Staff picks: Mission Local’s favorite Mission Local stories of 2023

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Sandra Salmans, editor

I’d nominate the coverage of the killing of Banko Brown and the aftermath — the contested video, the righteous anger and many demonstrations, the absurdity and pathos of a security guard, who himself used to shoplift snacks and has a record, killing someone for that offense. And then subsequent rethinking about the wisdom of security guards carrying guns. Good pieces by Eleni Balakrishnan, Joe Eskenazi, Will Jarrett and Griffin Jones.

Sara Miles, newsletter 

The Potrero Hill projects have long been some of the city’s most segregated and derelict public housing. But they sit on some of the most valuable land in San Francisco, with spectacular views; a planned rebuild of the deteriorating barracks will add market-rate units. 

Mission Local reporter Christina MacIntosh, with Eleni Balakrishnan and Annika Hom, talked with longtime tenants, and those who had been pushed out by the rebuild or worsening conditions. They stuck with the story after a fire started by squatters ripped through boarded-up apartments, killing one person and displacing more. Their reporting uncovered the cynicism of the Housing Authority, the failures of BRIDGE housing, the dereliction of the Eugene Burger management company, and the lack of city accountability that make the projects so dangerous for remaining residents.

Heartbreaking and important.

Joe Eskenazi’s ongoing coverage of San Francisco city corruption is, unfortunately, a major theme of 2023. The multiple rackets in and around the Department of Building Inspection, the appointment of an inexperienced and very well-paid crony to run the War Memorial — the hits, alas, just kept coming. (Will Jarrett’s lucid companion piece, the Web of Corruption, has kept pace with the sleaze.)

And where city officials have been just inept or irresponsible — the continuing payroll debacle at SFUSD, police staffing and response times, the looming budget crisis, the about-face on safe consumption sites, and so much more — it’s been essential to have Eskenazi keeping an eye on things. Strange and terrible sagas, indeed, but always elegantly explained.

Eskenazi’s work breaking the story and deconstructing the narrative on the murder of Bob Lee got the headlines, but his furious, brilliant take on the city’s response to a judge’s ruling on homelessness went deep.

Yes, Will Jarrett’s the genius behind the Web of Corruption, a damning report on costly law enforcement settlements, and so many other data projects. He did a deep dive into the budget, and patiently followed the bad behavior at Parcel 36 — but he’s also responsible for one of my very favorite pieces, with archivist Vince Woo. “Hidden history of BART revealed” uses rediscovered copies of BARTalk, the workers’ internal newsletter from 1981 to 2003. The dispatches come, the story says, “from this parallel universe where BART is taken as a common good.” It’s also a world where a car full of clowns and a visiting tiger named Gandhi could ride the trains.

Finally, I loved Mark Rabine’s scenes from humanity piece, about a cake served on the 22 Fillmore. Short, sweet, and surprising: A perfect San Francisco story. I also love SNAPS, especially Walter Mackins‘ photos.

Annika Hom, reporter

I can’t lie: While the reporting skills of my colleagues are noteworthy, beautiful prose is what gets my heart pumping. Obviously, Yujie Zhou’s Mission Cliffs techie story is a superb example in that category, as was Joe Eskenazi’s funny and reverent farewell to Ben Rosenfield (the sofa metaphor? Unmatched!) 

Griffin Jones captured every person she wrote about with so much empathy. I loved her community-centered profiles specifically, including the one about John O’Connell High School seniors. Kelly Waldron’s hot-dog vendors feature and Eleni Balakrishnan’s profile on Paula Canny were also wild, wonderfully written rides. 

Eleni Balakrishnan, reporter 

Joe Eskenazi’s column about Banko Brown’s killing was disturbing and poignant, highlighting both the untimely end of Brown’s life and the unfortunate circumstances of his killer’s, and the dystopian roles our society cast the two marginalized men in. 

Annika Hom and Griffin Jones did lots of reporting, and Will Jarrett created a map of the places to find fentanyl test strips and Narcan in the neighborhood — although time-consuming and not always flashy, this kind of reporting is so very important and can save lives. 

I also loved Yujie Zhou’s story on the overnight line outside the Chinese consulate. It was such a unique and fun story, and a peek into a world I might never have known existed.  

Yujie Zhou, reporter

Few news stories have such an immediate impact as Annika Hom’s coverage of City College of San Francisco’s heating issues — students had to jump from “one icebox to another” in unheated classrooms. Five days after Hom’s story, City College’s board called an emergency meeting and fixed some of its heat before this winter.

