Good Morning, San Francisco

Clear skies and a crisp 57 degrees this morning — the kind of June day that reminds you why the fog gets all the headlines but the sun does all the work. Layer up, it tops out at 59. And speaking of work that gets done despite the conditions: today's the day we talk about the sixty-three people who hauled eight tons of garbage out of a ditch the city couldn't be bothered to reach.

Sixty-Three Volunteers Did in Three Hours What Oakland Hasn't Done in Five Years

Here's the story that should make every taxpayer in the East Bay sit up. On Sunday, sixty-three volunteers with the Urban Compassion Project pulled 16,000 pounds of illegally dumped material — couches, furniture, bags of who-knows-what — out of a steep-sided stretch of the Lake Merritt channel. By hand. Up inclines. In the heat. The kicker: this is a corner the city says it cannot physically access on its own, and by the group's account, it hadn't been cleaned in five years.

Read that again. Five years. A drainage channel feeding one of Oakland's signature public spaces, left to rot because it sat in a bureaucratic blind spot. And the moment private citizens did the hard part — the actual hauling — Oakland managed to collect the staged debris within 24 hours. Funny how the city found the capacity once the work was already done and stacked neatly at the curb.

I want to be fair here, because the 24-hour pickup is genuinely the system working as it should: residents flag a problem, do what they can, and government handles the last mile. That's a healthy partnership. But it also exposes the uncomfortable truth underneath. We are not short on money for sanitation, cleanup contracts, or public-works headcount. What we're short on is the will to deploy any of it proactively, before a nonprofit organizes a volunteer army on a Sunday and shames the result onto Reddit.

The lesson isn't "volunteers are great," though they are. It's that civic muscle still exists in this region, and it consistently moves faster, cheaper, and with more heart than the agencies we fund to do exactly this. If Oakland wants to earn back trust, it could start by figuring out how to reach that channel before year six — or by cutting the groups already doing the job a check and getting out of their way.

The Rundown

Sports & Spending

The A's spent six June days playing "home" games in Las Vegas — a promotional preview of the $2 billion future they abandoned Oakland to chase. On Sunday the preview ended with the Rockies hanging 23 runs on them, the most Colorado has ever scored, in a 10,000-seat minor-league park baking at 101 degrees. The promised land, it turns out, looks exactly like what it is: a Triple-A field with a big-league scoreboard nobody could stop running up. When a franchise torches its history for a stadium boondoggle, the least the universe can do is offer a metaphor this clean.

As for tonight's Pirates–A's matchup, don't believe the "road skid" hype on the wire — Pittsburgh snapped its losing streak days ago, and Skenes isn't pitching. Two deeply ordinary teams, one coin-flip game. If you're betting, the plus-money side on the Pirates is the only edge worth a dollar here.

Housing & Business

H Mart on Alemany is about to get 55 percent bigger, converting the old 24 Hour Fitness bay in the Ocean View neighborhood into a housewares wing and growing from 48,266 to nearly 74,775 square feet. The grand-opening party hits June 19. This is what private investment looks like when a company actually believes in a neighborhood — two years after buying the whole shopping center for $37 million, they're doubling down on a corner of SF that doesn't get many ribbon-cuttings. No subsidy, no task force, no five-year plan. Just a business expanding because customers showed up.

Culture & Food

After nearly three months dark, New Lun Ting — the Chinatown diner regulars call the Pork Chop House — held a soft reopening Saturday with a lion dance from the Jing Mo Athletic Association, with a full reopening Monday. The closure wasn't a permit fight or a rent spiral; it was a tragedy, a vehicle that crashed into the storefront in late March and killed a man delivering carpet. That a 1987-vintage family spot clawed its way back through months of structural repair is the kind of grit Chinatown has always run on. Go order the pork chop.

And a tip of the hat to Carl Nolte, the Chronicle's "Native Son," who retired Friday at 92 — exactly 65 years to the day after his first shift in 1961. A fourth-generation San Franciscan from Potrero Hill who covered this city's streets and waterfront longer than most of us have been alive. You don't have to share every opinion a columnist ever filed to recognize a genuine institution walking out the door. They don't make careers — or San Franciscans — like that anymore.

Across the Bay

If you've got one weekend night for Oakland, Telegraph Avenue is making the call easy. Guttermouth headlines a five-act all-ages punk bill at Crybaby on Saturday (doors 5:30, tickets around $30); Holy Locust brings acoustic folk-punk to Thee Stork Club on Sunday for ten bucks. Two shows, one mile apart, real local bands filling out the cards. This is the small-venue ecosystem that keeps Bay Area music alive — support it before another one becomes condos.

One More Thing

Sixty-three volunteers moved eight tons of trash in three hours on a Sunday, and the city's heaviest lift was sending a truck the next day — proof that in the Bay, the most reliable public service is still your neighbors.