a joy and a challenge.

In 2021, Brightline released the results of a survey about air quality issues experienced by people living in single-room occupancy buildings across San Francisco. Since then, what efforts have been made to mitigate some of the concerns expressed by residents?

The challenges are ongoing. One, there’s been a lot of good reporting on this even recently talking about how many of the buildings, particularly on the west side of San Francisco and neighborhoods like Chinatown, Bayview-Hunters Point on the east side of San Francisco, really are filled with essentially aging buildings that don’t have things like a modern HVAC system — air conditioning, air filtration.

Those larger projects to retrofit these buildings or make them more resilient, those are typically really expensive projects — like we’re talking in the millions or tens of millions of dollars at least. So, in the meantime, trying to get them individual air filtration units can be considered a stopgap measure.

There are even more emergency-oriented measures that we worked on in the past, so that would be something like creating a do-it-yourself air filtration system, like taking a MERV 13 filter and stitching it together with a box fan using duct tape. But that in our minds is very much like a very last-minute measure — if you can’t access an individual air filtration unit, that is the measure you should be taking. But for us, we’ve really been pushing for increased funding and access to individual air filtration programs created by, for instance, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District.

Is the organization taking any steps to support older adults and other residents in single-room occupancy buildings, specifically those who are disproportionately impacted by climate change?

Brightline has been working with SRO tenant leaders for some time now, and this is a program that’s originally organized by Central City SRO Collaborative. They’ve maintained offices in the Tenderloin, but really, they serve SRO tenants across eastern San Francisco. We’re talking Mission District to South of Market to the Tenderloin to Chinatown as well.

Just to focus on the SRO population: Seniors and SRO families are probably the two populations I worry a ton about because the vulnerabilities are very unique for each. Seniors, they have easily interplay of different health issues at that point. And one of the kind of understandings about SRO seniors is that it’s harder for them to move out of SROs at the end of the day. This is often like their last housing unit they’ll live in before they pass. And then, for SRO families, you’re talking potentially crowding three, four people in an 8-by-10 unit. That happens quite a bit in Chinatown SROs, too. That itself presents its own set of issues for that whole age range that’s within the household, right? So, it’s everything from the lack of privacy, mental health issues, to having to share that air within that space, and not have the resiliency, the infrastructure, that you need to protect against climate change.

Thinking through policy changes at the end of the day: We have done direct distribution of air filtration systems. We did a program with Chinatown Community Development Center about two years ago where we distributed about 100 air filtration units in Chinatown, the Tenderloin, South of Market areas. But it only goes so far. Part of the reason why our nonprofit exists is to affect policy change. It’s not just about, you know, 50 units here, 100 units there; it’s hopefully trying to increase access to thousands of units at a time.

Could you describe Brightline’s air quality monitoring project, including the reasons behind launching this program in San Francisco?

It started out originally in community partnership. We were doing initial meetings through the nonprofit partners of our programs, so that’s both Community Youth Center, CYC of San Francisco, and Central City SRO Collaborative. So, CYC, that partnership is a youth leadership program. It’s meant to really connect high school students to environmental issues among other things. And air quality kept coming up because wildfires were starting a bit earlier. And so, there was an increasing awareness of, “This might be an ongoing issue,” and “What are the conditions in our local communities?” And that was a similar string we found in Central City SRO Collaborative and our work with SRO tenant leaders there, too.

Through that kind of community input, we applied for a state air quality monitoring grant. We were awarded it in late 2019. And then in January 2020, we were super excited to start up the program with a technical partner. Clarity is the partner that we’ve used a lot. I don’t know if you’ve seen these devices, but they’re essentially the size of a shoebox, you know, solar panel on top. They’re very resilient devices. And the good thing about them is that you can just throw them up and not worry as much about them over a long period of time.

With the Air Quality Monitoring Program, that was thrown for a loop because of the pandemic, which then came down in March 2020. So, it did delay our planning a bit for a few months.

And we were originally planning to roll it out in say, like, October, November of that year. But then the wildfires hit in August and September, which is when we started rushing out the air quality sensors, and we had done like a ton of community surveying over street corners where we should site these sensors. And in essence, it takes a lot of coordination and work.

