District 1 supervisor will battle Scott Wiener, Saikat Chakrabarti, and others in race to succeed Nancy Pelosi

by Kelly Waldron November 20, 2025 (MissionLocal.com)

District 1 Supervisor Connie Chan announced on Thursday that she is running for Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi’s seat as the San Francisco member of the U.S. House of Representatives. 

“San Francisco has always belonged to the people — not the powerful. And people in our city are struggling. Families are hurt by high costs, communities are devastated by Trump policies,” Chan wrote in a press release announcing her run. “I’m running for Congress to build coalitions, build up our communities and bring our voices to Washington.”

Chan has served as the supervisor for District 1, which covers Richmond, Sea Cliff and Presidio Terrace, since January 2021. She is up against Scott Wiener, the state senator for San Francisco, and Saikat Chakrabarti, a former tech executive and former chief of staff to New York City Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

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She is the only major Chinese candidate.

In her campaign launch video, Chan sought to distinguish herself from her opponents with thinly veiled swipes at both Wiener and Chakrabarti: “I’m not a corporate Democrat. I didn’t make money in tech. I’m a working mom. I made lunch for my kid.” 

Wiener has raised more than $1 million for his campaign so far, according to campaign finance filings, and much of his giving comes from employees in the financial, insurance, and real estate sectors, according to Calmatters’ Digital Democracy project. 

Chakrabarti became a centimillionaire as a founding engineer at Stripe. He has pledged to self-fund his campaign. 

In her video, Chan also took a stab at Wiener’s stance on housing, vouching to “build real affordable housing, not the Sacramento version that destroys our neighborhoods.”

As state senator, Wiener, the godfather of the YIMBYs, has passed a number of policies to spur development, loosen zoning restrictions and put teeth into housing construction mandates. 

Chan has taken a different approach: She has expressed concern about how those same laws could change San Francisco neighborhoods and potentially displace tenants and small businesses.

Most recently, she attempted to pass amendments to exempt existing housing stock from the mayor’s upzoning plan. (Those amendments were not integrated into the plan, as they would have effectively gutted it and made it noncompliant with state requirements.) 

Chan is a progressive politician who has strong ties with the city’s major labor unions. In her November 2024 reelection campaign, a labor-backed political action committee spent handsomely to support her, raising more than $800,000.

That, and her opposition to Prop. K, which removed cars from the Great Highway, were difference-makers in her supervisorial race. Wiener favored Prop. K. 

In her campaign launch video published on Thursday, Chan touted her record as supervisor. She highlighted a progressive-friendly list of accomplishments: Tenant protections, free Muni for youth, and raising wages for city workers.

Pelosi, the retiring incumbent, endorsed Chan’s campaign for supervisor in 2024. The two also worked together to pass Prop. 50 in 2025. The speaker emerita has not yet publicly offered an endorsement for her successor nor committed any campaign funds. 

Chan was born in Hong Kong and immigrated to the United States at the age of 13. Before becoming supervisor, she worked as a legislative aide to several elected officials, including District 10 supervisor Sophie Maxwell, District Attorney Kamala Harris and District 3 supervisor Aaron Peskin.

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Kelly Waldron

kelly@missionlocal.com

Find me looking at data. I studied Geography at McGill University and worked at a remote sensing company in Montreal, analyzing methane data, before turning to journalism and earning a master’s degree from Columbia Journalism School.More by Kelly Waldron

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Family members of Ukrainian children deported from Kherson by Russia made a rare public appeal for their return on Monday in Paris. Since the start of its full-scale invasion, Moscow has deported Ukrainian children into Russia, often sending older children to re-education camps and putting younger children up for adoption.

Issued on: 19/11/2025 – France24.com

By: Joanna YORK

“I am a grandmother,” 55-year-old Liubov Burina says, her voice shaking with emotion, before she has to take a moment to calm her nerves.  

The former seamstress has not seen her grandchildren, Angelina and Yevhen, since March 2022. Due to a family crisis, the three-year-old and one-year-old had been placed in a Kherson orphanage overnight when Russian forces invaded the Ukrainian city.  

In the morning, when Burina went to collect the children, they were gone.

“We were looking for them everywhere. We contacted every institution, the police and social services,” she says. “Then an organisation found that they had been moved to occupied Crimea.”  

The children were en route to being deported to Russia and had been listed on one of the country’s adoption databases under new identities.

