News
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A Fresh Food Oasis in San Francisco’s Tenderloin

03.31.2014
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By Melanie Young, KALW
In San Francisco’s Tenderloin, getting healthy fare often is not an option. Without a full-service grocery store in the neighborhood, residents rely on corner stores, and the district has the city’s highest concentration of convenience stores. Tenderloin resident Steve Tennis says what they sell is often, “Poison, it’s just poison. Mothers with little kids in their arms in their strollers. What is the first thing these children see that are two, three years old?

News
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Covered California Gives People More Time to Finish Their Applications

03.27.2014
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By Rachel Dornhelm, KQED, The California Report
Officials with California’s health insurance exchange are adamant they are not extending the March 31 deadline to sign up for insurance under the Affordable Care Act. Still, they announced Wednesday that there will be some leeway for those who start an application by this Monday at midnight. Read the complete story at The California Report

City Hall
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Poor Is the New Black: Segregation in San Francisco Today

03.26.2014
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“This is the San Francisco Americans pretend does not exist,” James Baldwin said on KQED more than half a century ago.
Baldwin, a world-renowned black writer and activist, was referring to the Fillmore district of San Francisco, where he and KQED documented the after-effects city bulldozing, literally, black neighborhoods in the name of “urban renewal,” and the unemployment and isolation of young blacks in Hunters Point. » Read more

News
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Three Weeks Left for Free Tax Preparation in Bay Area

03.26.2014
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By the Editorial Team, Oakland Local 
Bay Area residents can have their taxes done for free through United Way’s Earn It! Keep It! Save It! program, available at more that 200 locations in Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo and Solano counties. The service is available to households that earned less than $52,000 in 2013.

News
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Supervisors to Consider Legalizing San Francisco In-Law Units

03.25.2014
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By Bryan Goebel, KQED News Fix
San Francisco supervisors have begun considering a proposal that would allow landlords to voluntarily legalize in-law units, or secondary apartments, that make up a shadow housing market where some of the city’s most vulnerable tenants live, sometimes in substandard conditions. The measure by Supervisor David Chiu is an effort to preserve one of the city’s largest stocks of affordable housing. City officials estimate there are up to 40,000 in-laws, often in the garages or basements of single-family homes, which make up about 10 percent of the housing supply. A public hearing on the proposal Monday before the supervisors’ Land Use and Economic Committee was dominated by questions about how it would affect property owners, who would pay for potentially expensive upgrades to bring the units up to code, and complaints from residents in the city’s western neighborhoods who fear increased density. Read the complete story at KQED News Fix. 

News
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The New Gold Rush: How Tourist Rentals Are Affecting San Francisco’s Housing Market

03.24.2014
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By Ben Trefny and Charlotte Silver, KALW Crosscurrents
The sharing economy in San Francisco is humming. Companies like Airbnb have figured out how to make a lot of money by using existing housing stock to meet consumer demand, which in Airbnb’s case is coming from tourists. Fast Company magazine declared AirBnB will soon become “the world’s largest hotel chain – without owning a single hotel.”
On the surface, it might look like a win-win. But where somebody’s getting paid, somebody is usually losing out. In the case of tourist rentals, people looking for permanent, long-term housing may be the losers.

Climate Change
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Q&A: Bay Area Needs to Organize to Fight Sea-Level Rise, SPUR Researcher Says

03.24.2014
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Laura Tam, who has done environmental sustainability research at the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association for six years, says climate change adaptation planning is one of her most important responsibilities. She helped shape the Bay Plan, a controversial policy that answered complaints about guidance recommending restrictions on bay-front development issued by the Bay Conservation and Development Commission in 2010. » Read more

News
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All of These Monster Invasive Fish Came Out of One Small S.F. Lake

03.20.2014
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By Eric Simons, Bay Nature
Jonathan Young, a San Francisco State graduate student in biology and ecological restoration intern at the Presidio Trust, has the job of trying to restore some semblance of native life to Mountain Lake, in San Francisco’s Presidio. But as this sequence of photos shows, the native three-spined sticklebacks and Pacific chorus frogs he would like to restore would face some ferocious predators lurking in the watery depths. So it is Young’s job, for now, to try to get the predators out. It is  a tough — perhaps impossible — task for a lone man with a fishing net. Mountain Lake covers about 4 acres and is around 10 to 12 feet deep, small in the grand scheme of things, but that does not seem to have harmed its ability to support, for example, a very very big carp.

News
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Talk of Immigration Reform Fuels Spike in Fraud Cases

03.19.2014
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By Maria Antonieta Mejia, New America Media
Cecilia, an undocumented Mexican immigrant, never anticipated that her life in the United States would turn into a real-world telenovela, the popular Spanish-language dramas. A few years ago, she married a U.S. citizen who soon started to mistreat her. He later filed for divorce without telling her, but then the couple reconciled and got remarried. Then he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Before he died, he told his wife that he wanted to help her regularize her immigration status.