San Francisco Public Press (https://www.sfpublicpress.org/author/kevin-stark/page/2/)
Kevin Stark is a journalist living in San Francisco. Before joining KQED radio in spring 2019, he worked for the Public Press for 10 years, having covered local politics, labor, health care and the environment.
Officials offer explanations for 18-month delay in releasing city-funded study that foresees serious climate-related flooding in Mission Bay in the decades ahead. The release followed a public-records request by the Public Press.
The vision of a future San Francisco buttressed by dikes, levees and seawalls over coming decades is being overshadowed by an increasingly accepted alternative: moving away from the waterfront. Some experts argue that physical barriers offer only the illusion of protection and that cities should accept that some neighborhoods will need to be abandoned.
Gov. Jerry Brown on Wednesday rallied scientists fearful that decades of crucial climate data could disappear after President-elect Donald Trump takes control of the federal government.
If passed, Measure AA would help protect coastal real estate from sea level rise by funding wetland restoration. Beneficiaries could include major developers and tech companies in Silicon Valley.
Google, Facebook and others are building headquarters along the shoreline as scientists paint a grimmer picture for coastal development.
Voters approved the Giants’ $1.6 billion waterfront development, but environmental questions linger about whether Mission Rock could be occasionally or permanently submerged as bay waters rise by many feet before the end of the 21st century.
Builders plan to invest more than $21 billion in offices and homes in flood-prone areas, where waters could climb 8 feet above today’s high tide by the end of this century. Land-use records reveal that the building boom, fueled by a white-hot tech economy, is moving too fast for regulators to keep pace. (Cover story from the summer 2015 print edition)
Sea level rise of 8 feet is an unlikely but worrisome possibility. Many objections to preparing aggressively for sea level rise center on the uncertainty in projections about how quickly global warming will cause the oceans to expand. But the science is increasingly clear.
New projections reveal that a major proposed housing and retail project could be underwater by the year 2100.
As statistics go from tick marks to laptops, police struggle to make sense of trends
The San Francisco Police Department cannot precisely measure the number of domestic violence cases it handled before 2011, because investigators in the Special Victims Unit hand-tallied monthly records, and used changing and inconsistently understood categories of crimes. This story appeared as part of a special report on domestic violence in the Fall 2012 print edition of the San Francisco Public Press.
