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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Investing in resilience pays

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Advancing climate justice 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At the beginning of “Fiddler on the Roof,” when Tevye is introducing the audience to the denizens of Anatevka, a student asks the rabbi if there’s a proper blessing for the czar.

“A blessing for the czar?” asks the bemused rabbi. “May God bless and keep the czar … far away from us!” 

It’s a throwaway line. On the other hand, it’s the one I think about the most. Every morning at drop-off when I watch all the kids run through the gate of their public school, it hits me: 

May God bless and keep the San Francisco Unified School District central office … far away from us!

Well, Mann Tracht, Un Gott Lacht — Man Plans and God Laughs. Like every SFUSD parent, I was recently asked to fill out a survey on the pending closures/mergers of schools. This is not far away from us: On the draft agenda for the July 16 Board of Education meeting one could find a proposed $1.75 million contract for the massive infrastructure consulting firm AECOM to handle “Resource Alignment logistics management.”

Well that’s some amazing language there. “Resource alignment logistics” means what you think it means: The district is proposing to bring in an infrastructure specialist to oversee closures and consolidations. It’s all a bit on the nose, isn’t it? The financially strapped school district, which has been instructed in no uncertain terms to stop throwing money at high-priced contractors, was proposing that it bring in a high-priced contractor to oversee the liquidation and consolidation of its own assets. 

Nobody is laughing now.

This item was summarily yanked off the July 16 agenda. But it, or some version of it, will be back. School closures and mergers are coming — whether you like it or not, to borrow a phrase from Gavin Newsom. These are not good times for the district: It’s hemorrhaging students, it must now amend for years of spending beyond its means, and further fiscal missteps could trigger a state takeover. No one should want this: The state will make cuts with the brutality of a Civil War battlefield medic.

Staving off a state takeover is paramount. It’s not everything, it’s the only thing. There is no other hand. 

The district is in a difficult place, and that calls for difficult measures. Everyone gets that. But parents — and everyone else — might be surprised to learn that the district does not expect to save much money via school closures. And while the district has pressing and immediate financial concerns — and is budgeting accordingly — school closures won’t save money in the short-term. 

As that $1.75 million proposed contract indicates, it may cost money in the short-term.

With the possible exception of the military and law enforcement, nobody indulges in the use of acronyms like a public school district. So let’s talk about the DAC meeting regarding RAI.

Or the District Advisory Council discussing the Resource Alignment Initiative — you know, closures and mergers. 

During the May 6 meeting of this body, the district’s enrollment director purportedly said that school closures “would not save a lot of money, but are about making the most of the district’s resources.” When asked, minutes later, what the specific cost savings of closing schools would be for the district, the purported answer was “not much.” 

We have to use the “purported” here because, while this meeting was recorded, the first 30 to 45 minutes were, inexplicably, not included on that recording. But we have spoken to half a dozen attendees or participants at the meeting who attest that this indeed happened. 

The San Francisco Unified School District isn’t shouting from the rooftops that school closures won’t save much money and won’t save money quickly. But, when asked, it admits — eventually — that this is the case. 

“The primary goal of closing, merging or co-locating schools is to use the district’s limited resources to create strong and supportive learning environments for every student and educator,” writes a district spokesperson. “The Resource Alignment Initiative allows us to organize our investments better. It’s about making structural changes to the system that allow us to use our resources more wisely so that we alleviate this strain across the system.”

Fine, but my direct questions were “How much money does the district anticipate it will save via school closures/mergers/resource alignment? Will the district save money?” 

So I asked the district if it’d be accurate to say the following: 

The monetary savings are not projected to be significant, especially in the short-term, and this is not the driving motivation for this move; 

There is presently no estimate or goal of how much monetary savings will be derived from closures/mergers/consolidation.

I was told that, yes, these are both accurate.

You’re not going to believe this, but the district is saying that the primary goal of the Resource Alignment Initiative is resource alignment.

This argument is not without merit. The district has lost thousands of students, and many of its schools are underenrolled. At the same time, around a sixth of the school’s classrooms at the beginning of the recently concluded academic year were staffed by substitute teachers or teachers yanked out of special assignment. 

The district, in short, doesn’t have enough butter for its bread. The posited solution is to have less bread. Like the SFUSD representative said on May 6, this is about making the most of the district’s resources.

The case the district is making is that these consolidations will actually be more equitable and more economic. The real budget killer for SFUSD are underenrolled classrooms — which require just as many teachers (or substitute teachers) as fully enrolled classrooms. Also, the state of California has stressed a need to consolidate, and if the district doesn’t do it the state will break out the bonesaw and start doing amputations. So there’s that. 

These are not terrible arguments, but public school families, who suffered through remote learning and are now faced with the grim prospect of having their children’s school experience further traumatized by a closure, can only take so much. For parents confronted with the district’s cloying and esoteric survey about “resource alignment,” it’s jarring to learn that this sacrifice that they are being asked to potentially make for the greater good isn’t a cost-saving move necessitated by the district’s dire finances. 

Frankly, it feels like a bait-and-switch.  

The surveys, maddeningly, asked parents to imagine that they had 12 coins, and could divide them into buckets marked “equity,” “access” and “excellence.” 