And is the data being shared with the people who are in neighborhoods with poor air quality?

Definitely. We do try to break this down into more concise data reports and analyses. We’ve done this in various ways. We’ve done presentations before youth and SRO tenant leaders. We’ve done it in the form of writing. Social media and communications are another big part of what we do. Of course, talking to traditional media, too, is part of it as well.

But it tends to be more driven by, “What’s the crisis at the moment?” People often take the air around them for granted, and it comes baked into their existence. Only when you have extreme climate change events like wildfires that people are like, “Oh my goodness, what is the air right now? And where’s the air report?” And I think part of our work has been good in that — keeping people apprised.

Brightline has been doing a lot of work around the policy of environmental justice mapping. I was wondering if you could share a little bit more about that specifically. What are you trying to accomplish, including with CalEnviroScreen?

I think generally when we try to address issues around climate change, we want to make sure that no community is left behind. And for environmental justice mapping, the point of it is to ensure that we are having equity when we create policies that address environmental issues. 

CalEnviroScreen has had a long history now in the state of California. It was originally created under state legislation SB 535 as a way to define what is a so-called disadvantaged community.

The challenge in CalEnviroScreen is that it’s not a bad tool, but it has struggled to capture the Bay Area as a region accurately in the past. And they’ve gone through several versions. The earliest versions did not include Bayview-Hunters Point, and that was like a huge struggle to just even get the city and county of San Francisco recognized as having a so-called disadvantaged community that needed investment. And now, Bayview-Hunters Point, I think, is pretty well recognized at this point as a community deserving of investment and economic opportunity.

The next level challenge has been really trying to encompass more South of Market, more of the Tenderloin. So, there are little slivers of SOMA and the Tenderloin, but none of the Mission District and none of Chinatown is included currently in the map. And at Brightline, we filed essentially a coalition advocacy letter to argue for improvements to the changes. It’s very clear that there’s a history of incidents in Chinatown and in the Mission District to have racial discrimination, disinvestment, and, overall, there are unique environmental injustices that are being suffered in each community, too.

So, SROs, which we’ve talked about in the past, are older buildings built in the 1900s. And they don’t have the resiliency built into that. They don’t have the infrastructural improvements needed to withstand climate change effects. So, if you have massive climate change events like wildfires, for instance, that are pouring smoke into cities, our most vulnerable are low-income households and families that can’t afford an air filtration unit. And that is typically an SRO tenant, for instance, or an SRO family. So that’s the kind of targeting I think we need to demand of our environmental justice mapping tools.

What do you think about the Heat and Air Quality Resilience Plan launched by the city?

It’s a good start. I did look it over. And we have been supportive of their efforts around heat mapping. A big question is, “Where does the funding come from at the end of the day?” I think there are pathways for implementation, but people need to be prepared that this will have costs, and it will require enormous resources to do correctly.

Do you think, prior to launching this report, the steps that the city has taken to protect older residents and vulnerable populations have been adequate?

Overall, we could always be moving faster. I think that’s the challenge is that from an advocacy standpoint, we’re not moving quickly enough whether it’s serving our senior populations or addressing climate change. I do think that we’re grappling with problems in the state that we’re in, we should be creating big alarm bells for people. In other words, this is not something we need to fix 10 years from now. This is something we need to do now.

I think this is also true of just, philosophically, climate change as an issue — the idea that we can fix issues related to climate change like 20, 30 years from now is increasingly not true.

And yeah, I do think we need very aggressive actions in the next few years to even get to a stage where people are OK, and that they are hopefully surviving, if not thriving.

This Q&A, part of a series of stories on the health impacts of climate change on older adults, was produced with the support of a journalism fellowship from the Gerontological Society of America, the Journalists Network on Generations and the Archstone Foundation. Zhe Wu translated the interview with Weihong Wu.

