“They used to be tolerable, but now it’s unbearable,” said Vigil, who lives in the four-unit building with her family and is the landlord, renting two units to tenants. 

Her father bought the Bryant Street house decades ago, and it has no cooling system and little insulation. When a heat wave hits, she and her tenants fight it together. They share ice, folding the cubes into bandanas to make cold compresses, and she makes big batches of iced jamaica to share. When it gets too hot to be inside, they sit in the yard, take a walk or go for a drive because the car has air conditioning. Two years ago, she bought fans for the bedrooms, but they just blew the hot air around.

Soon they may all get relief. Vigil is participating in a pilot project run by environmental justice organization PODER to decarbonize her home, a process that will add a new heating and cooling system and insulation, among other retrofits. The setup should allow Vigil and her tenants to stay inside comfortably.

The renovation, finally underway after years of planning, will test what it takes to make San Francisco’s multi-unit apartment buildings more eco-friendly. Scaled up, the retrofits would shrink the city’s carbon footprint and reduce indoor pollutants, improving the health of residents. But many tenants and their advocates fear that the work could end up displacing renters if landlords hiked rents to recoup retrofit costs and evicted people who couldn’t pay.

“Low-income tenants are in a precarious position, and we don’t want upgrades to lead to ‘reno-victions,’” said Antonio Díaz, PODER’s organizational director. 

PODER is leading the initiative with funding from the San Francisco Department of the Environment. In this early stage of construction, the organization is soliciting contracting bids from local companies owned by women of color. Decarbonizing Vigil’s building will entail installing solar panels, new electric stoves and windows to rein in energy consumption. 

Díaz estimated that construction would begin in a month and a half and last up to six months. A similar pilot project is in motion on Sycamore Street, managed by Emerald Cities Collaborative, a nonprofit that creates green jobs for women and people of color. Each organization received $100,000 from the city, with $50,000 earmarked for the retrofits. 

Fear of ‘reno-victions’

San Francisco has pledged to reach net-zero emissions by 2040, and decarbonizing its buildings will be a key step. In 2022, 44% of the city’s emissions came from buildings, according to the Department of the Environment. 

Low-income renters and people of color disproportionately suffer from indoor air pollution from gas stoves, and stand to benefit from electrification. 

But the retrofit work will also put them at risk, tenant advocates warn, because landlords have a financial incentive to use renovations to push out longtime residents. 

City Hall allows only meager annual rent increases for pre-existing tenants of rent-controlled buildings — in the most recent year, landlords could raise rents up to 3.6% — enabling people with modest incomes to afford living in San Francisco by staying in the same apartments for many years. But landlords can reset apartment rents to the market rate for new tenants, potentially making much more money. 

Advocates point to a recent mass reno-viction — a retrofit that would also evict tenants — in West Los Angeles as an example of how bad things could get in San Francisco. Following a fire that killed one person in their massive apartment building, corporate landlord Douglas Emmett Inc. issued eviction notices in May 2023 to their property’s 577 occupied rent-controlled units, arguing that it would be easier to comply with the city’s mandate to upgrade the sprinkler system if the building were vacant — the Los Angeles government denied the sprinklers were mandated. Renters organized to file wrongful eviction cases, and this June a judge ruled that the nearly 100 tenants still living in the complex could stay. An estimated 480 people had already accepted relocation fees and left. 

Risk of pricing out tenants 

But there are other, subtler ways that retrofits could hurt and possibly displace tenants.

In San Francisco, rent-control landlords can legally hike rents to help them cover the costs of renovations that benefit their tenants and raise the property value — including decarbonization upgrades like replacing windows or improving insulation. 

Landlords regularly bump up rents through these so-called capital improvement pass-throughs, said Lupe Arreola, executive director of Tenants Together, a statewide coalition of tenant-rights groups. 

The risk of retrofit-driven rent increases “is real, because it’s already happening for basic repairs,” she said, even those that should not qualify for pass-throughs. Arreola added that she has also seen landlords illegally use tenants’ safety deposits to pay for such repairs. 

Tenants might move out if the renovations increased their rents beyond what they could afford. 

They might also move out to avoid the commotion of the retrofits, or their landlords could ask them to leave temporarily in exchange for stipends to cover moving and living expenses while away. But stipends seldom make up the difference between rent-control tenants’ low housing costs and those of nearby market-rate units, Arreola said, so those people often leave the neighborhood or the city. 

Renters displaced by renovations have a legal right to return when the work is done. But retrofits can drag on; Arreola said she had seen one project take 10 years. The more time that passes, the less likely tenants will come back, she said. 

Extensive, potentially invasive repairs may be necessary in many of the city’s older buildings, where lower-income residents tend to live, before decarbonization upgrades could begin, Arreola said. A whopping 70% of multi-unit housing was built before 1950, and all rent-controlled housing was built before 1979. 

That’s why “we need to put in safeguards. It’s going to require legislators doubling down,” Arreola said. She would like to see evictions outlawed in buildings during decarbonization upgrades, and for a limited time after the work finished. 

Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, a Los Angeles-based tenant advocacy nonprofit, made policy recommendations in its 2023 report, Decarbonizing California Equitably: Pass-throughs should be banned for retrofits, with minimal annual rent increases regulated by the government for between five and 15 years after construction wraps up. 

San Francisco’s Department of the Environment is aware of the risks that low-income renters face. It is in ongoing conversations with the Rent Board, which enforces the city’s rent-control laws, and community-based organizations in an effort to make sure decarbonization does not drive displacement. 

“We need more education about rental protections,” said Cyndy Comerford, planning director of the Department of the Environment’s Climate and Health Program. She said she does not believe rental protections need to change to mitigate risks to tenants. 

State pares back retrofit funding

Decarbonization is expensive, and for many building owners it’s only doable with government subsidies. 

But in May, Gov. Gavin Newsom slashed funding for the Equitable Building Decarbonization Program, from $922 million to $525 million. The cuts dismayed policy advocates and local officials. 

“It’s going to mean less money going to low-income San Franciscans,” Comerford said. 

State funds can come with strings attached for recipient building owners and protect against renter displacement. California’s Low Income Weatherization Program, which funds energy-efficiency measures and solar installation, mandates that property owners sign contracts promising to keep rents affordable for low-income tenants for at least 10 years following retrofits. The state also provides the subsidies up front — that better encourages retrofits than federal funds, which are often paid as rebates following the work and best serve building owners who already have the money for a retrofit in hand. 

Back on Bryant Street, Vigil said she looks forward to improving the comfort and health of her family and tenants with the coming retrofits. Just as much, she wants the pilot to be useful to the Mission District, providing a template that others can follow to decarbonize. 

“I see this as a small project starting here with me, but then growing out into the community,” Vigil said. “I want to use the resources I have, and this building is one of them.”

The post Green Retrofits Might Displace Tenants — One Landlord’s Pilot Project Aims to Protect Them 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 agency has taken a multifaceted approach to determine which neighborhoods will be disproportionately affected by conducting heat and flood vulnerability assessments, creating community resiliency scoring systems and collaborating with local nonprofits to gather temperature and humidity data.

Those investigations have revealed that Chinatown could be particularly vulnerable during periods of extreme weather due to a range of socio-economic factors as well as the built environment. Within the neighborhood, older adults living in single-room occupancy buildings are among populations at heightened risk. Reasons for this include physiological changes related to aging and financial barriers associated with making climate-resiliency adaptations to older buildings.

The San Francisco Public Press this summer interviewed residents in single-room occupancy buildings in Chinatown about their experiences during extreme weather events in recent years. The residents, who spoke Taishanese and Cantonese, which have been translated below, described hardships they experienced and steps they took to protect themselves, and offered ideas for support that could be beneficial for them and their neighbors in the future.

As droughts, wildfires, storms, floods and other catastrophes become more frequent and aggressive, each neighborhood, city and state will face its own set of adversities and health inequities. The story of how these challenges are unfolding in Chinatown offers a glimpse into how they could play out for older residents in other climate-vulnerable places.  