God help me, I was reminded of a story my mother used to tell about her student instructor days at Pershing Junior High in Brooklyn when a teacher began a lesson by saying “Suppose we go to a Persian bazaar to buy a chicken…” 

An oversized student in the back row stood up, slowly ambled to the front of the room and said, in a calm voice, “I ain’t going to no motherfucking bazaar and I ain’t buying no motherfucking chicken.”

You know what? Me neither. It is maddeningly unclear how this coins-in-buckets crap will be translated into what schools to spare or cut — and why are we pitting excellence, access and equity against each other? In any event, most every parent was left to ponder how to navigate this nonsensical format to impart the simple message of don’t close my kids’ school.

So, the district’s arguments about cutting and merging schools are not baseless. But parents are in no mood to hear them, especially after this muddled messaging. Hastily undertaking this critical process via a method that comes off as both inane and opaque — and doing it during the depths of the summer — comes off as insulting. And, sadly, there are more problems here. 

The district is working on a long overdue zone-based enrollment plan to replace the excruciating school roulette system that has plagued the existence of public school families for all too long. That’s for the best: But does it make sense to make decisions on what schools to cut before the enactment of a system that might totally shake up which schools children are assigned to? 

No, it does not. But it does add stress and misery to the lives of public school families. This may indeed be a sacrifice some children and families make to greater serve the needs of the district writ large. But, rest assured, the pushback will be intense. And, following that intense pushback, no one is mandated to take one for the team: As ever, families with options will take them and families with money will spend it. If conditions worsen, parents with the ability to pull their children from public school will do so — further shrinking the district’s dwindling enrollment, reducing payments from the state and leaving the burden, once more, on the least advantaged families and children.  

Well, that’s hardly equitable. And, in San Francisco, the demographics work out how you’d think they’d work out: About 38 percent of city residents are white, but only 13.7 percent of public school children are.   

It’s always better to have options. It’s always better to have money. And if you can’t keep the czar far away from from us — you better keep us far away from the czar.

The post Will SF Public School Closures Save Money? Not Much. And Not Quickly appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Restoring eelgrass

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Living on the water

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The policy fight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The housing deal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Osbaldo Varilla-Aguilar rarely worried about his health. As a construction worker, he had enough gigs to earn more than $500 a week under the table, allowing him to rent a studio for $600 a month with two other Latinx construction workers in San Francisco’s Mission District. Despite working nearly full-time, he was barely able to make ends meet. So, when the pandemic hit, Varilla-Aguilar continued working. He got critically sick in December 2020. To this day, Varilla-Aguilar still wonders whether he got COVID on the job, or at the grocery store.

Either way, it landed him in a coma — for more than three months.

“It was such a difficult time,” said his sister Araceli Aguilar-Perez. “To see him like that, it affected me a lot.” Aguilar-Perez said the doctors recommended disconnecting Varilla-Aguilar from the ventilator after two months. The family refused. Hoping for a miracle, Aguilar-Perez talked to her unconscious brother through a hospital monitor via Zoom calls every week. Then, in March 2021, Varilla-Aguilar woke up. “When I opened my eyes, it felt like a few days [had passed],” said Varilla-Aguilar. “But they told me it had been three months … It was a shock.”

Today, more than three years after he was discharged from the hospital, Varilla-Aguilar still depends on the oxygen respirator next to his bed. He has since moved out from his shared Mission District studio, and lives in Sunnydale in a shared home with other Latinx workers.

He and his housemates are among the community that was hardest hit by COVID in San Francisco: immigrants, especially those working unprotected essential jobs. As the devastating impact of COVID in Latinx communities in the Mission District and Bayview is increasingly documented, the lingering, and sometimes extreme, symptoms of infection are much less understood.

Weeks after being discharged from the hospital, Varilla-Aguilar noticed his vision was going blurry while waiting at a bus stop. Within four hours, his left eye went permanently blind.

“[COVID] can cause many things, one of them being thrombosis,” said Dr. Hector Bonilla, a clinical infectious disease expert and associate professor at Stanford University. According to medical research, critically ill COVID patients like Varilla-Aguilar are especially at risk for severe health outcomes like thrombosis, or blood clots. “It can happen any place [in the body],” said Bonilla. “Maybe this can explain what happened in the eye.”

Combined with his deteriorated eyesight, Varilla-Aguilar also endures fatigue, brain fog and depression, which are among the more common symptoms cited by people who experience long COVID. He said he also never fully recovered the strength he lost during his months-long coma, despite a year in physical therapy.

“I don’t have the strength that I used to, and I run out of breath when I try,” said Varilla-Aguilar. “So it’s hard finding steady work.” Despite his physical weaknesses, he continues to take on physically demanding jobs like landscaping, and on occasion, roofing gigs. “I have no choice, I need to pay the rent. If I don’t do it, who else is going to help me?”

According to the 46-year-old, doctors have not been able to determine why COVID took an extreme toll on his health. Instead, doctors have prescribed him several prescription pills to help reduce some of his ongoing symptoms. Still, he believes this hasn’t been enough, and that the cost of medication is expensive. His experience is one faced by millions of long COVID patients across the country as researchers continue to look for the underlying causes of the mysterious symptoms.

Amid medical uncertainty, Varilla-Aguilar, like other sufferers of long COVID, has turned elsewhere for solutions. Previously skeptical of alternative medicine, Varilla-Aguilar agreed to his sister’s “baño de pies” after months of coping with numbness in his feet. The foot bath was infused with herbs like Santa Maria, rue, rose buds and eucalyptus, which his sister blended into a bucket of hot water. The effort was meant to reduce stress and inflammation. After a few treatments, he said he was shocked to have gained back sensations in his feet.