The post Brightline Defense Takes on San Francisco’s Air Pollution and Environmental Justice Concerns: Q&A With Executive Director Eddie Ahn appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Foghorns sounding on the Golden Gate Bridge signal that San Francisco’s “natural air conditioning” is rolling in, keeping San Francisco cool. During summer, the fog prevents triple-digit heat in the East Bay from roasting the city’s homes and businesses.

That pattern is changing. Since the 1970s, San Francisco’s average temperature has increased by 2 degrees Fahrenheit. Now, city leaders are developing new strategies to keep people safe, with infrastructure designed for much cooler weather. The question is whether San Francisco is ready for the next deadly heat wave.

During the summer, chilly waters off the Northern California coast create a cool marine layer that is pulled inland like a blanket by the warmer air in the East Bay. On the other side of that weather pattern, an upper ridge of high pressure usually indicates where temperatures will be hottest.

On Labor Day 2017, the cool marine layer never reached San Francisco, and temperatures predicted to be in the upper 80s, soared to a record-breaking 106.

National Weather Service Meteorologist Brian Garcia said his agency didn’t see it coming — prediction models were off.

“It looked like the peak of that ridge was going to set up over the East Bay,” he said. “We were looking at temperatures upwards of 115 for Livermore.”

The ridge ended up 30 miles to the west — right on top of San Francisco. Any possible ocean breezes were blocked by a wall of high-pressure air.

The extreme heat took the lives of three elderly San Franciscans and three more people on the Peninsula. Most died alone in overheated buildings. None of them had called 911. Dozens of other people in San Francisco were taken to hospitals with serious heat-related illnesses, overwhelming local emergency medical services.

Threat Starts at Lower Temperature in SF

Most San Franciscans live without air conditioning. The 2020 Census found that in the metro area that includes San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley, only 47% of households had air conditioning. That percentage is certainly lower in San Francisco, which is typically cooler than the East Bay. 

Adrienne Bechelli, deputy director of San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Management, said people in the city are at higher risk with even moderate heat.

“Our thresholds in San Francisco are much lower than in other comparable cities nationwide, or even in other neighboring counties, because a lot of homes don’t have air conditioning in our work or commercial spaces,” she said. “So, our spectrum starts with pre-planning — depending on the incident — in the high 70s, but usually low 80s.”

Bechelli said setting heat protocols in motion starts with the forecast.

“A couple of days out, when we get that spot report from the National Weather Service, we will hold various levels of meetings with our key city partners, as well as other community stakeholders,” she said. “That would include policy-level meetings, as well as operational coordination meetings.”

Agencies participating in such meetings include the Department of Public Health, the Human Services Agency, the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing and the Recreation and Parks Department, as well as the police, fire and sheriff’s departments. Elected leaders and representatives from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency and the San Francisco Unified School District would also take part.

While the Department of Emergency Management coordinates the effort, no one person in San Francisco makes the decision as to which level of response is appropriate.

On average, San Francisco has three days a year over 90 degrees. By comparison, San Jose sees 16.

San Jose Deputy City Manager Kip Harkness is the person who makes decisions about heat emergencies when San Jose’s Emergency Operations Center is activated during an extended heat wave.

“We believe that it’s important to have the authority to act at the appropriate and lowest level possible,” he said.

In most situations, San Jose agencies independently decide to do things like open cooling centers, Harkness said.

“Now, it’s just standard protocol,” he said. “If it got longer or larger, we’d pull everybody together. And we’d work through what additional resources were needed to support the people in the field.”

San Francisco’s response system can’t be set in motion by one official, Bechelli said.

“We do so much pre-planning, where we have all of these specific thresholds and triggers where all the city departments responsible during extreme heat know what that threshold or trigger is,” she said. “The Department of Emergency Management holds that authority to ask other city departments to activate their extreme heat operations protocols at a lower threshold.”

Keeping Track of Heat

When San Francisco officials found themselves scrambling on Labor Day in 2017 to deal with an unexpected, deadly heatwave, many were asking why the forecast was off by 20 degrees.

Garcia, the National Weather Service meteorologist, said the problem was one of scale.

