The Weekly Digest (December 17, 2023)
Happy Sunday, Brionies!
Here’s what you need to know about San Francisco politics this week and beyond:
City Hall
The Board of Supervisors will be on Legislative Recess from December 18, 2023 through January 5, 2024, per the regularly scheduled Board meeting schedule. The next regularly scheduled Board meeting will be on January 9, 2024.
Happenings around town
Tuesday, December 19 at 6pm, Ingleside Station
Thursday, December 21 at 5pm, Central Station
Marin GOP Hosts an Evening with Israel’s Deputy Consul General to the Pacific Northwest
Monday, December 18 at 6pm, location provided upon RSVP
What we’re reading
Stating that San Francisco’s homeless population is largely made up of transplants to the city will get you shouted down by local activists, who claim that the homeless are mostly locals who ended up on the street because of high housing costs. As Sanjana Friedman lays out in this piece, however, the evidence that most San Francisco homeless were formerly housed here is weak, based on self-reported data, and heavily influenced by ideology. The local-versus-transplant distinction is critical because it drives the diagnosis. If San Francisco’s homeless are mostly recent migrants, it suggests that incentives – tolerance for public camping, financial assistance, and easy access to drugs – are inviting them here. We encourage further investigation into this question because if we are ever going to solve homelessness in San Francisco, we will need all the facts, even the uncomfortable ones.
Whether your front door sports the telltale blue plastic-clad bundle every Sunday morning or not, we recommend this deep dive by former New York Times editor James Bennet into the paper’s hostility to conservative opinions. Bennet writes: “The bias had become so pervasive, even in the senior editing ranks of the newsroom, as to be unconscious. Trying to be helpful, one of the top newsroom editors urged me to start attaching trigger warnings to pieces by conservatives. It had not occurred to him how this would stigmatize certain colleagues, or what it would say to the world about the Times’s own bias. By their nature, information bubbles are powerfully self-reinforcing, and I think many Times staff have little idea how closed their world has become, or how far they are from fulfilling their compact with readers to show the world “without fear or favor.” Maybe we should add a trigger warning to the Digest every week?
Quick hits