Since then, Varilla-Aguilar uses and advocates for natural remedies rooted in Indigenous practice, including the consumption of teas, herbs, and whole foods. He is also a member of “Somos Remedios,” a Mission-based grassroots research group that documents Latinx solutions to treating long COVID.

Though Varilla-Aguilar now makes his health a priority, he admits that he will never be the same again. “Everyday there is an effort to live, to work, and to have enough money to eat,” said Varilla-Aguilar. “I found [strength] within myself, [when] there was nowhere else to find it.”

The post After Months-Long Coma, This Latino Immigrant Worker Is Still Fighting Mysterious Symptoms appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

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The first time Keith B. walked through the door of Rypins House, a residential treatment home for older adults run by the Progress Foundation in San Francisco, he thought to himself: “Where is everyone?”

A former luxury car salesman and behavioral health worker, the 60-year-old had spent years cycling in and out of institutions — detox centers, hospitals, homeless shelters. They were usually crowded and noisy, with lots of yelling. He was always on alert, afraid people would steal from him. Keith lives with bipolar disorder and took to self-medicating with street drugs back in the 90s. But as he aged, he wanted a calm space to sort his life out. Start making plans to get a hip replacement. Acquire his real estate license. Go back home to Philadelphia.

Keith came to Rypins House in August last year after a drug relapse that left him on the streets of San Francisco for four days, unable to sleep. He first sought help from the Dore Urgent Care Clinic, another Progress Foundation facility that offers a place for people to stay and get help for a few days when they’re in a crisis. It’s a gentler, cheaper alternative to an emergency room visit. From there, he was given a bed for up to six months at Rypins, a butter-yellow Victorian house in a neighborhood far from the Tenderloin, where he doesn’t owe drug dealers money and has a better shot at staying clean.

More than 1 million California adults like Keith — and 19.4 million Americans — live with both a serious mental illness and substance use disorder. In fact, roughly half of all people with severe mental illness are thought to also have a co-occurring substance use disorder. Traditionally, treatment programs target one of these populations or the other. Progress Foundation is one of the few across the country serving people who have both — so-called dual diagnosis patients. What’s especially unusual is that two Progress homes are reserved for people 55 and older.

One of his first nights in the house, Keith was sitting in the living room all by himself watching ‘Coming to America.’ He put the movie on pause to go to the bathroom and when he came back, nobody had sat in his chair or taken the remote control.

“It just hit me like, ‘Wow, I’m really in a peaceful, quiet environment,’” he said. “I’d almost gotten used to the chaos of the street and institutions. They’re not good places to heal. This place doesn’t feel like a program. It feels more like a home.”

Rypins House: A respite from the storm

Progress Foundation was founded in 1969 on the belief that recovery is possible at any age. It began as an alternative to medical models that largely rely on hospitalization and clinical treatment. Instead, it employs a social rehabilitation approach, and has created a variety of programs to meet people’s needs at different stages. Nurse practitioners rotate between the programs, and clients can take medication they administer themselves. All of the programs provide clients with a home-like environment where they can learn independent-living skills.

“Our clients are constantly being told, ‘You’re gonna be ill the rest of your life,’” says Progress Foundation Executive Director Steve Fields, who has led the organization since co-founding it. “We’re trying to show them a pathway out of thinking so narrowly about themselves. We’re saying, who knows where you can end up? You may have episodic crises, but that’s not your definition. We can work with you on a recovery plan because we believe that you can reach a level of functioning in the community.”

Rypins House and the Foundation’s ten other residential programs — each tailored to a different need — all attempt to address a huge problem in the mental health system: the lack of places people can go after they’ve been treated for a crisis. Fewer than 50% of patients discharged from a hospital following emergency mental health treatment are seen by a therapist or other provider within seven days, according to data gathered from health plans, and that number drops below 30% when it comes to Medicare patients.

There simply isn’t enough capacity to meet the need, says Tom Insel, a psychiatrist and former director of the National Institute of Mental Health. This is due to a shortage of beds, workers and safety net services as well as residential treatment programs. “The problem isn’t just people entering the hospital. It’s how they leave. There’s no practical plan for most people when they are discharged,” he says.

Progress Foundation is funded primarily through county health departments, and in San Francisco, that means it prioritizes clients who come from the inpatient unit at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital as well as nursing homes that serve patients on Medicare or Medicaid. The agency also receives referrals from the jail system, as well as people like Keith who come from other Progress programs. This is the Foundation’s attempt to create a true continuum of care — a system that can help address the needs of patients at different stages and with different needs.

“We don’t see addiction as being something separate from mental health,” says Jim Roberts, director of residential treatment, supported living and permanent housing. “If anything, we see some of these substance abuse issues as a symptom and behavior of their mental health.”

The Progress Foundation’s wide network

Dore Urgent Care Clinic — where people can stay up to 23 hours to avoid unnecessary hospitalization — is on one end of the spectrum. On the other end are the foundation’s transitional programs where people can stay for between three months and one year.

There’s not much research on the benefits of longer stays for people who have dual diagnoses, but a 2001 study showed that while people in short-term dual-diagnosis programs tend not to remain long in the programs or fare very well, those in long-term programs did better: They were more apt to reduce their substance use and less likely to become homeless afterward.

