Here’s one vote Trump won in SF: He’s the year’s biggest story
December 31, 2016 Updated: December 31, 2016 7:00am
The biggest story of 2016 in the Bay Area was also the biggest story in the world.
At the start of the year, Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy was something of an oddity — the New York businessman and onetime reality TV show host was having a nice little run in the GOP polls, but he also had huge negative ratings that seemed certain to doom him well before the primary campaign reached California. In early January, a Field Poll found that Trump had slipped behind Texas Sen. Ted Cruz among the state’s likely Republican voters.
A little more than 10 months later, thousands of people who had assumed — or hoped — that Trump would never be elected president found themselves in the streets of Oakland, San Francisco and other California cities, reacting with anger to the biggest news of 2016.
It was all enough to propel Trump to the top of the list of the year’s 10 most significant local stories, as selected by Chronicle reporters and editors. The real estate mogul’s election wasn’t local news, strictly speaking, but the shock waves that rolled west from Trump Tower shook the Bay Area harder than any other story in 2016.
Hard was a fairly reflective word for the year in general. Every year spent above ground, so the saying goes, is a good year. But some good years are better than others, and plenty of folks are dubious about the goodness of the year that’s coming to a close.
Also on the list of top stories was the decision by California voters to make recreational cannabis legal, a decree that no doubt came as welcome relief to some stunned Democrats in need of solace.
Many of 2016’s most significant stories were awful. Thirty-six people, mostly young artists, perished in the flames of the worst fire in Oakland history. Police officers in several Bay Area jurisdictions faced discipline and criminal charges for allegedly sexually abusing a teenage girl, and a string of shootings of minority suspects in San Francisco cost the police chief his job.
Some were stubborn perennials. For many people, housing remains prohibitively expensive, and for too many others, it’s completely out of reach — the only home is an overpass, doorway or any other space providing the barest shelter from the elements.
Perhaps the year’s weirdest story also had to do with housing: the revelation that the tallest residential building in San Francisco was sinking into the bay fill and starting to lean — not as much as that other leaning tower in Italy, but enough to make marbles roll across the polished floors of multimillion-dollar condos.
The Chronicle’s list of the year’s top 10 stories:
1. Trump’s election shocks Bay Area and the world
Nearly 63 million U.S. voters made their mark next to the name of a man who vowed to build a wall along the length of the Mexican border, suggested barring Muslims from entering the U.S. and was caught on tape bragging about how he was a star and so could grab the private parts of women. For all that, Trump also tapped into the economic and cultural angst of many voters, particularly white ones who don’t live on the East or West coasts, and he wasn’t Hillary Clinton, whose candidacy generated minimal enthusiasm even among many Democrats. (Even so, she became the fifth candidate in U.S. history to win the popular vote yet lose the election.) In three weeks, Trump will raise his right hand on the steps of the U.S. Capitol and be sworn in as president. He’s an early favorite to head next year’s list of most notable stories.
2. Ghost Ship fire kills 36 in Oakland
It was billed as an avant-garde electronic dance concert. Inside a ramshackle two-story warehouse on Dec. 2 in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood, several dozen music fans climbed a makeshift wooden staircase and were unable to retrace their steps when a fierce and fast-moving blaze broke out on the first floor. Thirty-six people — most of them young artists and musicians — perished when the building known as the Ghost Ship was consumed. In the days that followed, Oakland officials admitted that their building and fire inspectors had never noticed that people were residing and events were being held in a building that had no permits for either use, and Alameda County prosecutors opened a criminal investigation they said could result in murder charges.
3. S.F. police shootings force out chief, prompt reforms
Greg Suhr, who rose through the ranks of the San Francisco Police Department to become chief, had the strong support of the rank and file. But with police treatment of minorities a growing issue nationwide, Suhr’s position at City Hall was weakened by the fatal police shooting of an African American stabbing suspect in December 2015 and two officers’ killing of a homeless Latino man on a Mission District street in April 2016. On May 19, when an officer fatally shot an unarmed African American woman who was driving a stolen car, Mayor Ed Lee summoned Suhr and asked him to resign. In December, Lee named Los Angeles Deputy Chief William Scott to the job. At the top of Scott’s agenda will be the implementation of hundreds of reforms recommended by a U.S. Justice Department task force, as well as adoption of new use-of-force rules approved by the city Police Commission.
4. Police officers accused of exploiting underage girl
The alleged sexual exploitation of a teenage girl by a large number of police officers kept mayors, police chiefs and internal affairs officers busy for much of the year. The young woman at the center of the scandal told The Chronicle she had sex with nearly 30 law enforcement officers over two years, some of them when she was being sexually exploited as a minor. Richmond disciplined nine officers, Oakland moved to fire four cops and discipline seven others, and Alameda County prosecutors filed criminal charges against seven current and former law enforcement officers. Amid the chaos, Oakland Police Chief Sean Whent stepped aside in June, and the city went through two interim chiefs in eight days. For the rest of the year, Oakland’s city administrator presided over the Police Department.