[Read more: “Protecting Chinatown’s Older Adults from Climate Disasters Requires More Funding, Nonprofits Say”]

Since the founding of San Francisco’s Chinatown, the oldest and largest in North America, its residents have experienced natural disasters that have threatened their lives and well-being. In the early years, the deadly 1906 earthquake caused widespread devastation. More recently, extreme weather conditions have caused suffering for some residents, especially those who are older and living in buildings that aren’t equipped to protect them from these hazards.

Shao Ao Situ, 81, has been living in a single-room occupancy building in Chinatown for about 30 years. He has experienced several extreme weather events, including the wildfires in the western parts of the U.S. that engulfed San Francisco in smoke in 2020. “The wildfires and resulting haze have a significant impact, especially on us as elderly people, because they affect our respiratory system,” Situ says. He says he had eye irritation, cough and fatigue due to the toxic air.

The building where Situ lives has individual rooms for each tenant. Residents on each floor share bathrooms, laundry facilities, a kitchen and a living room. Situ often watches television with his wife in the living room. He says one strategy that city officials and community groups could adopt to educate residents about climate disasters would be to reach out to multicultural media outlets that residents typically watch, such as KTSF. “We often get information through TV,” he says. “I hope more people can share this type of knowledge there. I tend to remember information better after seeing that on TV.”

When San Francisco was blanketed in wildfire smoke in the summer and fall of 2020, Situ says he mostly stayed indoors. He says he did not receive any support during that time or during other crises. “Where can we go for help?” he says. “We had absolutely no such advice made available to us.”

Units in Situ’s building measure about 8 by 10 feet, which is typical for single-room occupancy buildings. Inside Situ’s room are a bunk bed, a table, a dresser and shelves holding his belongings. There is a single window where he hangs his clothes.

When smoke and toxic particles from wildfires in neighboring regions drifted into San Francisco in 2020, Situ says he kept his window mostly closed, leaving a small opening for ventilation. He says he put up a piece of cardboard to cover the gap, demonstrating how he does that even today.

Situ keeps a stock of surgical masks and sanitizer. During the wildfires, he says he bought N-95 masks. “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,” he says. “Not with government money. We paid out of pocket. The N-95 masks were very effective.”

Situ’s neighbors are also older. He says they would benefit from more education from community groups and government agencies on how to protect themselves during wildfires. “I think governments can do a better job,” Situ says. “One is publicity and guidance, such as holding lectures to introduce smoke and haze prevention matters and methods. I believe it will be of great help to residents, especially the elderly.”

Bifang Kuang is one of Situ’s neighbors. Kuang, 84, says she has been living in the single-room occupancy building for about 10 years.

During the severe rainstorms in the Bay Area this past winter, Kuang says she did not go out to get medications or groceries until the downpour lessened. When asked what support she had during the rain, she holds up an umbrella.  

For older residents in Chinatown, especially those who have trouble with mobility, walking up the hills in their neighborhood to get food, medications and other supplies could be dangerous during heavy rains. One single-room occupancy tenant told the Public Press that arranging grocery deliveries for older neighbors during those times would be helpful. Community organizations and city agencies report that scaling up support services and creating climate-resiliency infrastructure continues to be difficult due to funding constraints.

Yesica Prado edited the photos for this piece. 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 For Chinatown’s Older Residents in SROs, Climate Disasters Pose Greater Risks 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.

After the 2018 Camp Fire tore through Paradise and neighboring areas, claiming at least 85 lives and displacing 50,000 people, some older residents from that region relocated to Carson City, Nev., and nearby locations.

Months later, Dr. Elizabeth Haase, medical director of psychiatry at Carson Tahoe Hospital and Behavioral Health Services and a founding member of the Climate Psychiatry Alliance — a group of mental health professionals raising awareness of the effects of climate change on mental health — said she observed worsening health, including exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and rapid progression of dementia in some of the older people who had relocated from the Camp Fire zone.

“People can have a very dramatic decrease in their overall mental and physical health that’s connected to one of these climate events — that is likely to get missed, in terms of the association,” Haase said. One of her older patients developed pneumonia in addition to worsening of her chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and was hospitalized for several months, she said. Her patient’s mental health also deteriorated.

“In offering her the understanding — because I’m somebody that knows about climate and health — that what was happening to her now is linked to her experience in the fire was actually quite therapeutic for her,” she said. “And you know, a lot of sort of depressive and grief-related symptoms came out. And we were able to talk a little bit about what it means to be in your 70s and lose your home with absolutely no possibility, financially, of rebuilding.”

Like Haase, mental health experts based in the San Francisco Bay Area are exploring the ensuing physical, mental and emotional effects of climate change. Dr. Robin Cooper is co-founder and president of the Climate Psychiatry Alliance, and an associate clinical professor at the University of California, San Francisco’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. She also has a small private practice in the city.

Cooper spoke with the San Francisco Public Press about what needs to be done locally to address climate change’s mental health toll. The following excerpts from the interview have been edited for length and clarity.

You’ve been working as a psychiatrist for decades, and in recent years, you’ve been exploring the threats of climate change to mental health. What got you interested in this field?

I have always been, outside of my professional endeavors, an activist. At the time that I began to learn about and think about and be introduced to the issues of climate change, it had that — “Wake up! Oh my God, this is a potential existential threat.” Once knowing about something that profound, I can’t turn myself away from it. And I began to be active in a number of organizations that were addressing climate change in its broader sense. But as I began to discover, I could use my voice most effectively in the realm that’s close to my work. So, I began to be involved much more in the health impacts of climate change.

A lot was being said about the general broad range of health impacts, but at the end of a talk, a pulmonologist or cardiologist or infectious disease person would say, “Oh, by the way, there’s some mental health impacts.” And I was shocked. I said, “Oh my God, we should be talking about that. We need to be the experts on that.” I met other likeminded psychiatrists, but our voice was very, very tiny at that time. And we came together with the idea that this was something we needed to take ownership of, know more about and be able to speak to it.

Could you describe how climate change affects the mental health of older adults?

So, you and I are both Californians, we know about the Paradise fire. Paradise was a community that had a large number of retirees. It was affordable. It was a place where people could go after years of living in other communities, buy a home that was going to be their place of retirement and live up the rest of their lives. The massive loss of their homes, their community, the place that they could live. These are people who retired, they’re on fixed incomes, who lost everything. So, when you lose your home, and you don’t have a lot of economic resources for rebuilding, you really have secondary emotional impacts. And so, where do you live? The loss of your social support — the greater level of poverty that you live out the rest of your life — interferes with the ability to make choices. And that has huge emotional impacts with depression, post-traumatic stress and a greater vulnerability.

If we look at the disasters that happened in Puerto Rico [in 2017 following Hurricanes Irma and Maria], particularly, the elderly were left on their own. They had no access to medications. Young people had gone to the U.S. mainland for jobs. So, the elderly were left on their own with little to help them recover. And those have huge implications for their emotional wellbeing and their physical wellbeing.

As extreme weather events continue to increase, what should local governments, hospitals, nonprofits and other organizations that are providing services to older people be doing now to strengthen the mental health infrastructure?

We’re in a big crisis, as you know, in health care delivery. We need to make changes in our health care delivery as we confront the vast kinds of troubles that people are going to experience from climate change. And that means shifting to funding and providing care in a more public health, community health manner using population-based ways of intervening. It means that the governmental agencies and those who pay for health care have to do that in a different way.

It also means empowering people in communities to do that before there are extreme heat waves and disasters. It means tightening up our neighbor-to-neighbor relationships, particularly for the elderly. That’s incredibly important, because they can be isolated, left alone, not able to care for themselves. If we have a public health model, and a model based on connectivity in communities, we can have partnerships. We can have buddy systems so Joe knows that Mrs. Smith, who is 86 years old and in her home, is alone and knows what she needs, and has someone to bring her to cooling centers, or help modulate continuing her medications as these disasters and climate events emerge.

Let me just give you another little example. Hurricane Sandy hit New York and the Eastern seaboard with ferocious impacts. Elderly people in this particular public housing that I’m aware of were stuck in their apartments for days without food, light or ability to get out because of the elevators not working. And then people came to the door. And they didn’t know if they were safe. They didn’t know if those were intruders who were going to hurt them, or people there to help them. It doesn’t have to be that way if we take care of some of these things before.