“When we look at models, typically they are in 3-kilometer, 12-kilometer or larger grid boxes,” he said. “And around here, in 3 kilometers, you can go from sea level to 5,000 feet up Mount Tam, and it’s a completely different climate regime.”

Garcia said the system has improved over the last five years, and now the models are based less on a precise forecast and more on probabilities.

“So, instead of saying, hey, it’s going to be 85 degrees in the city, we’ll be able to say the probability of it being 85 degrees in the city is 90%. The probability of it being 105 in the city is 5%,” he said.

Since 2017, the National Weather Service office in Monterey has been reaching out proactively to local municipalities as soon as it sees the threat of rising heat.

Cooling Near You

In the past, San Francisco would open cooling centers and encourage people to travel to them to get out of the heat. That proved a challenge for some seniors, disabled people and families who had to leave their neighborhoods to find a place to cool down. 

Bechelli said the city now offers three categories of weather relief centers.

“The first are overall public locations, things like shopping malls, museums, local parks, local swimming pools, locations that are accessible year-round to the public,” she said. The second category includes city-operated facilities, such as libraries and community buildings. The third category includes sites that people use in their neighborhoods, such as YMCAs, senior and community centers and homeless shelters. The Department of Emergency Management coordinates with all those groups and tries to get the word out to people who need to use them.

When heat and wildfire smoke came to the city during the COVID-19 pandemic, some people avoided leaving hot houses to go to weather relief centers. Bechelli said that fears about COVID-19 and smoke could put people with underlying health risks in serious danger.

“Extreme heat is much more serious than extreme smoke for most people,” she said.

That’s also true when sheltering at home. Opening a window to bring in cooler, but smoky air is less dangerous than being shut up in a hot room for long periods of time.

Bechelli said she is confident the city is focused on managing increasing numbers of heat waves as the climate warms.

“As emergency managers, we do everything in our power to try to stay out ahead of the hazards that impact our communities,” she said. “We always have areas for improvement, we always are looking for specific corrective actions that we can implement to make our citywide response even better. But I definitely feel confident that we are better established to respond to an extreme heat event now than we were in 2017.”

Heat Safety How to stay safe in the heat: Stay somewhere cool Drink plenty of water Wear light clothing and hats Take a shower Close blinds during the day, open blinds at night Avoid: • Being outside between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. (when it is the hottest) • Strenuous activity • Eating or drinking sugar, alcohol, caffeine and high-protein foods Drink water and cool down right away if you: Feel tired, weak or dizzy Have a headache or muscle cramps Are sweating heavily Faint Look pale You may be experiencing heat exhaustion, which can become heat stroke if not addressed promptly. Get immediate medical attention if someone: Has difficulty breathing, a headache or nausea Has a fever (body temperature of 103 F or higher) Has red, hot, dry skin without sweating Is confused, delirious or hallucinating Is dizzy, unconscious or unresponsive They may be experiencing heat stroke, which can be deadly. Call 911 if someone is having a medical emergency. From SF72.org

The post Cool San Francisco Could Get Walloped by Next Heat Wave, but City Says It’s Ready appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

The racial reckoning that followed the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer inspired the reexamination of many historical figures, including John Muir, the man often called “the father of the national parks.” 

Even the Sierra Club, which Muir founded, issued a statement in June 2020 acknowledging some racist language in his early writings. It read, in part: “Muir was not immune to the racism peddled by many in the early conservation movement. He made derogatory comments about Black people and Indigenous peoples that drew on deeply harmful racist stereotypes, though his views evolved later in his life.”  

Muir has been honored extensively, with his name on many sites and institutions, including 28 schools, a college, a number of mountains, several trails, a glacier, a forest, a beach, a medical center, a highway and Muir Woods National Monument, one of the most visited destinations in the Bay Area. But in the time since the Sierra Club issued its nuanced statement, some have come to believe that Muir’s legacy should be diminished because of his racist statements, despite his contributions to the preservation of wilderness and later writings praising native tribes. 

John Muir is such a touchstone and cultural icon for Californians that “Civic” decided to take a look again at his legacy by traveling to Yosemite National Park in Mariposa County. 

