“As an adjudicated insurrectionist, Trump is an illegitimate president according to Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, and therefore every official act as president will be illegitimate.”
–Mike Zonta, co-editor of OccupySF.net
The 14th Amendment states: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”
Call your Congressperson and your U.S. Senators at (202) 224-3121
Democratic state attorneys general across the US are preparing for President Donald Trump to take unprecedented actions to interfere with the 2026 midterm elections.
As reported by Politico on Monday, the Democratic AGs have been conducting war games aimed at countering “a series of increasingly extreme scenarios” where Trump tries to block Democrats from retaking the US House of Representatives later this year.
Among the many possibilities that the AGs are preparing for are that the Trump administration orders the seizure of ballots and voting machines, defunds the post office to block the delivery of mail-in ballots, and sends federal immigration enforcement officials or even the US military to patrol polling places.
The AGs have also been carefully monitoring Trump officials’ rhetoric for hints of future election subversion plots, such as when US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said recently that the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) would “make sure we have the right people voting, electing the right leaders.”
Washington Attorney General Nick Brown told Politico that such statements are a “red-alarm fire that people need to take very seriously,” and emphasized that Democrats need to be ready for the president to commit outright crimes to keep the GOP in power.
“He will try anything,” warned Brown. “We have to just sort of think creatively about: If you were the president and you were trying to invalidate an election or undermine an election, what are the oddball, ludicrous, unconstitutional theories that you might advance?”
In addition to Noem’s comments about DHS getting involved in elections, Trump ally Steve Bannon has floated sending US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials to monitor polling places, while Trump in January said that “we shouldn’t even have an election” this year.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta told Politico that it was “sad and tragic” that his office had to take such preparations, but said it was necessary because the president “wants to continue to have his party prevail, seemingly by whatever means necessary.”
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel pointed to the recent FBIseizure of materials related to the 2020 election from Fulton County, Georgia as a sign of what’s to come during the midterm elections.
“We recognize that what happened in Fulton County could happen in Detroit,” she said. “Not because there’s any merit to claims that anything wrong happened in Detroit, but because we know that those claims will be made again.”
Politico also reported on Monday that Democracy Defenders Action has recruited Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-NJ) to deliver a “State of Our Democracy” speech on Tuesday ahead of Trump’s State of the Union address where she will outline the threats the president and his administration pose to Americans’ voting rights.
Norm Eisen, executive chairman of Democracy Defenders Action, told Politico that the speech was necessary because “the threats facing our democracy have never been greater.”
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Join the week of action to halt ICE/Border Patrol terror. Members of Congress return to DC tomorrow; this will be a critical week in our fight against new ICE and Border Patrol funding without meaningful guardrails and a stop to the violence in our communities. Groups are encouraged to organize nonviolent rallies outside congressional offices, and everyone should use our call and email tools to keep up the pressure on their Members of Congress.
Sign up for the ICE Out for Good Funding Fight weekly phonebank. On Tuesday (1pm ET), we’ll be calling voters in key states to encourage them to call their Members of Congress and urge them to hold the line and demand that ICE’s terror tactics be stopped for good.
Watch the People’s State of the Union, Tuesday (8pm ET). Instead of watching Trump lie to the Joint Session of Congress, join us and partners MoveOn and MeidasTouch for a livestream of counterprogramming featuring progressive Members of Congress, organizers, and Americans impacted by regime policies.
Don’t watch the SOTU – join our livestream instead!
The State of the Union (SOTU) is a Constitutionally-mandated presidential address traditionally attended by every Member of Congress and, since the advent of television, watched by millions. This year will be different!
We’ll be joined by, among others, Senators Tina Smith and Chris Van Hollen, Representatives Pramila Jayapal and Delia Ramirez, fellow organizers, and Americans directly impacted by the regime’s cruelty and chaos. We cannot give Trump and his lies the attention he craves. This SOTU isn’t business as usual — it’s a call to action. We hope you’ll join us!
Plus: The DCCC holds its endorsements meeting, and the supes vote on more chain stores and an illegal $40 million luxury hotel tax break. That’s The Agenda for Feb. 22-March 1
Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna warned this week of the profound dangers of AI—but also offered proposals to ensure that the explosive new technology benefits all of us, not just a tiny cadre of billionaires.
Speaking at a town hall at Stanford, Sanders was blunt: We are facing, he said, the “most profound technological revolution in history.” (He noted that some AI leaders say that before long, the technology will be smarter than humans—”although that’s not a very high bar.”)
Given the stakes, he said, Congress should be asking questions that it is almost entirely avoiding: “Who is pushing this, who benefits, and who gets hurt. Will a handful of billionaires benefit, or will the general public benefit?”
Sen. Sanders and Rep. Khanna talk about control of AI
Sanders asked whether the likes of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison and Peter Theil were working for the benefit of humanity, as they often insist, or for their own personal benefit. “I know these guys,” he said. “I don’t think so.”
He asked that we as a society slow the technology down a bit, so that our regulations can catch up. His simple pitch: A moratorium on new data centers.
Khanna said that it’s critical to “keep humans in the loop.” If AI leads to substantial increases in productivity, those gains should be shared by all workers, not just the investors and tech lords.
(As UC Berkeley Professor Robert Reich is fond of pointing out, the fundamental problem with the US economy is that 100 percent of the wealth gains for the productivity increases in the past 30 years have gone to the top 10 percent, most of it to the top one percent.)
He also called for a Future Workforce Administration, to do what the federal government did during the New Deal.
Sponsored link
Khanna added: After every losing election, the Democrats do an “autopsy,” and talk about “messaging,” and “charisma,” when they need to talk about policies that will matter—like taxing the billionaires to pay for education, health care, good jobs, and affordable housing. “We don’t want to offend the corporate interests,” he said.
And that model hasn’t worked.
Now that the state Democratic Party convention is over, the local democrats will hold their endorsement meeting Wednesday/25, with the local party, controlled by corporate democrats, deciding on who to back for supe in D2 and D4. The Democratic County Central Committee will also decide who to endorse in the School Board race and the one judicial race.
That means the incumbent supes will likely get the endorsement.
For the challengers, “no endorsement” would be a big win. The DCCC endorsement carries the party label, but also gives the candidates prominent mention on the Democratic Party slate card, which goes out to every registered dem in the city. More than 50 percent of the voters in both D2 and D4 are registered democrats.
No endorsement means no name on that card.
