Our Man in San Fran
The 'Cheapest Property in San Francisco' Is a Dilapidated Shack Selling for $350,000
The realtor told me the place is so trashed no bank will finance a mortgage, so that's $350,000 in cash—and people are apparently willing to pay.
Most of the People Killed by San Francisco Cops Are Mentally Ill
For years, the city has failed to look after its mentally ill population, and too often this results in cops having to deal with situations they don't have training in.
How to Break into the San Francisco Giants' Baseball Stadium
This is the last in a four-part series on housing the substantial homeless population in San Francisco. Randy showed us what it's like living in the margins of America's most overpriced city.
Meet the Guy Who Earns His Living Drawing Peanuts Characters on Their Period
Living in an SRO means you're either one step out of homelessness or one step away from it. As part of our series on housing the homeless in San Francisco, we talked to a man who spends his days wandering between bars in the Mission and drawing dirty...
Visiting the Last Remnants of San Francisco's Low Income Apartment Buildings
San Francisco's SROs (single room occupancy housing) once used to function as low-cost dormitory-style apartments for the city's artists, students, and transient workers. In the first in a three-part series, we look at SROs today: mismanaged apartments...
Hunters Point Is San Francisco’s Radioactive Basement
The Bayview is home to more than a fifth of San Francisco’s black population, who make up a third of the district’s residents, and are seen as easy targets for police and developers alike.
Oakland Is Giving Kids Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Oakland is a hotbed of gang violence, poverty, drug abuse, and mental illness. A CDC study says that roughly one-third of inner-city children suffer from a form of post-traumatic stress disorder, a local news station colloquially called "Hood disease."
San Francisco's Public Transit System Is Doomed
San Francisco's public transit system is one of the largest in America, yet most of the system is still based on infrastructure from 80 years ago. What happened to our idyllic vision of gleaming streetcars and clean, electric buses?
A Revenge-for-Hire Business Just Opened in San Francisco
A real-life version of the revenge business in the movie Dirty Work has opened up in San Francisco and is currently taking on clients. I interviewed the mysterious owner of the company to ask him how he gets around the fact that his line of work...
San Francisco Police Beat a Man for Riding His Bike on the Sidewalk
After the whole Batkid thing ended in San Francisco, the SFPD reminded the city that they actually are the ones to dispense justice as they see fit, beating an unarmed man named DJ Williams for riding his bike on the sidewalk.
Photographing San Francisco Punk with Ruby Ray
Ruby Ray, whose photos were featured in the legendary zine Search and Destroy back in the 1970s, documented the disenfranchised punk world of San Francisco at exactly the right moment. Now, three and a half decades later, her photos are gaining...