The foundation also has a handful of cooperative living apartments and three independent living apartment buildings. Clients need to be enrolled in or applying for Medi-Cal, and to be San Francisco residents in order to receive the more intensive services. Undocumented immigrants are now eligible too, since, as of January 1, a new state law provides Medi-Cal to all low-income residents, regardless of immigration status.

The program is a bargain, Fields says. He estimates that a bed at a Progress residential treatment program costs around $300 per day compared with $1000 to $2000 at a hospital — or more.

The foundation’s homes for seniors are especially important since older adults throughout the country are the fastest-growing age group experiencing homelessness, according to an October 2023 report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. In California, most older adults on the streets had never been homeless before age 50, when life circumstances such as an illness, a work accident or a cut in their work hours cost them their home and left them priced out of the market. In the San Francisco Bay Area, adults over 55 are estimated to make up half of the homeless population.

The co-ed program for seniors started nearly 40 years ago with six beds at Carroll House in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights neighborhood. Shortly after, to keep pace with demand, Rypins House opened with six more beds. As far as Fields knows, they are the only such programs in the country for seniors with dual diagnoses.

Both are almost always full, and the need continues to grow. In the first 11 months of 2023, an estimated 316 people over 55 died of an overdose in San Francisco, 42% of all the overdose deaths, according to the San Francisco Medical Examiner. Overdose deaths are rising rapidly among older people all across the country.

Progress Foundation takes a harm reduction approach. Clients are encouraged — but not required — to be sober. The location of Carroll House in sleepy Bernal Heights, a place where people can’t easily buy drugs or alcohol, is ideal for sobriety. Keith, for one, hopes to start attending AA meetings again. It’s part of the individualized plan that he’s created with the staff, reflecting a core belief at Progress Foundation that clients take ownership of their recovery.

“We’re there to provide guidance and support,” Roberts says. “We treat the clients themselves as the expert, and collaborate with the individual we’re serving to meet the aims they’ve defined for themselves.”

That doesn’t mean they’re on their own, however — staff members are available 24/7 if clients need them for health problems or other needs.

During the daytime, group meetings take place, tailored to the needs of the clients living in the house at the time. On the Friday I visited, the group met in a cozy living room at Rypins House, surrounded by books and a piano. Led by nurse facilitators from the University of California San Francisco, clients brainstormed ways of getting social support. Keith said he was going to get a library card to read autobiographies, and that he wanted to start playing chess again.

Staff encourage these kinds of activities as a way to develop social connections. They also help clients connect to case management, psychiatry appointments, housing, and more — everything they need to be independent. As part of its contract with San Francisco County, Progress Foundation must help a minimum of 80% of clients to move to a lower, less intensive level of support identified in their treatment plan, a number they have consistently met, says Fields. But it’s complicated.

“Am I happy with all of the choices as time goes on that are available to people? No,” he says. “At least they’re not in the hospital.”

In the past year, only two out of 32 clients from the seniors program were rehospitalized during the course of their stay; the rest were able to make it through and enter one of a variety of housing choices when they left the hospital.

Some of those include traditional apartments, single room occupancy hotels, and board and care homes, which are slowly disappearing. There’s also Hummingbird Place, a psychiatric respite center that will work with clients to find a path to permanent housing after they leave. It’s a huge challenge, given California’s sky-high housing costs, especially for those who don’t have Social Security. And the age of the unhoused is rising in California.

Fields worries that as people move between different programs and facilities, each operated by a different organization, no one person or agency is looking out for people at all stages and taking responsibility for their progress.

“Who’s responsible for John Smith, who may enter the system at the emergency room, go to Progress Foundation’s acute diversion, then Rypins House for six months, and move on to a supportive housing program run by another agency?” he says.

What’s needed, he says, is essentially a system-wide super case manager, who can follow a person through all levels of the system, no matter which program they’re in.

Staff at Rypins and Caroll try to set clients up for success by helping them learn how to navigate living with roommates — odds are, they’ll have to do so in the future for financial reasons.

Rebuilding a life

Andrea Q came to Progress Foundation after living in a single room occupancy hotel in the Tenderloin, where she stopped taking her bipolar disorder and anxiety medications because there was nobody to hold her accountable. “That’s the first thing that went out the window,” she told me.

Then the 62-year-old relapsed with her husband, with whom she’s been using substances and off for 30 years. In June last year, she overdosed — and almost died after injecting a combination of Xanax, methadone, and fentanyl. Her heart stopped beating — only to be revived with a shot of Narcan. It was the wake-up call she needed to come to Carroll House.

“We’ve pretty much had it with that life. I can’t tolerate any kind of drugs anymore. It would be like a death sentence,” she says. “I wanted somewhere I have to be held accountable.”

These days, Andrea spends most of her time developing a routine outside the house that she can continue once she leaves — like swimming at a nearby pool and being part of a writing group. She gets Social Security and hopes someday to move with her husband, who’s in another treatment facility, to “a nice place” outside San Francisco.

For now, Andrea likes being around people her own age who won’t mind hearing about her osteoporosis. She enjoys the camaraderie with her roommate the most, an older Latina woman who dyed Andrea’s bob hot pink — and in the process, dyed a patch of her own hair when she touched her temple with a stained hand.

