School District Moves Slowly to Manage Its Real Estate - NY Times

1101 Connecticut St

Jennifer Gollan at the Bay Citizen writes,

Despite being one of the largest financially struggling landowners in the city, the San Francisco Unified School District has largely failed to actively manage its holdings, leaving a number of valuable properties idle for years.

Decades of declining enrollment led the district to acknowledge in 2007 that roughly 20 percent of its holdings had little or no educational use. It also designated 10 vacant or underused properties as surplus and concluded that selling them would net an estimated $134 million, plus millions more in property tax revenue.

Read more at NY Times/Bay Citizen 

Read the 2009 SFUSD Evaluation of Potential Surplus Sites

For Local Hiring Law to Succeed, Plenty of Cooperation Is Required - NYT

Jonathan Weber writes for the New York Times,

With the city planning to directly spend about $10 billion on public works over the next decade, there is a baseline logic in trying to use that spending to help those who have been hurt most by the recession.

But the local-hiring mandate will work only if everyone — the city, the unions, the contractors and the aspiring workers — gets behind the idea of using construction projects as a tool of social policy. Ideally, hundreds of low-income San Franciscans will get stable, middle-class jobs in the construction trades. But safety-valve provisions in the legislation could invite mischief, and leave city taxpayers with higher bills and not much more.

Read more at The New York Times