UCSF launched a climate change and mental health task force in June 2019. What did the group set out to do and what has it accomplished, especially for older people?

I would say our achievements have been in the realm of educating mental health trainees about the impacts of climate change in mental health. I believe that medical students need to be what we call climate literate in their educational endeavors. How can we train doctors, and anyone in health care, adequately, if we don’t train them to think about the most significant threat to our wellbeing of this century?

That task force is now being integrated more into this campuswide center on climate health and equity, which actually is a UC-wide endeavor that the Office of the President has supported that is multi-campus, although it’s primarily based at UCSF. I will say it is profoundly underfinanced.

Are you aware of other projects like that in the Bay Area?

There are things happening at many institutions, not with creating a task force, but other kinds of things. Stanford has a new faculty position for one person in the Department of Psychiatry to embed climate change and mental health into their department. Davis has a number of people who are exploring and doing research. But I will say to you, all of these things are siloed. Coming together is a really big issue in the realm of climate and mental health.

The surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, last month sounded the alarm about the loneliness epidemic in the U.S., and how social isolation has a detrimental effect on the health of older people. And climate disasters could worsen this disconnection, especially if older adults are displaced from their homes and communities. So, on a local level, what steps can be taken to alleviate the loneliness crisis?

I think it is enhancing recreational, social meal programs that bring people outside of their homes and engage them with each other in socially involved activities. We know that caregivers are so underpaid, and that there’s been a massive loss in numbers of people who are doing caregiving for the elderly, because you can’t make a living off of it. We have to fund caregivers, so that those who are isolated in their homes have regular connection.

Given all the challenges and complexities of investigating and implementing solutions to address climate change’s toll on mental health, what gives you hope for the future?

Hope is a funny word. Hope is not optimism. Hope is not like, “I can see our way out of this.” We are going to have very, very significant, enduring, unrepairable damage from the impact of climate change. What gives me hope is this new way of defining hope — radical hope. I can envision a better world to live in. And when I see what’s happening, I can’t turn away from it, I have to lean into it. And some people are saying now, hope is a verb we create out of the activism that we do to confront our wicked problem. And what we do now is not going to make this all nice and better, but it will affect the kind of world that we’re moving toward in the future.

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.

See also:

• “Research on Climate Change and Health Reveals Risks for Older Adults: A Q&A With Dr. Andrew Chang,” 1/27/2023
• “Battling Despair Over a New Climate Change Reality,” 9/14/2021

The post Climate Change Can Harm Mental Health of Older Adults: Q&A With Dr. Robin Cooper appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Sea level rise is forcing cities around San Francisco Bay to weigh demand for new housing against the need to protect communities from flooding. Builders say they can solve this dilemma with cutting-edge civil engineering. But no one knows whether their ambitious efforts will be enough to keep newly built waterfront real estate safe in coming decades.

Meanwhile, developers are busy building — and telling the public that they can mitigate this one effect of climate change, despite mounting evidence that it could be a bigger problem than previously believed.

On Treasure Island, a flat tract of 20th-century landfill with epic bay vistas, workers have poured the foundation for a 22-story tower, the first of six planned high-rise buildings, and broken ground on an affordable housing complex. Another, for families and unhoused veterans, is nearly complete. Townhomes, retail space and a waterfront transit hub are also in the pipeline. All told, the $6 billion development would be home to 20,000 people or more.

Engineers for the public-private consortium transforming the island, Treasure Island Community Development, say they are pursuing aggressive sea rise adaptation strategies. Improvements include raising some of the land by several feet, preparing a buffer zone for future levees and pumps, and setting aside low-lying open space that could convert to floodable marshland as higher bay waters spill onshore.

This is not a cheap endeavor. The development group’s director, Bob Beck, did not return multiple emails and phone calls regarding costs for this work. A 2011 report by the city of San Francisco, which includes Treasure Island, estimated that “geotechnical stabilization” measures would cost $137 million. Storm drains, soil grading and landscape and open-space improvements would add about $120 million.

Dilip Trivedi, the site’s project manager with international engineering firm Moffatt and Nichol, has been touting the consortium’s efforts for more than a decade. He said in a recent interview that the most built-up parts of the island should be safe from sea rise through at least 2070. Fifty years or so is a reasonable planning horizon for new developments, he added, and additional phased seawall construction can help future generations stay a step ahead of ever-higher tides.

“When you put together significant infrastructure, you don’t want to have to maintain it for about that time,” Trivedi said. “It is what we call project life.”

Climate scientists, however, commonly try to predict sea rise out at least to the year 2100, a time when some current schoolchildren could be octogenarian residents of the island.

Every contemporary climate model predicts that, even with deep carbon reductions starting this decade, several feet of sea rise are locked in. The debates for climate adaptation strategy are how many feet and how far down the road we should consider.

With ever more sophisticated climate predictions, the outlook for sea level rise has continued to darken, indicating that current trends will likely accelerate through the end of the century. In one pessimistic scenario — which researchers say is among the possibilities in a “business as usual” global greenhouse gas emissions future — much of the island could find itself underwater frequently, and some of the most developed areas could occasionally be threatened with flooding.

To home in on Treasure Island’s future, the San Francisco Public Press asked researchers at the United States Geological Survey’s Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center, based in Santa Cruz, to provide an analysis of storm conditions under various climate scenarios using sea rise projections by the Ocean Protection Council. They found that bay waters could surge higher than the developers have long been saying publicly.

In that analysis, by 2100 there is a small but not insignificant chance of 4 feet, 11 inches of sea level rise — slightly more than what the island’s engineers have accounted for. Adding in the effects of tides, weather and other transient events, such as in the kind of extreme storm seen once in a century, that total could be 2 feet, 11 inches higher.

The resulting surge would, at least temporarily, send waves 1 foot, 2 inches higher than the lowest ground floors of some planned housing complexes.

While the project’s engineers never address this possibility in their public narratives, documents they have prepared show they have known about similar scenarios for years.

Their own maps, which superimpose flood conditions on existing land elevations, line up fairly closely to the Geological Survey’s map data. Yet the engineers have chosen to downplay the likelihood of these outcomes as they pursued permits to build, arguing that novel construction technologies could make the development invulnerable to flooding under any reasonable course of events.

In a 2016 sea rise adaptation filing with a regional watershed agency, Moffatt and Nichol included six maps showing potential flood conditions in each construction phase, side by side with maps showing how the planned short- and long-term sea level rise protections would prevent inundation. 

One map shows 4 feet of sea rise. Before any land improvements, nearly the entire island would have been inundated — up to 8 feet in places — during flooding calculated by FEMA to have a 1% chance of occurring per year. Another part of that document showed a graph that indicated a 4-foot rise was possible by around 2093. The Geological Survey’s analysis of the Ocean Protection Council extreme scenario for 2100 puts sea rise closer to 5 feet.

But Trivedi said that the raising of the land under many of the buildings, plus additional shoreline improvements, would protect key infrastructure. Beside that map, the engineers showed how the existing 3.5-mile perimeter wall could be raised by 1 to 3 feet, depending on location, which they said would keep much of the island dry, although a note appended to the diagram said: “Does not show intentional flooding from managed retreat on northern and eastern shorelines — TBD.”

Within the last year, regulators have started questioning whether the steps developers are taking are sufficient to guarantee that the island remains dry in the long term.

“This is a community that will be around a while,” said Ethan Lavine, chief of permits for shoreline development for the Bay Conservation and Development Commission. “At a certain point in time, they will need levee protection.” Lavine’s office is pressing Trivedi and his colleagues to use a more cautious view of climate change when assessing whether Treasure Island’s flood prevention techniques can handle what nature might throw at them. 

When evaluating permit applications, government agencies require developers to reference the “best available science” to assess threats from climate change. In October 2021, the engineers issued an update to the 2016 filing. In it, Trivedi compared his firm’s sea level rise expectations against studies by several scientific bodies, including California’s Ocean Protection Council and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. His preferred predictions minimized the effect of the worst-case scenarios. The only needed change, he argued, would be to move up the time frame for planning adaptations by as much as five years. 

