>> good morning everyone. here we are. some of you have been with us. this is our fifth building the infrastructure of america event for our country. democrats delivered today safe streets and roads for all. some of you were with us when we began this series of just a few weeks ago at the joe mazola training center where we saw apprenticeships in action, kids learning how to weld so they could repair and build water systems which were very much

apart of the infrastructure legislation, the bipartisan ininfrastructure frame work. following that, some of us were together at the transbay terminal where we all came together to solute what was happening in that legislation for transportation in the bay area. $5 billion to come right here for transit whether it's e electricfication. next, we had a town hall which was participated in by thousands of people in the bay area to talk about with garrett hoffman what was happening in the legislation to save our planet as we improve the quality of life, created jobs, lowered costs in the legislation. and, today, we have our fifth event. this one is a matter of life and death. this one is so important to us and this one takes place on a day where across america will

probably add up to about 500 events including the ones that i mentioned to come to the community, thank people for their ideas, to share with them opportunities that will be there as we build back better. this is an initiative of president joe biden. president biden has said i want to do everything i can in a bipartisan way to build the infrastructure of our country, but i will not confine my vision for the country to that and so we're working on the b.b.b., the build back better legislation as we go forward to save the planet to lower cost for health care, to prescription drugs, lower cost for child care, lower costs in every way, lower taxes for the middle class again doing so paid for by making people who are wealthy and corporate

america to pay for fair share. that's what's taking place today. so it's an honor to be in san francisco. we'll be joined by the mayor shortly. i want to thank her for all of her initiatives. oh, we are. thank you, mayor, for honoring us with your presence. and thank you for the leadership and the priority you have placed on the safety of the people of san francisco which is a very major responsibility for us. your vision 0 bold plan to end traffic fatalities by 2024 as well as your leadership just last week with the proposal to invest $400 million in muni reliability and street safety. i solute you for that and i know you join me in saluting our bay area colleagues who are here who are going to be making

their fregss. janice lee, the san francisco bicycle coalition and i know you will agree our v.i.p. today is julie nicholson who survived a terrible traffic injury on our streets here in san francisco and extraordinary courage and resilience inspires us all and she will be speaking and representing the voices of so many of those who are here, families for safe streets. thank you all for being here. for sharing your tragedies, but also giving us your courage to turn your pain into progress and help to prevent other families from suffering the agony that you have. and we even have some other survivors of crashes as well. so we'll be hearing from them; but first as i put in context,

this is a drum beat across america to make sure this happens, i'll talk to you know just a little bit before i have the privilege of yielding not only yielding, but praising our mayor once again. here's what it's about. the bay area has long seen more of its fair share of heart breaking traffic deaths. you all are here as eloquent testimony to that. while we saw 462 traffic fatalities nationally last year marked the most traffic deaths and fatalities have been shortly on the rise for a decade. they are families shattered by

the tragedy, community safe streets and roads for all. we secured $14 billion nationally for roadway safety which will help make california streets safer and friendlier. $260 million from the highway improvement program to help reduce fatalities and injuries on our roads. this will help design complete streets to design safe and accessible. but the new $5 billion safe streets for all initiatives, our city can compete for funding for vision 0 particularly for our high injury network just 13% of

roads account for 75% of severe and fatal accidents. with new funding to modernize our data collection, we'll get a clearer picture of where and how our crashes occur. and with $7.2 billion for transportation alternatives nationally, we'll improve safety of sidewalks, bike lanes, just got a tour in terms of what it means for bike lanes and trails. so i just want to for the bay area workers, rebuilding middle class as we rebuild communities. it will be transformative safe system approach and i know that's what's happening right here on folsom and second with this historic achievement, democrats are delivering for the bay area and beyond. i was now at this point supposed to be introducing

julie nicholson. instead, we're just going to hear first from our distinguished mayor and we thank her for the priority of the people of san francisco. whether it's safety on the streets. safety in terms of their health care. safety in terms of diminishing drug use. more people have died of drug use and covid here. and the mayor is taking the bull by the horns. with that fighting retail crimes and all. safety is the first responsibility of government. it's the oath we take to protect and defend whether it's the constitution or the people, our mayor has been a champion in living up to that important priority for the community, for the people, for the children, our mayor, london breed. [ applause ] [please stand by]

