Liza Veale

In the Bay Area, one strategy for dealing with the housing shortage is to try to build ourselves out. But brand new housing can be too expensive for middle- and working-class people to move into. In San Francisco, it now costs $700,000-800,000 to build a new unit. That’s forced many developers in the area to ask if there is a way to build more quickly and for less money. There is. It’s the same way we build anything more efficiently—by using factories.

When the rain arrived this winter, so did a line of tents along Division Street beneath the Central Freeway in San Francisco.

All week long we've been playing this sound, and asking you to guess what it is and where in the Bay Area we recorded it.

Super Bowl 50 is about to touch down in the Bay Area. While the game is taking place in Santa Clara, San Franciscans will host many of the visiting fans and fanfare. 

The median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco’s Mission District is currently about  $3,500 per month.

Airbnb has been reshaping the way San Franciscans think about property from the time the company was founded seven years ago. Since then, the company has grown, largely unregulated, to a $25 billion market valuation.

The recent fire in Lake County demonstrated just how quickly disaster can ignite on our dry California landscape. Here in the densely populated Bay Area, we’re no less vulnerable.

If you live in San Francisco, you’ve got local elections coming up next month; are you planning on voting? Last year, only about a third of eligible San Franciscans made it out to the polls. This year you might want to.

She was one of the richest and most powerful people in the state — and she was a black woman. Mary Ellen Pleasant was a real estate innovator and millionaire, a socialite — and an abolitionist known to the black community as "Black City Hall."

The light is low and dark orange on Oakland’s International Blvd. Groups of people cluster around food stands or bus stops. Some are playing dice.

Billboards dot the landscape on Oakland’s International Blvd. Many display slogans like: “When I was in the life, I thought I was alone,” or “Teens sold for sex aren’t prostitutes. They’re rape victims.”

At first glance, websites like Seeking Arrangement.com and SugarDaddy.com might look a lot like ordinary online dating sites. They promise to match “successful, beautiful people” with each other. But in one big way, they’re very different.

Remember in 2008 when the terms green economy and green collar jobs were big buzz words? You probably know the basic idea: if we’re going to curb the climate crisis we need to replace energy sources and other systems with green ones. The transition will be a lot of work, but the upside is, we have a lot of people looking for work.

Beginning next fall, all San Francisco public schools will offer a class called Ethnic Studies. It’s a look at American history and culture from the perspective of people who aren't white. It’s also a chance to break down race in the classroom, and deal with tough concepts like unconscious racism and structural inequality.

How do neighborhoods develop distinct identities? Why was San Francisco’s North Beach an enclave for poetry, for example? Or the Castro a haven for gay men in the 1960’s and 70’s? Is it possible to engineer a neighborhood scene into being?

That’s what Mike Parayno wants to do. He’s the man behind Birdland, an underground jazz club run for many years out of his Berkeley garage. It wasn’t licensed and eventually got shut down by the city. So last summer, Parayno went legit. He moved his venue to Oakland’s Longfellow neighborhood. He wants to turn the historically black, residential area into a place where late-night live jazz music brings neighbors out into the street. Sounds crazy, but he might actually be able to pull it off.  

In 2014, small press Timeless, Infinite Light published an anthology of poetry called “It’s Night in San Francisco but it’s Sunny in Oakland.” It is a collective memory of the winter of 2011, Oscar Grant Plaza, Oakland: the site of the encampments and acts of resistance staked in solidarity with Occupy Wall street.

This song is by Taraf de Locos. If you like it, you can see them live on Friday night at the Red Poppy Art House at 7:30. And if you really like it, you can support their Kickstarter campaign.

Dr. Robert Okin served as chief of Psychiatry at San Francisco General hospital for 17 years. During that time, he cared for many of the people you see on the city’s streets when they end up in the hospital. Okin says many homeless people suffer from mental illness and as we walk by them on the street, we too often fail to remember that they are just like you and me. So, Dr. Okin spent two years photographing and talking to San Francisco’s homeless population, collecting their profiles in a photo essay book called Silent Voices: People with Mental Disorders on the Street.

Earlier this fall San Francisco Muni buses displayed an ad that may have upset you. Or angered you. Or made you feel threatened. The Muni ad was part of an anti-Islam campaign calling itself the American Freedom Defense Initiative, or AFDI. It wasn’t the first time AFDI’s ads ran on Muni buses and it probably won’t be the last.