With their matching pink hair, they sat with their housemates on a Friday evening in August to dine on Andrea’s cheese and tomato quesadillas. Eating together builds community and encourages responsibility, and clients take turns making meals. Cooking can be challenging for Andrea, and sometimes provokes anxiety. So she keeps it simple — quesadillas or ravioli.

These two senior homes are in high demand, especially in the spring. When beds open up, program staffers go to hospitals, jails, and other programs to interview potential clients. One thing they let prospective residents know is that staying there means learning to navigate conflict.

Just ask Andrea. One night not long ago, one of her housemates didn’t show up for dinner. He came into the kitchen a bit later and declined Andrea’s offer of a quesadilla. He made a bowl of Ramen instead, and spilled it all over the microwave.

“Are you going to clean it up?” Andrea asked.

“How?” he said. “What do you clean it up with? Water?”

“No, with paper towels,” Andrea said. “You know how to clean up.”

“I’ll do it in a little bit.”

He sat at the table in his flannel shirt and slurped the noodles, saying little. Andrea was irritated, but said nothing more. Then the man took his bowl to the sink, tore off some paper towels, and wiped the microwave clean. Andrea thanked him, a tinge of pride in her voice.

“Good for you,” she said. “Good job.”

Reporting for this story was supported by the California Health Care Foundation and the National Institute for Health Care Management.

The post After the Crisis: Unique Program Helps Older Adults Grappling With Both Addiction and Mental Illness appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

When enrolling for classes for the upcoming school year, some Bay Area students will find a new, unique course option that promises a deep dive into the history and contributions of African Americans across the globe.

A half dozen high schools will offer Advanced Placement African American Studies in 2024-2025. This is the first year the course will be available to all U.S. schools following a two-year pilot program by the College Board.

In 2022, the College Board, a nonprofit organization that is responsible for the AP course system, initiated a pilot program for AP African American Studies in 60 schools, followed by expansion to 700 schools nationwide in 2023.

Lowell High School in San Francisco is offering the class for the first time in the coming school year.

The Acalanes Union High School District in Contra Costa County will offer the course at Acalanes, Miramonte, Campolindo and Las Lomas high schools.

“I just think African American Studies hasn’t historically had a big place in the curriculum. I hope that it will kind of open up our students’ minds to recognize the kind of contribution of the African American population in this country,” said the district’s Superintendent John Nickerson.

In anticipation of the introduction of AP African American Studies in the Acalanes Union High School District for the 2024-25 school year, administrators, students and community members engaged in discussions regarding the potential impacts of the course within Bay Area school communities. During those discussions, there was only minor disapproval.

“The pushback was not really about the content of the course. There was nobody pushing back saying we don’t need African American Studies,” Nickerson said. But “there are some pushbacks that we don’t need another Advanced Placement course. And then there’s always pushback where teachers fear that because a new popular elective is introduced, other electives will fall off and may be the courses that they’re teaching.”

Another debate was the proposition of introducing African American Studies as a separate course, rather than integrating the course content into mandatory history classes, including U.S. history and world history. While some express concerns that teachers may omit certain information under the assumption it will be taught in AP African American Studies, many believe that a focused space for African American history will benefit students.

“I think one of the biggest problems in American conversations surrounding anti-racism, justice, diversity, equity, inclusion, bias, anti-bias is that we go way too broad and it’s impossible to have the prolonged, specific, useful conversations that we need to have,” said Zachary Reese, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology and former African American psychology professor at the University of San Francisco. “And that’s what I really like about the creation of this kind of course. Yes, it does create a separate space and other people might feel less a sense of responsibility, but also it creates a really neatly focused space to work on a specific problem and highlight a specific group of people and celebrate a specific group of triumphs.”

AP African American Studies spans four historical periods from approximately 900 BCE to the 2000s. It is an interdisciplinary course in which students will analyze primary sources, engage in historical discourse, and write about their learnings.

Other Bay Area schools offer course

Bishop O’Dowd High School in Oakland was part of the College Board’s pilot program and continues to offer the class. “The first pilot year I had 65 students; this year I have 68; three sections each year,” said Bishop O’Dowd AP African American Studies teacher Tony Green. “The class is popular because the class is far different than those based purely on western civilization. We cover African history, African influence on European history, and the influence of African culture on the diaspora since the beginning of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1433.”

Diverging from traditional AP courses, AP African American Studies invites students to delve deeper into a topic of their choice through the Individual Student Project. This component allows students to develop an argument regarding a chosen topic or event and present their findings to the class.

“Since it’s a project-based course, it gives students a lot of opportunity to find out what they’re really interested and curious about learning more about,” said Acalanes High School English teacher James Muñoz, who participated in the pre-course preparation discussions. “I actually think that this course is a transformational course because it doesn’t just exist within the College Board framework. It actually invites students to be more proactive in their communities.”

Class discussions play a pivotal role in unpacking course material in AP African American Studies. Some believe it may help foster a deeper understanding and personal connection to the content.

“We all have some experience being racialized people and that makes it so the content is like easy to wrap your mind around, easy to relate to. And the benefit of relating to content is that we pay more attention to it, we are more likely to remember it and we’re more likely to integrate it in our daily life. So, I think discussion and personal reflection is super key in this class,” Reese said.

Educators say AP African American Studies brings students the opportunity to learn about experiences and histories that may differ from their own, broadening their understanding of identity and societal dynamics. Engaging with diverse perspectives in the classroom can better equip students to navigate discussions about race and racial inequality with more confidence, they maintain.