. . . . it was really about a demand from the people of san francisco to see change to see see change

in the particular areas. so many collisions to build for access from the east side to the west side. homes were bulldozed in my community to make what i for gary boulevard which is in essence a freeway in the middle of our city. and we have had to make some significant change and as speaker pelosi has said, 13% of the location that are the high injury network represent 75% of the collisions that occurred in the street causing major injury and death. this infrastructure bill is so important because here in san francisco we are fortunate that the people of the city care about making improvements to our

city. and last week i introduced a transportation and safety bond that will help with high injury corridors and we will aggressively continue the work. but local dollars alone are not enough, and we need help. this infrastructure bill will not only help san francisco. it will help this entire country. so that we can improve safety on the streets especially in major densities like san francisco where you have seen a significant increase in the number of people who are walking and biking and i am really proud that this city has taken steps since i have been mayor to produce 20 new miles of protected bike lanes as well as daylighting and changes.

and we prioritize safety over speed. so that we change how people move around the city. so people know exactly where they belong on the streets to get from point a to point b. madam speaker said our responsibility as leaders to keep people safe. and part of keeping people safe is making investments and sometimes the changes and removal of parking and other things make people upset or uncomfortable. at the end of the day, if it's going to save someone's life, this is a small sacrifice to make. i am grateful to be here with the extraordinary leader with walk sf and the bicycle coalition and so many advocates who have been impact by tragedy. tragedy where they lost loved ones and where sadly they have

experienced it personally hems. and my hope is that we don't continue to go down this path. that is why these investments and that work in san francisco is so important. at this time and i would like to yield the floor back to our special guest julie. thank you so much. >> thank you so much, mayor breed. and madam speaker. what an incredible honor it is to be here today. i am julie nicholson. i am a member for safe streets community and see behind me a professor of early childhood and a mother of three wonderful girls. almost two years ago january 4, 2020 i was out doing my favorite form of self-care jogging in the panhandle and kel a britting getting to the -- celebrating getting to the end of my

husband's final chemo treatment and a driver ricochetted off a car and making an illegal left turn and came into the park to hit me throwing me 20 feet and leaving me with a broken back and broken neck. took me eight months of therapy and healing. but here i am. i'm fortunate. going through that experience opened my eyes to the preventible health crisis of traffic violence. this is a preventible health crisis that is getting worse not better. it is a preventible health crisis that impacts not just me but everything with the preventible health crisis with proven solutions. i am standing up feeling so thankful, so grateful and overwhelmeded as a traffic violence survivor and i also

feel so grateful to our federal leaders for the infrastructure bill that is going to bring attention and action to bring safer streets. we have trauma all across this country from those who are being hurt by traffic violence, but i'm here to say thank you to madam speaker. and on behalf of families for safe streets and our community, i want to say thank you for the infrastructure bill, for the action you are taking to make our streets safer. it means so much to me. it means so much to all of us. >> thank you. >> and it says so much when we talk about what julie describes. and the eloquence of your statement and speaking for

families for safe streets and the tragedy they underwent and one of them said this isn't about an accident. some of this is the decision to run a red light and we have to be prepared in every possible way. and the person who knows that very well is jeffrey tumlint director of san francisco municipal transportation area. thank you so much. >> let's hear it for jeffrey for keeping san francisco moving in a way that is safe for bicycle, pedestrians, people in cars and the rest. and during the q&a he will take all the hard questions because he tells us a beautiful story about what is happening at second and fulsom with the and