‘We are left without any rights’

The exact number of children deported from Ukraine to Russia and Crimea in the aftermath of the full-scale invasion is unknown. Ukraine puts the figure at 19,546, although this includes children deported with their parents.

Russia says it moved the children from warzones in Ukraine for their safety but has refused to provide the Ukrainian authorities with a list of deported minors, as is required by international law.

The International Court of Justice in 2023 issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his commissioner for children’s rights Maria Lvova-Belova for the unlawful deportation and transfer of children from occupied areas of Ukraine into Russia.

Read moreMother Russia: Maria Lvova-Belova, the Putin ally deporting Ukrainian children

According to research from Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab, deported children have been taken to at least 210 facilities inside Russia and occupied Ukraine, where the majority of older children are subject to “re-education” and militarisation.

Younger children are more likely to have their identities changed and be put up for adoption.

Burina’s grandchildren were typical of the “vulnerable groups” targeted for deportation, including orphans, children with disabilities and children from low-income families.

“We are left without any rights to get them back”, she says, speaking at a rare press conference in Paris, organised by the Emile Foundation which works to reunite Ukraine’s deported children with their families.

Next to her, Darina Riepina is also hoping to find her children, Maksym and Margarita,

“I’m an ordinary mother. I thought we would live an ordinary life,” she says, through tears.

Riepina was living with her adopted daughter in Kherson in March 2022 and had started the paperwork to adopt Maksym and Margarita, who were living in a local orphanage.

“The package of documents for the adoption was almost ready right when the full-scale invasion began”, she says. She has since completed the process, making her the legal guardian of the three biological siblings.

Riepina and her eldest daughter were forced to flee Kherson without the younger children when Russian forces invaded.

Three-year-old Maksym and 10-month-old Margerita were among 48 children taken from the Kherson Regional Children’s Home by Russian forces.

Read more‘Demographic conquest’: Inside Russia’s campaign to indoctrinate kidnapped Ukrainian children

‘She should be with her family’

Locating and returning deported children is a long and complicated process. In Kherson, families had to wait nine months until the city was liberated before there was a local police force to whom they could report their children missing.

The search for minors who have been deported is complicated by the fact that investigators cannot travel to Russia or occupied Ukraine, and negotiations with Russia are sensitive.

When Kyiv demanded the release of 339 Ukrainian children during negotiations with Moscow in June, Russia said the request was evidence that hundreds rather than thousands of children had been deported.

According to Ukraine, 1,819 children have so far been returned from deportation, forced transfers or occupied territories, partly due to the efforts of international mediators such as Qatar and the United States.

Riepina and a team of volunteers searched for 10 months before they found Margerita. “It was the best news just to hear that she was alive,” she says.

But the joy was short-lived. Her youngest daughter had been moved to Crimea and then to Russia, where she had been adopted by Russian politician Sergey Mironov, a key Putin ally.

She had been renamed and given a falsified Russian birth certificate listing Russian parents, according to a BBC investigation.

Moscow has denied Riepina’s demands to have the child take a DNA test to prove her identity and her biological link to her brother and sister, even though Russian and Ukrainian law prefer that siblings be adopted together.

In October, Margerita celebrated her fourth birthday. “We have no connection with her,” Riepina says. “All we have are the last pictures we saw in the news.”

“She is not a soldier. She shouldn’t be living as a prisoner. Her rights are being violated,” she adds. “She should be free with her family, in her country. Her sister is waiting for her.”

She has even less news of Maksym, although Riepina says he has been located in an orphanage in Russia.

Alongside her, Burina is desolate that she has not been able to see her grandchildren grow up.

“My grandchildren are everything to me. Russia shouldn’t have taken them. I hope that they will be returned one day, and we will live in peace,” she says.

• Alice Conry & Ayah Alsheikha | Staff
• Nov 19, 2025 (DailyCal.org)

The Berkeley Federalist Society hosted a panel on Tuesday at the UC Berkeley School of Law titled “Why Israel Won: A Panel on Oct 7th and the Wider War.” The event drew a crowd of roughly 50 people while an equal number of protesters challenged the topic of the panel and the controversial speakers from outside.

Ahead of the event, Berkeley Law sent an email to Berkeley Law Students for Justice in Palestine, or Berkeley LSJP, a campus group that organized the protest. The email threatened to report demonstrators to the state bar if they were found to violate Time, Place, and Manner regulations. 