School Board president Phil Kim is on the ballot because he was appointed and hasn’t yet faced the voters. He’s a charter school guy who worked for years for KIPP, a big national charter school chain. His main opponent, Brandee Marckman, works for the San Francisco Education Alliance, which opposes charter schools. Interesting to see where the billionaire slate comes down on that one.
Same with the judicial race, which pits a prosecutor, Phoebe Maffei, against a public defender, Alexandra Pray.
That meeting starts at 6:30 at the Milton Marks Auditorium, 455 Golden Gate.
A measure that would undermine the city’s limits on chain stores (and undermine the hotel workers) is back at the Land Use and Transportation Committee Monday/23 after a delay of several months. The bill sounds harmless: ” Ordinance amending the Planning Code to allow additional uses as principally or conditionally permitted in Historic Buildings citywide.”
In reality, it would undermine the city’s laws limiting chain stores and would hurt the ability of labor unions to demand project-labor agreements for new hotels.
Former Sup. Matt Gonzalez, who wrote the chain-store limitation law, is opposing it, as is former Sup. Aaron Peskin. From our original breaking story:
Former Sup. Aaron Peskin, who has reviewed the legislation, said that North Beach generally doesn’t allow chain stores, which are known in the code as “formula retail.”
“If this passes, you could put in a Starbucks,” he said. “In the Sunset, you could put in a cannabis dispensary without any public hearing.”
In some cases, the building owner wouldn’t even have to go through the Historic Preservation Commission; the planning director has the right to approve “temporary” retail uses.
Former Sup. Matt Gonzalez, who wrote the original legislation back in 2004 that required a conditional use hearing for formula retail outlets, told me Lurie’s bill could create an incentive for owners to push out local businesses and replace them with higher-paying chains.
Another element: In San Francisco, building a hotel requires the cooperation of labor, what’s known as “card-check neutrality.” If the workers want a union, management can’t interfere.
“That goes out the window with this bill,” Peskin told me. Put a hotel in an historic building and all the rules are off.
Meanwhile, Sup. Rafael Mandelman, who voted for the mayor’s Rich Family Zoning plan while winning some protections for historic buildings, is seeking to landmark 26 buildings in his district.
In essence, the supes and the public are supposed to take the word of the developer that the project won’t work without $40 million in public subsidies.
In the discussion Feb. 10, Sup. Matt Dorsey said that “whenever we’re doing something that is committing resources or in this case denying ourselves resources we have an obligation to be transparent with the finances.”
That hasn’t happened.
From the Sunshine Ordinance:
The City shall give no subsidy in money, tax abatements, land, or services to any private entity unless that private entity agrees in writing to provide the City with financial projections (including profit and loss figures), and annual audited financial statements for the project thereafter, for the project upon which the subsidy is based and all such projections and financial statements shall be public records that must be disclosed.
When I asked for that data, here’s what I got:
That does not seem to comply with the law
Sups. Connie Chan and Jackie Fielder voted against this proposal on first reading, but nobody has mentioned the serious Sunshine Ordinance violation.
The full board will also vote on a resolution affirming the city’s intent to take over PG&E’s assets and create a public-power system. It will pass; I wonder if anyone will vote against it, and if the mayor will veto it.
The full board meeting starts at 2pm.
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 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.
Doug Kari discovered a journal that belonged to a Merry Prankster who went by the name Cool Breeze
FILE: Ken Kesey, on top of the Furthur Bus, holding a flute with some of the Merry Pranksters in 1967 during a rollicking trip to San Francisco from his home in La Honda, Calif. Joe Rosenthal/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty
By Doug Kari Feb 22, 2026 (SFGate.com)
Amid a stack of old books in an antique store in Utah sat an edge-worn journal filled with handwritten spiritual musings and psychedelic drawings. “Whose journal was this?” I wondered.
The answer, as I would learn, linked the journal to legendary 1960s San Francisco counterculture group Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters. The group, which included Grateful Dead associates and author Neal Cassady, is best known for evangelizing LSD on a cross-country road trip in 1964.
I didn’t travel to Utah looking for books — instead I was investigating a homicide case. As a true-crime writer, I wanted to visit places where Ashlee Buzzard, accused of killing her daughter during a road trip through the West, stopped for gas.
This quest brought me to Panguitch, population 1,788, near Bryce Canyon National Park. As I walked down the city’s main street on a chilly winter’s day, the warm glow from the windows of Smokin’ Hot Antiques, an antique store in an old firehouse, lured me inside. Under a pile of hardcover books sat the journal.
I turned the cover to find a note from “Lee Anne” to someone named Rodger: “May this journal bring you many hours of happy reflection.” Rodger had filled the following pages with fountain pen writings and surreal watercolors.
One of his earliest entries: “I will be like a violent beautiful man of the West bearing a great sack of precious jewels.” Other entries suggested he was high when he penned them. “In the evening’s sunset the orange through the oak trees reaches my soft smiled lips,” read the calligraphy script. “In the romantic promenade of the angels of mercy my own body caresses the currents among the All.”
Intrigued, I sought out the antique store’s proprietor, Beverly Howard, who was adorned in turquoise and wearing a denim skirt. She told me the journal came from the estate of a woman who left behind a house crammed with eclectic belongings. “She was kind of a hoarder,” Beverly said. “But the things she had were interesting.”
After buying the journal for $24, I drove another hundred miles to Torrey, Utah. Inside my hotel room, I leafed through the journal and admired the intricate artwork. Tucked into the back of the journal, where the yellowed pages remained blank, was an envelope addressed to Rodger Williams c/o Joan Kohl.
This led me to connect with Kohl by phone. She said that her brother Rodger Thomas Williams, born in the South Bay in 1945, was a childhood friend of Ron McKernan, later known as Pigpen — an original frontman for the Grateful Dead. As a teen, Williams moved to Haight-Ashbury and became part of the burgeoning hippie scene.
Toward the end of our call, Kohl said: “By the way, my brother’s nickname was Cool Breeze. He’s mentioned in the book ‘Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.’”
For a moment I was speechless. When I attended UC Berkeley as an English major, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” author Tom Wolfe’s account of Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters, was required reading for one of my classes. The book opens with a scene where Wolfe and Cool Breeze are riding down one of the city’s steep hills.
“Cool Breeze is a kid with three or four days’ beard sitting next to me on the stamped metal bottom of the open back part of a pickup truck,” wrote Wolfe. “Bouncing along. Dipping and rising and rolling on these rotten springs like a boat.”