Choosing which stories to tell

Lee Stetson has studied John Muir and performed as Muir in six one-man shows he wrote about the 19th- and early 20th-century naturalist. Stetson has thought long and hard about Muir’s legacy and the disparaging statements he made about impoverished people he encountered in his early journeys. 

“Context is the question,” Stetson said. “We have to consider the comments from a young man who was first encountering the Black people in the South as he walked down to the Florida keys from Kentucky.” Muir’s comments on the Indian cultures that he met related to what Stetson called the “shattered cultures,” or tribes decimated by displacement. 

Muir called the handful of Miwuk living in Yosemite who had survived a racial genocide “dirty.” But his later writings show that his attitude shifted over time.

“When he arrived in Alaska” in 1899, Stetson said, “he was accompanied by and guided by Indians. He became incredibly fond of them. He was engaged with Indian cultures that were fully intact. His understanding of their loyalties, their families, their culture in general, was certainly very positive in every way.”

Regardless of whether one agrees with the argument for putting John Muir in historical context, when it comes to national parks, we often forget the people for the trees. But some of the Miwuk — people who still call Yosemite and the land surrounding it home — say the credit given to Muir for his stewardship and preservation efforts are overstated. 

“We were the first stewards of the land to be there,” said Sandra Roan Chapman, chairperson of the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation. “They say John Muir found Eden. He didn’t find Eden. It was always there.” 

“Everything you read about in Yosemite is about John Muir,” she said, adding that members of other tribes have told her they feel the way she does, wondering why Muir’s name is on so many sites that are significant to Indigenous people. “Why do we always have to have John Muir on our sites? So, to me, it’s like, if it wasn’t him, it would have been somebody else.” 

She said that when Muir entered Yosemite, he knew nothing about the impoverished people in the region who survived by working for mostly white tourists. 

One might argue that debating John Muir’s legacy centers the focus on one man, rather than sharing the history of displacement, violence and inequity faced by native tribes.  

The members of the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation have more pressing things to contemplate than John Muir’s legacy. They are fighting for federal recognition, acquiring resources for their community and keeping their culture alive. They recently reached an agreement with the National Park Service giving them control of the site of a former native village in Yosemite Valley that was demolished by the park service in the 1960s. Construction on the site is under way to give the tribes a cultural and educational center in the heart of Yosemite. (The Public Press will share stories about those developments in future reporting.)

Rather than dwell on the negative things Muir said, Chapman said she prefers to focus on the possibilities for her tribe and others.

“They banished us out of Yosemite, but we’re still here,” she said. “And because we have our laughter, and we have our ceremonies, and we stay positive with everything that we’ve gone through, all the hardships and everything that we’ve had, we still stay positive. And that’s what you have to do.” 

Fighting for nature

San Francisco prides itself on being green, but much of those bragging rights come from the clean hydro power from the O’Shaughnessy Dam at the mouth of Hetch Hetchy Valley. Since the completion of the system carrying water from Yosemite in the early 1930s, it has given San Franciscans pristine water to drink and with which to flush their toilets. 

Muir spent the later years of his life fighting the construction of the dam, taking a major role in a national campaign to defeat the project. Despite his efforts, the trees in the valley were cut for lumber and the sacred sites of the Miwuk were drowned when dam construction began in 1916. 

In addition to his work as an actor and playwright, Stetson served on the Mariposa County Board of Supervisors from 2011 to 2015 and has strong feelings about the lost valley.  

“To drown it to a depth of 400 feet was to essentially obliterate a great national treasure,” he said. “They could very easily have stored that water downstream. We could do that today. There would be some loss of electrical power that is currently generated, but that can be replaced.”

Stetson is a supporter of the Restore Hetch Hetchy movement that wants to remove the dam and store the water downstream. 

“You could easily blow a hole in it — most of that sand would pour out that has built up at the bottom of it,” Stetson said. 

“In a few generations, we could have that valley back to us to a significant degree,” he said. “It would have a bathtub ring around it for a number of centuries. But hey, the planet can handle a couple of centuries.”