“We planned to host our rally at Heyman Terrace, a space on the perimeter of the law school where we’ve held several unpermitted, impromptu gatherings in the past,” Berkeley LSJP said in a statement. “However, yesterday we received an email from the opaque Building Oversight Committee, warning that since we hadn’t reserved the space, proceeding with the event ‘could’ result in suspended organizational privileges and disciplinary action that would be reported to the State Bar.”

While the panel features three speakers, Berkeley LSJP flyers targeted two speakers, namely John Yoo, a Berkeley Law professor who is infamous for his role in former President George W. Bush’s administration as an author of the “torture memos.”

The memos provided the legal justification for Abu Ghraib — a detention facility used during the Iraq War that led to widespread outrage as the United Nations deemed many of the tactics used to be in violation of international law. 

The other notable speaker, Berkeley Law professor Steven Solomon, has been an outspoken critic of campus administration’s response to alleged antisemitism. 

In February, Solomon authored an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal titled “Mr. Trump, Investigate My Campus,” after which a joint Department of Education and Department of Justice Taskforce to Combat Anti-Semitism announced an investigation into campus. Solomon is now on the payroll of the federal task force as an adviser on legal issues.

The last speaker, history and public policy professor Daniel Sargent, drew less criticism online as he has not been outspoken on social issues. His research focuses mainly on American foreign policy.  

During opening statements before general discussion and audience questions, Sargent identified “four factors” that signified Israel’s victory in the war: institutions, autonomy, persistence and openness. 

Solomon discussed the “morality” of Israel’s actions and specifically why the term “genocide” is misused when discussing the country’s military actions in Gaza. Yoo focused on how the war fit into U.S. grand strategy as well as the future implications of the war and its effect on future conflicts in the Middle East.

Regarding Palestine, Sargent said he believes Palestinians deserve rights and dignity, and that “a just peace demands the Palestinian dignity be affirmed.” While Solomon claimed Israel had acted “morally higher” than other nations in a “war like this,” he said he sees people dying in the conflict as a “tragedy.” 

During the panel, a group of nearly 50 protesters, led by student group Berkeley LSJP, gathered outside the building around 1 p.m. to denounce Berkeley Law for hosting the event. 

The protest remained removed from the building itself as the email from administration warned against violations of Time, Place, and Manner, including the use of amplified sound during the demonstration. A violation of this rule would result in “either (or both) disciplinary action and suspension of the group’s ability to reserve space within the Law School,” according to the email, which was provided to the Daily Cal. 

Protesters gathered for less than an hour, chanting “Free Palestine” and taking turns addressing the audience in front of Heyman Terrace. 

“I think a lot of faculty and students on this campus are afraid to speak out for justice,” said Brooke Lober, a protester and campus lecturer in gender and women’s studies. Lober earlier condemned Yoo, stating, “It’s unbelievable that he still has an office on this campus.”

Lober claimed that in the past, she was doxxed and received death threats after speaking out for a ceasefire resolution at an Oakland City Council hearing. 

“Even someone like me, who’s a lecturer at the school, who doesn’t have security of employment, I feel compelled to use my voice, nonetheless,” Lober said.

The Berkeley Federalist Society, the organizer of the panel, is a conservative and libertarian organization that aims to bring a conservative view to the theory and philosophy of law on campus, according to the group’s president, Shneur Gansburg. 

Gansburg said the group was aware the panel would be protested and some of their previous events surrounding Israel had also been protested.He claimed that protesters attempted to pull the fire alarm at the event but it had been shut off. 

“We are in an academic environment and I feel like these events should happen and people should be able to hear differences in opinions and thoughts,” Gansburg said. 

While protests occurred outside, the proceedings inside remained uninterrupted. A number of police were present both inside and outside of the event. The lack of disruption even prompted Yoo to comment, saying that he was glad he was able to make it to the end of his remarks uninterrupted. 

“To Berkeley Law and its Building Oversight Committee (we know you’re reading this!): shame on you,” Berkeley LSJP wrote in the statement. “We will not be cowed by your threats. We broke no rules today, but we adhere to increasingly restrictive and draconian policies only to the extent that doing so advances the struggle for Palestinian liberation.”

President Donald Trump joined by Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (C) and Administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Mehmet Oz, speaks during a press conference in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on May 12, 2025, in Washington, DC.

 (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

“If we had Medicare for All everyone would have healthcare with no premiums, deductibles or co-payments and we’d save $650 billion and 68,000 lives a year.”