Williams was tied up in legal problems during the summer of 1964, when Kesey and the Merry Pranksters embarked on their LSD-fueled trip across the country, in a Day-Glo bus named Furthur. “He got caught smoking a joint,” Kohl recalled. “Back then, even a small amount of marijuana could land you in jail.”
When Wolfe wrote about careening down an SF hill, Williams, aka Cool Breeze, was on probation. “Right now Cool Breeze is so terrified of the law he is sitting up in plain view of thousands of already startled citizens wearing some kind of Seven Dwarfs Black Forest gnome’s hat covered in feathers and fluorescent colors.”
After the hippie era faded, Williams moved to Tahoma, on the west shore of Lake Tahoe. He worked as a handyman, although his passion was art. “He never sold any of his drawings,” Kohl explained. “He said the art was for itself alone.”
Kohl confirmed that the journal was “definitely his writing and sketches.” The breakup of Williams and his first wife, mentioned in the journal as a recent event, places the timeframe as mid-1970s. Kohl said that Williams lived for a while in Utah and maybe that’s how the journal landed there.
Williams, a long-time smoker, died in September 2025 with COPD. In keeping with his background as a Merry Prankster, he believed there was more to human existence than everyday life. “Lift us up to the bright track — vast, unlimited, the domain of one’s thoughts,” wrote Williams in his journal. “They go towards a beauty, a region of the firmament.”
Tomorrow night (Tuesday, February 24) will be one of the most consequential State of the Union addresses ever. Not because of what Donald Trump will say. But because of what WE will say.
Join DEFIANCE.org, as we host the STATE OF THE SWAMP: The Rebuttal to the State of the Union, from 7-11pm ET. This will be one of the largest LIVE “SOTU” rebuttals ever, featuring Robert De Niro, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, Stacey Abrams, Mark Ruffalo, Members of Congress, and dozens more.
Here’s everything you need to know. Below.
I heard you’re doing something BIG that morning. What is it?
You heard right. The morning of Tuesday, February 24 we will be delivering copies of the U.S. Constitution to EVERY Republican Member of Congress with a message: You swore an oath to this. Not to a man. Remember that tonight.
And guess what? We’ve flown in the Portland Frog Brigade to handle the deliveries. That’s right, defiant Americans in blow-up frog costumes will be going door-to-door on Capitol Hill to deliver the Constitution. The same people who’ve been protesting Trump’s agents at ICE facilities — and leading marches nationwide.
You won’t want to miss it. Tune in below at 930am ET, Tues, Feb 24 at DEFIANCE.News or by clicking the button below.
Help spread the word. Let’s make sure more people are watching the TRUTH than are watching Trump’s LIES.
Share ALL of this info — by forwarding this email or sharing this post. Your friends, family, and colleagues can sign up to watch at DEFIANCE.org/sotu to get updates and livestream links. Or forward them this email and share this post.
Share the hilarious ad from the Portland Frogs. Promote the video on your social media accounts. Re-post the video from X, Substack, Threads, or Instagram.
Can I join the virtual VIP pre-show?
Yes, you can. In fact, in addition to the FREE livestream, there are ticketed packages that include exclusive access to the virtual PRE-SHOW with VIP guests, media, and surprises. You’ll also get special event merch, access to the event BINGO, and more!
Who’s speaking at the main event — the rebuttal to the State of the Union?
The lineup is jam-packed with cultural icons, elected leaders, pro-democracy champions, former Trump officials who’ve turned against him, new-media stars, and many more. Full lineup below.
Okay, I get it. This is awesome. I’m in. So how do I stream it LIVE?!
Anyone can watch the STATE OF THE SWAMP event for FREE online starting at 645pm ET on Tues, Feb 24. Here are your options. Or you can tune in to www.DEFIANCE.News to watch on Substack!
Pay close attention throughout the night. We will be making some MAJOR announcements about efforts to counter Trump’s abuses of power, restore the rule of law, and hold law-breakers accountable.
One more thing: I heard a secret. There’s another surprise after the event?
Yup. That’s right. But we’re not going to spoil it here. If you’re watching the event, don’t worry. We’ll remind you that AFTERWARDS you should tune in at www.DEFIANCE.Newsfor a special, late-night livestream. By 11:15pm ET we should be back on the air. For what, you ask? For a defiant moment. Something that’s never been done before… we hope you’ll watch.
So where can I watch that great frog promo again?
Right here.
Your friend, in defiance,
Miles Taylor
DEFIANCE.Newsprovides urgent reporting on threats to America from within. Sign-up free below or become a paid subscriber on DEFIANCE.org orhere on Substackfor unlimited access to news, events, and VIP chats.By joining, you become a Member of DEFIANCE.org and 100% of your support goes to protect democracy, including real actions we announce every Wednesday.
P.S. Join us tonight (and every weeknight) for DEFIANCE Daily @ 5p ET – Watch LIVE on our DEFIANCE.News page, on our YouTube channel, or on my X account. Tonight we will do a special “preview” of the SOTU rebuttal event!
“I Am An American” traces the sacrifices Japanese Americans made during World War II. Photo: Shawna Chen/Axios
A powerful new exhibit that opens Monday in San Francisco tells the story of a generation of Japanese Americans, known as Nisei, who fought wars both at home and overseas during World War II.
Why it matters: As America approaches its 250th anniversary, the soldiers’ family members are intent on making sure their history is honored.
The big picture: Nearly 33,000 Nisei soldiers fought in the European and Pacific theaters despite the U.S. government’s incarceration of roughly 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry between 1942 and 1945.
Many Japanese American children spent pivotal development years under the constant surveillance of armed guards. Photo: Shawna Chen/Axios
Zoom in: The exhibit — located in the Military Intelligence Service Historic Learning Center — takes viewers through the 20th century Japanese immigration wave, the attack on Pearl Harbor, life behind barbed wire and soldiers’ sacrifices on the battlefield.
The 4,000 men who initially joined the 442nd Regimental Combat Team had to be replaced nearly 3.5 times due to the losses suffered. About 14,000 men served in the unit in total, earning nearly 9,500 Purple Hearts and 21 Medals of Honor, according to the U.S. Army.
It became the most decorated unit for its size and length of service in U.S. military history.