Echoing Muir

In our interview with Stetson, we had him take on the role of Muir, something he has done in his plays and at live events the world over, using his deep knowledge of the man’s writings and experiences. 

In the most important political moment of his life, John Muir convinced President Teddy Roosevelt to spend three days camping with him in Yosemite in May of 1903. Muir influenced the nature-loving president to expand Yosemite and create more national parks and monuments, setting a significant precedent for land conservation. 

I asked Stetson, speaking as Muir, where he would take political leaders today. 

“The Hetch Hetchy Reservoir,” he said. “I think one could find a great deal of instruction in it. And then, take them to Yosemite Valley and to show them what the Hetch Hetchy could look like. To preserve it is to preserve the loving process of creation. It is an enormously important thing to be doing.”

Stetson as Muir answered our final question: What would you tell the average person about why we still need wilderness?

“To go to it,” he said. “Go, because everybody needs to be kind, at least to themselves. And go because everybody needs beauty as well as bread, in places to pray and then play, where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.

The post John Muir, Racial Politics and the Restoration of Indigenous Lands in Yosemite appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Walk into Animal Care and Control’s bright and clean new facility on Bryant Street and you might be greeted by a human volunteer or an adoptable dog. But behind the scenes, officers are investigating alerts about possible abuse, errant wildlife and distressed animals. Animal Care and Control is an emergency service, and officers have been on the job throughout the pandemic, even having to cut hours temporarily as employees fell ill. Though call volume dropped dramatically with the first shelter-in-place order, as workers in many other sectors return to the job and are out and about more, and as kitten season approaches, the facility could see an increase in activity. For the staff on duty, each day can bring surprises.  

“That’s what makes the job so exciting, is that you have no idea what the day holds,” Lieutenant Eleanor Sadler said. “So you’re responding to all these calls. And it’s, you know, a sick pigeon that just looks sad on somebody’s doorstep or a raccoon hanging by its foot from a fence or hit-by-a-car possum, or squirrel in a chimney. There’s just a million variations of the trouble the animals can get into that they just needed a little bit of help with.” 

Sadler has decades of experience as an officer responding to calls, but she also works with the public in a less tactile way. She is the voice behind the widely popular Officer Edith Twitter account. With the likeness of a former resident Amazon parrot as its avatar, the account posts photos and insights that range from comedic to heartwarming to insightful.  

When Sadler first took over the account, “it was me and, like, 100 people, and it was just nonsense. And then I got retweeted by a local journalist,” she said. “And then suddenly, there was a massive input of followers, and things started getting really fun. And I started trying to figure out what works, what represents the agency well or is also interesting to people.” 

Neither the Twitter account nor the parts of the facility that are open to the public capture the entirety of what animal control officers do day to day.  

“You can’t ever really know what we do until you have this kind of conversation. It’s like, people have no idea that we arrest for animal cruelty,” Sadler said. “But they also don’t see the officer that picks up the 2-week-old kitten and it’s in bad condition but they’re like, ‘we’re on the fence about euthanizing this guy, we don’t think he’s gonna make it,’ and then the officer is like, ‘I’m going to take him home.’ They spend every two hours waking up making formula, warming them up, feeding them, peeing them. You know, it’s not just a job. It’s like a vocation for the people that are here.” 

Animals can end up at the shelter many different ways. They can be surrendered by an owner or found loose. Wildlife may need to be removed from an unsafe situation. Sometimes pets need a temporary home, like when the owner goes to the hospital, dies or is incarcerated. Some pet owners find themselves overwhelmed by multiplying animals. Officers also investigate allegations of animal abuse and may seize an animal in a welfare investigation. 

“We have hundreds of complaints a year. The majority are either a misunderstanding or just false. And then periodically, we get one that’s really serious. And we have to investigate it thoroughly and put all the pieces together,” Sadler said. “Our main goal is to make sure these people cannot have animals again.” 

Last year, a suspect in such a case was arrested after a lengthy investigation found he had inflicted multiple broken bones on his golden retriever puppy. The man pleaded guilty to misdemeanor animal cruelty and neglect.  

