Really worth reading the piece by Chris Carlsson at SF. Streetsblog on planning and public spaces and the thinking – breathing – that experiments like the pocket parks, Sunday Streets, etc push.

Earlier Today By Mark Rabine
Planning Your Friday? Got A Bike?
This from the SFPD: “The Critical Mass bicycle event takes place on the last Friday of each month. March’s event will be on the 26th. Participants begin forming each month at Justin Hermann Plaza at the foot of Market Street at about 6:00 P.M. Because of the large number of bicyclists, traffic, particularly in the downtown area, will be impacted, and motorists are alerted to possible driving delays.”

Much Earlier Today By Mark Rabine
In the Mission Today

If you want to beat PG&E, you’ve got to get up pretty early in the morning. The Mission Community Council will hold its monthly gathering this morning at 9 A.M. at the Valencia Gardens Community Room featuring CleanPowerSF, one of the key local groups fighting PG&E to bring public power to the City. However, if you’re looking at more non-traditional healing methods, check out Camen Vicente, noted Ecuadorean curandera (“medicine woman”) at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts (MCCLA) tonight at 7.

Falling Funemployment

SFAppeal reports that rents are dropping like a stone and are predicted to keep dropping. Good news, no? Maybe not. Combined with falling rentals is rising unemployment. Rents for one bedrooms have dipped 10% while unemployment has risen 8.5% since last November. Still, a one bedroom at $1700 a month is not what you would call cheap; anyway the Great Recession is over, right? Not everybody thinks so. For example, the grumpy old SF Controller, who provided the figures, doesn’t expect funemployment to return anytime soon to the City.

The Small Goddess of Big Things

Please welcome Arundhati Roy (pictured above) to the Mission. A best-selling Indian novelist, activist and polemicist for the poor, she will be speaking at Mission High School tomorrow night at 7. If you’ve never heard Roy speak in person, prepare yourself for a unique and profoundly moving experience. Bright, fiery and passionate, she spares no sentiment in denouncing the corporate malefactors whose planetary rape and plunder have brought us to the brink of incalculable disaster. We hear tickets are still available. For more information go to http://www.haymarketbooks.org/2010/02/22/March-26-Arundhati-Roy-in-San-Francisco.

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I’ve been a Mission resident since 1998 and a professor emeritus at Berkeley’s J-school since 2019. I got my start in newspapers at the Albuquerque Tribune in the city where I was born and raised. Like many local news outlets, The Tribune no longer exists. I left daily newspapers after working at The New York Times for the business, foreign and city desks. Lucky for all of us, it is still here.

As an old friend once pointed out, local has long been in my bones. My Master’s Project at Columbia, later published in New York Magazine, was on New York City’s experiment in community boards.

As founder and an editor at ML, I've been trying to figure out how to make my interest in local news sustainable. If Mission Local is a model, the answer might be that you - the readers - reward steady and smart content. As a thank you for that support we work every day to make our content even better.

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