Jon Queally

Nov 19, 2025 (CommonDreams.org)

President Donald Trump on Tuesday proclaimed he would not sign any fix to the nation’s healthcare crisis that would send money to what he termed, in all capital letters, as the “BIG, FAT, RICH INSURANCE COMPANIES, WHO HAVE MADE $TRILLIONS, AND RIPPED OFF AMERICA LONG ENOUGH”—and progressives did not hesitate to point out that by taking for-profit, private insurers out of the healthcare equation, one would quickly—if they cared about covering more people with less money—be left with something more akin to the kind of universal, publicly-supported healthcare systems that most nations in the developed world already enjoy.

“Just wait until we tell you about Medicare for All,” said Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a Democrat running for the US Senate in Michigan, in response to Trump’s Truth Social post.

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The president has been openly railing against the insurance companies that benefit from federal subsidies that are central to the healthcare plans made available on exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act (ACA), but his solution—a nebulous call for direct payments to individuals who could then somehow purchase “THEIR OWN, MUCH BETTER INSURANCE” with those same federal dollars.

With significant cuts to Medicaid—the largest in the program’s history—and an end to ACA subsidies that could see premiums double or more for over 20 million people in the coming year, Democrats are warning of a healthcare crisis in 2026 like nothing the nation has ever seen.

https://x.com/BernieSanders/status/1989026386821149120?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1989026386821149120%7Ctwgr%5E13c85bc42aacfc0b16e6eda45c68bf7970329a67%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2Ftrump-trashes-big-fat-rich-insurance-companies-progressives-wait-until-we-tell-you-about-medicare-for-all

But the solution being offered by Trump and his GOP allies in Congress, according to progressive critics, would only further entrench the crisis.

“Trump’s ‘healthcare’ plan will bankrupt and kill millions of Americans,” warned Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, a single-payer advocacy group. “We can eliminate the private insurance industry, and save $650 billion per year with Medicare for All—which would cover everyone, save families money, and include dental, vision, prescriptions, and long-term care.”

“We can eliminate the private insurance industry, and save $650 billion per year with Medicare for All.”

On Sunday, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), went on “Face the Nation” in order to put some “meat on the bone” regarding direct payments and said his office was working closely with Trump’s White House on the proposal.

Essentially, what the Cassidy-Trump plan would do is replace federal subsidies for inadequate health plans with high deductibles from private insurance giants with federal cash payments that people could only use to purchase—wait for it—inadequate health plans with high deductibles from private insurance giants.

After Administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Dr. Mehmet Oz, also on Sunday, played a similar card on behalf of the Trump administration by saying, “If you had a check in the mail, you could buy the insurance you thought was best for you,” immediate pushback followed.

Warren Gunnels, a longtime policy advisor to Sanders in the Senate, was among those who slammed Oz’s efforts to deceive the American people by pushing the Trump administration’s direct payments.

“If we had Medicare for All, everyone would have healthcare with no premiums, deductibles, or co-payments, and we’d save $650 billion and 68,000 lives a year,” said Gunnels in response to Oz’s remarks. “If we gave cancer patients, at most, a check for $6,500 for a $150,000 treatment, they’d go bankrupt and die an early death.”

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Jon Queally

Jon Queally is managing editor of Common Dreams.

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Move signals a shift away from the ‘housing first’ model, which has proven effective all over the country

By Tim Redmond

November 18, 2025 (48hills.org)

In a move that signals a shift away from the proven and effective strategy of “housing first,” the Board of Supes today replaced one of the authors of the housing measure Prop. C from the board that oversees its spending.

The board voted 7-3 to replace Coalition on Homelessness Director Jennifer Friedenbach with William Lemon, who runs the Castro Country Club, a sober space.

Friedenbach was the driving force behind Our City, Our Home, which raised taxes on the city’s biggest corporations to pay for supportive housing and services for unhoused people or people at risk of homelessness.

Sup. Jackie Fielder, who spoke highly of Lemon, said the move was more than a simple decision to replace one qualified activist with another. “I fear her removal is in retaliation for her support of housing first,” Fielder said. “Her removal further undermines Our City Our Home.”

