San Francisco Bay Guardian

The Chron's having a hard time figuring out why there are so many more homeless families looking for help.

"It's been difficult to pin down any kind of trend," said Elizabeth Ancker, assistant program director at the nonprofit Compass Connecting Point, the group that manages the waiting list and helped find Bailey a shelter room. "We're really just seeing more of everybody - every demographic, in every situation."

No shit.Read more »

A new book by local historian William Issel explains the key role the Catholic Church played in funding and supporting progressive causes in 20th Century San Francisco, and Randy Shaw's take on it is accurate: For a while, in the 1970s and 1980s, the Church funded a lot of the tenant advocacy and poverty work in this city. The other side of that is a piece of the debate over the new Pope that we're not hearing much.Read more »

Gavin Newsom sat down for an hour with Brian Edwards-Tiekert of KPFA's Up Front, and the show is remarkable. Brian was a little less harsh than Steven Colbert, who (properly) said the Gavster's new book, Citizenville, needs "a bullshit detector" and that "everything in there could be carved on a stone and put in someone's garden," but he did a great job putting Newsom's book in the context of state and lo Read more »

Yes, your garbage rates are going up. As much as 23 percent, maybe. That’s what Recology, the local trash monopoly, announced March 15.

The rate hike isn’t as bad as some people expected, nor is it as high as earlier predictions. More important, the way the company charges for the three bins we all use is going to change rather profoundly: No more free recycling and compost bins, but you can save money if you cut back on the amount of unrecyclable crap you shouldn’t buy anyway that’s headed to the landfill.

Here’s how it’s going to work:Read more »