Despite more housing project approvals, the growth of housing in San Francisco slowed in 2018, compared to prior years. The Examiner goes into all of the facts and figures presented in the Housing Inventory report, which is expected to be presented to the city’s Planning Commission today.

San Francisco may soon become a ‘smart’ city, which would include thousands of devices citywide to provide wireless service and record audio/video.  Privacy concerns are tangible with this proposal, and it may be the first tech-related upgrade to be affected by Supervisor Aaron Peskin’s January legislation to protect the public from overly-intrusive technology. 

The Chronicle questions the accuracy of Supervisor Peskin’s recent criticism of the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing in this piece.  Peskin has said that San Mateo County receives homeless data faster than San Francisco does - however, that’s inaccurate, according to a spokesman for the county of San Mateo.  “My bad,” said Peskin.

Friday, tolls for crossing the Golden Gate Bridge may rise again, following a meeting of the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District Board of Directors (try saying that five times fast).  The amount of the possible increase is not clear.  Currently, the District faces a $74 million budget shortfall which could be shored up with another fare hike.

Wednesday afternoon, a group of City College students gathered on the Chinatown campus to protest the cutting of several classes with “healthy” enrollment.  Classes included computer science, ethnic studies, nursing and more. 

Wednesday, the Historic Preservation Committee voted unanimously to grant ‘legacy business’ status to the San Francisco Glide Foundation.  This generally protects businesses from displacement, as it can qualify landlords who have 10-year leases on them for a $22,500 annual grant from the City.  The status also allows businesses to be eligible for a $500-per-employee grant, capped at $50,000 maximum.  Glide Foundation spokesman Sam confirmed that Glide had sought legacy status “for a long time.”

In this piece from The Bay Area Reporter, twelve LGBT-related statewide bills are highlighted as they undergo the legislative process.  Multiple bills are authored by Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), including a bill to ban medically unnecessary surgeries performed on intersex infants, and another that would prevent gay male adolescents from having to be listed on the state's sex offender registry for sleeping with a boyfriend who is a minor.  Both bills have encountered stiff resistance - the first bill being opposed by the California Medical Association, and the second one coming under fire from conservative groups. 

Wednesday, Assemblyman David Chiu (D-San Francisco) introduced legislation that would address the massive amount of food-related waste generated by festivals in California, including Outside Lands and Coachella.  Under Chiu’s bill, vendors would get authorization to serve food on reusable containers from local health enforcement.

Phil Matier says domestic violence advocates decided to publicly call for Giants CEO Larry Baer’s suspension, weeks after video of a public physical altercation with his wife went viral, because they were waiting for Baer to accept personal responsibility and announce his plan to seek treatment for anger issues - but it never came.  Rather, Baer announced a self-imposed leave of absence from the team and his wife Pam released a statement downplaying the incident, moves that Commission on the Status of Women President Debbie Mesloh says were “tone deaf.”

In related news, on Tuesday the SF District Attorney’s office declined to file charges against Baer saying that after reviewing the video footage and interviewing witnesses, including Larry and Pam Baer, “the evidence does not support filing criminal charges.”

More than 150 (and growing) current and former inmates of the decrepit San Francisco County Jail No. 4, have joined a lawsuit over frequent - “near daily” - raw sewage flooding that routinely saw inmates eating and sleeping in cells sullied by the flooding, and were forced to clean the raw sewage out of their cells without proper safety equipment.

The suit alleges, per an uncovered OSHA memo from 2017 that says as much, that City officials knew about the systemic problem, but balked at spending money on the crumbling infrastructure when they had plans to relocate inmates of the jail “in the next couple of years.”

At yesterday’s SFMTA Board meeting, directors instructed staff to install protect bike lanes on Howard between Third and Sixth streets by April 18th, and a plan to extend the new lanes to the waterfront could be ready for officials’ review by this summer.  

SFMTA Chair Malcolm Heinicke also asked staff to study what streets could potentially become car-free and Muni-only, in a bid to respond to the public pressure to make SF streets safer.

Mayor Breed sent a letter to the agency’s directors in advance of the meeting calling for increased safety measures along Howard and beyond, and more than 200 protestors rallied at City Hall yesterday in support of the same, as the community continues to mourn and organize after the death of cyclist Tess Rothstein.

Despite San Francisco having the lowest levels of HIV since the start of the epidemic, there is one group in the city that continues to contract new infections and are half as likely as their housed peers to have the virus under control; people who are homeless.

SF General’s Positive-health Onsite Program for Unstably-housed Populations, or POP-UP, is a new program launched in January that has enrolled 23 homeless patients who are HIV-positive and either not on medications to treat HIV or unable to take the meds consistently enough to keep the infection under control.

SF MUNI’s Operator Union, Transport Workers Union Local 250-A’s leadership was suspended Thursday by the national union who will take over ongoing contract negotiations with the City. “In recent days, the situation deteriorated to the point where decisive action by the TWU International is required to protect Local 250-A members,” the Transport Workers Union leadership wrote in a letter to Muni operators. The International Transport Workers Union will contract negotiations for roughly 2,000 drivers on behalf of the local.