Friedenbach has also argued that spending money on short-term shelters is nowhere near as effective as permanent supportive housing. In a statement to the supes, she noted:

 There has been much said about the Prop. C categories and the desire of some electeds to move money from housing to shelter.  Their idea is typically explained that shelter is quicker to get up and running and less expensive.  Neither are true. Housing First is an evidence-based model, has been massively researched and it works across the country.  In SF, our supportive housing has a 97% success rate. Regardless of current political winds, nothing solves homelessness like a home.  Obviously, building housing takes time and is expensive; however it does save money in both the long run and in the short term.  It is worth the effort.

Housing first starts with the concept that the most important and effective way to combat street homelessness is to get people into supportive housing. Once they are housed, there’s a chance for them to work on substance use issues, mental health issues, and employment readiness.

Sup. Matt Dorsey, a close ally and supporter of Lemon, wants to take a different approach: He’s pushing for recovery housing that would mandate sobriety.

Dorsey said he wanted to see an advocate for sobriety on the oversight panel because “we are starting to make progress on drug-free housing. Sometimes there are appointments that reflect needed directional change.

A majority of the supes apparently agree. Board President Rafael Mandelman said that he wants to “make a change in this body.”

Friedenbach noted:

We continue to be faced with a revolving door in our system.  Folks are leaving the hospital, treatment programs, shelters and other institutions and falling back into homelessness. This requires system changes that ensure unhoused people leave the streets behind, are able to stabilize in housing, and are simultaneously able to address whatever issues they are facing, be that behavioral health, physical health, or lack of employment.  Currently, San Francisco spends about 5% of its budget on solving homelessness.  It spends a whole lot more keeping people homeless.

Only Sups. Fielder, Connie Chan, and Chyanne Chen voted to keep the most qualified advocate who has devoted her life to exactly what the Our City Our Home oversight board does.

The board also rejected a Chan proposal that would have protected legacy businesses from demolition or displacement under the mayor’s Rich Family Zoning Plan.

Stephen Sherrill went even further, saying that some chain stores might help with neighborhood “vibrancy” and that “supporting local business is different from protecting local business.”

Wow.

Six supes voted to protect legacy businesses: Fielder, Mandelman, Myrna Melgar, Shamann Walton, Connie Chan, and Chyanne Chen. Since the motion required eight votes, it failed.

48 Hills welcomes comments in the form of letters to the editor, which you can submit here. We also invite you to join the conversation on our Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. 

Tim Redmond

Tim Redmond has been a political and investigative reporter in San Francisco for more than 30 years. He spent much of that time as executive editor of the Bay Guardian. He is the founder of 48hills.

18 November 2025/SF News/Jay Barmann (SFist.com)

The SF Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to approve a new affordable-housing program based in a new building on mid-Market Street that would be dedicated to housing artists and creative types who are largely being priced out of the city.

“The story of San Francisco cannot be told without its artists,” says Supervisor Rafael Mandelman in a statement. “This program is an important step toward honoring that legacy and ensuring artists remain at the heart of our city’s future.”

Mandelman adds that this is a “major step toward ensuring artists can afford to live, create and thrive in San Francisco.”

The Artist Housing Certification Program is the first-ever housing program in the city dedicated to providing affordable housing to artists, and the legislation establishing it was introduced by Mandelman last month.

The program will operate in conjunction with a new 90+-unit development that is still in the predevelopment stages, to be constructed on the site of the McRoskey Mattress store at Market and Gough streets (1687 Market Street). As SFist reported in May 2024, an anonymous benefactor gifted $100 million to two non-profits for the purpose of building what’s been dubbed Artists Hub on Market, or just 1687 Market. The non-profit developer who shared in the gift is Mercy Housing.

The project received its Planning approvals back in March, and construction is expected to begin in early 2026. The finished development will have over 90 units designated affordable and for local artists, and the building will also include a black-box theater and other designated creative spaces.

The San Francisco Arts Commission will be administering the new program, and it’s not yet clear when applications might begin. Eligible applicants will need to be artists or arts administrators and their families, making at or below 80% of area median income or AMI (2023 AMI levels are shown here).

A press release for today’s announcement cites a 2023 annual report by the Arts Commission that cited a 2018 survey that found that 19% of artists who responded said they had been displaced from their housing in the last two years.

A driving force behind 1687 Market is Randall Kline, a founder of SFJazz who oversaw the construction of that organization’s $64 million SF Jazz Center, completed in 2013. Kline apparently was the one who solicited donors for a project to build artist housing in the city.