as a local member of the state legislature -- so in any case, >> i hope he is not one of my constituents. >> i just really want to thank all of you for being here. i want to thank the speaker for the tenacity and vision at the last that i was able to attend. i want to thank the mayor for her vision and tenacity in a very difficult position. she is inspiring as a speaker. thank you so much for your career and vocation and your heartfelt story about your experience and to all of you as

the speaker said through experiencing and helping you save lives. and i want to thank somebody as a staff person and appreciate -- she is shaking her head. we used to serve together when i was an mtc commissioner and she was a wonderful staff person and now she is working with san francisco to make sure the projects are done. and so this is really a kwigs vigs and it is time as the mayor said and the speaker has done so with her usual tenacity and for the federal government to reengage in the trfk. and when i started in transportation and the federal government and the model was almost 75% from the federal government, 25% local and state. and here in san francisco and

the region with the eastern bay and contra costa county where we have passed super majority self-help sales tax to invest and where the state has done that and the mayor mentioned she is doing it again. now the federal government is back thanks to our leadership. this whole systems management not only will save lives but help everyone's quality of life. for every single occupancy vehicle you take off the road and put somebody on a bike or walking, it saves the environment. it is a multiplier of 10 on climate and traditional pollutants. it creates safety and reduces congestion. my constituents in the suburbs say every time we take one of us out of a car and put them on transit and bikes like comben hagan and amsterdam and mus any where 50% of the peak trips are by bike, we start to reduce congestion along with tele

commuting and this is how readdress our transportation challenges hoer in the bay area. and what happens in the bay area and what happens in california, as jimmy carter said, happens in the rest of the united states. what we're doing here today not just saves lives here, not just in the region, not just in california, but will save lives all over the united states. so thank you so much for your vision, your tenacity and heartfelt advocacy. >> thank you. they are a health issue. clean air for our children. they are a safety issue in terms of what we are talking about here today. they are a jobs issue and the jobs created to do all of this. and they are, again, ea quality of life issue by getting more cars off the roads and more people safety making their own

choices about walking and biking and here is jody who i referenced in my remarks. and from pedestrian. >> i want to take a moment to remember the people who have lost this year in san francisco to violence with a moment of sigh tense. in the past month we lost aram who moved to san francisco to be closer to his grand kids and made the city his home. he loved walking. he was walking home after working the night shift as a

security guard and was hit and killed in the bayview neighborhood. we also lost andrew zieman. andrew was a paraprofessional who works at the elementary school he attended as a child. the school kids used to call him mr. andrew. he was hit and killed outside of the school on november 10. i was only 30 years old. only one block from here where we stand, antonio was hit and killed while, like so many others, simply trying to cross the street. standing with me today as you have heard from julie and members of the san francisco bay areas for safe streets. these are people who suffered incomprehensible loss. steve, gina and joe, we are here for you today.

other survivors survived being severely injured with traffic crashes. the brave people are here to demand that the changes to the streets and mayor breed is standing with us as well as a true visionary for safe streets. it is deeply meaningful for us no n pedestrian with madam speaker as well as representative. thank you for being here. for so long they have been focused around making it easy for cars to get around. and the speed of vehicles has been the priority. but this bill does change that.

the thing that i think about is every day what if a mid sight airport fell from the sky? that is the equivalent of what we are counting in our country from countless towns and cities and people in communities are suffering from unsafe streets for facing the crisis we have in our cities. we are sending a clear message that the country's approach to traffic safety must change because crashes are preventible. it is packing it up with funding to change this and doing this

right here in san francisco. walk san francisco along with our advocates together with our city's mayor london breed and our city's agencies are pushing hard to make san francisco the beacon for other cities. we are trying to show what we can do when safety is the number one priority. and trying to cross the street is no longer a life or death situation. this infrastructure bill is focused on safety. that is incredible. this might be the first time in our city's history that federal agency is thinking about safety first. and as secretary of transportation pete buttigieg said, we cannot and should not accept these fatalities as part of walk fran and representatives for standing with us today.