Other Nisei worked as linguists in the U.S. Army’s Military Intelligence Service, which set up training grounds in the Presidio — where the exhibit is now hosted.
Tatsuro Matsudo’s sign, shown in the above collage. Photo: Shawna Chen/Axios
San Francisco is the first stop for the traveling exhibit, which is named “I Am An American” in honor of the signTatsuro Matsuda placed in his family’s Oakland store the day after the Pearl Harbor attacks.
“The [Matsuda] family eventually got put into camps, but this was a statement,” exhibit curator Christine Sato-Yamazaki told Axios. “Many of the Nisei soldiers, when you talk to them, say, ‘Well, we wanted to just prove that we were … Americans, just like anyone else.'”
Even so, the shame and trauma associated with the history meant a lot of it went unknown.
“They never talked about it,” said Millbrae-based Anne Okubo, whose father served in the 442nd Regimental Combat Unit and mother graduated from high school in a camp. “We knew he was a medic, but that’s all we knew.”
“Our parents just wanted to assimilate,” Okubo added. “They wanted us to be as American as we could be because they were punished for being Japanese.”
Gary Uchida, who served in the 100th Infantry Battalion, inked images and phrases associated with his service on his travel bag. Photo: Shawna Chen/Axios
What they’re saying: “I’m hoping that this exhibit will help create that awareness, even if it’s not taught in schools and the rest of the country,” said Sato-Yamazaki, referring to the 442nd unit.
Her own grandfather, Dave Kawagoye, served as a sergeant; his garrison cap, which features the 442nd unit’s motto “Go for Broke,” is displayed in the exhibit.
What’s next: The exhibit is on display through Aug. 31. Tickets are $15.
It’s set to embark on an 11-city national tour over the next five years, including stops in Portland, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, Chicago and Honolulu.
By J.K. Dineen, Staff Writer Feb 23, 2026 (SFChronicle.com)
Gift Article
John Weil stands inside 263 Summer St. in Boston, an office building being transformed into housing. It’s part of Boston’s successful office to residential conversion program, which Weil runs.Simon Simard/For the S.F. Chronicle
San Francisco and Boston are coastal cousins: a pair of historic cities full of character and culture, narrow alleys and stately avenues, seafood and salty waterfronts, old money and new, left-leaning politics sprouting from roots in ever-evolving ethnic neighborhoods.
And by early 2023 both cities were grappling with the same questions: What would it take to create housing out of the office buildings that had emptied out since the pandemic? How to revive hollowed downtown neighborhoods by injecting thousands of residents while also reducing the glut of ghosted office space that had crushed property values?
Both cities responded by launching office-to-residential programs around the same time. Three years later they are in very different places. Boston’s conversion program is a wild success. San Francisco’s has yet to get off the ground.
Since Boston’s program launched in 2023 the city has received 22 applications to convert 1.25 million square feet of office space into 1,517 units. From the city’s Seaport and Back Bay to the South End and Financial District, developers are snapping up historic buildings — many of them brick-and-beam structures with wood floors and arched windows — and reinventing them as living spaces.
Meanwhile in San Francisco, despite extensive efforts — the city has cut fees, sliced red tape, relaxed zoning restrictions and eliminated both affordable housing requirements and transfer taxes — not one conversion project has started construction. One project announced in January of 2024, Forge Development Partners’ 124-unit conversion of the Humboldt Bank building at 785 Market St., stalled out due to lack of financing. The developer now hopes to start construction in 2027. Another, a conversion of the Warfield office building on Market Street, was foreclosed on by its lender before construction started and sold to a nonprofit.
So why is Boston’s conversion program generating so much housing while San Francisco is still waiting for applications to come in? There are a couple of obvious reasons.
One is that Boston’s strong mayoral system allowed Mayor Michelle Wu to move fast to offer financial incentives for conversions, without passing local or state legislation. In July of 2023, Wu announced that developers willing to convert downtown office buildings to housing would be eligible to receive a 75% property tax abatement over 29 years.
Adam Burns, who heads up Pinnacle Development, which last year completed Boston’s first conversion and has two others in the pipeline, said the tax abatement is helpful — but the finances have to make sense.
“It doesn’t turn a bad deal into a good deal,” he said. “You still can’t pay someone $600 a foot for a vacant office building, but it can move the needle from something that is marginal to something that really does work.”
In contrast, what Wu did with the swoop of a pen has taken San Francisco more than a year of complicated political and legislative maneuvering.
Last week, Mayor Daniel Lurie signed a bill establishing a downtown financing district. Eligible projects in the district — it covers the Financial District, Union Square, parts of SoMa and the Market Street corridor from the Embarcadero to Civic Center — will receive annual incentive payments over 30 years to offset development costs of converting office buildings to residences. The payments are backed by the increases in future property tax revenue that will be generated once the struggling office buildings become apartments or condos.
While city planners estimate the payments will amount to about $100,000 per unit for a typical project, establishing the program was not easy. It required both the state Assembly and the board of supervisors to approve legislation. An independent board of directors was formed to oversee the district and sign off on qualified projects.
“The city is doing all the right things to get there, but boy did it take a long time,” Forge Development CEO Richard Hannum said after the vote.
Lisa Follman, an architect with San Francisco’s Skidmore Owings & Merrill said she hopes the new financing district “will ignite a fire” under building owners who have considered converting but not done it.
“Boston did three years ago what San Francisco did last week,” Follman said. “It takes time for those financial incentives to play out.”
But, beyond the political advantages, Boston has another secret weapon: A senior level manager who is in charge of personally ushering every project through every step from pre-application to construction permitting.
That person, John Weil, is a former real estate developer who pounds the pavement looking for potential conversion candidates. Rather than submitting plans to all the relevant departments — public works, fire, building — developers only have to hand the application to Weil. Once a project qualifies for the program, he takes over.
“We have one point of contact, it sounds silly and mundane but it’s actually very important,” said Prataap Patrose, senior advisor to the chief of planning for Boston. “It’s truly one stop. John is that one person to call.”
Weil started in the summer of 2023 after a consultant had studied 380 buildings that would qualify for the program. He looked into how much debt there was on each property, what the ownership structure was, how much of it was leased and for how long. He sought out owners who might be interested in selling and developers who might be interested in buying.
“I try to come at this from a developer’s mentality. I spent my days walking the buildings, calling the owners, and saying, ‘What else do you own? ’” he said. “My card has my cell phone number on it. I expect it to ring seven days a week — and it does.”
