Yearly Archives: 2015

By Lisa Aliferis, KQED News Fix/State of Health The new year arrives Friday and with it a host of new state laws. Here is our roundup of new ones coming in health. Most take effect on Friday, except where noted: Vaccines: SB277 was perhaps the most vehemently debated bill in Sacramento in a long time. […]

By Ericka Cruz Guevarra, KQED News Fix The good news is that parts of the economy may be improving. The bad news is that those improvements have lulled people into a false sense of security — even as many still struggle to make ends meet. That struggle is playing out at Bay Area food banks, […]

By Devin Katayama, KQED News Fix The University of California says it has sold off investments in three large prison companies after pressure last month from black student organizations — but it’s a move that’s largely fiscal rather than the symbolic statement against prisons that the Afrikan Black Coalition wants to see. Earlier this year, […]

By Ted Goldberg, KQED News Fix San Francisco’s Navigation Center is a new kind of homeless shelter, attempting to help people living on the streets find homes, and Mayor Ed Lee believes it could help solve one of San Francisco’s longest and most intractable problems. The center differs from traditional shelters in that it allows […]

By Ted Goldberg, KQED News Fix San Francisco Supervisor David Campos plans to call for a hearing to look into why the city’s Fire Department still faces a backlog of hundreds of incomplete investigations. “There has to be a better way of these fires being investigated in a more timely fashion,” Campos said in an […]

By Kate Gallbraith, CALmatters.org Lawmakers are debating how to find money to fix the state’s deteriorating roads and bridges. But it will be almost impossible to end Californians’ top driving headache — congestion. Making roads wider is a traditional solution. But this holds little appeal in California, where land is expensive and and urban corridors […]

By Ted Goldberg, KQED News Fix The San Francisco Fire Department is trying to quell neighborhood concerns that a wave of arson is behind a rising number of fires in the city’s Mission District this year. The department took the unusual step Monday of publishing the number of blazes that caused major property damage in […]

By Hana Baba, KALW Crosscurrents Anti-Muslim sentiment around the U.S. is on the rise. The uptick started right after the attacks in Paris in November. Then came the December shootings in San Bernardino, and last week, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump called for a ban on Muslim entry into the country. Now American Muslims are […]

By Joe Rivano Barros, Mission Local A common cry on all sides of the housing debate is to build more affordable housing and build it fast. But more often than not onlookers are left wondering just what affordable housing means — and how affordable is it. The Mission has seen hundreds of affordable housing units […]

By Kate Galbraith, CALmatters.org California lawmakers are struggling to climb out of a deep hole. The gas tax that supports road repairs ranks among the highest in the country but the state has some of the worst roads in America. A recent report from the state Senate said 68 percent of California roads are in poor […]