In many cases, however, officers play less of a law enforcement role and more of an educational one. They teach residents why it’s detrimental to feed wildlife, and how to handle an unexpected animal.  

“The general rule of thumb is to move slower than you think you have to be, quieter than you think you have to be. And don’t panic,” Sadler said. “If it’s an animal that we need to deal with, call us. And we will help you. But don’t put yourself in danger.” 

Where domestic animals are concerned, the Animal Care and Control center on Bryant Street could be the place prospective pet owners find a new companion. But domestic or no, pets can also be too much to handle. Animal Control is equipped to help in both situations. 

“If you’re interested in adopting an animal, go to a shelter or rescue group. If you’re overwhelmed in the animal you have, there is no shame in surrendering them. Doing what’s right is most important. And if you are unable to take care of an animal properly, there are people who will do that and they won’t shame you or judge you,” Sadler said. “We are a resource for people and we want people to use this resource.” 

For animal-related emergencies, Animal Care and Control can be reached 6 a.m. to midnight at 415-554-9400.  

A segment from our radio show and podcast, “Civic.” Listen at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays at 102.5 FM in San Francisco, or online at ksfp.fm, and subscribe on Apple, Google, Spotify or Stitcher. 

The post Beyond Cute: SF Animal Control Enforces the Law, Educates, Helps Wildlife appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

On a chilly and still dark spring morning, just before 5 a.m., Recology recycling driver Gareth Willey was working up a sweat. He is a recycling driver for Recology Sunset Scavenger and was coming to the end of his Tuesday route in a residential neighborhood. “Civic” was hitching a ride to get a sense for the job and how it has changed during the pandemic. 

“It’s the cardboard that’s killing us,” Willey said. “It just makes this job so much more difficult.” 

Some customers had their boxes broken down and neatly bundled, which helps, he said. But on some of his runs, he would open a door to a basement and find boxes piled high and would have to figure out a way to get all the material out to the street and into the truck. 

On the flip side, so many people working from home meant traffic had reduced significantly. And crowded streets are a problem for the driver of a massive garbage truck. 

“That’s one of the quieter streets, the one I met you up on. There is some traffic, especially on the side streets, but it’s not unbearable. But pretty much the rest of my route is — it’s like a war zone,” Willey said, on the way to the freeway. His route complete, he now needed to get to the recycling facility where he would empty the truck. The predawn streets were already clogged with commuters. 

At the facility, truck after truck dumped collected material onto a tipping floor, where it was scooped into a machine that fed items into a system of conveyor belts three stories high. Human and machine sorters carefully picked through the material.   

In recent years, the mills and foundries that receive recyclables from Recology have stopped accepting bales of material with more than 1% impurities. The sorting facility must work to a very high standard to prevent contaminants from being compressed into bales with recyclables.  

Plastic bags are a contaminant. And despite their short useful lifetimes, they are stubbornly persistent in the environment and in the sorting facility — bags and films can wrap themselves around sorting equipment. Currently, as workers pull them from the recycling stream, plastic bags are sent to landfill. Often, they are soiled with food or other liquids, or used to hold other kinds of recyclables. 

Nonetheless, the city asks that consumers place clean, dry and bundled plastic bags in blue bins. That’s because for a brief time, there was a buyer for them, and there could be a market for them again in the near future. If a buyer is found, residents should already be accustomed to placing their bags in the recycling, rather than in the trash where they have no chance of being diverted from landfill. 

Generally, the best approach is to avoid plastic bags and low-quality, single-use plastics altogether, said Robert Reed, public relations manager for Recology’s recycling and composting programs in San Francisco. Manufacturers are watching what choices consumers make. 

“The real answer is to decline them whenever possible to reduce our consumption of plastic bags,” he said. “Some people don’t think voting with your consumer dollars is powerful, but they’re wrong. Voting with your consumer dollars is extremely powerful.”

A segment from our radio show and podcast, “Civic.” Listen at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays at 102.5 FM in San Francisco, or online at ksfp.fm, and subscribe on Apple, Google, Spotify or Stitcher. 

The post After You Unbox, Bin Your Recyclables the Right Way appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.