Good Morning, San Francisco

Light rain, 58 degrees, and the kind of gray that makes you want a second coffee before you face the day — high of 61, so don't expect the sun to bail you out. Meanwhile, 300 furious residents in Pittsburg just reminded the rest of the Bay what democracy is supposed to look like — and what city government does when nobody's watching.

Pittsburg Approved a 96-Megawatt Data Center in Secret. Now It's Paying the Price.

Here's the story that should make every East Bay homeowner sit up straight. Back in 2024, Pittsburg's city government quietly greenlit a three-story, 300,000-square-foot data center capable of drawing up to 96 megawatts — enough power to run a small city — without telling the people who'd be living next to it. Two years later, those people found out. And on Monday, more than 300 of them packed City Hall to ask the obvious question: how does a project this big get approved with this little public input?

The answer, predictably, was a non-answer. Mayor Dionne Adams listened for two and a half hours, then offered a vague promise to "follow up." No timeline. No moratorium. No oversight committee. Just the bureaucratic equivalent of a shrug. The organizers had done everything right — 13,000 Change.org signatures gathered in a single week, a packed chamber, specific and reasonable demands. They left with nothing.

This is the part where we're supposed to pretend it's complicated. It isn't. We're broadly pro-development around here — the Bay needs more of basically everything, and AI infrastructure has to live somewhere. But "build it" and "build it in secret and tell the neighbors after the ink dries" are not the same proposition. A 96-megawatt facility has real consequences for the grid, for water, for noise, for the people whose property values and quality of life were never part of the conversation. When government skips the conversation, it doesn't make the opposition go away — it just guarantees the opposition shows up later, angrier, and right.

Pittsburg's council has a choice now. It can treat Monday's crowd as a problem to be managed with soothing language, or it can recognize that a process this broken needs daylight. The residents aren't asking for the moon — they want a moratorium and a citizens' oversight committee. That's not radical. That's what should have happened in 2024.

The Rundown

City Hall & Politics

The CSU staff union — 36,000 strong — rallied outside SF State on Tuesday and floated a strike that's never happened in the union's history. Their contract expires at the end of June, and student assistants are bargaining a first-ever deal of their own. Both sides are stuck on wages and job security, and a system-wide walkout across 22 campuses would land squarely on students. Here's hoping the adults in the room find a number before finals season turns into picket season.

Public Safety

The good news is genuinely good: San Francisco logged its two lowest months for overdose deaths on record in April and May, with May's toll of 35 down 40 percent year-over-year. Progress is real and worth celebrating. The catch — and it's a serious one — is a wave of counterfeit pills laced with synthetic opioids reportedly ten times more potent than fentanyl, marketed straight to teenagers on social media. Disguised as Xanax or oxy, they could undo the gains fast. Parents, this is the one to read twice.

An Oakland man, Quaylin Tyrell Wesley, was arraigned Wednesday on eight felonies after allegedly assaulting an 11-year-old in a UC Berkeley dorm while working as a summer camp counselor. The infuriating wrinkle: the university confirmed the camp was run by an outside group but flatly refuses to name it, telling worried parents only that the program has "concluded." That's not privacy — that's a public institution choosing its own liability over the families who trusted it with their kids. Name the camp.

Comedian Ahmed Ahmed is suing San Mateo County and its disgraced former sheriff Christina Corpus — the first sheriff ever removed from office in California — alleging deputies beat, stripped, hooded and strapped him to a chair for hours after a booking last September. It's the latest in a string of Bay Area jail-abuse suits, and a reminder that "accountability" can't stop at removing one official. And in South Berkeley, homicide detectives are hunting for whoever shot a woman in the face near Ashby BART late Sunday. She's stabilized; the shooter's still out there.

Three years after SF police arrested 117 people — mostly kids — at the Dolores Hill Bomb, the city wants a judge to toss the civil rights case before a jury ever hears it. The plaintiffs' lawyers say every fact is disputed. When you sweep up 117 people in one night, you don't get to quietly summary-judgment your way out of explaining why.

Tech & Startups

Four days after the biggest IPO in history, SpaceX is buying Cursor-maker Anysphere for $60 billion — entirely in stock that's already up 56 percent since the debut. No cash out the door, just freshly-minted paper buying one of San Francisco's hottest AI startups. It's a dazzling bit of financial engineering, and a sign that the AI arms race is now being fought with monopoly money that happens to be worth real billions. Watch this one close.

Housing & Transit

Credit where it's due: Bay Area transit aced its World Cup debut, moving 37,642 fans to and from Levi's Stadium and clearing packed platforms in under 90 minutes — and they did it while charging full fare, unlike host cities that gave rides away. Months of VTA-BART-Caltrain coordination actually paid off. More proof that competent execution beats free stuff every time. Five more matches to go.

Less encouraging: Parkmerced, SF's largest housing complex, has been under a court-appointed receiver since its owner defaulted on $1.8 billion in debt. The 5,600 new homes the city approved back in 2011 are now buried in legal limbo, and 3,000 current households are along for the ride. A cautionary tale about betting a neighborhood's future on one overleveraged dealmaker's pitch deck.

Culture & Food

The Omakase Restaurant Group opened a 50,000-square-foot food hall in South SF — six concepts, a 100-seat bar, and a golf simulator — open weekdays only, because the entire clientele is biotech workers at the Gateway of Pacific campus. Eight months from LLC to opening day; say what you want, that's hustle. And in the Mission, Bar Brucato closes Saturday after 14 months above the distillery that bears its name. No lease fight, no scandal — the owners just chose to walk away on their own terms before the math turned. A rare and honest exit in a brutal restaurant economy.

One More Thing

Over at UC Berkeley, a program quietly diverts 200,000 pounds of abandoned student furniture every May before it can become curbside couch-art — proof that the answer to a mess is usually a little structure, not a lot of speeches. Somebody send Pittsburg the memo.