If you have more time during the holiday season, check out Eleni Balakrishnan’s profile of Police Commission vice president Max Carter-Oberstone, and Will Jarrett’s amazing interactive map of the thousands of properties around San Francisco that four notorious former Department of Building Inspection employees worked on.

Will Jarrett, data reporter

What a year! Of course, it is totally impossible to pick just a few standouts from 2023 — but, alas, that is precisely what the format demands. Therefore, behold:

Joe Rivano Barros’ coverage of the purported riot at the Dolores Street Hill Bomb is definitely a favorite. Officers arrested some 117 people, including 83 juveniles, and Mission Local had a first-hand account of the whole event because Rivano Barros stayed out until 4 a.m., talking to skaters, parents, and the police. He followed up with a half-dozen more stories, covering overtime costs, cases getting dropped, and a burgeoning civil rights lawsuit. Now that’s dedication.

I really enjoyed Beth Winegarner’s piece on parking meter vandalism. It’s a subject I never would have thought to write about, but it was packed with wild stats — like how the meters brought in $51 million in 2022, and how almost 10,000 needed repairs after vandalism.

Finally, I have appreciated Eleni Balakrishnan’s detailed and ongoing coverage of the Valencia bike lane drama. She found lots of fresh angles to the story, and helped clarify a confusing and contentious subject.

Xueer Lu, data reporter

Even though I just joined the Mission Local family this September as a data fellow, I’m ever so inspired by the quality, volume, and depth of craft produced by such a compact team that I’m now proud to be a part of. Naturally, like everyone else, it’s hard to pick favorites, but here are some that really stuck out to me.

Our reporters brought fresh, fun, but also thought-provoking perspectives to APEC in November: Junyao Yang’s observation on the Chinese media coverage of APEC; Joe Eskenazi’s write your own Doom Loop story generator, with the playful web app by Will Jarrett; and Annika Hom walked for hours with protesters to document how demonstrators greeted the Chinese President in San Francisco.

I appreciate Annika’s in-depth reporting on newcomers in San Francisco. She looked into the complexity of the phenomenon the city is witnessing and portrayed, with care, the life of an influx of immigrant children from Latin America: their struggles with shelter, language barriers, nutrition and mental health.

As a data journalist, I have been following Will Jarrett’s work even before I joined Mission Local. I love his breakdown on San Francisco’s 2023-2025 budget, an explanatory project using interactive charts and scrolly. 

Lastly, shoutout to our contributing SNAPS photographers, whose amazing photos captured glimpses of the Mission!

Junyao Yang, data reporter

Having seen hot-dog vendors near the Ferry Building, at Fisherman’s Wharf and on the streets in the Mission, I’ve always been curious what their deal is: How much money are they making? Do they know each other? Who are they working for? Kelly Waldron answered my questions in this story, while Joe Eskenazi and Waldron’s column explains the story behind the city’s efforts to target hot-dog vendors.  

I met some students who were just coming to the United States at a student listening session, who told me about the lack of Spanish-speaking tutors at their schools. I appreciated Annika Hom’s feature on newcomer students in the San Francisco Unified School District, and the challenges they face every day in their new country. 

Finally, I really enjoyed reading Yujie Zhou’s story on Mission Cliffs, a climbing gym in the Mission, where techies “build friendships as well as muscles.” She explains why heading to the climbing gym appeals to tech workers in the neighborhood, and how tech ethics transplants to the gym. 

Beth Winegarner, copy editor

Our reporters really held driverless car companies’ feet to the fire this year, including Will Jarrett and Joe Eskenazi’s tally of autonomous vehicles that interfered with emergency scenes, reports of firefighters shouting at the cars as though they were misbehaving dogs, the crashes that led the DMV to halve Cruise’s fleet in San Francisco and, finally, the horrific incident in which a Cruise car dragged a pedestrian 20 feet. I’m relieved this reporting contributed to unsafe vehicles being taken off the road for more testing. 

As someone who covered Bay Area public schools for years, including the San Francisco Unified School District, I was on the edge of my seat while reading our coverage, like this piece by Joe Rivano Barros, of teachers’ plans to strike. In the end, I’m glad the strike was averted, and the teachers won better contracts. 

Joe Rivano Barros, senior editor 

I like hard news best, so while we had a considerable number of well-written pieces — Yujie Zhou’s piece on the techie climbers at Mission Cliffs comes to mind, as well as Annika Hom’s dive into the lives of day laborers — the ones that stick with me most are the stories of crimes and misdemeanors: The breaking news story of Bob Lee’s murder suspect, Nima Momeni, being arrested in the wee hours, written by Joe Eskenazi — this piece proved, once again, how Mission Local punches far, far above its weight (and which has done gangbusters on our readership this year, too).