thank you for taking action to fundamentally change this country's approach to traffic safety. thank you so much. >> thank you for being with us. >> i want to extend my deep gratitude to madam speaker and representative for your tireless leadership in d.c., fighting for equity for bay area residents. the infrastructure and jobs act means equity for san franciscans right here in the south of market and means equity because this infrastructure bill is going to bring much-needed investments to streets historically design to be dangerous. just take a look at where we are

right here standing. they were never designed with people biking, walking or taking transit and these were defactor highways to ket through one of the densest neighborhoods and the results were deadly. the names of bicyclists hit and killed while biking on these two treat streets won't stop until investments are made and of course, i cannot forget antonio, the 78-year-old senior who was crossing a block away from here this past april. he was hit and killed by a speeding driver just around the corner from the senior affordable housing he lived in. he was a well phone and beloved member in the filipino community. it is people like this whose lives are cut short when we don't have our funds to update our infrastructure to the modern day. this needs to stop and we need to fund shovel ready projects now to bring equitable

investments to save lives on our streets thanks to state and federal funding, we are seeing the fruits of early implementation but they will soon be overhauled with transit priority traffic signals, better lighting and safe intersections for pedestrians and a protected two-way bike lane. lastly, thank you to you, mayor breed. you mentioned we are celebrating protected bike lanes ere and to build 20 miles of protected bike lanes in two years and thanks to jeffrey tumlin and the leadership at smif smif we want to thank you for prioritizing street safety because truly our lives depend on it. thank you.

>> thank you for being with us. thank you for being with us. one of the many fine points is highways through the areas and to divide communities is equity ir, fairness, justice and is so so much a part of what he is doing to undue some past injustices of dividing neighborhoods so that this just piece of it and within the

initiatives of building back better. and with that, any questions you may have? we like to start on this subject. on this subject. >> we never give up. wrote a letter to my colleagues yesterday. saying first and foremost we will continue to pass to fight the legislation. the democratic leader wrote a similar letter to his colleagues yesterday. this will happen, must happen and we will do it as soon as we can. there are conversations that are ongoing but we cannot walk away from this commitment and build back better and transforming the society. build back bet we are women in the work place and with work

force development for younger people and newer people who are reaching in with the diversity that is there. this will not pass and i have confident that senator manchin cares about our country. we will not be deterred. anybody want to add to that? >> amen. >> but back to here, i think it will be very interesting just to hear jeffrey tell us this year some of what you told us on the tour because he made one point that was very interesting and i never thought of every day. and when you are building these kinds of changes for safety in

neighborhoods, it is much more worker centric than big machinery. >> thank you, speaker. >> as the speaker said when we work for safe streets like building protected bike ways and upgrading traffic signals and other vision zero work t creation of jobs factor is so much greater than big machinery and concrete and steel. every single dollar spent on vision zero projects goes to creating skill labor jobs and hundreds up here at the sfmta. a lot of this work we do in-house and a lot more we spend on local contractors and disadvantaged enterprises to have the money spend in a way that develops community and created more skilled jobs.

>> thank you for that enlightenment and also for your leadership. any other questions on what we are doing here today? >> thank you, all, for coming and salute the mayor because what happens in pedestrian serves as a model aross loed and what they thought would work very well, so your voices, the mayor's intercession and turn into public policy benefit not just san francisco but the entire country so thank you for being here. to all of you who suffers through any of this, thank you for your generosity of spirit to share your stories so el

quantity so that other people will not have to offer. with that, again, congratulations, mayor, on your successes here. thank you, all, very much for coming. let's build back better for the people. thank you very much.

