In a city awash in tech, the city’s planning department remains in the Middle Ages

Hello Readers:

Reading Joe’s column this morning, you do have to wonder – how did San Francisco’s planning department get so far behind in technology.

In other news:

  • The UCSF/Latino Task Force testing site at 24th Street is small but mighty.
  • The tracker
  • A man with a hat.

Stay safe,

— Lydia

Stories

Covid Tracker: 33,099 cases, 366 deaths

Average new case numbers, hospitalizations and positivity rates continued to slowly decline.

UCSF/Latino Task Force BART site appears to be the most effective testing site in San Francisco

The small testing site run by UCSF/Latino Task Force proves to be a big winner.

San Francisco stubbornly clung to 19th-century technology. That crippled it during a 21st-century pandemic.

San Francisco’s paper-and-pen-based system, in which plans are manually moved from person to person to person in a time-consumingly sequential and linear manner, is a setup that traces back to the dawn of paper and pens. 

A man with a hat

Just a snap.

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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/executive 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.