Weil encouraged developers and building owners to come to the city early in the process.
“Don’t wait until you have a fully baked concept to call me,” he said. “Call me literally when you have a street address and I will walk you through what I know about that building, whether I think it’s a good candidate for conversion.”
And there are so many good candidates. In Boston’s Seaport District, Burns is converting an old dry goods warehouse on 263 Summer St. with its famous “Boston Wharf Co. Industrial Real Estate” red neon rooftop sign. It will yield 77 apartments.
Then there is the 11-story, 255-unit conversion project in the pipeline next to the South Meeting House on Washington St., where Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty hatched a plan to dump 342 chests of British East India Co. tea into Boston Harbor in 1773. Next to the Custom House Tower and a pocket park, 18 units are being built out at 150 Milk St.
“It’s definitely one of those ‘Paul Revere slept here’ buildings,” Weil said. “You come out on a snowy evening and squint and it feels like it’s 150 years ago.”
Burns said the buildings for conversions tend to be naturally affordable because they lack the yoga rooms and rooftop fire pits and gyms that add to the cost of modern residential high-rises. His first project, and the first to be completed under Boston’s program, leased up right away.
“It’s the sort of building where you look up at the beams and see the names of the guys who framed it or the ship that it came off of,” Burns said.
While San Francisco is far behind Boston’s conversions progress, local developers and architects say it’s not for lack of trying. The city has eliminated planning code requirements and streamlined permitting and approval processes. Former Mayor London Breed successfully passed Proposition C in 2024, which waived transfer tax fees for office-to-residential conversions once the building is converted to housing.
“I have been practicing in San Francisco for 20 years now and I have never seen as much movement as I have in the last 18 months,” Follman, the architect, said. “The planning code has been rewritten. The zoning has changed. One of the huge barriers (to conversions) is people don’t know how much the city has done.”
Still, San Francisco has unique challenges. Construction costs are the highest in the country and many conversions will require seismic upgrades — something Boston doesn’t have to worry about.
Jacob Bintliff, manager of economic recovery initiatives for the city’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, said recently that interest in the city’s conversions program has grown as the financing district got closer to launching.
“We have been fielding a couple of inquiries a week over the last few weeks. People are saying, ‘Let me see if I understand this right, I am interested. I am looking at buildings,’ he said. ‘We are encouraged by the level of interest and the level of detail that people are asking about.’
There are about 518 buildings within San Francisco’s new financing district, about 50 of which the city has identified as being good candidates for conversion. If they were all to be converted to housing it would produce about 4,400 units.
Once the math makes sense it can be an efficient way to produce housing with tons of character in the heart of the city, Burns said. While his Boston firm has mostly built new multifamily complexes, conversions are appealing because they provide “compression on the rate of return” — basically, new housing can be delivered faster so revenue starts rolling in sooner.
“If you already have a foundation, you already have a utility structure, you already have a facade, roof, windows — all that saves time,” he said. “The faster we can purchase something and bring it online the better our returns are.”
J.K. Dineen covers housing and real estate development. He joined The Chronicle in 2014 covering San Francisco land use politics for the City Hall team. He has since expanded his focus to explore housing and development issues throughout Northern California. He is the author of two books: “Here Tomorrow” (Heyday, 2013) and “High Spirits” (Heyday, 2015).
All nine counties of the Bay Area had robust streetcar systems at the start of the 20th century. In the East Bay, rumors swirl about how and why the Key System failed.
Key System Bridge Unit 187, part of the fleet that provided service across the Bay Bridge between 1939 and 1958, at the Western Railway Museum in Solano County in 2021. Credit: Dan Brekke
At the turn of the 20th century, streetcars crisscrossed the Bay Area.
For many people, they were the primary way to get around town — and to San Francisco for work. People would walk out their doors in Berkeley, Alameda, Oakland, hop on a streetcar that would take them to a ferry and be in downtown San Francisco in about 40 minutes. Remnants of these lines can be seen in many Bay Area streetscapes.
But what happened to the streetcars?
The history and disappearance of the Key System, which once served East Bay residents, has captured the imagination of many transit aficionados.
It’s a story that touches on a disputed piece of both East Bay and national transportation history, a conspiracy theory that involves some of the nation’s most powerful corporations and the role they played — or didn’t play — in the disappearance of streetcars in the East Bay. The story also encompasses a real-estate development scheme that shaped Berkeley and Oakland, the rise of suburban sprawl, and the dawn of the motor vehicle age.
Streetcars fundamentally shaped urban development
A Key System “A” line train on a test run across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco to Oakland in 1939. Courtesy: FoundSF.org
Streetcars were essential to the growth of cities in the Bay Area and across the United States in the final years of the 19th century and the opening years of the 20th. Electric railroads — either streetcar networks connecting neighborhoods or interurban lines connecting towns and cities — served all nine Bay Area counties in the early 20th century.
The place where that electric streetcar legacy is most obvious is San Francisco, where several electric lines that operated in the 1920s — Muni’s J, K, L, M and N routes — are still essential parts of the city’s transportation system. Two other lines, the E and the F, feature tourist-oriented service using historic streetcars.
For the first four decades of the 20th century, the East Bay was served by two major electric streetcar systems: one run by Southern Pacific and a competitor known popularly as the Key System. Southern Pacific’s system, initially called the Oakland, Alameda and Berkeley Lines, ran transbay service using ferries that left from long causeways, or moles, in West Oakland and Alameda.
The Key System was a collection of East Bay streetcar and transbay lines built or purchased and consolidated by Francis Marion Smith, known as “Borax” Smith because of his success mining and marketing the all-purpose mineral in the deserts of Nevada and southeastern California. Starting in the 1890s, Smith created a network of lines that eventually stretched from Richmond to San Leandro.
But creating a transit system wasn’t Smith’s main objective. He and partner Frank Havens had purchased about 13,000 acres, more than 20 square miles, under the aegis of a separate enterprise known as The Realty Syndicate. The streetcar and transbay train system Smith created was designed to serve the new neighborhoods that would be developed on the syndicate’s properties.
Oakland historian Mitchell Schwarzer said the streetcar network fundamentally changed the shape of the city. In his 2021 study of Oakland’s development, “Hella Town,” he said that by 1912, property subdividers had created more than 50,000 new residential lots close to streetcar routes.