“SFJazz was built to serve the local artist community,” Kline told the Chronicle last year. “Over the past 40 years, as I saw more and more artists leaving the city, I talked with potential funders about this idea to see if we could provide affordable housing. One donor stepped forward.”

Previously: Some Anonymous Donor Just Gave $100 Million to Build Affordable Housing for Artists on Market Street

19 November 2025/SF News/Jay Barmann (SFist.com)

SF-based developer Align Real Estate does, in fact, have a larger strategy to redevelop Safeway properties in the city and turn them into multi-story residential complexes with retail on the ground floor, including replacement Safeway stores.

With Tuesday’s announcement that Align, the same developer behind the project to redevelop the Fillmore Safeway property, was working to potentially redevelop the Ocean Beach Safeway in similar fashion, we surmised there could be a larger strategy at play. And we wondered aloud if the Castro Safeway and shopping center with its sprawling parking lot might also be on the list.

And while we still don’t know if it is, the Chronicle reports today that a third Safeway store location, the Mission/Bernal store at 3350 Mission Street, is also in Align’s sights. The developer has plans in the works to redevelop the 2.2-acre site — which extends between Mission Street and San Jose Avenue — into a six-story, 370-unit residential complex, with a much larger Safeway store in its base.

According to the preliminary plan, the units will be rentals, with a mix of studios, 1-, 2-, and 3-bedroom units, with 51 units designated affordable. And the current 32,000-square-foot Safeway will be replaced with a 56,000-square-foot Safeway — though, as in the case of the Ocean Beach property, the neighborhood will be without a grocery store during demolition and construction, which could take a couple of years.

A Safeway exec struck a very different tune than in the case of the Fillmore store, which the company closed in part due to rampant theft, well ahead of the development schedule at that property — with plans not even yet approved. The company has committed to returning to this property after construction is complete.

Kelly Mullin, president of Northern California operations for parent company Albertsons, gave a statement to the Chronicle acknowledging this store’s “long-standing role as a critical neighborhood anchor” in an area where “many families depend” on it. The Fillmore neighborhood likely feels the same, and while Align has committed to putting a smaller grocery tenant into that planned development, it does not sound like Safeway will be that tenant.

This project still could face pushback — especially because of its size. As at the Fillmore site, Align is hoping to take advantage of the state’s density bonus program to achieve that six-story, 370-unit count, but this will make it the tallest thing in the immediate neighborhood, save for the CPMC hospital a few blocks away. Most of the blocks surrounding the Bernal Safeway, which is also at the edge of Noe Valley, are low-slung residences that are two and three stories.

Align promised when they unveiled the Fillmore plans last week that they had more projects to announce — with a prospective new-unit total of 3,500. With today’s announcement, it brings the total to 2,746 units (1,800 at the Fillmore site, 526 at Ocean Beach, 370 in Bernal). That leaves one or two more projects to announce, possibly at other Safeway sites, with a total of 750 more units.

It should be noted that none of these projects yet have their entitlements from the city, and plans may change.

by Yujie Zhou and Io Yeh Gilman November 18, 2025 (MissionLocal.com)

San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie will commit to releasing weekly reports on how the tech firm OpenGov is overhauling the city’s embattled permitting systems — a contract it won even though city staff said it was not the best suited for the task.

PermitSF, Lurie’s initiative to tackle city permitting, was a key promise on the campaign trail. It launched earlier this year, with the goal of streamlining and centralizing permitting so that all city permits can be obtained through a single web portal.

The decision to release the weekly progress reports comes a month after media reports revealed that the mayor’s office went outside normal procedure to award the $5.9 million contract to build the new permitting system to OpenGov. The company’s costs were far higher than competitors, and it scored poorly with a panel of city staffers.

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The company’s leadership also has ties to Lurie including past donations to his campaign and his former nonprofit. The deal prompted Supervisor Jackie Fielder to call for a hearing to investigate the process. 

Ned Segal, the mayor’s policy chief for housing and economic development, “unilaterally” overruled a staff recommendation in awarding the contract to OpenGov, according to the San Francisco Standard.

The weekly updates will serve as “something public, so people can read it themselves without our explanation or yours, and it’s just out there in the open for people,” Segal said in an interview Tuesday. He hoped that the updates would bring some “transparency benefit” to the project, Segal added.

The documents, the mayor’s office said, will be shared whether they report good progress, bad progress or no progress. 

