According to studies, queer seniors are poorer than their straight counterparts. They’re half as likely to have health insurance, and two-thirds as likely to live alone. Not to mention facing discrimination in medical and social services, retirement homes, and nursing care facilities. So much for the “golden years.”
Here in San Francisco, LGBT seniors face another grave threat: evictions. Many of our elderly live in rent-controlled apartments that are targeted by real-estate speculators and investors out to make big bucks turning them into tenancies-in-common.

With median rents close to $3,000 a month and vacancy rates low, the odds are pretty good that an evicted senior won’t find an affordable place in the city. For a senior with AIDS, an eviction is especially threatening since our city offers the best treatment and services. Studies show that people with AIDS who lose their apartments tend to die sooner, especially if they become homeless. 

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The Chron's having a hard time figuring out why there are so many more homeless families looking for help.

"It's been difficult to pin down any kind of trend," said Elizabeth Ancker, assistant program director at the nonprofit Compass Connecting Point, the group that manages the waiting list and helped find Bailey a shelter room. "We're really just seeing more of everybody - every demographic, in every situation."

No shit.Read more »

Gavin Newsom sat down for an hour with Brian Edwards-Tiekert of KPFA's Up Front, and the show is remarkable. Brian was a little less harsh than Steven Colbert, who (properly) said the Gavster's new book, Citizenville, needs "a bullshit detector" and that "everything in there could be carved on a stone and put in someone's garden," but he did a great job putting Newsom's book in the context of state and lo Read more »

The latest problem with the 8 Washington condo project emerged March 12 when the Chron reported on a new study that shows construction of the most pricey condos in San Francisco history could threaten a major sewer line that serves a quarter of the city. Read more »

Check out the news this week:

The Associate Press reports that there are increasing numbers of homeless and poor people in Silicon Valley. The piece almost sounds like something I would write:Read more »

So the Association of Bay Area Governments, which plays an outsized role in local planning by making all sorts of projections, based on whatever economists and demographers use to make projections, that are supposed to guide how cities in the region make land-use decisions, says San Francisco should be prepared to see its population grow to 964,000 people by 2035.If you figure that's only an estimate, and probably off by at least five percent, we could be talking about a millio Read more »

The Western SoMa Community Plan had its first hearing before the Board of Supervisors Land Use and Economic Development Committee today, with dozens of speakers praising the eight-year citizen-based planning effort that developed it but with much of the testimony criticizing the plan's emphasis on facilitating housing development to the exclusion of other goals.Read more »

The fate of the “purple building” – which has become caught up in the clash between nightlife and residential interests on the clubgoer-saturated 300-block of 11^th Street – remains undecided as the Western SoMa Community Plan heads into its first hearing before the Board of Supervisors Land Use and Economic Development Committee on Monday.Read more »

Texas Guv Rick Perry made a spectacle of himself trying to take businesses away from California, but as everyone with any sense predicted, his trip was a bust. Fact is, very few businessess anywhere make major relocation decisions because of taxes and regulations. But as Calitics points out (with a nice chart), the real reason people have left California of late is the cost of housing.Read more »

Interesting piece in the NY Times about the growing number of high-end condos in the city that are empty most of the year. Thurns out that the more expensive the housing, the more likely it will be owned by somebody who hardly ever lives there:Read more »