The effect on what had been a compact East Bay community focused on downtown was dramatic, with streetcar lines triggering a sprawl of new neighborhoods in every direction and the creation of commercial districts like Grand Lake, Rockridge, Piedmont Avenue and along stretches of San Pablo Avenue and East 14th Street, now International Boulevard.
The streetcar “affected everything — it affected where the residential areas developed, it affected where the commercial areas developed, it affected where industry moved pretty much,” Schwarzer said. Alongside the automobile, streetcars shaped the form Oakland took to this day, “both where things are located, how they’re distributed, how they’re built, what’s built, where they’re built,” Schwarzer said.
He adds that this early episode of sprawl also helped shape Oakland’s future demographic and class profile. The city’s vast residential expansion “allowed for the wealthier people to live on larger lots and to live separately and to erect barriers to minorities moving into their communities. Without the streetcar, they couldn’t have done that.”
Financial failures
Although the Key System and other streetcar operations were useful in driving real estate development and despite the fact that they carried more than 100 million passengers a year at their peak in the 1920s, they were, for the most part, failures as money-making enterprises.
The Key System was in deep financial trouble by 1913. According to the late transportation reporter and historian Harre W. Demoro, the Key’s early money troubles could be traced directly to Borax Smith’s risky and chaotic business practices. With the company deeply in debt, Smith was forced out in 1913. A series of crises ensued, with the company teetering on the edge of failure and being foreclosed on and reorganized in 1923 and 1930.
By this time, private automobiles had become a major presence in cities across the country, including those in the Bay Area. The growing popularity of car ownership is reflected in a steep decline in ridership for both the Southern Pacific and Key System after a peak recorded in the mid-1920s.
Drivers weren’t the only ones who were drawn to new motorized modes of transport. Starting before 1920, transit systems began to convert some of their train service to bus lines. By the mid-1920s, the Key System had joined in that trend, which accelerated through the U.S. entry into World War II in 1941.
Demoro found in a 1979 study of the Key System published in the National Railway Bulletin that by 1937, its buses accounted for more than half of the company’s business in terms of miles of service delivered. “From then on, the bus dominated” Key’s operation, Demoro wrote in his two-volume history of the transbay service.
Key System Bridge Unit 187, part of the fleet that provided service across the Bay Bridge from the East Bay to San Francisco between 1939 and 1958, at the Western Railway Museum in Solano County. (Dan Brekke/KQED)
The decline accelerated after the Bay Bridge opened to drivers in November 1936. The planned railroad service on the bridge wasn’t ready when the bridge opened, creating an opportunity for East Bay residents to enjoy the ease of car travel. When train service on the bridge’s lower deck finally began in January 1939, it did little to reverse the ridership slump.
And it’s right here that the conspiracy theory mentioned earlier becomes part of the Key System story. Because as the car was becoming king, companies related to the automobile industry bought up dozens of streetcar lines and replaced them with buses. That effort was intended, the story goes, to undermine mass transit to such an extent that riders would desert it in preference for automobiles.
A kernel of truth to the myth
General Motors, Standard Oil of California (now known as Chevron), Firestone Rubber and Phillips Petroleum really did invest in a company called National City Lines and a pair of subsidiaries that were in the business of buying mostly financially troubled streetcar systems and immediately converting them to bus systems. That happened in 46 cities across the country, including a few big ones, like Los Angeles, St. Louis, and yes, Oakland.
As automobile traffic grew, streetcars — and streetcar riders — often found themselves tangled in traffic jams like this 1940s faceoff between Key System trains and cars at 47th Avenue and East 14th Street (now International Boulevard) in Oakland. Courtesy :Western Railway Museum
The government really did take National City Lines, GM, its partners and their executives to court. In 1949, a jury in Chicago really did convict them of one count of violating federal antitrust law by conspiring to monopolize the sale of buses, fuel, tires and other supplies to the transit systems that National City Lines and its subsidiaries had taken over. The companies were acquitted on a second count alleging they had conspired to block competitors from doing business with the National City companies. In other words, the defendants were found guilty of trying to control the purchase of supplies that newly “motorized” transit agencies would need, not of any broader conspiracy to wreck mass transit.
The penalties the judge imposed were trivial: $5,000 for each corporate defendant — about $68,000 in 2026 dollars — and $1 for each of the executives who had played a part in the conspiracy.
But the story is more complex than the National City Lines case, said Ethan Elkind, who directs the climate program at UC Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment. “It’s really a story of technology change.”
The Key System’s ferry terminal in the middle of the Bay in 1933. People would walk out their doors in Berkeley and hop on a streetcar that would take them to a ferry and be in downtown San Francisco in about 40 minutes. Credit: Clyde Sunderland Studios
The electric streetcar systems that started appearing everywhere in the 1890s were a big leap in speed and performance compared to the horse-drawn omnibuses and cable cars they replaced. But then the next big innovation in transportation arrived.
“In the early 20th century, the big, disruptive technology was the automobile, and people adopted it en masse very rapidly, and it made these streetcars for a vast majority of the population essentially obsolete,” Elkind said. Cars not only competed for riders, they also competed for space on the streets.
“When you throw the automobile into that, and everybody’s driving now, these streetcars are getting stuck in traffic,” Elkind said. “They’re not really enjoyable for people to ride. And people are frustrated by the poor service, high fares, and they wanted the freedom and mobility that automobiles, private automobiles, represented.”
The argument that GM’s National Cities gambit was chiefly responsible for the collapse of electric railways across the county has been widely criticized as little more than a myth, one that ignores other factors that made many streetcar systems vulnerable by the 1930s, including their often poor physical and financial condition and the fact that, as shown by the Key System, bus transportation was becoming steadily more popular and economical well before National City Lines appeared on the scene.
The Key System’s slow demise
After struggling through most of the 1930s, a surge in wartime ridership had made the company profitable and by 1945, it was sitting on a sizable surplus. Although it had struggled to upgrade its cars and tracks before the war, it had begun making plans to revamp service.
The company began to follow through on all of these initiatives, contracting for new streetcars and moving ahead with the purchase of trolley buses to run on College Avenue and on the Arlington Avenue-Euclid Avenue service in the Berkeley Hills.
Berkeley-bound commuter line up to board a Key System “F” bus after San Francisco’s Transbay Terminal was reconfigured for bus service in 1959. AC Transit would take over the service the following year. Courtesy: Western Railway Museum
Then suddenly, all that work stopped. In May 1946, Key System management sold the company to National City Lines for $3 million ($52 million in 2026 dollars). By the end of the year, the company’s new owners decided to scrap all the remaining streetcar lines and replace trains with motor buses. The only trains the Key System still operated were the half-dozen transbay lines operating across the Bay Bridge.
