Maggie Angst, in a recent SF Chronicle article, discusses the proposal by the once-charming suburb to the north to install heavy restrictions on the overnight parking of recreational vehicles to decrease homelessness and increase available parking.
Read MoreTens of thousands of California (including Silicon Valley) millennials are exiting to red states—and with them, hundreds of thousands in annual income per household. NY Post’s Allie Griffin reports on a recent Smart Asset analysis.
Read MoreA state audit found that California invested a staggering $24 billion over the past five fiscal years to address homelessness. That's about $42k per homeless person/year. And yet the homelessness crisis has worsened. Fiscally responsible pols ask: is our Housing First strategy all wrong? KTLA reports.
Read MoreSJ State prof emeritus Dr. Elizabeth Weiss critiques—with James W. Springer in City Journal—today's anthropological trend of “social-justice ideology over verifiable facts.” Case in point? At SJSU, Weiss was censured (and blocked from research) for opposing reburying bones.
Read MoreAn abandoned construction site in LA’s Chinatown attracted a small group of squatters who proceeded to light it on fire—four times, this year alone. Neighbors begged the city for help, which, to the city’s credit, finally came. Early one morning, 130 firefighters responded when a conflagration spread to an apartment building. Karen Garcia of the LA Times reports.
Read MoreBack in June of 2023, executives from the South Bay Community Land Trust (SBCLT) stormed the offices of the Santa Clara County Ass'n of Realtors, threatened staff, and sent one employee to the hospital with damaged hearing. Pleas from SCCAOR to the City to speak up on their behalf went, predictably, unaddressed. And now, adding insult to injury, the City just gifted the SBCLT five million cool ones as part of a misguided and economically illiterate "housing preservation" scheme. We repost, below, our 2023 Opp Now exclusive interview with Gina Zari, gov't. affairs director at SCCAOR, about Land Trust execs' invasion of their offices.
Read MoreIs it possible that the billions spent on 232 service providers in San Francisco hasn’t actually reached those in need? Street homelessness might be down by 1%, but that’s cold comfort to the 8,323 people counted sleeping in shelters and city streets on a single January night. Overall, the number of unhoused folks is up 7% this year. And nobody knows where all the prevention money goes. The SF Standard’s David Sjostedt reports.
Read MoreHigh density housing promises to radically transform the character of Bay Area cities, but will it lower prices? In his Substack R-Curious, Gus Mattammal rebuts a misreading of basic economics, brought to us by progressive Substacker Darrel Owens. Before we zone high-rises into every Palo Alto and Woodside, says Mattammal, consider Manhattan: dense, yet unaffordable. Maybe the solution is to alter the demand side of the equation, to construct world-class cities in California’s interior.
Read MoreCalifornia's eviction moratorium may have expired, but the idea that residential evictions are largely unjust has (as Reason mag's Christian Britschgi explains in his newsletter) lived on. However, new research finds most evictions cost landlords 2-3 months' rent—so are used as a last resort, when nonpaying tenants refuse to work out a deal.
Read MoreSo goes Ray Bradbury's haunting 1950 short story, in which technology incessantly, futilely grapples against nature after human extinction. But what about today? How can we relate to technology (and vice versa)? In this Opp Now exclusive, four Bay Area art professors parse the delicate distinction between “authentic” vs. “technical.”
Read MoreEven if SF’s Dream Keeper Initiative hadn’t been shrouded in scandal, it'll likely expose City Hall to legal challenges, writes SF Standard’s Sanjana Friedman, who details how it can be viewed as “effectively race-based” and therefore violating state and federal law. Already, a court has slapped down GIFT—the basic income program that was based on identity. She now predicts the Office of Racial Equity will get sued for employment discrimination.
Read MoreDaniel Lurie (to replace Breed as SF's mayor) isn't the first political outsider to resonate with local voters. Here, WNYC examines the fascinating rhetorical dichotomy of “incumbent” vs. “outsider”—while tracing a history of successful outsider campaigns, all the way back to President Andrew Jackson.
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