JOEL ON TECH AND INNOVATION
The tech community is an important contributor to San Francisco’s dynamic economy and culture. Tech workers are creators and artists. They are our colleagues, friends, neighbors and family members. They contribute to San Francisco’s vibrancy and diversity, continuing a long history of newcomers transforming the city for the better.
We must ensure City Hall embraces innovation and is free from corruption.
The definition of progress is forward movement and continuous improvement. We won’t solve San Francisco's challenges by being stagnant, looking backward or shouting at history to stop happening.
Creating our best San Francisco will take innovation. We need to embrace the future, embrace change and manage it with common sense solutions.
It’s an honor to be given the opportunity to lead the next steps as a newly elected city supervisor. How we won.
Do you still believe in San Francisco? I do. I’m running for supervisor to create our best San Francisco.
When we’re forced to work and attend school from our kitchen tables, a shaky internet connection at home is as frustrating as driving down a bumpy road. City Hall is supposed to fill potholes. Perhaps it’s time to add fiber infrastructure to the list of essential municipal services. Fiber in every home would benefit everyone and give our local economy a boost in a post-pandemic world.
A radical change in our attitude toward business is needed if we want local merchants to survive beyond coronavirus — and keep our city from spiraling into irrelevance. Small businesses were going extinct in San Francisco long before the pandemic turned everything upside down. City Hall’s excessive fees, regulations and bureaucracy are to blame.
Hundreds of San Franciscans signed our petition asking Stonestown Mall to offer its parking lot as a coronavirus testing site. Their voices were heard and we’re continuing the petition to advocate for even more expanded testing.
If presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg can pick a running mate as well as a husband, America will be in good hands. It’s just one of many impressions from my lucky dinner with Pete and Chasten Buttigieg.
If a defendant is re-arrested awaiting a court appearance, the sheriff needs to know. Yet she often doesn’t because San Francisco lacks a fully interconnected criminal justice database that shares information in real time. After 20 years and tens of millions spent, will City Hall ever get it to work?
Two generations of Iranian-Americans never gave up on the American dream even when they weren’t always welcome. Nima’s parents accepted discrimination as a cost for being here. But in the age of Trump, Nima isn’t buying it. How the young lawyer keeps fighting despite defeat.
African Americans arrested for being in a Starbucks and the Supreme Court deciding if businesses can deny LGBTQ customers. Today’s news reminds Angelic Williams of The Green Book that helped her grandparents travel safely in Jim Crow America. So she created an app that tells LGBTQ people of color where they’re welcome.
How did a lifeline for LGBT persecution in the Middle East start on the Google bus to Silicon Valley? Meet Kevin Steen, who wouldn’t let 7,500 miles get in the way of helping his Jordanian friend. “Mohammad’s dad threatened to shoot him,” Kevin said. “It was an honor crime waiting to happen.”
Iris Bonilla, 20, feels the pressure of being the only Latina in the room — in her college computer classes and at her tech company internship. But don’t call her a unicorn. Hard work, not magic, has gotten her this far. There’s a very real program that academically pushes and supports underserved public school students like Iris to get into and survive college. “Having to represent an entire community is a lot to put on one pair of shoulders,” Iris said. “It’s been nerve-wracking to prove that I can do it. But I think that I have so far.”
No one ever expected a tech revolution on San Francisco’s quiet and once-analog Westside. But at 17, Natalie Lunbeck is one of the young women in West Portal helping close the digital divide: “It feels good to show girls that a computer scientist can look like them, and not just a 30-year-old man.”
Your next Lyft driver might be Cheol Ryu. Former child slave, North Korean refugee, Goo Goo Dolls fan. His favorite lyric: “When everything’s meant to be broken, I just want you to know who I am.” Meet Cheol. See the people behind our apps and be inspired by their stories.
Shrugs abound when asking people on the street what they know about the Office of Assessor-Recorder at City Hall. Yet Carmen Chu is poised to become the most famous and celebrated assessor-recorder in San Francisco history — by helping us survive the financial retribution of President Trump.
Armistead Maupin's "Tales of the City" celebrates baby boomers in the 1970s — when they could move to San Francisco as young people and re-imagine it. But what are the tales of our city today and who will write them? A new publication, The Bay City Beacon, promises to report the remaking of San Francisco by the millennial generation.
By Joel P. Engardio -- Baby boomers changed everything because they were never content with the old rules of sex -- or career, or parenting or retirement. Now senior citizens, they are beginning to face a final taboo harder to break than sex ever was. Death has a lot of room for improvement.
By Joel P. Engardio -- When it comes to things that evoke absolute feelings of love or hate, Airbnb is in the same league as Donald Trump, LeBron James and cilantro. In San Francisco, forces against Airbnb clash with those who swear by the polarizing innovation. There is a solution, but not everyone will like it.
By Joel P. Engardio -- It’s easy to forget that hippies and gays were originally despised as invaders and displacers when they first arrived in San Francisco. Does this mean a time will come when tech workers are celebrated in The City’s folklore?
By Joel P. Engardio -- For a nation that prides itself on democracy, we sure make voting inconvenient and confusing. But what if there was a promise of voting nirvana on the other side of the madness?
By Joel P. Engardio -- Tech bros get a lot of bad press for self-absorbed and jerky behavior. How did they become our best hope against the superbugs that threaten to kill 10 million people a year?
Joel Engardio speech on why moderates are the true progressives in San Francisco. Engardio was the guest speaker at the Golden Gate Breakfast Club in August 2014.
By Joel P. Engardio -- Consider how Detroit went from being the nation’s most innovative boomtown a century ago – much like San Francisco and Silicon Valley today – to the bankrupt, abandoned shell of itself now. And what cautionary tales we can learn.
By Joel P. Engardio -- The short walk from Twitter's headquarters to Assessor-Recorder Carmen Chu's office might as well be light years. Consider the 204,562 paper files that represent San Francisco's 204,562 properties. Keeping track of that many physical files means Chu never knows if the day will end in comedy, frustration or disaster.
By Joel P. Engardio -- There must be others like me in San Francisco who embrace liberal values but also crave a city that runs on common sense. Forward-thinkers who believe in progress and aren’t afraid of change. True progressives.
By Joel P. Engardio -- There isn’t a millennial or hoodie in sight at GemShare. The app is great, but what really stands out is that most employees of the startup are over 40 and women lead them.
By Joel P. Engardio -- What if a startup helped single moms find social services as easily as you pick a restaurant on Yelp? Rey Faustino is building an app to prove that San Francisco’s tech boom doesn’t just benefit the rich. "If Yelp was anything like the websites that poor people rely on for assistance, everyone would be up in arms about the crappy service,” he said.
By Joel P. Engardio -- Supervisor Katy Tang's approach to San Francisco's housing crisis is very different from her colleagues who are focused on stricter tenant protections without addressing the underlying supply problem. "I don't need to introduce quick-fix legislation five times a week," she said. "I'm trying to offer a different solution that addresses root causes."
By Joel P. Engardio -- We have a reactionary housing policy that plays whack-a-mole every time rent control creates another market distortion. Our gut always says, “Tighten rent control!” Perhaps it’s time to try a counterintuitive solution, like steering into the skid to avert a crash.
By Joel P. Engardio -- Based on the venture capital dollars flowing into San Francisco, we’re already being called the “new” Silicon Valley. But we deserve a unique name. Welcome to the Cloud Corridor.