In 1955, the company applied to the state Public Utilities Commission to abandon transbay service. The last trains ran over the bridge to San Francisco’s Transbay Terminal in April 1958. The Key System, now an all-bus operation, was purchased by a new public transit agency — AC Transit — in 1960.
The evolution of the Bay Area’s transit system
Looking back on those events in 1979, Demoro speculated that without the National City Lines takeover, the East Bay’s transit system would likely have evolved into a hybrid featuring streetcars, trolley buses along with motor buses. Whether the transbay service would have survived was less clear, he said, because of the state’s interest in reconfiguring the bridge to accommodate more motor vehicles — a goal realized when the Key System tracks were removed.
But he also marveled that the region managed to build BART, an agency created in the 1950s as the Key System trains were in their twilight years and both California and the rest of the United States went all in on highway spending. “That accomplishment … seems astounding today, he wrote.
But in one sense, the Key System hasn’t gone away. When AC Transit took control of the Key’s bankrupt all-bus operation in 1960, it continued an East Bay transit legacy that stretched back nearly a century. AC Transit continues to be a vital transportation link for hundreds of thousands of East Bay residents, much the way the Key System was in its peak years. And for those who travel between the East Bay and San Francisco, BART now serves the riders the way the Key System’s trains and ferries once did, although maybe a lot less romantically.
It’s still possible to ride some of the few surviving Key System trains at Solano County’s Western Railway Museum, on Highway 12 between Fairfield and Rio Vista. Muni offers a daily vintage streetcar experience on its F trolley car line, running along Market Street between the Castro and Steuart Street downtown.
Berkeleyside is a media partner of KQED, a listener-supported public radio station serving Northern California. Berkeleyside occasionally republishes KQED stories we believe will be of interest to our readers.
Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California Feb 23, 2026 THE COMMONWEALTH CLUB This fireside chat will feature the various Democratic candidates running to be California’s next governor in conversation with Nancy Tung, who is currently serving as the chair of the San Francisco Democratic Party, about the biggest issues facing the state of California. This conversation is taking place as delegates from throughout California arrive in San Francisco for the Democratic Party Convention weekend. Delegates will be evaluating the candidates and casting their votes on whom to endorse for governor as part of our special CADEM coverage of the state convention. Gubernatorial candidates will each have a 15-minute period to share their vision for the future of the Golden State one-on-one with Chair Nancy Tung. February 20, 2026 Speakers Xavier Becerra Former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services; Former California Attorney General; Candidate for Democratic Nomination for California Governor Ian Calderon Former State Assemblymember (D-57th District); Candidate for Democratic Nomination for California Governor Matt Mahan Mayor of San Jose; Candidate for Democratic Nomination for California Governor Katie Porter Former U.S. Representative (D-California 47th District); Candidate for Democratic Nomination for California Governor Tom Steyer Entrepreneur; Candidate for Democratic Nomination for California Governor Eric Swalwell U.S. Representative (D-California 14th District); Candidate for Democratic Nomination for California Governor Tony Thurmond California Superintendent of Public Instruction; Candidate for Democratic Nomination for California Governor Antonio Villaraigosa Former Mayor of Los Angeles; Former Speaker, California State Assembly; Candidate for Democratic Nomination for California Governor Betty Yee Former California State Controller; Candidate for Democratic Nomination for California Governor Moderator: Nancy Tung Chair, San Francisco Democratic Party Program Partner: San Francisco Democratic Party Speaker photos courtesy the speakers. Commonwealth Club World Affairs is a public forum. Any views expressed in our programs are those of the speakers and not of Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California.
Nobody wanted to buy the Port of San Francisco’s dilapidated, derelict drydocks. So it’s budgeting $61M to demolish them — lest they sink and triple the cost.
by JOE ESKENAZI February 23, 2026 (MissionLocal.org)
The 900-foot-long Drydock No. 2, one of two drydocks San Francisco will spend an estimated $61 million to demolish. Photo by Vincent Woo.
San Francisco’s weather, of late, has resembled the opening credits of “Gilligan’s Island.” Yes, it’s getting rough.
This city has had its fair share of experience with building-sized structures sinking and tilting. But it warrants mentioning that, at just 645 feet, Millennium Tower is dwarfed by Drydock No. 2. If things, quite literally, go sideways at the Port of San Francisco, it would be a catastrophe. Recovering a two-block-long structure from underwater would be costly — and the environmental consequences would be dire.
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The port declared an emergency in December. February’s ten thousand thundering typhoons have been more than a trifle anxiety-inducing.
A floating drydock is a large U-shaped vessel resembling a shoebox that is designed to be partially sunk and then raised with a ship within it. It is then drained, and repairs can be done to the ship.
Drydock No. 2, which was built in 1970, once had the capacity to hoist a ship as large as 54,800 tons. The adjacent drydock Eureka, which was built in 1945, is 528 feet long and could lift up to 17,500 tons. As it has no bow or stern — and therefore no port nor starboard — Port of San Francisco officials simply say Drydock No. 2 is listing “to the east.”
In response, this month the port fast-tracked $18.5 million to keep the drydock above water. Contractors have been hired and there is now 24/7 video surveillance of the faltering Drydock No. 2; automated pumps kick into gear when its 40 hulking ballast tanks begin taking water.
“Brown rust coloration.” The waterline of Drydock No. 2 is riddled with cracks, necessitating emergency maintenance. Photo courtesy of the Port of San Francisco.
There is steel reinforcement being undertaken on metal that was once perhaps an inch thick. Mission Local is told the hull is now paper-thin in places. Photographs shared by the port reveal that, like the Dude’s car, the primary hue of the drydocks appears to be “brown rust coloration.”
Maritime staff at the port admit that the present weather is scary. They are candid that the drydocks’ alarming condition has necessitated an “all hands on deck operation.”
And that costs money: That emergency appropriation of $18.5 million from the port’s revenue is a mere down payment on an estimated $61.2 million to dispose of the aging drydocks.
Think of it as palliative care for elderly infrastructure: The steep upfront costs are merely a bridge payment to ensure the drydocks last long enough to be demolished later — in an orderly fashion rather than simply falling apart. If the drydocks were to sink, the port estimates the price tag could triple or even quadruple. It would also unleash an environmental disaster.