Yet climate policy experts point out that with significant scientific papers being released each year, guidance for builders has become a moving target. Because they admit a great deal of uncertainty in their predictions, scientists always publish their results in charts that consider an array of environmental assumptions.

That gives developers leeway to choose which predictions to focus on when describing the risks to their capital investments. Treasure Island could be the most expensive local project in the region’s history to take advantage of this ambiguity.

Projecting Optimism

All of Trivedi’s recent public statements conclude that the likelihood of the gloomiest climate scenarios is remote, and that the level of risk to property and lives is insignificant given the proposed engineering fixes. But a close examination of the 2021 adaptation plan offers a few reasons for concern:

• It dismisses high-end forecasts, in which global warming accelerates due to uncontrolled carbon emissions.
• It selectively cites climate models that make planned infrastructure appear sufficient to virtually eliminate future flood risk.
• It focuses on relatively short time frames, such as 20 or 50 years, while offering little specificity about expected conditions at the end of the century, which falls within the lifetimes of some children alive today.

Trivedi said in an interview that for planning purposes, he is focused on one recent predicted milestone: 3 feet of sea rise by 2080. In that circumstance, the ground floors of most buildings, to be built upon a now-elevated development pad, would still have a buffer of nearly 4 feet above the average highest tide of today.

He also asserted that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a scientific committee organized by the United Nations, recently reported sea rise could be less severe than previously forecasted, based on the track record of recent years. “What has been observed is that sea level rise is not tracking” to the most pessimistic scenarios, he said. But there are reasons to question his conclusion.

The localized scenario for 2100 examined by the Geological Survey — the one resulting in water levels 1 foot, 2 inches above some developed areas — relies on a climate change prediction assessed to have a probability of 5%, that is, a 1-in-20 statistical chance of occurring. That prediction was published by the California Ocean Protection Council, a body of experts organized by the state government, in recent guidelines for community planning.

Trivedi said the international group’s current report indicates there’s “low confidence in that scenario happening.” When asked for a citation to back up this claim, Trivedi referenced a “localized model” of the findings from NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and five other federal agencies.

A report these agencies jointly issued in February 2022 in fact gave a more nuanced view. In a section titled “Future Mean Sea Level,” the authors did exclude one scenario used by the Ocean Protection Council that had been labeled “extreme” and not given a numerical probability. But that is not the scenario Trivedi said the group ruled out. This same report indicates that the West Coast is likely to see 4 to 8 inches of rise over 30 years, accelerating later in the century.

Regardless of the pace of the increase, Treasure Island developers say they have contingency plans relying on future residents or taxpayers to fund the construction of progressively higher walls around the urban zone — several feet every few decades. In its latest update, Moffatt and Nichol said sea level rise of 1 foot by 2043 would trigger the plan to elevate the perimeter.

A strategy reliant on levees might seem risky in light of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when faulty engineering of levees led to catastrophic flooding of parts of New Orleans that sit below the level of the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. In light of this recent history, Bay Area regulators are starting to ask whether the Treasure Island plan is entirely watertight.

A March 2022 letter from the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, the agency that issued the island’s 2016 permit for waterfront areas, called the update too optimistic and tolerant of long-term flooding potential.

“Public access along a shoreline and a big mixed-use development require using a medium-to-high-risk projection for sea level rise,” said the commission’s planning manager, Erik Buehmann.

Re-engineering Shaky Ground

On an island built by the government generations ago out of rocks, soil and dredged sand, preparing high-and-dry land would be difficult even if it were not in an earthquake and tsunami zone.

In numerous reports and public presentations, Trivedi has said construction workers have elevated land on the 100-acre development pad to 3 feet, 6 inches above the “base flood elevation” — a height calculated by Federal Emergency Management Agency representing a 1% chance of flooding each year. The homes, hotels and businesses there will be set back from the shoreline by 200 to 300 feet on most sides and as much as 1,000 feet from the northern shore because that area is more prone to flooding. Building is planned to roll out in phases through 2035.

Workers have spent years using cranes to repeatedly drop heavy weights to compact the soil. They have driven vibrating probes into the earth, filling the holes with concrete for stabilization. They then piled 1 million cubic yards of soil atop the compacted layer. These measures are intended to prevent the kind of ground liquefaction seen in the Marina District and elsewhere during the devastating 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Other geological improvements include inserting vertical wick drains, akin to long drinking straws, to help remove water from the soil as it compresses. These techniques have been used by civil engineers around the world for more than 30 years to develop areas without easy access to bedrock.

Trivedi said these measures, together with a jagged, rocky seawall raised to allow for just over 1 foot of sea rise, would help take energy out of large waves, and the setback would use the landscape to dissipate any possible overtopping before it reaches valuable structures.

At the same time, the engineers have recognized that much of the island — particularly the low-lying northern end — are indefensible. Areas that have flooded in the past will eventually be sacrificed to rising waters. That strategy has immediate, concrete consequences: Dozens of existing structures, including homes of about 3,000 people currently living there, are set to be demolished to create open space. Over time these areas could be turned into tidal marshland to protect the newly developed areas from storms.

Regulators Balk at a Sunny Assessment

The Bay Conservation and Development Commission, the agency most empowered to weigh in on new waterfront building, is hamstrung by a legal mandate to regulate only what happens 100 feet inland, regardless of elevation — an artifact of legislation dating from before climate change was a dominant concern.

The 2016 permit the agency issued for improvements on Treasure Island’s margins, including a ferry terminal, required adaptation updates every five years. Moffatt and Nichol’s 2021 update concluded that the original adaptation plans needed few changes, except for possibly needing to accelerate, by five years, the planning process for building higher perimeter levees.

Regulators balked at the assessment. In a March 2022 letter, the commission advised Moffatt and Nichol to plan more conservatively. The agency demanded consideration of a 1-in-200 chance sea rise scenario, in which seas rise 6 feet, 11 inches by 2100. Adding in a 100-year storm surge, waves could plausibly overtop portions of the sea wall along the southeastern side by about 1 to 2 feet, and along the northern end by about 1 foot. That is an even worse outcome than that predicted by Geological Survey’s localized flooding model.

The commission said Moffatt and Nichol seemed too dismissive of chances that things could go wrong.

“The permittees decided to design the project considering very low risk of sea level rise related impacts” the letter said, noting also that engineers seemed too focused on the short time horizon of 2080.

Trivedi counters that the Treasure Island development was never built upon projections of a certain sea level happening by a certain date, because seawalls can, for all practical purposes, be built arbitrarily high, on whatever schedule is needed.

“We adopted an approach where we decided on an allowance we are building into the project,” he said in the interview. “As future projections come out, we will adjust the date of the adaptation.”

Commission staff met with planners from Moffatt and Nichol last summer to work out the requested additions to the 2021 adaptation strategy. Buehmann, who worked on the original permit, said follow-up discussions were to be expected because the Treasure Island permit was the first since the commission began requiring builders to submit sea rise assessments. “We didn’t expect it to be perfect the first time,” he said.

Whatever comes of this process  which Trivedi referred to as merely “an internal thing” that was required for the filing — the adaptation plan is unlikely to change significantly, because the development pad is already in place and huge construction cranes are sprouting up on Treasure Island’s skyline. What is left in the playbook is raising future seawalls, ceding the northern open space and the installation of pumps.

Government officials have long acknowledged the inevitability of Treasure Island’s relying on artificial barriers. In 2015, Brad McCrea, regulatory program director at the commission, told the Public Press: “At the end of the day, this will be a levee-protected community — there’s no getting around that.” Since then, agency staff have not changed their view.

Rapidly Outdated Climate Science

To determine how high to raise the building pad, Treasure Island builders consulted several climate studies published as early as 1987 and as recently as 2007. At that point, scientists were predicting that by 2100, oceans could rise as much as 4 feet, 7 inches.

This forecast was echoed by a state panel of scientists and policy experts in 2009, when then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger visited Treasure Island to announce its findings and call for better sea level rise mitigation.

