Tenant advocates are concerned about the financial impact of a proposal to require owners of earthquake-vulnerable buildings to make safety upgrades. For more than a decade, The City has struggled with how to get owners of what are known as “soft-story buildings” to upgrade them to withstand a major earthquake, but costs and the debate over who has to pay for fixes have long hampered the effort. Read More

Engineers studying the 8 Washington St. project have raised concerns about how construction along the proposed waterfront development could adversely affect a sewer line that carries a quarter of The City’s wastewater. Yet despite such objections, which were raised by project opponents during Tuesday’s meeting of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, that body voted to deal with such concerns at some point in the future, since the project is still in the approval process. Read More

A housing development approved Thursday for the west side of Mount Sutro will feature 34 units in 12 two-unit and 10 one-unit buildings. It also will create a new road to access the development, 68 parking spaces and a water-catching system to prevent the hillside from getting saturated and potentially creating landslides, according to development plans. Read More

New hospitals will grace both Cathedral Hill and the Mission district after a lengthy and contentious development squabble between city leaders and California Pacific Medical Center officials ended in a tentative compromise announced Tuesday. CPMC had once sought to tear down the vacant Cathedral Hill Hotel and replace it with a 555-bed hospital nearly twice the size of San Francisco General Hospital. St. Luke’s Hospital in the Mission district, which primarily serves low-income people, would have been reduced in size and could have been shut down. Read More