If the docks sink to the bottom of the bay, this will necessitate an expensive reclamation and release fuel into the water. And perhaps other toxins as well: While the port says it has found no indications of harmful material within the docks’ ballast tanks, shipyards are notoriously dirty sites. The sediment within those tanks would comprise the dregs from nearly 50 years of sucking in and pushing out the local waters.
The Port of San Francisco’s 900-foot Drydock No. 2 (foreground) and 528-foot Eureka. Photo by Vincent Woo.A shipyard worker during BART construction in 1967. Photo courtesy of SFMemory.org.
The port is an “enterprise agency,” which generates its own revenue. So this is not city money, per se. But it’s still not fun to have to spend scores of millions of dollars to demolish assets that nobody wanted to lease or buy and have now become a liability. Yet there was little the city or its port could do to stave off this day.
This eventuality was inviolable the moment that the Hawaiian Merchant, the first containerized ship to visit San Francisco Bay, sailed beneath the Golden Gate Bridge in 1958. The monumental drydocks that helped fuel and maintain San Francisco’s status as a maritime powerhouse, now corroding in disuse and on the verge of slipping beneath the waves, serve as massive metaphors for the end of a San Francisco era.
https://videopress.com/embed/PnpiiNjB?cover=1&preloadContent=metadata&useAverageColor=1&hd=0The drydocks at Piers 68-70 today. Video by Vicent Woo.
Of note, “Vertigo” also came out in 1958. Little did its scriptwriters know it, but the city was sitting atop the precipice of a roller coaster and getting ready for some real change. And nowhere changed more than the city’s waterfront. To start: A study from the mid-1960s estimated that close to 12 percent of all the city’s jobs — that’s around one job out of every seven or eight — “is supported by the activity directly and indirectly associated with the port.”
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Like crime stats in the 1970s or real-estate prices in the 1940s, this is a figure that is difficult for present-day San Franciscans to grasp.
What happened? A lot, but, in a word, containerization. It doomed this city’s port. The boats were too damn big. They required too much damn land. Heavy federal subsidies helped the Port of Oakland — which is sprawling and can accommodate giant ships — quickly catch and pass San Francisco in the 1970s.
The loss of thousands of jobs on the docks, in warehouses and in transportation triggered a blue-collar diaspora from San Francisco. Black people made up 13 percent of San Franciscans in 1970; that number was 5.6 percent in 2020. The stevedores, warehousemen and drivers were replaced by white-collar workers, contributing to an explosion in the price of residential real estate. The city has replicated this cycle ever since, substituting wealthier and wealthier white-collar workers.
The Port of San Francisco is now — and long has been — a real-estate holding company. The rusting, listing drydocks jutting out of the water are holdovers from a different time.
A cruise ship in drydock at San Francisco’s Piers 68-70. Photo courtesy of the Port of San Francisco.A cruise ship in drydock at San Francisco’s Piers 68-70. Photo courtesy of the Port of San Francisco.
It’s amazing, in retrospect, that a working shipyard was operating at Piers 68-70 and employing hundreds of workers until a decade ago.
BAE Systems — the British aerospace, munitions, information security and Muni hybrid engine behemoth — abandoned the site in 2016, unloading it for a dollar (and a $38 million pension liability) to a smaller operator called Puglia Engineering.
Puglia sued BAE in 2017, alleging fraud — in large part based upon the ragged condition of the drydocks, which it claimed was concealed. That case dragged on for years and ultimately resulted in a settlement. Puglia declared bankruptcy and the port received a roughly $5 million settlement from BAE to maintain the shipyard, which has been deserted since 2017. As recently as 2022, port workers say that you could wander through and see jackets and helmets eerily hung up on pegs, as if it was a Friday before a Monday.
Piers 68-70. Photo courtesy of the Port of San Francisco.
The port did not receive any takers to run the shipyard, and potential deals to sell the drydocks fell through. A Turkish outfit had thoughts of scooping them up, “but their inspectors came to assess the material condition,” says Dominic Moreno, the port’s assistant maritime director. “They deemed it non-viable.”
For the vast majority of San Franciscans, the idle drydocks are out of sight, out of mind. The last time they were in the news may have been when the 650-foot Drydock No. 1 came unmoored in a storm in 2002 and took itself on a trip to Treasure Island (it was later scrapped and replaced by Eureka). People will notice, though, if the cranes atop Drydock No. 2 collapse, which the port warns could well happen if the 900-foot vessel leans further to the side.
If you’re wondering why the drydocks can’t simply be floated to the Farallons to be scuttled amid the veritable “graveyard of ships,” including some packed with radioactive waste, Moreno notes that “we don’t sink ships in the ocean anymore.” Also: it would be a challenge to tow the drydocks that far without a significant risk of first sinking in a navigation channel. Even if we did do that anymore.
Despite their status as an environmental and financial sword of Damocles hanging over the port, Moreno describes the pending loss of the drydocks as “bittersweet.” Right up until the shipyard’s closure in 2017, the place hosted hundreds of union jobs. Moreno’s own uncle used to work around here.
But things change, and the decline and fall of the port as the economic engine of San Francisco was nothing short of transformational. It was, perhaps, the most significant factor in the metamorphosis of the city from what it was to what it is — and what it will be.
The drydocks’ journey from asset to menace is a coup de grâce for the working-class city that was already underway when the Hawaiian Merchant sailed into the Bay and “Vertigo” sailed into theaters. And it’s a continued inversion of San Francisco: The city once served the economic needs of its all-important waterfront. But, now, the waterfront’s economic role is circumscribed — and it serves the needs of its city.
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Joe is a columnist and the managing editor of Mission Local. He was born in San Francisco, raised in the Bay Area, and attended U.C. Berkeley. He never left.
“Your humble narrator” was a writer and columnist for SF Weekly from 2007 to 2015, and a senior editor at San Francisco Magazine from 2015 to 2017. You may also have read his work in the Guardian (U.S. and U.K.); San Francisco Public Press; San Francisco Chronicle; San Francisco Examiner; Dallas Morning News; and elsewhere.
He resides in the Excelsior with his wife and three (!) kids, 4.3 miles from his birthplace and 5,474 from hers.
The Northern California branch of the Society of Professional Journalists named Eskenazi the 2019 Journalist of the Year.More by Joe Eskenazi
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