5. Voters legalize recreational use of marijuana
State voters approved Proposition 64 in November to legalize the possession and cultivation of marijuana for recreational use. The law, its details still being hashed out, will transform the state’s big cash crop and take it out of the backwoods and into the tax base. Medicinal marijuana has been legal in California since 1996 but, under the new rules, pot smokers will no longer need to seek a doctor’s permission. No retail stores can open until Jan. 1, 2018, but it’s now 100 percent legal for adults to fire up in private.
6. Tent city focuses attention on S.F. homeless crisis
When the rains set in last winter, tent after tent began to appear on a stretch of Division Street beneath the protective awning of the Central Freeway in San Francisco. At its most crowded, the camp was home to as many as 350 people — only a small fraction of the 6,700 people who, by conservative estimates, live on the streets of the city. For decades the greatest minds and most compassionate hearts in San Francisco have labored to find an answer to the problem — hospitality centers, counseling, temporary shelters, roving vans full of do-gooders. In 2016, Mayor Lee created a Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing — bringing responsibility for the problem under one agency’s roof for the first time. Voters’ defeat of a sales tax measure in November, however, complicated city plans to pour more money into housing and services that could keep people off the streets.
7. Millennium Tower sinking, leaning
Measure twice, cut once. That’s the rule for building things, including skyscrapers. For whatever reason, the 58-story Millennium Tower at Mission and Fremont streets developed a tilt and began to sink after its completion in 2009. The lean doesn’t sound like much — 2 inches to the northwest at the top of the 645-foot monolith. And the sinking was about 16 inches. On the other hand, $350 million buildings that sell $12 million penthouses aren’t supposed to lean or sink at all. The developer blamed construction next door of the Transbay Transit Center, while the government agencies overseeing that project pointed the finger right back at the developer, which had decided not to drive the skyscraper’s pilings down to bedrock. Even after everyone got lawyered up, the outlook for the Leaning Tower of Pisa West remained askew.
This June 27, 2011 file photo shows Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky, who drew criticism for sentencing former Stanford University swimmer Brock Turner to only six months in jail.
8. Stanford sex-assault case spurs new laws
The criminal case against former Stanford University student Brock Turner wasn’t the stuff of major news — until the woman he had sexually assaulted outside a campus party while she was unconscious stood in a Santa Clara County courtroom at his sentencing in June and read a searing, 7,244-word statement. “I want to show people that one night of drinking can ruin two lives. You and me,” the woman told Turner. “You are the cause, I am the effect.” Her determination to regain “my energy ... my confidence, my own voice” spoke to all survivors of sexual assault — who were all the more outraged when Judge Aaron Persky sentenced Turner to just six months in jail, saying the defendant’s lack of criminal history and demonstration of remorse argued against a stiffer sentence. By the end of the year, Turner was a free man and Persky had survived a state judicial commission’s misconduct investigation. But the case did lead to changes on the state level — the Legislature passed a string of new laws inspired by the case, including adding sexual penetration of an unconscious person to the legal definition of rape.
9. Housing crisis spurs search for solutions
The tent camps of San Francisco and Oakland are symbols of the worst aspects of the Bay Area’s tight housing market, but thousands of people’s lives are complicated by the area’s high real estate prices and scarce supply. Year over year, the median price of a house has risen for 55 consecutive months, and there are few signs that rising mortgage interest rates are cooling off the market. The situation prompted passage of multimillion-dollar affordable-housing bonds in Alameda and Santa Clara counties, along with a resurgence of rent control in Richmond and Mountain View. Public anger was stoked by the attempted evictions of a group of nuns from their San Francisco soup kitchen and a 97-year-old woman from her Burlingame home. The epicenter of high prices continued to be San Francisco, where the average apartment’s monthly rent rose to around $4,000 and the median home price on Zillow was north of $1.1 million. Study after study showed home buyers and renters alike continued to veer away from the city for more affordable digs — and often wound up an hour or more away.
10. Drought causes tree die-off, heightens water wars in Congress
The drought stretched into a fifth year in much of the state, particularly in Southern California, where rainfall last winter was only about half the historic average. Since the last big rain year in 2010, scientists determined, 66 million trees in the state have died from the effects of too little water. The age-old water wars of California continued in Sacramento and in Washington, D.C., and even led to a well-publicized squabble between the state’s two senators over whether environmental rules should be relaxed to deliver more water to San Joaquin Valley farmers. Sen. Dianne Feinstein said they should and got the idea through Congress over the protests of Sen. Barbara Boxer, who ended her 24-year Senate career with a crushing defeat.
Steve Rubenstein and Kevin Fagan are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: srubenstein@sfchronicle.com, kfagan@sfchronicle.com
