650 Divisadero hearing tomorrow!

Affordable Divisadero

Tomorrow at the Planning Commission, 12 p.m. SF City Hall Room 400

The final plan is for a 66-unit rental building with only 9 on-site affordable units, a dismal 13.5%. 

What happened to doubling the affordability on Divisadero?

In 2013, 650 Divisadero filed an application for a 16-unit building, the maximum allowable number of units they could build under the existing zoning laws. 

In 2015, Supervisor Breed upzoned Divisadero (and Fillmore). 650 Divisadero modified their proposal to become a 60-unit building. 

That same year Affordable Divisadero organized, and in 2016 Supervisor Breed introduced the Divisadero-Fillmore legislation to increase the percentage of on-site affordable units required in exchange for the increase in the number of units granted.

That legislation has been sitting on her desk for 6 months while 650 Divisadero makes its way through the Planning process. 

Now 650 Divisadero is scheduled to be approved, but the Divisadero-Fillmore legislation was never finalized. We are asking the Planning Commission to postpone the hearing on 650 Divisadero until Supervisor Breed finalizes her legislation.

Thank you for your support. See you at the Planning Commission tomorrow

Gus Hernandez

Chair, Affordable Divis Steering Committee

Rob's comment:

Brace yourselves for a betrayal by Supervisor Breed.

Paul Krugman: Trump is nuts

Krugman's tweet: "An American first: a president who was obviously mentally ill the moment he took office. Thanks, Comey."

After Trump's July 6 speech last year, James Fallows made a similar diagnosis:

The half-hour of Trump’s performance was objectively as alarming, in mental-balance terms, as anything we have seen from a major party candidate in modern history. I can’t find an online video of the whole 30 minutes that has acceptable audio quality. But imagine the mosquito clip extended at full length and you have the idea.

I defy anyone to watch these 30 minutes and feel comfortable with the idea of Donald Trump making the countless judgment calls required of a president. This man is not well. But he is the man the GOP is about to nominate for the presidency.

Trump may not be clinically insane, but Fallows is both more general and more specific when he says "This man is not well." Trump has been the boss since his father died. Except for his critics in the media, there was no one close to him to tell him he was full of shit. Intellectually he's led a sheltered life. The Truth is whatever the boss says it is.

The day after the election, Jonathan Chait told us what we were in for:

...The Trump years will be a horror...The Republicans will pass massive regressive tax cuts; they will take access to medical care from the poor and sick; they will deregulate the financial industry and fossil-fuel emitters.

And that is just the beginning, the best-case scenario. Trump is an impulsive, egotistical bully, intolerant of criticism and dissent and drawn to the ruthless application of power. Many liberals have been warning that American democracy is far weaker than we believed, and this was before any of us imagined a monster like Trump commanding the Executive branch. 

Trump will shake the Republic to its foundations. And the Republicans will shake it with him. If there is a central point I tried to drive home, it is that Trumpism grows out of a decades-long trend toward authoritarianism as the dominant tendency of Republican politics. I don’t know what American government will look like after four years of Trump — or if it will only last four years, or even if it will only last eight...

The "horror" is just beginning. The last time I was really scared about what the federal government was doing was during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. I've learned since that only President Kennedy stood between his military advisers and an all-out attack on Cuba that risked war with the Soviet Union.