>> after my fire in my apartment and losing everything, the red cross gave us a list of agencies in the city to reach out to and i signed up for the below-market rate program. i got my certificate and started applying and won the housing lottery. [♪♪♪] >> the current lottery program began in 2016. but there have been lot rows that have happened for affordable housing in the city for much longer than that. it was -- there was no standard practice. for non-profit organizations that were providing affordable housing with low in the city, they all did their lotteries on their own. private developers that include

in their buildings affordable units, those are the city we've been monitoring for some time since 1992. we did it with something like this. where people were given circus tickets. we game into 291st century in 2016 and started doing electronic lotteries. at the same time, we started electronic applications systems. called dalia. the lottery is completely free. you can apply two ways. you can submit a paper application, which you can download from the listing itself. if you apply online, it will take five minutes. you can make it easier creating an account. to get to dalia, you log on to housing.sfgov.org. >> i have lived in san francisco

for almost 42 years. i was born here in the hayes valley. >> i applied for the san francisco affordable housing lottery three times. >> since 2016, we've had about 265 electronic lotteries and almost 2,000 people have got their home through the lottery system. if you go into the listing, you can actually just press lottery results and you put in your lottery number and it will tell you exactly how you ranked. >> for some people, signing up for it was going to be a challenge. there is a digital divide here and especially when you are trying to help low and very low income people. so we began providing digital assistance for folks to go in and get help. >> along with the income and the

residency requirements, we also required someone who is trying to buy the home to be a first time home buyer and there's also an educational component that consists of an orientation that they need to attend, a first-time home buyer workshop and a one-on-one counseling session with the housing councilor. >> sometimes we have to go through 10 applicants before they shouldn't be discouraged if they have a low lottery number. they still might get a value for an available, affordable housing unit. >> we have a variety of lottery programs. the four that you will most often see are what we call c.o.p., the certificate of preference program, the dthp which is the displaced penance housing preference program. the neighborhood resident housing program and the live

worth preference. >> i moved in my new home february 25th and 2019. the neighborhood preference program really helped me achieve that goal and that dream was with eventually wind up staying in san francisco. >> the next steps, after finding out how well you did in the lottery and especially if you ranked really well you will be contacted by the leasing agent. you have to submit those document and income and asset qualify and you have to pass the credit and rental screening and the background and when you qualify for the unit, you can chose the unit and hopefully sign that lease. all city sponsored affordable housing comes through the system and has an electronic lottery. every week there's a listing on dalia. something that people can apply for. >> it's a bit hard to predict

how long it will take for someone to be able to move into a unit. let's say the lottery has happened. several factors go into that and mainly how many units are in the project, right. and how well you ranked and what preference bucket you were in. >> this particular building was brand new and really this is the one that i wanted out of everything i applied for. in my mind, i was like how am i going to win this? i did and when you get that notice that you won, it's like at first, it's surreal and you don't believe it and it sinks in, yeah, it happened. >> some of our buildings are pretty spectacular. they have key less entry now. they have a court yard where they play movies during the weekends, they have another master kitchen and space where people can throw parties. >> mayor breed has a plan for

over 10,000 new units between now and 2025. we will start construction on about 2,000 new units just in 2020. >> we also have a very big portfolio like over 25,000 units across the city. and life happens to people. people move. so we have a very large number of rerentals and resales of units every year. >> best thing about working for the affordable housing program is that we know that we're making a difference and we actually see that difference on a day-to-day basis. >> being back in the neighborhood i grew up in, it's a wonderful experience. >> it's a long process to get through. well worth it when you get to the other side. i could not be happier. [♪♪♪]