The first three weekly status reports, written by OpenGov’s project manager, Angelica Au, were sent on Oct. 31, Nov. 7 and Nov. 14. The latest memo indicates that the goal of rolling out fire permits, building permits and events permits by February is realistic. 

Earlier this year, many in the city felt that goal was aggressive at best, and unrealistic at worst.

Between late October and mid-November, the project health of PermitSF moved from a red status, indicating the presence of major issues, to a stable yellow status, indicating only potential risks to project delivery.

Meanwhile, over the three weeks, some due dates have been postponed by several days to several weeks, including one that has been pushed back by as long as four weeks. 

The weekly updates also identified small potential barriers to meeting the February deadline including the day off for Veterans Day. 

“What we’re looking for is to see that, each week, you are making progress, that you’re having new challenges come up,” said Segal in the interview, whether it’s about collaboration between departments, or how to tie two software systems together.

In an interview today, Florence Simon, director of the Mayor’s Office of Innovation, added that meeting the February deadline to roll out a subset of permits is “a big deal.”

“The last time somebody tried to do this, which was Accela before Ned and I got here, it was like an eight-year project that cost $12 million and no permits,” she said.

Lurie has steadfastly stood by the controversial contract in the past month, and Segal spoke highly of the collaboration with OpenGov.

“OpenGov have been great partners because they’ve done this implementation many times, they are able to look around corners and help us understand what challenge might come next,” he said.

The 13-year-old firm says that it has worked with more than 2,000 governments across the country. It is unclear, however, whether it has worked with any clients similar to the size and complexity of San Francisco.

The two references OpenGov listed in its response to the PermitSF Request For Information were Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Chattanooga, Tennessee.

The former has a population of about 121,000 and the latter has a population of around 191,000, though the city’s request for information required references from public sector clients that can speak to the vendor’s experience with cities “at a similar scale to San Francisco.”

Regarding the upcoming hearing called for by Supervisor Fielder, Segal said, “We’re just going to keep plugging away on the implementation.”

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Yujie Zhou

yujie@missionlocal.com

I’m reporting from Bayview-Hunters Point and Chinatown. I came on as an intern after graduating from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and became a full-time staff reporter as part of the Report for America and have stayed on. Before falling in love with the Mission, I covered New York City, studied politics through the “street clashes” in Hong Kong, and earned a wine-tasting certificate in two days. I’m proud to be a bilingual journalist. Follow me on Twitter @Yujie_ZZ.More by Yujie Zhou

Io Yeh Gilman

io@missionlocal.com

REPORTER. Io is a staff reporter covering city hall as a part of Report for America, which supports journalists in local newsrooms. She was born and raised in San Francisco and previously reported on the city while working for her high school newspaper, The Lowell. Io studied the history of science at Harvard and wrote for The Harvard Crimson.More by Io Yeh Gilman

By Laura Waxmann, Staff Writer Nov 17, 2025 (SFChronicle.com)

Gift Article

Camilla Ealom, All Things Bayview executive director, listens to an audience comment during the Hunters Point Shipyard Citizens Advisory Committee meeting in San Francisco on Monday.Scott Strazzante/S.F. Chronicle

For weeks, San Francisco residents and officials have been slamming the Navy for waiting nearly a year to disclose that a radioactive heavy metal was found on the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, a Superfund site the federal government has been cleaning up for decades.   

On Monday evening, Navy officials took a rare step during a community meeting full of angry residents: They apologized.

The Navy took 11 months to report the discovery of plutonium 239, used primarily in nuclear weapons and power plants, to its regulatory partners, which include the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the California Department of Toxic Substances Control, the Regional Water Quality Control Board and the California Department of Public Health. San Francisco health officials have told the Chronicle that they weren’t informed about the finding until last month. 

“I have really thought about the situation that’s occurred … on this issue, we did not do a good job,” Michael Pound, the Navy’s environmental coordinator who for the past two years has been overseeing the toxic cleanup at what is now a development called the San Francisco Shipyard, told a room full of residents who gathered at 451 Galvez St. for a briefing from the Navy on the incident.

“We were too busy being engineers and scientists and trying to think through (the data) and did not put ourselves in the community’s shoes,” Pound said. “I can’t undo what’s been done but … we need to do better.”

But for community members who for years have asked for transparency in a cleanup already marked by fraud claims, the meaning of the discovery was clear: The Navy and its partners had failed them, once again.

