A 7.5-magnitude earthquake hit off Japan’s northeastern coast early Monday, triggering a tsunami warning that sent a 2.6-foot wave crashing into Kuji port in Iwate prefecture less than an hour after the initial tremor. The shaking reached Tokyo, hundreds of miles from the epicenter. It’s the second major quake to hit that region since December. The warning has been lifted.
Closer to home, San Francisco’s stalled skyscraper pipeline got a small shot of oxygen Monday. The Jackson, a 41-story hotel and office tower slated for 530 Sansome Street near Jackson Square, has landed a new financial partner. Los Angeles-based McCourt Partners is joining Related California in a joint venture on the project, according to reporting first flagged by SFist. The tower, designed by SOM and BergDavis, now targets a 2030 completion date. If it gets built, the project would add hotel rooms to a downtown market that’s spent years trying to recover occupancy numbers that collapsed during the pandemic. It’d also change the skyline at the northern edge of the Financial District in a way that’s hard to miss.
On the governor’s race: Tom Steyer has committed more than $115 million to broadcast TV, cable, and radio advertising. That’s roughly 30 times what his closest Democratic competitor has spent on air. “We’re running a campaign that meets voters everywhere they are,” a Steyer spokesperson said. The billionaire, who made his money in hedge funds before pivoting to climate advocacy, is the clearest example yet of what full-throttle self-financing looks like in California politics in 2026.
Thirty times. Let that settle.
In Richmond, police responding to a welfare check on Friday found two people dead inside a residence. Investigators believe the case is a murder-suicide. The identities of the victims haven’t been released.
The I-80 construction corridor through SoMa kept grinding away Monday. Traffic was slow but didn’t lock up entirely. The bigger problem, according to some business owners in the area, is that customers aren’t bothering to navigate it. They’re just not coming. That kind of revenue loss doesn’t produce headlines or incident reports, but it’s real and it compounds week over week.
Berkeley is weighing changes to how buildings get nominated for landmark status, a process critics say has been hijacked to block housing projects. Under the current rules, 50 signatures are enough to trigger a hearing on whether a structure deserves historic protection. The city wants to raise that bar. The proposal won’t satisfy everyone, but it puts Berkeley squarely inside the statewide fight over whether preservation rules can coexist with actual housing production. California cities have been trying to figure that out since at least 2018, and most haven’t landed anywhere clean.
The unofficial 4/20 gathering at Sharon Meadow in Golden Gate Park was officially canceled again this year, but whether that changes anything on the ground is a separate question.