It ‘encourages people to look outward’

“The Bay Area is really unique in that we have a lot of racial, ethnic, cultural diversity, but we’re super spread out. We’re super segregated as peoples. And I think this can lead to this effect where people know about their own racial, ethnic and cultural experiences but surprisingly little about others.” Reese said. “And I think this class is one that encourages people to look outward, even if they are Black or African American, to think a little bit more broadly about what it means to be a racialized person living in the United States and to sort of critique some of our preconceptions and open ourselves up to other people’s experiences.”

Some students say they value having a focused space where they can explore history in unique ways, different from the conventional approach found in other history classes.

“African American injustices are often taught as a small subtopic of the history curriculum, so a whole class dedicated to it could help the Acalanes community learn about new ideas and topics. Acalanes in particular has a very small percentage of African Americans on campus, and this class could allow people a more detailed view and a deeper understanding of [those] students on campus,” Acalanes 11th grader Kate Roberts said. Roberts took an Ethnic Studies class and is considering AP African Americans Studies.

Superintendent Nickerson estimates that each AUHSD campus (excluding the Acalanes Center for Independent Study) will have two sections of AP African American Studies. While the new course may deter students from other elective options, the AP label may help increase the course’s popularity over the next couple of years.

“I think that the course being AP might actually increase student enrollments because when picking classes, students want to show rigor on their applications; so, if they have the option to choose a new, interesting class, that still gives them a grade bump, I believe more students will take it over a non-AP course,” said Acalanes High School 11th grader Sophie Chinn.

AP courses are often more rigorous than regular high school classes, as they are undergraduate-university level. High school students enrolled in AP classes can earn college credit and placement if they pass a culminating AP Exam.

Some at Acalanes also believe that AP African American Studies could positively affect their school community in ways that transcend the classroom.

“I think that if everyone at Acalanes took some sort of cultural studies class it could change our culture. Acalanes is not particularly diverse when it comes to race, so many of us don’t understand how race disparities play into school communities,” Roberts said. “I think that we would be able to recognize many issues that circulate on campus, and everyone would have a greater knowledge on how to solve issues. People may have more open and accepting minds as well, which would be very beneficial for our community.”

Acalanes High School Principal Eric Shawn added, “The skills that [students] develop by learning diverse perspectives and histories and contributions, and the way that they study, will expand their and our knowledge of what is possible.”

Go here to learn more about the AP African American Studies course.

Haley Chelemedos is an 11th grader at Acalanes High School in Lafayette.

The post More Bay Area High Schools to Offer AP African American Studies This Fall appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

It’s becoming commonplace in open-intake shelters and rescue facilities across the Bay Area: The number of unadopted pets is growing; animal caretakers and staff are stretched thin; and efforts by local municipalities to provide care and comfort to every animal surrendered is becoming increasingly difficult.

California animal shelters and rescue organizations – even those across the country – are experiencing an overflow crisis. The number of stray dogs taken into shelters rose 6% from 2022 statistics and 22% from 2021, according to Shelter Animals Count. 

“I just can’t remember so many dogs coming in every single day,” said Sue James, board president of the Tri-Valley Animal Rescue. The Dublin-based volunteer organization provides medical care and fostering services to animals from the East County Animal Shelter. James said many shelters around the country “are overflowing, and it’s a tough time.”

The Solano County shelter – located just north of the Bay Area in Fairfield – currently has a two-year waiting list to surrender an animal due to capacity restrictions. Shelters have to take into account the health of the animals they keep in their facilities. When they create capacity restrictions, they must make sure every animal has its own dedicated space. 

Alexandra Kay, board president of the Bay Area Alliance for Animals in San Carlos, said another cause of shelter overflow is the lack of awareness on how much maintenance and expense is involved in taking care of a small animal. 

“It takes a little bit of time for these things to add up, to know that care is very expensive,” Kay said. “Pet food is very expensive. Flea treatment is very expensive, and that’s also saying that nothing goes wrong with your animal, like needing surgery for chronic conditions.”

James mentioned that people buying from breeders raises a problem, as well. 

“If people would learn more about the joys of adopting shelter animals and saving their lives perhaps more people would adopt versus buy,” James said. 

Euthanasia on the rise

As the number of animals in shelters increases, so do euthanasia rates. About 920,000 shelter dogs and cats are euthanized annually, according to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. 

Traditionally, rescue organizations such as the Tri-Valley Animal Rescue take on the overflow from open-intake shelters, which possess a legal obligation to take in any stray animal from their jurisdiction brought or surrendered to their facility by Animal Control or the public. This is creating a challenge for volunteers who foster in their homes animals on the euthanasia list.

Another challenge is the cost of spaying and neutering animals, said Amanda Lee of the Underdog Animal Rescue in Lafayette.

“Pretty much nowhere, in the Bay Area specifically, do we have what we call no-cost, or low-cost spay and neuter clinics,” Lee said. “We used to before COVID, and most shelters had some sort of option, but now because everything’s running just differently in general, there’s very few options.”

According to Lee, spay and neuter services at the average veterinarian clinic start at around $700. 

“The only reason that overpopulation is a problem is because there is not enough spay and neuter happening,” Lee said, adding that there is “not enough education behind it, not enough resources.”

Fostering a positive environment

Currently, the Tri-Valley Animal Rescue offers incentives for fosters until the animal gets adopted, as well as a program where volunteers can pick up animals from the East County Animal Shelter and take them for walks and socializing, and give them love. 

James said the goal is to “keep them as happy as they can be in the shelter environment while they wait to get adopted from the shelter,” James said. 

She added that her group shares with Underdog Animal Rescue the goal of removing animals from negative shelter environments and moving them to positive foster environments. 

Underdog’s Lee said that an animal shelter environment can feel “highly stressful. Just a person going in there, it’s loud, it’s cold, there’s no emotion.”

The Bay Area Alliance neuters animals for free to prevent pet overpopulation and provides care for animals on the euthanasia list. 

“There is no room for those animals to be born into the system,” said Kay of the Bay Area Alliance. “And if they were born into the system, their life would be difficult, they would just end up euthanized at the shelter in the long run.”

The pandemic ripple effect 

The COVID-19 pandemic served as a contributing factor to the overflow, with backyard breeding increasing during quarantine. However, this is not the only factor that shelters and rescue organizations are seeing.  

Dogs require a higher amount of human-animal interaction. When owners worked from home during quarantine, a dog would get used to being with the owner at all times. When the owner returned to in-person work, they weren’t able to give their dog the same amount of attention as before. At times, this resulted in owners not being able to take care of the pet. 

“What we didn’t want was to have the animals get adopted during the pandemic and then once the pandemic was done, to have them come back into the shelter,” James said. “They might have loved the animal – particularly when they’re home and [when] they needed the companionship. They learned that it can be difficult with the dog if you’re gone long, long hours.”

James pointed out that it is slightly different with cats, who are fine being on their own during the day. The problem with cats is the high feral cat population. During kitten season (from spring to summer months), when cat reproduction is at its peak, feral cats are most likely not spayed or neutered. 

One way rescue organizations are fighting to eliminate the overflow crisis is via fostering. Lee pointed out that by fostering, one could save two lives: The life of the animal they foster, as well as the one that takes the foster pet’s spot in the kennel. 

Fostering is “very similar to babysitting your friend’s dog,” Lee said. “You’re providing shelter, love, care and boundaries. If you save multiple per year, that number just keeps multiplying.” 

Additional resources:

• ASPCA – Pet Shelter Statistics
• Tri-Valley Animal Rescue
• Bay Area Alliance for Animals
• Underdog Animal Rescue 
• Shelter Animals Count

Keerthi Eraniyan is a 9th grader at California High School in San Ramon.

The post State Animal Shelters, Rescue Groups Battling Overflow Crisis appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

More than one month after statewide eviction protections expired on June 30, less than 4% of rent relief funds requested by San Francisco households remain unprocessed, with 55% of funds paid out. 

Over 20,600 San Francisco households had asked for almost $340 million in rent and utility assistance from both state and local COVID-19 rent relief programs as of the week of July 11, government figures show. The amount requested declined 9% between April 11 and July 11 as the state continued to weed out ineligible applications. The state stopped accepting applications on March 31, more than a year after it opened a financial aid program to cover housing debt incurred by tenants due to pandemic hardship. 

Households whose applications have been approved can stay an eviction even if they have not received payment yet; however, those with applications under review or pending applicant information — a category that applies to 1,154 applicants in San Francisco — are vulnerable to eviction.  

California passed legislation to ensure all eligible households who applied by the March 31 deadline will receive funding. Recent budget proposals would earmark additional money for rent relief. 

The following figures include San Francisco residents’ requests from California’s COVID-19 Rent Relief Program and San Francisco’s original Emergency Rental Assistance Program, which stopped taking applications in September 2021. It does not include requests from the city’s newest rent relief program, which began accepting applications April 1. 

Over $140 million in rent and utilities requested from the state program by San Franciscans had been denied as of the week of July 11. Almost 1,000 San Francisco applicants appealed their denials. 

On July 7, an Alameda County Superior Court judge barred the state from denying any more pending applications or any appeals of denials that occurred in the previous 30 days until a hearing is held to determine if applicants’ rights to due process were violated in the application review process. 

In 2021, California received $5.2 billion for emergency rental assistance funds from the federal government. The state has since acquired nearly one out of every three dollars of federal reallocations of unused funds from other states, for a total of $198 million.  

Tenants who had previously applied to the program and were awaiting rent relief were protected from eviction through June 30 for rent due between April 2020 and April 2022 under AB 2179. Under the same bill, local eviction protections passed unanimously by the Board of Supervisors in March were voided until July 1, but have since taken effect.  

In response to the state’s move to cease accepting applications, the city reopened its own rent relief program for tenants who are seeking funds for rent debt accumulated in April and beyond. So far, it has distributed close to $4.3 million in funds to 713 of the 4,415 households that have applied, and residents who need help are encouraged to apply. 

In its previous rent relief program, San Francisco assisted over 3,200 applicants with $22.8 million in relief. An additional $243,878 in requests from 53 households are yet to be processed. 

The statewide eviction moratorium, protecting tenants who could not pay rent because of COVID-19 hardship, was originally scheduled to end Jan. 31, 2021, but lawmakers extended it twice. Following the moratorium’s final end date, Sept. 30, San Francisco tenants became vulnerable to eviction for nonpayment of rent if they had not paid at least 25% of the rents due in the preceding 13 months, as well as October’s rent. 