>> i view san francisco almost as a sibling or a parent or something. i just love the city. i love everything about it. when i'm away from it, i miss it like a person. i grew up in san francisco kind of all over the city. we had pretty much the run of the city 'cause we lived pretty close to polk street, and so we would -- in the summer, we'd all all the way down to aquatic park, and we'd walk down to the library, to the kids' center. in those days, the city was safe and nobody worried about us running around. i went to high school in spring valley. it was over the hill from

chinatown. it was kind of fun to experience being in a minority, which most white people don't get to experience that often. everything was just really within walking distance, so it make it really fun. when i was a teenager, we didn't have a lot of money. we could go to sam wong's and get super -- soup for $1. my parents came here and were drawn to the beatnik culture. they wanted to meet all of the writers who were so famous at the time, but my mother had some serious mental illness issues, and i don't think my father were really aware of that, and those didn't really become evident until i was about five, i guess, and my marriage blew up, and my mother took me all over the world. most of those ad ventures ended

up bad because they would end up hospitalized. when i was about six i guess, my mother took me to japan, and that was a very interesting trip where we went over with a boyfriend of hers, and he was working there. i remember the open sewers and gigantic frogs that lived in the sewers and things like that. mostly i remember the smells very intensely, but i loved japan. it was wonderful. toward the end. my mother had a breakdown, and that was the cycle. we would go somewhere, stay for a certain amount of months, a year, period of time, and she would inevitably have a breakdown. we always came back to san francisco which i guess came me some sense of continuity and that was what kept me sort of stable. my mother hated to fly, so she would always make us take ships places, so on this particular occasion when i was, i think, 12, we were on this ship getting ready to go through the

panama canal, and she had a breakdown on the ship. so she was put in the brig, and i was left to wander the ship until we got to fluorfluora few days later, where we had a distant -- florida a few days later, where we had a distant cousin who came and got us. i think i always knew i was a writer on some level, but i kind of stopped when i became a cop. i used to write short stories, and i thought someday i'm going to write a book about all these ad ventures that my mother took me on. when i became a cop, i found i turned off parts of my brain. i found i had to learn to conform, which was not anything i'd really been taught but felt very safe to me. i think i was drawn to police work because after coming from

such chaos, it seemed like a very organized, but stable environment. and even though things happening, it felt like putting order on chaos and that felt very safe to me. my girlfriend and i were sitting in ve 150d uvio's bar, and i looked out the window and i saw a police car, and there was a woman who looked like me driving the car. for a moment, i thought i was me. and i turned to my friend and i said, i think i'm supposed to do this. i saw myself driving in this car. as a child, we never thought of police work as a possibility for women because there weren't any until the mid70's, so i had only even begun to notice there were women doing this job. when i saw here, it seemed like this is what i was meant to do. one of my bosses as ben johnson's had been a cop, and he -- i said, i have this weird

idea that i should do this. he said, i think you'd be good. the department was forced to hire us, and because of all of the posters, and the big recruitment drive, we were under the impression that they were glad to have us, but in reality, most of the men did not want the women there. so the big challenge was constantly feeling like you had to prove yourself and feeling like if you did not do a good job, you were letting down your entire gender. finally took an inspector's test and passed that and then went down to the hall of justice and worked different investigations for the rest of my career, which was fun. i just felt sort of buried alive in all of these cases, these unsolved mysteries that there were just so many of them, and some of them, i didn't know if we'd ever be able to solve, so my boss was able to get me out of the unit. he transferred me out, and a

couple of weeks later, i found out i had breast cancer. my intuition that the job was killing me. i ended up leaving, and by then, i had 28 years or the years in, i think. the writing thing really became intense when i was going through treatment for cancer because i felt like there were so many parts that my kids didn't know. they didn't know my story, they didn't know why i had a relationship with my mother, why we had no family to speak of. it just poured out of me. i gave it to a friend who is an editor, and she said i think this would be publishable and i think people would be interested in this. i am so lucky to live here. i am so grateful to my parents who decided to move to the city. i am so grateful they did. that it neverrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

>> president walton: good afternoon. and welcome to the december 14, 2021 regular meeting of the san francisco board of supervisors. madame clerk, would you please call the roll? >> thank you, mr. president. supervisor chan? >> supervisor chan: present. >> supervisor haney: present. >> supervisor mandelman: present. >> supervisor mar: present. >> supervisor melgar: present. >> supervisor peskin: present. >> supervisor preston: present. >> supervisor ronen: present.