Liza Veale

After the destruction of the North Bay Fires, most Sonoma County residents could get financial assistance to help rebuild. But for the more than 40,000 undocumented immigrants living there, access to financial support has been limited.

The Republican tax bill will likely be up for a vote by the end of the week. The final version is expected to be released on Wednesday. These tax changes will hit California harder than much of the rest of the country, and it will likely hit us in a weak spot: the housing crisis.

CalFire has named the blazes that devastated Sonoma and Napa Counties earlier this month the October Fire Siege. FEMA says this is the worst fire disaster in California’s history.

It’s been decades since this country has had anything like a tenants' movement. If you’re young enough you might not even be familiar with the phrase. But today a movement is forming to fight for policies that preserve and create affordable housing. Last week, renters and their advocates coordinated more than 50 political actions in 45 states as part of national renters' week of action. In the Bay Area, Alameda hosted a weekend-long, statewide gathering of over 400 California tenants and organizers in the movement.

A year ago, San Jose's homeless advocates were excited by city-approved plans to build the Bay Area’s first "tiny home" villages for homeless people.

Yet now that the city has to pick locations for these proposed villages, objections from nearby residents have become a major stumbling block.

You may know Lake County for the nude retreat center Harbin Hot Springs. Maybe you know it for its marijuana farmland. Or maybe your first association with the place is just fire.

President Trump appointed Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon, to run the Department of Housing and Urban Development. This week the Senate advanced his nomination, bringing him one step closer to becoming secretary.

Cheap rental housing can feel like a vanishing resource in San Francisco. Property owners are selling buildings for multiples of what they originally bought them for, and who can blame them? But the consequence is that almost all the units are getting fixed up and turned into luxury housing. It’s the way of the market, and it can seem inevitable. But what if it’s not?

Eva Castillo* thinks of herself as a strong person. She was raised in the Sunnydale projects in San Francisco, sharing a bedroom with three brothers. Now, she works construction — often as the only woman on the job. But when she was evicted, she says she felt truly helpless for the first time in her life.

Though we’re all understandably consumed by the news at the national level, the last election also came with consequences for the Bay Area locally—especially for the region’s ongoing housing crisis.

About a dozen people have returned to sleeping on the sidewalk, after an unpermitted settlement in a public park was cleared out by the City of Oakland last Thursday.

Today is National Human Trafficking Awareness Day. While trafficking might seem like an issue we’re all on the same side of, when it comes to how we should go about combating the problem, people don’t always agree.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of the web text and the current audio falsely states that SF BARF is mostly funded by "ordinary renters." In fact, over $86,000 of the group's funds were contributed by real estate and corporate groups. They also described the site as being "less than a mile" from the Bayshore Caltrain stop. In fact, the border of the site reaches all the way to the station. Lastly, we did not mention that the Baylands Site includes land that is not landfill. 

A few months ago, when it became clear that the small town of Brisbane was looking to build up a huge development that would not include any new housing at all, San Francisco Supervisor Jane Kim floated the idea of basically annexing part of the town into her city, so that San Francisco could make sure housing got built. 

UCSF is conducting one of the first ongoing studies on the experience of homelessness among adults over 50. It’s called the Health Outcomes of People Experiencing Homelessness in Older Middle Age, or HOPE - HOME. 

Some of the only housing that’s gentrification-proof in the inner cities of the Bay Area are SRO’s or Single Room Occupancy buildings. They’re the residential hotels you see mostly in neighborhoods like the Tenderloin and SOMA and in downtown Oakland.

As of this month, San Francisco’s public housing is now all privately run. 3,500 units have been transferred from the city’s ownership to various housing groups: some non-profit, and some for-profit.

Prop Q is about clarifying the city’s policy on homeless tent encampments. Right now, tents and other make-shift shelters often violate a few rules, like sit/lie or public nuisance ordinances and other rules against blocking sidewalks. Prop Q would make them specifically illegal.

Prop P is one of several super technical housing policy measures on the San Francisco ballot. It would change the way the city picks developers to build affordable housing on public land.

If you follow the politics of housing development in San Francisco you know it’s been a highly divisive year; long-time affordable housing activists havebeen sparring with pro-growth advocates. The city’s November ballot reflects that divide.

Some homeless advocates in San Francisco are working to make the streets more hospitable for those who are forced to live on them. Proposition Q wants to nullify those efforts, by making encampments specifically illegal.

When most people are on their way to sleep, San Francisco’s Homeless Outreach Team, or SF HOT, is just beginning its graveyard shift.

In 2014, media attention was white-hot on Central American children crossing the border alone. Though the headlines have since died down, the migration — and the gang warfare causing it — has not.

Next week, San Francisco voters will decide if they want to give the Board of Supervisors control over how much affordable housing private developers are required to build—thereby enabling the Supervisors’ plan to hike up the requirement higher than that of any other city in the country.

KALW is turning 75!!!

Some of our friends helped sing us in to a new quarter-century of funky community radio. 

In order to talk about Andre Thierry, first you have to talk about the godfather of Zydeco music, Clifton Chenier.

In Oakland, just past Jack London Square, there’s a zone along the water that’s a little wild. It’s past the new condos and great restaurants, past the wholesale produce warehouses that open for business before dawn, and down the channel from Lake Merritt’s newly landscaped park. It’s an in-between space. But change is coming from both sides.

On Thursday April 7th, 2016, San Francisco police shot and killed Luis Gongora, a 45-year-old man living in a homeless encampment of tents on Shotwell Street in the Mission District.

For about a third of Americans, regular hours and benefits are giving way to a patchwork of contracting, temping, and moonlighting. The way we make a living is changing.

For decades, development investors didn’t want to touch Oakland. In 1997, one economist called the city an “ugly duckling in a bay of swans.” But these days, Oakland is one of the “hottest,” or fastest-growing, real estate markets in the country.