Moffatt and Nichol then relied on these studies to anticipate that the oceans would rise 3 feet by 2075. So the company proposed raising the development pad to 3 feet, 6 inches above the predicted levels for a once-in-a-hundred-year flood.

Moffatt and Nichol did not spell out a rationale for setting the height of the development pad, as the Public Press reported in 2010. The firm did argue that raising it higher could create other problems, such as jeopardizing the island’s stability under the weight of packed soil and adding expense. “At some point it doesn’t become cost-effective — it’s a matter of acceptable levels of risk over your planning horizon,” Trivedi said in an interview then.

To be sure, when Treasure Island plans were drawn up, scientific modeling showed wide uncertainty about how much global temperatures could increase. In 2009, scientists around the world were saying that oceans could rise anywhere from a minimum of 3 feet, 3 inches to a maximum of 4 feet, 11 inches by 2100. At that time, the effects of ice melt from land via glaciers, snowpacks and ice caps were little understood.

Today, European and U.S. scientists using satellite imagery to measure the shape of Greenland’s ice sheets say melting is outstripping gains from snowfall. In a paper published last August, they found that no matter how much countries curb emissions, seas will rise by a minimum of 11 inches from this effect alone.  

Focusing Locally

The U.S. Geological Survey developed the Coastal Storm Modeling System to help protect waterfront communities. It simulates the forces behind wave and wind data and translates them into local flood projections that include tides, storm surges, waves and seasonal events such as El Niño.

The Public Press requested that the agency simulate a small section of San Francisco Bay, in the vicinity of Treasure Island, relying on probability scenarios for global sea levels in 2100 developed by the California Ocean Protection Council in a 2018 guidance paper. This report offered up sea rise projections of likelihoods as high as 50% and as low as 0.5%. 

The Ocean Protection Council’s examination of a wide array of probabilities heavily influenced the Bay Conservation and Development Commission’s critique of the Treasure Island adaptation update. The commission’s biggest concern was that change might happen faster than the engineers were anticipating.

[Explore sea level rise scenarios using Climate Central’s interactive tool. Here we show floodwaters at 7.8 feet above the present-day high tide line. ]

But Trivedi said the Ocean Protection Council’s past predictions had already failed. “If you look at the year 2022 projections, follow the OPC formulas,” Trivedi said. “We should have seen about 8 inches of sea level rise since 2000. In reality, it has been about 2 inches or less.”

Most forecasts predict increased global temperatures due to persistent carbon pollution. But the emissions projections are still hotly contested.

The Ocean Protection Council examined two emissions scenarios. One assumed that carbon dioxide output doubles through 2050. The other imagined more aggressive greenhouse gas reductions — 70% by 2050 and “net zero” emissions by 2080.

For the purposes of seeing how bad things could plausibly get, the U.S. Geological Survey used a midlevel emissions scenario. This decision was based on detailed simulations into the next century of swell and waves along the Pacific Ocean. What the researchers found was that paradoxically, milder greenhouse gas levels generated worse storms for California’s coast than do extreme ones. 

“What’s really changed in the research community is that worst-case scenarios have become more common,” said Patrick Barnard, a research geologist with the agency. “The state is asking communities to prepare for these.”

This approach helps waterfront areas learn to be more risk-averse to protect property and lives.

Avoiding Mistakes of the Past

Foster City is paying a high price for waterfront sprawl. Like Treasure Island, the mid-Peninsula community 25 miles to the south was built entirely on landfill, not unusual in the Bay Area, where efforts to accommodate population growth stretching back to the Gold Rush consumed most of the wetlands and tidal marshes.

Foster City did have worries about flooding decades ago. It is shot through with artificial waterways, including two sloughs, several small canals and an artificial lagoon. Barely above sea level before being developed, it would not exist if not for its levees and seawalls. 

Yet, in 2014 FEMA informed Foster City officials that new studies showed the levee system was neither strong nor tall enough to withstand a major storm and the large waves that would result. Update the seawalls and levees, or the entire city would be designated a floodplain, the agency said. 

Sixty years ago, developers there hauled in tons of sand to raise the land several feet to construct thousands of homes in what became a 33,000-resident community. That was a time when climate change was not a part of city planning vernacular. Today workers are busy widening and raising levees and adding interlocking steel plates as a bulwark against the storms federal regulators warned of, as well as rising seas.

But Treasure Island, which is slated to add 8,000 units of housing to accommodate more than 20,000 residents, is still more than a decade away from build-out. What the engineers put in place there in the next few years could avoid Foster City’s mistakes — or compound them.

To be sure, some cities are starting to alter blueprints on pace with the evolving science. In October, the Port of San Francisco announced it was collaborating with the Army Corps of Engineers to study how to shore up the city’s seawall along its eastern waterfront, from Fisherman’s Wharf to the Hunters Point Shipyard, to combat both sea rise and earthquake risk. This area includes attractions like the Chase Center sports arena, a project green-lighted before a city-commissioned study surfaced that predicted flooding from sea level rise in the new Mission Bay neighborhood, as the Public Press reported in 2017.

Port officials now say they anticipate 7 feet of sea level rise by the end of the century. That is 2 feet, 5 inches higher than the level Treasure Island’s developers are planning for in their adaptation strategy.

The Port’s yearlong effort will consider elevating barriers along the Embarcadero, installing a system of locks at Mission Creek and buying back and cleaning up privately owned landfill areas around Islais Creek to return them to the tidal zone.

Not Easy to Abandon a Home

In the grips of a housing affordability crisis, San Francisco needs new construction. But is a flood zone the wisest place to build? That could depend on how long we expect buildings to last.

Barnard, of the U.S. Geological Survey, has traveled to many communities, including Okracoke Island, part of North Carolina’s Outer Banks, to assess how to protect people from storms. In September 2019, Hurricane Dorian shut the island down to visitors. For residents, it was hard to consider leaving a place they have inhabited for seven or eight generations. “You can’t detach people from their place, or their heart,” Barnard said. “They’ll stay until water is up to their nose.” 

Before the developers moved in, Treasure Island had roughly 3,000 residents, according to the 2020 Census, many living in homes built for the U.S. Navy in the mid-20th century when it was a military base. Nearly half have a household income less than $50,000, and many do not speak English. 

Now these residents are on tenterhooks. Under an agreement with the developer, people who lived on Treasure Island before 2011 are guaranteed new affordable and rent-controlled units. But the wait times and other inconveniences have been tough. Everyone is living in a construction site with an unreliable electrical grid that browns and blacks out frequently. 

The new units are supposed to be comparable to what they had, but longtime islander Christoph Opperman said they have been offered “interim” units that, for example, might not have enough space for a family, or lack laundry facilities.

“They’re picking us off one neighborhood at a time by making us do two moves,” Opperman said. “We’re not entitled to just anything on the island, but we are entitled to fair treatment.”

Treasure Island’s planners are essentially acknowledging that they must sacrifice part of the island to the bay, even while pursuing a more built-up urban environment just several hundred feet away. This combination of advance and retreat is all part of the plan, the engineers say.

Asked whether he would move to Treasure Island, Trivedi did not hesitate to say yes, observing that no part of the Bay Area was completely free of danger.

“I don’t see why not,” he said. “I mean, should people be moving to San Francisco, because of the seismic risk? Buildings are being designed to codes. And flooding is the same way.”

A version of this story was republished in partnership with Inside Climate News.

This reporting is supported by grants from the Solutions Journalism Network’s Business and Sustainability Initiative and by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Correction 5/4/2023: An earlier version of this story misstated the process the U.S. Geological Survey used to report an extreme flood projection for Treasure Island. The model upon which it was based was produced not by the agency, but by the Ocean Protection Council. Also, the likelihood of that scenario is higher than originally given — 5%, not 0.5 %.

The post Promising to Prevent Floods at Treasure Island, Builders Downplay Risk of Sea Rise appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Rains this winter and early spring ended the drought in the Bay Area and brought a kind of weather whiplash that put San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Management to the test. 
 
Early in the storm cycle, the department faced challenges communicating with the public, especially with people experiencing homelessness. Internal confusion over the forecast delayed the opening of its Emergency Operations Center until a major storm was under way. In at least one instance, flood barriers were deployed too late to prevent homes and businesses from being inundated. 
 
