Author Archives: Public Press staff

By Nathaniel Dolton-Thornton, Bay Nature The hiking group was supposed to meet 20 minutes ago, but I’m sitting here on the roadside staring at a locked gate and a handful of discouraging signs. “Hazardous Fire Area,” “Bioregional Habitat Restoration Project,” “No Parking Any Time” (twice). Past the gate, a road winds up through thick green […]

By Sarita Hiatt, New America Media Mai Dang has worked in nail salons for 12 years and believes that the toxic chemicals she handled caused her to develop asthma. “I realized that the products we used to make our clients beautiful were the culprits,” said Dang during the launch in San Francisco this month by […]

By Joe Rivano Barros, Mission Local Some 100 people crowded the 16th Street BART plaza at noon Monday to support 100 percent affordable housing at the 16th Street market-rate project that became embroiled in litigation last week after the developer sued the owner for acting in bad faith. Supervisor David Campos also made an appearance […]

By Natalie Yemenidjian, KQED News Fix San Francisco’s Academy of Art University, an institution that has been operating for 86 years, is the nation’s biggest private art college. But only 32 percent of its full-time students graduate in six years — compared with 59 percent for colleges nationally and as high as 90 percent for top-of-the-line […]

By Meira Gebel, Mission Local Walking on San Carlos between 18th and 19th streets, 76-year-old Jerry Avila points to changes he has seen on the block where he has lived for more than 30 years. For most of that time little changed, he said. But in the last two years, the hodgepodge block of businesses […]

By Anna Challet, New America Media In California, hundreds of thousands of kids in immigrant families are eligible for Medi-Cal but have not enrolled, according to a new study from Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families. Some of them are kids who have undocumented parents, but who are themselves citizens or lawfully residing. Some of […]

By Susan Cohen, KQED News Fix Rose could be anywhere from 10 to 12 years old. The stray Chihuahua showed up one day in Amanda Smulevitz’s Oakland neighborhood, and the woman eventually took the dog in. A few years later, Smulevitz adopted Lily, a soon-to-be-6-year-old of the same breed, saving her from a home where […]

By Tim Redmond, 48 Hills/El Tecolote Adan Lobo, a native of Honduras, was living in a small, run-down place on Hampshire Street, sharing a room and showering under a tarp to keep the dirty water leaking from the ceiling above from dripping on his head. It was, he says, “kind of nasty.” But now he […]

By Pauline Bartolone, CALmatters Not far from the Amish farms of Central Pennsylvania, in the rolling hills southwest of coal mining country, Dennis Brubaker raises 30,000 pigs a year for slaughter. In four enclosed barns, the hogs gain 2 pounds a day away from predators. That is, until they are shipped away to be processed for […]

By Catherine Girardeau, KALW Crosscurrents When someone is imprisoned, it does not just affect the incarcerated. It affects the people left behind. Young people. Nearly 3 million children in the United States have parents in the criminal justice system – it’s almost 1 in 10 kids in California alone. It can be costly and difficult […]