RoboProg makes good 2

Photo: Jana Asenbrennerova

More from Heather Knight's Chronicle bouquet thrown to new District 8 Supervisor, Rafael Mandelman: 

He has long been a committed member of the city’s progressive wing, but he doesn’t particularly sound like it when he talks about solutions to the city’s street misery. He sounds middle-of-the-road — by San Francisco standards anyway — and downright practical. He supports Wiener’s proposal to strengthen the state’s conservatorship program for the mentally ill and give counties more control over their own approaches.

Not a controversial position, which our new mayor also supports, not to mention that she was endorsed by Scott Wiener. The only reason the board of supervisors failed to endorse it earlier this year: they first want to hold a committee hearing on the proposal:

“I’ve heard from people who say the bill loosens the standard for conservatorship,” said Supervisor Norman Yee, one of the five “no” votes. The resolution sponsored by Supervisor London Breed needed eight votes to pass because it was brought to the board without a committee hearing.

Why bring an important policy proposal to the board without a hearing? Will Mayor Breed know better? Or was her proposed resolution always just political grandstanding?

More Knight on Mandelman:

Mandelman also supports more psych beds and more subacute treatment facilities for people well enough to leave psychiatric wards but who need additional care...He wants to build far more affordable housing. He was tepidly supportive of Mayor Mark Farrell’s clearing of tent camps in the Mission District, saying that if people refuse help again and again, it’s fair to insist they move along...

Nothing new or controversial there. And wanting "to build far more affordable housing" has long been conventional wisdom in San Francisco. But crucial questions are unanswered: What exactly does "affordable" now mean in this city? Where does Mandelman propose building "far more" housing? Like this project on Fulton just off Divisadero? Can we build our way to affordable housing in SF?

More:

And asked whether the city should continue to allow blatant injection drug use on our sidewalks, Mandelman laughed. “No! No!” he replied. “We should have safe injection sites, but it is not tolerable to have the norm of open-air injection drug use.” He supports more drug treatment services, as well as more police foot patrols to order drug users to, in his words, “knock it off” and issue citations if need be.

This is simply lame---not "downright practical"---as if "knock it off" or "citations" are likely to have any impact on people that far gone in drug addiction.

Instead, the city should consider arresting people that are shooting up on city streets. Have them kick in a jail cell---while being monitored by a doctor, of course, to prevent medical complications. That would at least be a potential deterrent.

City highrises: Waiting for the Big One

Downtown San Francisco (Photo: Jim Wilson)

In today's NY Times: At Risk in a Big Quake: 39 of San Francisco’s Top High Rises

...Engineers have known about a major defect in certain steel-frame buildings since 1994, when shaking from the Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles fractured critical joints in more than 60 buildings, bringing at least one very close to collapse. The building code was rewritten to eliminate the flawed technique.

Yet nearly a quarter of a century later, California is still wrestling with what to do with the hundreds of buildings, many of them high rises, that were constructed during the more than three decades when the defective connection system was widely employed...

“This is an issue that structural engineers should have been dealing with continuously since the mid-1990s and we just dropped it,” said Keith Porter, an earthquake engineering expert who helped lead the United States Geological Survey study that published the list of San Francisco high rises. “We don’t know how to deal with a problem this big.”

Experts consider these buildings vulnerable to collapse only in extreme shaking caused by rare and powerful earthquakes, similar to the one that struck San Francisco in 1906.

The list, buried among the seismic calculations of an appendix in the U.S.G.S. report, includes around 40 steel-frame high rises clustered in downtown San Francisco and built between 1960 and 1994, the approximate years when the flawed technique was employed. There are more than 200 high rises in the city...

On the List

In April, the United States Geological Survey published a report with a list of high rises in downtown San Francisco that included 39 steel-frame buildings constructed between 1960 and 1994, the approximate years when a flawed welding technique was employed. The list was compiled with help from the Structural Engineers Association of Northern California.

1. Hartford Building, 650 California

2. Beal Bank Building, 180 Sansome

3. Bechtel Building, 50 Beale

4. 44 Montgomery

5. 425 California Street

6. 555 California Street

7. McKesson Plaza, One Post

8. Pacific Gas & Electric Building, 77 Beale

9. One Embarcadero Center, 355 Clay

10. Transamerica Pyramid, 600 Montgomery

11. 100 Pine Center, 100 Pine

See also City's highrise boom: Seismic safety "never a factor."

He reminds me of the gremlin outside Shatner's plane window

"Eating Animals" skewers factory farming.