Then, there’s the follow-up: The profile of Momeni by Eleni Balakrishnan that detailed, at a time when most of the media was focused on allegations made regarding Bob Lee’s character, how Momeni had a history of drugs, ghost guns and accusations of rough treatment by former girlfriends and sex workers. It came together in days, with the Wall Street Journal nipping at Eleni’s heels, and involved a breadth of reporting resources. 

Will’s long series on San Francisco police and deputy sheriffs’ settlements: A true public service, making dozens of settlements public, and detailing the total costs of law enforcement wrongdoing, both financial ($70 million over 13 years) and personal. It’s a world-class data project, like those done by much larger and better-resourced national publications. 

Annika’s piece on Javier Campos, the suspect in the Mission District mass shooting, who was charged and arraigned this month, contextualized Campos’ actions — showing how he had lost family members to gun violence and had a long history with the criminal justice system — and it revealed that Campos had seemingly bragged about the crime online days after the shooting. Not easy, but quick and important work. 

Finally, we are not stenographers, and some of our most important pieces involve talking to experts and getting their views: Those who say we are unlikely to arrest our way out of the doom loop (by Griffin Jones and Balakrishnan), and those who corrected misinformed criticisms of the Police Commission (by Balakrishnan, who did a lot of the correcting herself, too).  

Joe Eskenazi, managing editor

Chronologically, I am one of the last Mission Local staffers to offer his or her $0.02 for this roundup. One reason for this is simply logistics: It’s hard to get back up, read a year’s worth of articles, and try to be pithy after you’ve fallen asleep on your kids’ floor while putting them to bed. 

But part of it is by design. I can be a bit like the little man with the broom you see at the bottom of every Mission Local article — and ensure we miss nothing. 

I’ve written it in the past, but when you sit down and peruse a year’s worth of coverage, it really sticks out that, hey, we’re doing all right. There were so many good articles this year, and I have so many talented colleagues. 

I’ve written this in the past, too: We are lucky to have Naomi Beth Marcus writing profiles for us of the Mission’s random denizens: Clowns, swim-class instructors, eyeglass technicians. They’re all surprisingly deep, and so well-written. 

Many of my favorite stories this year were bittersweet: I was glad we got to read them, but sorry we had to read what we read. Take Lingzi Chen’s valediction for a cobbler forced to abandon his business, or Eleni Balakrishnan’s farewell to David Inocencio, a giant in the field of youth justice, gone too soon at 59.

I don’t think the general public understands how much better Mission Local is because of Will Jarrett — whether it’s the maps and charts he can whip out astonishingly quickly for breaking stories that add so much clarity, or the exhaustive compendiums and interactives he creates that will go on to serve as a perpetual reference for anyone who wants to know about how this city really works. This was a big year for Jarrett, and next year will be bigger. Onward.

A few more quick favorites before I go back to sleep on my kids’ floor: I really loved Annika Hom’s slice-of-life about Newkirk’s, the sandwich shop preferred by General Hospital emergency physicians (if ever you have a heart attack in a San Francisco restaurant, be sure to do it there); Yujie Zhou’s night out “coning” driverless cars; and Benjamin Wachs’ requiem for Uptown, the bar Scott Ellsworth breathed life into — but it couldn’t live forever and neither could he.   

Finally, I must say I certainly enjoyed the photography on our story about Smitten Ice Creamery re-opening after being ransacked and vandalized. Hey, a man can kvell.

That’s my time. Good night and good luck. 

Lydia Chávez, executive editor

What strikes me, looking back at the year, is the gift of having years of years of coverage to fall back on. The archive inevitably adds depth and nuance to the present. When Yaeko Yamashita, the owner of the beloved store Laku, announced this month that she was closing, Junyao Yang wrote a lovely story about the 70-year-old. But she could draw on earlier pieces, and we could also include videos that captured Yamashita  in 2014, when she was 59, and in 2012, when she was 57.  

And when Annika Hom worked for several days to piece together a profile of Javier Campos, who will go on trial in January for allegedly shooting into a crowd of young revelers and injuring nine, she was able to reach into our archive — and the archive of Richmond Confidential, which was a Berkeley J-school project at the same time as Mission Local, to find the traumas that shaped his young life. 

And I very much appreciated — and find enormously useful — two data tools designed by Will Jarrett: Explore your neighborhood data, and see how your neighborhood voted. Spend some time playing around with these, and you will learn some surprising things about different parts of the city.