San Francisco is among the most rodent-infested cities in the United States, according to an October report from pest control company Terminix.
To compile its ranking, Terminix used data from 300 branches nationwide to determine where its rodent control services were called most in 2025.
The board on Friday voted 7-2 to strip Choudri of his sole authority to sign and manage contracts under $25 million and to require the agency’s in-house attorneys to approve or change any new or existing contracts.
Several board members slammed the consultants for the travel expenses. Lynn Schenk, who has served on the board since 2003, said the spending suggests a troubling pattern and deserves a deeper dive.
“I am outraged that we would be treated like a piggy bank for these kinds of expenditures,” she said during the board meeting. “And it says to me that there are other expenditures that are being treated this way.”
When East Bay resident Dana Gersten found out she was pregnant with her first child, she knew she didn’t want to raise the child alone. She wasn’t single — she has a loving, devoted partner — but she envisioned her baby growing up surrounded by a supportive community, ideally in a communal housing environment where people share resources and help one another day to day.
According to Zack Rosen, founder of California YIMBY and the Abundance Network, the problem with politics is Americans being too involved. Bemoaning the rise of small-dollar political donations in fundraising documents leaked to the Prospect, Rosen is blunt: “Small dollar internet fundraising makes politics dumber.” Rosen misses what he considers to be a bygone era of elite dominance. Lamenting the current state of democratized influence, Rosen says “the old gatekeepers were political professionals who could count cards; small dollar donors today are amateurs yanking the handles of ActBlue slot machines.”
This sentiment is laid out in substantial detail, filling 31 pages across two separate documents obtained by the Prospect. In an email exchange, Rosen confirmed the documents’ legitimacy.
People in the US have concerns about the housing market and lack of supply in high demand areas. Everyone agrees that more housing is needed.
Why don’t those that want more housing, build more housing? They keep waiting for something to happen but if they took control of their future by building their own housing, they’d solve their own problems.
Excuse me, English is not my first language and I don’t know if I phrased this right
So many cities have been gentrified since the 1980’s- NYC, SF, LA, Austin etc due to increased density in formerly artistic and creative spaces.
Is there any way to preserve art and music and creative cultures as cities go through this?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1877916611000452
cheap/underused land → artists move in → cultural identity develops → neighborhood becomes desirable → investment increases → land/rents rise → artists become economically marginal → displacement
Interview starts at 1:58
The project’s watchdog is sounding the alarm that the high-speed rail could be out of money by December 2027. Now, lawmakers and the future governor of California have to decide whether to find more money in the budget or take out a loan for the project that’s been plagued by delays and cost overruns. On California Politics 360, Ashley Zavala sits down with the first-ever high-speed rail inspector general, Benjamin Belnap** **
“In almost every California county for which Redfin has data, assessed values grew faster than market values from 2017 to 2025, meaning homes are generally having more of their value taxed. In Santa Clara County, for example, the average assessed home value was about $640,000, or 46% of the average estimated market value of $1.4 million. By 2025, the average assessed value was nearly $1.1 million, or 57% of the average market value of $1.9 million.
That doesn’t mean Prop 13’s benefits to property owners are going away. The difference between assessed values and market values acts like an accordion, stretching and narrowing as the housing market cycles through ups and downs.”
“The higher prices for buyouts are “putting even more pressure on PE firms to squeeze the juice out of their portfolio companies”, Batt said, at a time when there’s almost no regulation governing how they do that.
“They can engage in financial engineering or just slash and burn on the operating side,” Batt said. “And it takes years for anyone to really see it.”
The only way I can see forward to remove landlords is to start more housing co-ops. The alternative would be state managed housing, which seems possibly worse than having private landlords.
Has anyone here started a co-op, or live in one?
Automakers, dealers and repair shops are changing business practices to adapt to a new normal: the 13-year-old car.
California’s high-speed rail (HSR) is not a transportation failure; it is a governance failure. It did not collapse because infrastructure is hard to build, it collapsed because California’s governance architecture is not designed to deliver megaprojects.
The August 23, 2026, "60 Minutes" segment “Ghost Train,” led by correspondent Jon Wertheim, underscored what I have argued for more than a decade: the project is failing because of planning errors, management breakdowns, and the absence of both sound project design and the institutional structure needed to carry it out.
California’s high-speed rail remains technically alive, but its glacial progress and soaring costs have made it a veritable “ghost train,” a promise that lingers across the landscape without delivering meaningful transportation.
The project was promoted as transformative, promising to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco at true bullet-train speeds. Instead, it has become a symbol of uncertainty over whether the original vision can ever be realized. With certainty, the original promise was political marketing, not engineering reality.
Today, the project is mired in land-acquisition disputes, lawsuits, complex environmental reviews, and dependence on costly private consultants instead of in-house expertise. Critics, including regional leaders, argue that the billions committed to high-speed rail could have been used to modernize existing urban transit, bus networks, affordable housing, or water infrastructure.
The failure began at birth. The state promised a bullet train with no route, no land, no environmental clearance, and no institutional capacity—the combination of people, systems, resources, leadership, and routines that allow a public agency to actually implement policy effectively.
The project began with only ten employees responsible for managing and overseeing it. Rather than build in-house engineering and rail expertise, the authority was persuaded to shift that enormous responsibility to consultants. Before long, consultants dominated the project, creating the unusual arrangement in which government employees reported to consultants, who then managed other consultants.
I’m looking for property with acreage (20+ acres) for my parents who are retired, moving from NYC. What are the actual drawbacks to this much land in the bay? I assume fire control/clearing is a hassle and possibly insurance. How much overhead is that?
This is the listing I’m looking at: