Newsitem List

Hurricane Katrina ripped two holes in the curved roof of the Louisiana Superdome, letting in rain as thousands of storm refugees huddled inside Monday....

If those 100,000 New Orleans poor are in fact concentrated in the Superdome and disaster then strikes, it will be the single biggest massacre of the poor since the real-life Vlad the Impaler (the Count Dracula of fiction) invited the poor men, women and children of his land (Transylvania) to dine in a building - and then set the building on fire to murder them all. And that would all be in typical character for the Dajjal Bush, who bicycled around his ranch in the days following last December...

Civic Center Hotel tenants, neighbors and advocates picketed the Plumbers’ Union yesterday in protest of its plans to evict residents and demolish the 156-unit building. The union claims that seismic retrofits, required by city law, are prohibitively expensive, forcing the union to shut down the building. However, tenants question the union’s motives – and the cost to the hotel’s low-income residents....

"Americans make a living selling each other houses, paid for with money borrowed from the Chinese. Somehow, that doesn't seem like a sustainable lifestyle."...

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The Problem of Fibromyalgia is Solved:...

San Franciscans disagree on many issues, but a near consensus exists that the city’s approach to affordable housing is broken and must be repaired. On one side are those unhappy with the lack of cost accountability for nonprofit housing, and on the other are those upset that current city affordable housing laws shortchange those most in need. As the Board begins a nearly three week recess, there is a perfect opportunity for Supervisors to create consensus legislation that could meet both of t...

A group of senior, youth, family and housing advocates demanded more funding for affordable homes in San Francisco yesterday. Declaring themselves part of the nascent Housing Justice movement, activists blasted Mayor Gavin Newsom for a recent goal he set for new affordable units to be built in the city, a goal opponents argue sits far below the current need and fails miserably to meet the City's goals outlined in its General Plan. Should the Mayor fail to raise his sights higher, they argued,...

San Francisco is submitting a request to HUD next week for the acquisition and rehabilitation of a well-maintained 84 unit SRO that has long been marketed to tourists. The total price tag is $17.5 million, or over $200,000 per unit for a room without kitchen. In the Tenderloin, a 2-3 bedroom family housing project nears completion at a per unit cost of $500,000-$600,000. This is more than double the cost of an upscale condo. Since nonprofit and most market-rate projects both pay prevailing wa...

A warning to short-term real estate speculators and tenancy in-common (TIC) buyers: Your housing bubble is due to burst. So predicts Ted Gullickson of the San Francisco Tenants Union. According to Gullickson, the current boom of low interest rates coupled with the inflated real estate market is not going to last much longer. In fact, it soon will crash in the way that the stock market did in 1929. His caution comes after the San Francisco Rent Board reported for May of this year 80 Ellis Act ...