Author Archives: Public Press staff

By Farida Jhabvala Romero, KQED/CALmatters On a wet sidewalk in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, Michael Cameron approached a middle-aged man snorting a white powder cupped in his hands. Cameron, a 65-year-old volunteer in the neighborhood, asked the drug user to move across the street. He knew hundreds of schoolchildren soon would be walking by. “Guys were […]

By Antoinette Siu, CALmatters With just 11 days to go until the federal government intends to roll back net neutrality, California’s Senate has stepped into the void by advancing a bill that aims to maintain equal internet access for all its citizens. This fight over who pays for the internet and how it should be […]

By David Gorn, CALmatters A battle is escalating between the dialysis industry and an influential union in California, with allegations on one side of shoddy practices in the treatment of kidney patients and accusations of political bullying on the other. With a growing number of Californians on dialysis, the union has teed up an initiative […]

By Alyssa Jeong Perry and Levi Bridges, KQED News/The California Report In the winter of 1990, a private plane carrying a small group of passengers crashed on the high-altitude plateau of central Mexico. For Maria Mendoza, the accident started a chain of events that sent her on a northward journey all the way to Oakland  […]

By Theresa Harrington/EdSource Today For 11 years, students from all over the world have gathered at Oakland International High to learn English and math, as they also learn to navigate new lives far from where they were born. Chanthavy, 16, who left Cambodia in 2009 and learned English in Malaysia before arriving in the U.S. […]

By Julie Cart, CALmatters  As California accelerates its efforts to reduce greenhouses gases over the next decade, experts are pointing to vulnerabilities in its celebrated cap-and-trade system, weaknesses that could make the state’s goals difficult — even impossible — to reach. Cap and trade, featuring a market where permission to pollute is bought and sold, […]

By Jeremy Dalmas, KALW/Crosscurrents April 15 just passed and you, hopefully, finished paying the IRS. But if you’re an independent contractor in San Francisco, your taxes to the city are due next on May 31. This is separate from the money you pay to the IRS or the state of California. Confused? You’re not alone. […]

By Matt Levin, CALmatters The median price of a California single-family home is now well over half a million dollars. That’s more than double what the average house costs in the rest of the U.S. Put a more nauseating way, you could buy two “average” non-California houses for the price of one California house. Can’t […]

By Charlotte Silver, Mission Local San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera is using a gunfight that surprised a sleepy street in Bernal Heights last October as part of his salvo against property owners who illegally rent out their homes on short-term rental sites like Airbnb. On Wednesday, Herrera announced that his office had filed a […]

By Felicia Mello, CALmatters The message popped into UC Berkeley sophomore Varsha Sarveshwar’s inbox a few days before the start of her Introduction to General Astronomy course last fall. It contained the usual details about class times and textbooks. But then there was something surprising: a plea from the professor to skip the first day […]