Despite those missteps, the city rallied a coordinated response from its Emergency Operations Center, where multiple city agencies, along with Pacific Gas and Electric Co. representatives, gathered to discuss and act on emerging issues in real time. 
 
It has been years since California faced this kind of barrage. The National Weather Service said that at least 14 powerful atmospheric rivers have slammed into California since October, triggering flooding and downing trees that have killed at least 22 people statewide, including two who were struck by falling trees in San Francisco.
 
And there could be more trouble to come: The Sierra snowpack is at a staggering 225% of normal, and while it will fill reservoirs, a fast spring melt could cause even more flooding. 
 
In a new “Civic” episode, we examine how the city responded to the first big deluge of the season and what it learned from that harried experience to improve response to subsequent storms. 

The biggest rainstorm hit San Francisco with 5.5 inches of rain on New Year’s Eve, when many city employees were away on vacation. Adrienne Bechelli, deputy director of San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Management, said city departments were able to mount a full response despite being short staffed. 
 
“The city tasks that were the most urgent priority were, of course, flood mitigation and clearing catch basins ensuring that all of our storm drains were clear,” she said. 

Emergency response teams also helped drivers whose vehicles were stranded in floodwaters and worked to get people living on the streets into emergency shelters, she said.  
 
Despite those efforts, some residents and businesses in the Mission District said the city was slow in providing information and failed to put up additional flood gates as it has done before previous storms. 

Blame game

On Jan. 3, Mayor London Breed began a news conference saying the city didn’t expect so much rain. 
 
“We were under the impression and notified by our National Weather Service that we could anticipate not even an inch of rain,” she said. Less than one inch of rain is not considered a threat according to the city’s winter storm and flood plan. 
 
Mary Ellen Carroll, the executive director of the Department of Emergency Management, echoed the mayor’s claims and said the city scrambled to increase its response on New Year’s Eve: “Our city employees rallied and we activated our Emergency Operations Center late morning when we realized what was actually happening was a little different than the actual forecast.”
 
Brian Garcia, the warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service in the Bay Area, disputed those claims. He said the forecast showed a strong system hitting San Francisco days before it arrived. 
 
“We started messaging that on the 26th and 27th, when we started putting out information for the New Year’s Eve system,” he said. “We issued a flood watch on December 28. So, we definitely saw something coming in.” 

The weather service issues flood watches when the risk of a hazardous weather or flood event increases significantly.
 
San Francisco’s own response protocol lays out an elaborate system to prepare for major storms. The city activated its emergency response on Dec. 28, after the National Weather Service issued its flood watch 96 hours ahead of the storm. 

Garcia said city leaders’ forecast concerns seemed to center on whether the New Year’s Eve fireworks show — which had been cancelled during the first two years of the pandemic — could proceed as planned over the bay near the Embarcadero. 
 
“There was a focus for all of us to see if the rain was going to clear out by then, on the briefing that we provided on December 28,” Garcia said. “We were talking about the wind and the rain across our entire area, including the city, and how nasty it was going to be. The fireworks were definitely a bit of a focus.” 
 
The city seemed to have moved past the “one inch of rain” forecast claim in late February, when Bechelli said the forecast didn’t hamper the city’s efforts. 
 
“We were full out in terms of our operational response,” she said, shifting the focus to the city’s storm water capacity. “The built infrastructure of San Francisco is not built to handle five and a half inches of rain in a 24-hour period — we’re going to see inevitable flooding.” 
 
Garcia is ready to move on. “You’re always learning how to communicate better,” he said. “We continue to look forward to many years of a strong partnership with the great city of San Francisco.”
 
A representative from the Department of Emergency Management wrote in an email that the city hopes to bring National Weather Service representatives into the Emergency Operations Center during future storms. 

Seeking shelter

Following the New Year’s Eve storm, San Francisco Public Press reporters Yesica Prado and Madison Alvarado visited eight San Francisco neighborhoods over three days to talk to homeless people out in the rain. 
 
Prado said that access to shelters varies a lot by neighborhood.
 
“Some places, like in the Bayview, people are able to be more settled down versus being in the Civic Center or being in Japantown, where people are constantly on the move, and they will have to seek shelter if they want accommodations for the night,” she said.

Alvarado said nonprofits were scrambling to find spots for people and, in some cases, sent them across the city where there were beds available.  
 
“We were visiting a shelter and dining room down in the Bayview. We actually heard that at the end of the day the St. Anthony Foundation bused people down to Mother Brown’s in the Bayview, because they knew that there were shelter options down there,” she said. 

San Francisco added more beds to all its shelters in anticipation of a demand surge and worked with nonprofits and churches to add more, but Alvarado said finding information about where beds are available can be difficult for people without access to the internet. 
 
“If you don’t have a phone, you don’t know where you can go because you don’t know where they are,” she said. “Maybe you know of another shelter, but you don’t know how to get there.” 
 
During their reporting, they came across a man shivering on the sidewalk. 
 
“We noticed that nobody had actually approached him,” Prado said. “We didn’t ask for an interview. We went to ask ‘do you need any help?’ And then all he could muster is that, yeah, like he was cold. So we went back to our car, and we got some supplies for him, some dry clothes. But once we came back, he wasn’t really responsive. And that’s when we thought, he really needs some other kind of help.”
 
Prado and Alvarado said they looked online to see whom they should call. The Healthy Streets Operation Center website indicated that calls from concerned citizens would not be returned. Prado and Alvarado were reluctant to call 911, which they said they thought might bring a police response to a medical issue. So, they ended up calling 311, and a team designated to help homeless people showed up a few minutes later. 
 
Confusion over whom to call was understandable. During the Jan. 3 news conference, San Francisco Fire Chief Janine Nicholson discouraged people from using 911 for anything less than an emergency. 
 
“I can’t stress it enough,” she said. “Call 911 for life threatening emergencies only. We still have to run all of our critical 911 calls, whether it’s a cardiac arrest or a car accident or a fire.” 
 
But Bechelli said that calling 911 is the right choice: “Our 911 dispatchers are trained to send the right resource for that particular problem. If there is a medical emergency, they will send a medical response in order to help that person.”

Encampment sweeps continued 

Representatives from the Department of Emergency Management said that they reached out to people in encampments to offer them shelter ahead of and during the rain storms, and in some cases, to warn them that the place they were in was prone to flooding or other dangers. Meanwhile, the Department of Public Works continued to dismantle tent encampments during the inclement weather, as witnessed by our reporters. 
 
Alvarado spoke with a man named Duane who said he had been camping on 19th Street near Harrison Street for about a month, and that city workers kept asking him and other people nearby to move. 
 
“They were making us move every week, every week, back and forth, back and forth. No matter if it was raining,” he said. 
 
Our reporters said the city was offering temporary shelter stays to people in the two encampments they visited, but few of the people they spoke to said they were taking the offers. 
 
Duane said he thought congregate shelters and even navigation centers, which allow groups of friends to stay together, were too dangerous. “You got to deal with a bunch of crazy people. They pick fights with literally no reason,” he said. “It’s like, yeah, they offer you housing. But you gotta jump through hoops to get in.”

Mitigating floodwaters

The city has long known where flooding is most likely to happen and has some plans to mitigate it. After the December and January storms, residents and businesses affected by flooding were asked to fill out questionnaires to help the city track damage and potentially help San Franciscans get federal relief. 
 
Bechelli said 117 people submitted responses about flooding affecting their homes and 17 submitted responses about their businesses. Many responses came from people in the Marina, Mission, Bernal Heights, Glen Park, Castro, Potrero Hill and Dolores Heights neighborhoods, she said. 
 
Most had flood damage, but few had flood insurance. The Federal Emergency Management Agency declined to offer emergency grants to those affected, but will offer Small Business Administration Disaster Loan assistance. Applicants must apply in person at the War Memorial building on Van Ness Avenue. 
 
The city has plans to address some areas prone to flooding. The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission has allocated $632 million for three large drainage projects in low-lying areas. 