Hundreds of homes have already been built at the Shipyard, and thousands more are planned for the site but can’t get underway until the cleanup is complete. 

Pound described the sample as an “outlier” and attempted to calm concerns: The airborne heavy metal sample measured as a dose of 0.04 millirem —  “far below” levels that could pose a health risk to workers and the local community.

And yet, that level was higher than the “action level” agreed upon by the Navy and its regulatory partners in the plan that governs the Superfund site’s cleanup, and triggered a reevaluation of the air sample by a Navy contractor. 

“We then had a non-detect,” said Pound, describing a situation in which Navy officials were perplexed by two different results for the same sample: one that showed elevated levels of plutonium 239, and one that did not. 

“This was concerning for us,” admitted Pound, adding that the datasets were next sent to a third-party laboratory for analysis. That laboratory’s procedures were subject to an audit, which concluded that “the plutonium results are valid” and that the sample showing the exceedance was an outlier.

Pound said it’s still unclear why there was a higher level of plutonium 239 than expected. The contaminant was detected in an area of the Shipyard known as Parcel C, which sits below a hill where new homes were built a decade ago, and near a community of artists that occupy studio spaces in buildings at the Shipyard. It was discovered as the Navy’s contractors were “grinding” and “moving” asphalt on Parcel C. But the asphalt, which Pound said was placed around 2015 — decades after irradiated ships that were brought to the shipyard after atomic bomb tests could have contaminated it — was an unlikely source.

Pound said that the Navy received the “outlier result” in March and that the laboratory analysis was completed by April. Between May and September, the incident was further investigated — it took months before an audit of the laboratory’s procedures was finalized, he said. 

Ahimsa Porter Sumchai, medical director of the Hunters Point Community Biomonitoring Program, which screens residents and workers of the area for toxic metals and other hazardous chemicals, was angry about the situation. She pointed out that the Navy had a real-time dust monitor placed on Parcel C, meaning the Navy should have known about the contaminant sooner.

Sumchai described the Navy’s failure to disclose information about the plutonium 239 sample after it became aware of it, as “proof of concealment and fraud.”

Steve Castleman, an attorney specializing in environmental law, pointed out that the Navy has assured the community in the past that parts of the Shipyard were cleaned to regulatory standards — and yet, radioactive objects have continued to turn up. 

“In Parcel A, you found a (radioactive deck) marker you claimed could never be there,” Castleman said. “In Parcels B and C, you found another deck marker and a glass shard that had high concentrations of radioactivity that you also said could never be there. In Parcel G you found 62 strontium 90 samples that exceeded the cleanup goal. … And you ask us to trust you?”

State and federal regulators tasked with overseeing the Navy’s activities at the Shipyard said Monday that they were also kept in the dark. 

“Unfortunately the EPA did not learn about this until Oct. 23. We were sent an email with the details. I have adequately expressed to Michael Pound how we feel about that. We were not happy about the late notification,” said Michael Collins, a remedial project manager with the Environmental Protection Agency. 

But Collins said the EPA agrees with the Navy’s assessment that the plutonium 239 sample did not pose a “human health risk” even though the agency had yet to fully verify the Navy’s data as of Monday, having only received it last week. 

“They haven’t given us everything we asked for or require,” he said, when pressed by community members about the timeline.

Michael Howley of the California Department of Toxic Substances Control said the state agency “did not learn about this until about the same time as the public.”

“Our agencies have not been able to participate in the Navy’s review to date,” Howley said. “We have prepared our own information request to make sure we can validate the Navy’s analysis.” 

Others, too, said they were still waiting for the Navy to share all of its data supporting how it arrived at the conclusion that residents are safe.

Castleman, the attorney, confronted Navy officials: “When are you going to provide the data to the public?” 

Danielle Janda, the Navy’s base closure manager for the Shipyard, said the Navy was still finalizing its report on the incident — but promised it is working to “get it up on our website shortly.”

Nov 17, 2025

Laura Waxmann

Reporter

Laura Waxmann covers the business community with a focus on commercial real estate, development, retail and the future of San Francisco’s downtown. Prior to joining The Chronicle in 2023, she reported on San Francisco’s changing real estate and economic landscape in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic for the San Francisco Business Times.

Waxmann was born and raised in Frankfurt, Germany, but has called San Francisco home since 2007. She’s reported on a variety of topics including housing, homelessness, education and local politics for the San Francisco Examiner, Mission Local and El Tecolote.