However, California lawmakers did create some protections for renters who were unable to pay back rent after the moratorium expired. Tenants who applied to the state’s rent relief program before the deadline and were waiting on relief were protected from eviction through March 2022. State lawmakers in late March extended those protections through June 30. 

Even though they may have been barred from evicting some tenants, starting in November 2021, landlords could sue tenants to obtain unpaid rent that was due from March 2020 through September 2021. If a landlord pursues the debt in small claims court, they and the tenant must represent themselves in the courtroom. 

Are you facing eviction? Call the Eviction Defense Collaborative at (415) 659-9184 or send an email to legal@evictiondefense.org as soon as possible. The organization advises that tenants respond within five days of being served with court papers to avoid the risk of a default judgment against them.

Is your landlord suing you to recover pandemic rent debt? Go here to read our guide on how small claims court works, and how to argue your side of the case.

The post San Francisco Rent Relief Tracker appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

If state lawmakers don’t act fast, tenants across California will become vulnerable to eviction next month for rent debts they accumulated during the pandemic.

Amid increasing calls for Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature to avert an eviction wave, the San Francisco Public Press held a live panel discussion Wednesday about how the state got to this moment and what comes next. The Public Press spoke with Ora Prochovnick, director of litigation and policy at the Eviction Defense Collaborative, which provides free legal aid to people facing eviction, and Shanti Singh, communications and legislative director at Tenants Together, a statewide coalition of tenant-rights groups.

“We are definitely facing a serious crisis,” Singh said, adding that if tenant protections expire, “you’re going to see a lot of people who incurred rental debt during COVID who will be left effectively defenseless.”

The main takeaways:

• Tenants who have struggled to pay rent because of COVID-19 hardships should immediately apply for rent assistance. Qualified applicants will receive financial aid, though it may take months for the money to arrive.
• Applicants for rent relief cannot be evicted for their pandemic rent debts while they await a decision from the government. That protection expires March 31, which is also the state’s deadline to apply for rent aid.
• Multiple organizations, as well as San Francisco Mayor London Breed, have called on the state to extend eviction protections beyond March.
• Tenant advocates are worried that the state will override protections recently passed at the local level. Unless that happens, San Francisco tenants facing COVID-19 hardships will be shielded from eviction for unpaid rents due in or after April.

Eviction protections are complex, and tenants can better understand them by checking this Public Press flow chart.

Are you facing eviction? Call the Eviction Defense Collaborative at (415) 659-9184 or send an email to legal@evictiondefense.org as soon as possible. The organization advises that tenants respond within five days of being served with court papers to avoid the risk of a default judgment against them.

Is your landlord suing you to recover pandemic rent debt? Go here to read our guide on how small claims court works, and how to argue your side of the case.

The post ‘A Serious Crisis’ — Experts Discuss Expiring Eviction Protections appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Local governments throughout the state will have to figure out how to help people still struggling to cover rent as the economy continues its climb back to pre-pandemic levels.

“We are working diligently with our community-based program partners on a public information and outreach campaign to get all eligible tenants and landlords to apply and respond to the program by March 31st,” said Audrey Abadilla, spokesperson for the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development.

The state has committed “to provide support to eligible applicants” who apply for rent relief by then, according to a government memo the Public Press obtained and that Abadilla verified as authentic.

“It is critical applicants act as quickly as possible to complete their application and reply to any requested action or response,” the memo said, because that would allow quicker processing.

People can apply for financial aid to cover past or future rent and utility fees, going back to April 2020.

Though the statewide eviction moratorium ended in October, rent-relief applicants have retained eviction protections while they awaited a decision from the government.

Those protections will also terminate at the end of March, meaning that landlords will be able to evict renters with outstanding debts beginning April 1. To avoid eviction, by that date tenants must pay at least 25% of what was due from the beginning of September 2020 to the end of September 2021, as well as 100% of what came due since then.

Potentially thousands of San Franciscans will still be awaiting payments by April, leaving them vulnerable to eviction, based on a recent Public Press analysis. Renters across the state could face the same risk, according to a survey published Tuesday by Tenants Together, a statewide coalition of tenant-rights groups.

San Franciscans have continued to apply for rent relief in recent weeks, though the pace has slowed compared with earlier in the pandemic, according to the Public Press’ Rent Relief Tracker. The government had received $298.4 million in requests and paid out $115.7 million by last week.

Throughout California, requests totaled at least $7.1 billion by mid-February, and the state had paid out at least $2.1 billion from more than $5 billion available, according to data from the California Department of Housing and Community Development. Those figures do not count requests and payments processed by locally operated rent-relief programs throughout California.

Last month, the Legislature passed a budget bill that authorizes the state to pour more money into the rent relief program if the volume of eligible applications merits it.

Eviction protections for people facing COVID-19 hardships are complex, and the Public Press has created a flow chart to help tenants understand their rights.

Are you facing eviction? Call the Eviction Defense Collaborative at (415) 659-9184 or send an email to legal@evictiondefense.org as soon as possible. The organization advises that tenants respond within five days of being served with court papers to avoid the risk of a default judgment against them.

Is your landlord suing you to recover pandemic rent debt? Go here to read our guide on how small claims court works, and how to argue your side of the case.

The post California’s Rent-Relief Program to Stop Taking Applications March 31 appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.