• The Wawona Street Stormwater Project in West Portal will be under construction until 2024.
• The Lower Alemany Area Rainwater Improvements Project in Bernal Heights will improve stormwater management near the Alemany Farmer’s Market, and the Interstate 280 and U.S. 101 interchange in Bernal Heights. Construction isn’t expected to begin before 2025 with completion in 2028.
• The Folsom Area Stormwater Improvement Project would cover multiple streets in the Mission to reduce flooding in one of the neighborhoods hardest hit in even moderate storms. The project is in the planning phase with no date set for construction to begin. 

In a more modest effort, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission has distributed $2.5 million in grants to schools and nonprofits to fund rain gardens, green roofs and other green infrastructure projects to help slow down and redirect floodwaters.

Weather response report card

So, how did the city respond to our wild and wet winter? 
 
There were communication problems. 
 
It’s unclear why city officials and the national weather service got into an argument over the New Year’s Eve forecast. Confusion over the forecast delayed the opening of the city’s Emergency Operations Center.
 
Given conflicting instructions, San Franciscans may have been confused about when to call 911, especially around helping homeless people. 
 
Finding information about shelter locations generally requires access to a smartphone or the internet. Direct outreach to the homeless is limited by staffing constraints and the fact that those needing the information move around a lot. 
 
Overall, the city’s response to protecting people in need was hampered by the same factors that have led to so many people living on the streets: a lack of long-term housing and a focus on temporary shelters, which are often considered by the homeless to be worse than staying outside. 
 
The city knows where the most problematic flood areas are and has plans to mitigate many of them, but those infrastructure projects are years from completion. 

The New Year’s Eve storm was the city’s second wettest on record, only surpassed by a Nov. 11, 1994, storm that brought 5.54 inches of rain to San Francisco. It is too early to know whether California will break its previous record set in 1952-53 for wettest season based on snowfall. The total snowpack results are usually measured and reported April 1. 

Inconsistent weather patterns

For the last few years California has been experiencing a series of La Niña weather patterns, which normally mean drier than usual conditions. An El Niño pattern usually means a wetter than average winter. But within those two major patterns are lesser intra-seasonal oscillations that can change from month to month. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration explains that variations in tropical rainfall can shift the wintertime jet stream and atmospheric circulation over the North Pacific and western North America, thereby overriding the dominant seasonal weather pattern.
 
The weather service’s Garcia explains that if the intra-seasonal oscillations “all come together in the right way, they can override a strong entrenched signal. We can have El Niño years that are extremely dry. And conversely, we can have La Niña years that are extremely wet. It’s not unheard of, it’s just not the norm.” 
 
The La Niña pattern officially ended March 9. It’s unclear whether we’ll see an El Niño pattern by next fall or a neutral pattern.
 
“In California, we typically end major droughts with major floods,” Garcia said. “This has happened multiple times throughout California’s history. So, is this related to climate change at all? The way that it’s related to climate change are the extremes at which we’re seeing those higher heights and lower lows. It’s not happening any more frequently than historically, it’s just getting deeper and higher at the same time.”

CLARIFICATION 4/10/23: The Department of Emergency Management responded to this story to characterize the changing activation status of its Emergency Operations Center. Though only described as “open” during specified times, it is otherwise continuously in standby mode and monitoring events.

The post Intense Weather Stress-Tested SF’s Emergency Response appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Against this backdrop and with extreme weather events on the rise, physician-researchers like Dr. Andrew Chang, an attending physician specializing in cardiology at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System and postdoctoral research fellow at the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute, are investigating how the biological mechanisms of aging and a warming world will affect the health of older adults.

In 2022, Chang and his colleagues examined medical literature to study the intricate and nuanced ways that climate change-fueled disasters and other environmental factors influence the cardiovascular health of older people. They summarized their findings in the journal Current Cardiology Reports. In an interview with the San Francisco Public Press, Chang shared some of the concerns expressed by older patients during environmental disasters like wildfires, and explained the challenges researchers often face while gathering data on this subject.

Below are excerpts from the interview, which have been edited for length and clarity.

What was the motivation for you and your colleagues to embark on researching the health impacts of climate change specifically on older adults?

In the immediate phase, the group of people who most suffers from the effects of climate change are our older adults and some of our senior citizens, and the reason for that is sort of twofold. First is, there are pretty unique biological changes that happen to the human body with aging, which actually increase the susceptibility to environmental factors. And the second thing is, there are social factors as well which make older adults less resilient against some of these events. So not surprisingly, if you look at the casualty rates from both natural disasters, as well as long-term exposures to things like air pollution, disproportionately, it is older adults who are dying from some of these conditions or developing conditions or suffering from the effects of these things. I think, very quickly, it became clear to us that the study of climate change’s effects on human health disproportionately involves the health of our older adults.

Wildfires are an ongoing concern here in the Bay Area as well as across the state. And your article explored the relationships between climate change and wildfires and cardiovascular risk for older people. Could you explain how they are linked?

The biggest thing is that older adults don’t have the same barrier functions that younger adults and younger people do. And what I mean by that is that most of the injury that happens from wildfire smoke is from inhalation. So, you breathe in particles, and particulate matter we know is highly inflammatory, and it enters your body. It enters the circulation through the tiny blood vessels called capillaries that are inside of your lungs. Older adults don’t have barrier functions at those blood vessels that are as robust as younger adults. So, you kind of have more of a leaky effect, where more of those toxins are absorbed. And then they enter into the bloodstream. 

Now, not only are more toxins coming in, there’s underlying susceptibility. There’s just the normal process of aging that causes us to have reduced lung capacity. If you imagine that we’re already starting out with reduced lung capacity as an older adult, then losing even more of that is more dangerous. Similarly, just due to normal aging processes, the heart muscle becomes stiffer, the arteries are less elastic. So, any of these toxic effects basically become magnified. 

And then on top of all of that, of course, older adults are more likely to have preexisting cardiopulmonary diseases — things like heart failure or high blood pressure or diabetes — and all of those things work additively or multiplicatively in terms of your injury from air pollution exposure.

Were there any other particularly startling or surprising findings that you came across as you were doing this research?

I was really surprised how so many of the deaths that are attributable to heat waves or heat events were actually cardiac rather than things coded as heat stroke or heat exhaustion. Because, I guess in my head, it had seemed that the actual exposure to the heat itself was probably going to be the biggest determinant of injury. As a clinical cardiologist, it kind of reinforced to me that heat-related injury for older adults is a cardiac problem.

Were there any challenges that you and your team experienced as you were working on this paper? Did you run into any hurdles in finding data about how climate change will affect the elderly population?

The paper that you’re referencing is … our synthesis of what the entirety of the literature looks like. In terms of data, our group also does a lot of primary research using primary sources of data. In general, in those situations, there are some challenges. One of them is that a lot of exposures tend to be gradual, over long periods of time. Things like air pollution, for example, we know climate change makes air pollution worse. But everyone experiences some amount of air pollution at baseline. So, there’s a challenge of studying something that’s sort of insidious, and occurring over a long period of time, in terms of things like air pollution. 

On the flip side, studying things like wildfires or extreme heat events, which are very intense, very short exposures. Part of that is also challenging because it’s hard to gather data in the moment. When there is a natural disaster, say like a wildfire, the priority on the ground really is to evacuate people. It’s to make sure that they’re being safe, that they’re being cared for. And a lot of research ends up happening retrospectively, trying to kind of go back and cobble together what exactly happened. So, you start to lose some of that individual granularity. 

You can gather much more granular data. For example, some of my colleagues are putting air sensors in people’s homes and looking forward to future wildfire seasons to see how much does that impact their health outcomes. The challenge on that side is also that’s very granular data that tends to be kind of hard and expensive to do on a large scale. 

And are you currently doing any research?

I’ll speak more generally, just because these studies are ongoing. But some of the questions that we’re interested in generally are: What were the effects of specific wildfire seasons on emergency room visits? Did emergency room visits for certain types of conditions — say, asthma attacks, heart attacks, strokes — change before and after specific wildfire events? 

Other things we’re looking at are things like subclinical markers. What I mean by subclinical markers is: Is there an early detection system for injuries to the organs from these insidious, prolonged exposures? To give you an example, I look at ultrasound data of the heart in older adults — people over 65 — to look at over the course of five years or so of air pollution exposure. Are there subtle findings like subtle changes that happen to the way the heart moves? The way the heart muscle moves that may mean worse things are down the line? Can we identify these things early on? Can we identify people who are at risk for worse things like heart failure down the line from air pollution exposure? So that’s another thing that I’m interested in. 

In your clinical practice here in the Bay Area, do conversations about climate change come up with your older patients who have cardiovascular diseases?

The climate change issue that I field the most questions about are usually during wildfire seasons. I think part of that has to do with the visibility of it. When it looks like “Blade Runner” outside, the skies look pretty apocalyptic. I think it’s pretty clear to everybody: If you’ve ever tried to go jogging during a bad air quality day, it’s quite apparent that your heart and lungs are not happy with what’s going on. And I have to say most of our patients are also aware of that. I think that’s less of a thought during the extreme heat, because most people don’t immediately connect extreme heat events with heart disease, but I will definitely say I get a lot of questions from patients during wildfire season asking: What does this mean for me? What are the dangers to me? And most importantly, what should I do?

How can healthcare professionals help older people understand the risks of climate change?

We do know that unfortunately, older adults are less mobile and less able to evacuate in times of climate crises. I think one of the saddest statistics I’ve ever heard is that during Hurricane Katrina, over half of the people who died were over the age of 75. That really speaks to the fact that emergency planning has to be done in advance for older adults.  

I know a few of the environmental agencies do in general recommend that people at higher risk for harm from these situations have a disaster response plan. And having these types of disaster management plans is something that we can and should be talking about with our patients, particularly those who live in parts of the country with seasonal emergencies like hurricanes or wildfires or extreme heat waves. I think, as of now, that’s probably something that we as clinicians should be talking about with our older and vulnerable patients that we probably aren’t doing.

While older adults overall are vulnerable to climate change threats, your paper mentioned how those experiencing poverty and structural racism are at greater risk. Could you say more about this?

People who are at a lower socioeconomic status are almost always at higher risk. Part of that has to do with the fact that a lot of current solutions that have to deal with these things involve money, things like air conditioning for heat, and the fact that people who have money and means are more likely to afford higher quality care, so they are less likely to have developed some of these risk factors even if they are the same age as somebody who may be poor. 

In terms of racial, ethnic breakdowns, we’re increasingly recognizing that certain policies, for example, redlining, have marginalized certain groups of people such as African Americans to unfortunately live in parts of cities and communities that may be exposed to higher rates of air pollution — for example, near highways or industrial areas. And as you can imagine, having a higher baseline underlying rate of air pollution exposure means you’re more likely to be injured when there’s a spike in it from something like a wildfire. 

Anything else you wish to add?

I think, moving forward, we shouldn’t take a paternalistic attitude. There are a lot of things that older adults can also offer in the fight against both climate change and climate change-mediated disasters. There’s a certain resilience that you gain from life experiences. 

Also, older adults, a lot of them have this transgenerational thinking, this ability to imagine and advocate for a world for future generations — for their children, for their grandchildren, for their great grandchildren. That, I think, is really powerful. And in many societies, like First Nations societies, elders are quite respected and are important decision makers. Anything that we do in terms of policy, we need to make sure that older adults are equal partners in the decision making, and that we try to leverage their specialized skill sets or their strengths or their worldviews in order to craft our responses to these things, because we’d be surprised at a lot of the strength and resilience that we’ll find from our elders.

This Q&A, the first in 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.

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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

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The Bay Area can house millions more people without increasing its water use, according to a new report from the urbanist and water-use think tanks SPUR and the Pacific Institute. This could be done by continuing to improve water conservation efforts while concentrating on developing infill housing to prevent urban sprawl.  

“Assuming that the region will add 2 million new jobs by 2070, that means that that will attract about 4 million new people to the region,” said Laura Feinstein, sustainability and resilience policy director at SPUR and, with Anne Thebo, co-author of the report.  

Feinstein said the region needs to build 2.2 million homes to accommodate current housing needs as well as anticipated growth and to prevent a continued decline in housing affordability. 

Not only can adding people without increasing water use be done in theory — the report notes that it has been done before. Since the 1980s, the Bay Area population has grown by about a quarter while the region has decreased its total water use by about the same fraction.  

 “People are using water more efficiently indoors,” Feinstein said. “They’re using less water outdoors to irrigate their yards, and businesses are using less water to produce their goods.” 

The report stresses infill housing as a water conservation strategy in part because half of residents’ water use comes from outdoor applications like watering large yards and gardens — particularly those with plants poorly adapted to the region’s Mediterranean climate. Indoors, updating appliances to more water efficient models when old ones are replaced can help, as can detecting and addressing leaks.  

“People lose about 10% of their water use just to leaks in their homes,” Feinstein said. “So, finding those leaks and fixing them is huge.” 

Statewide, the agriculture sector is the largest water user, accounting for 80% of consumption. In the Bay Area, however, 90% of water use goes to supplying homes and businesses, the report says. Indoor residential use consumes the largest share, followed closely by businesses and institutions. Feinstein said businesses have been decreasing water use by about one percent every year, even though no new statutes require them to improve water efficiency. 

Another strategy the region should implement, the report suggests, is improving the way it allocates water to municipalities. 

“Historically, California has not distributed water according to need. Water is distributed according to the water rights that people got many decades ago,” Feinstein said.  

East Palo Alto, which is surrounded by extremely wealthy Silicon Valley communities, consumes very little water per person compared with adjacent cities. All of these municipalities buy their water from the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, which draws it from Hetch Hetchy Reservoir. In 1984, when the agreements were put in place, East Palo Alto received the lowest per-person water allocation in the area. 

“East Palo Alto, when they were handing out those allocations decades ago, got a sort of — I could say ‘inexplicably small’ allocation. But it’s not that inexplicable. As always, the town that was primarily people of color, and that was lower-income, got the least amount when the negotiations were happening,” Feinstein said.  

That remained the case until 2017 and 2018, when nearby cities Mountain View and Palo Alto agreed to sell some of the water they weren’t using to East Palo Alto.  

The previous decades of chronic shortage affected East Palo Alto in ways that go beyond everyday water use. While the region can add more homes without using more water in aggregate, local water shortages have halted construction in some cities, East Palo Alto among them. From 2016 to 2018, the city enacted a building moratorium because it did not have enough water to service new construction as well as existing uses. 

Beyond redistributing resources from one community to another, the region might also consider giving water rights to the environment, Feinstein said.  

Because human uses divert so much water from the state’s rivers, the delta is too salty for certain wildlife to flourish during drought years. That diversion happens even if local consumers use less water, so the SPUR report recommends that the region find ways to ensure that unused water is returned to the environment. 

“There’s no way to ensure that if the city of San Francisco decreases its total water use by 10%, then that amount of water stays in the rivers of the Sierra, rather than being diverted,” Feinstein said. “It just means that another person who’s in line for water is likely going to take the water.” 

The state’s water regulation agencies have told the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission it should reduce the amount of water it diverts from rivers, which the utility claimed it could not do. The local agency also filed suit to fight the proposed restrictions.   

“It would be a dramatic hit to our entire service area, both in San Francisco and outside of San Francisco,” San Francisco Public Utilities Commission Assistant General Manager of the Water Enterprise Steven Ritchie told “Civic” earlier this year. “Trying to identify additional water supply would really be harmful to the communities and the Bay Area as a whole.” 

Feinstein said the report’s findings show that readily available technology to reduce water use, and best practices that residents and businesses have already been putting in place, can help the region reduce its water use even more.  

“If we just continue those trends for the next five decades, that per-capita water use and total water use would drop off quite a bit,” she said. “We could actually decrease water use for the whole Bay Area by about a quarter. And we could therefore leave a portion of that water for the ecosystems.” 

That will, however, take many years and careful planning. 

“It takes decades to really decrease water use on a per capita basis really substantially,” she said. “So, we can’t just do it overnight. We have to be looking decades out to see those big gains in efficiency.” 

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. 

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