The Forum: Now You're All Watching
Our new community forum puts every Californian in the same room, so what one of us catches, all of us know. Your first job is to help us build this cycle's voter guide.
Garry's List
A 501(c)(4) civic engagement organization for the Bay Area and California.
Latest posts
The New Gatekeepers, Part Two: Scarcity by Design
San Francisco's affordable-housing nonprofits block the market-rate housing they don't control, ration the subsidized housing they do, and have already raised half a billion dollars without a clear account of where it went. The Affordable Housing Guarantee Act on November's ballot doesn't fix that model.
The New Octopus
Every company you rely on, from Airbnb to Stripe, started as a little startup that got a chance to grow, and that chance depends on open access to the platforms everyone builds on. The path forward is simple and pro-growth: open APIs, real interoperability, and fair placement, so the next generation of founders gets the same shot.
The Environmental Law That Became a Housing Veto
For fifty-three years, NIMBYs have used and abused CEQA to stop housing everywhere in California. AB 130 and SB 131 exempted most urban infill homes from it last June, but voters have a chance to finish the job with Proposition 45 this November, expediting review for housing, transportation, water, health, and clean energy projects.
How Oakland's Leadership Produced the Worst Property Crime Rate in the Nation
Oakland's leaders built their brand on progressive values—equity, reform, community-first justice—while quietly presiding over the nation's highest property crime rate and a clearance rate near zero. The costs of that failure have landed almost entirely on the Black and working-class neighborhoods progressive politics claims to champion.
The New Gatekeepers
The left coined "non-profit industrial complex" to warn of the co-optation of its causes. Ironically, San Francisco has since built the fullest working example of it, where ideological purity substitutes for outcomes and dependency substitutes for delivery. The result is a coalition that claims to speak for the poor, while its own constituents, given an actual vote, keep voting it out.
The Democratic Party Endorsed the Wealth Tax. Its Doctors, Teachers, Nurses, and Firefighters Didn't.
California Democrats endorsed Prop 40's wealth tax by just two votes, but the doctors, teachers, clinics, and construction unions the measure is supposed to help all voted no, warning it makes the state's budget more volatile, not less. The party made its statement, and now voters decide whether a one-time tax on a few hundred people is worth the risk to the funding schools and healthcare already…
The Caucus to Watch as California's Legislative Session Closes
A 26-member bipartisan California caucus has quietly built a real track record on affordability, housing, and energy, most visibly with AB 30, a bill that cut gas prices 20 cents a gallon after regulators failed to for 8 years. Co-chair Anamarie Ávila Farías embodies the group's independent, results-over-party approach, one of the Legislature's few genuine "mavericks."
Billions of Dollars in, Homelessness in LA Continues to Rise
Los Angeles has poured billions into homelessness programs —Prop HHH, Measure ULA, Inside Safe, LAHSA—and a federal audit found the city "doesn't know how much it is paying, and for what," with nearly zero financial oversight anywhere in the chain. Now homelessness in the city is rising again, and the pattern underneath every failure is the same: money moves, programs run, and no one's job ever…
Why California Is a Crucial Artery in Beijing's Campaign Against American AI
A Shanghai-funded network has spent five years organizing on-the-ground campaigns against U.S. data centers, with California serving as a critical staging ground. It's part of a broader Chinese effort to slow American AI development, underscoring the need for scrutiny of who's bankrolling local opposition.
False Choice Narratives Are Anti-Asian
San Francisco has repeatedly sold Asian Americans the same false choice: safety for justice, excellence for equity, and now prosperity for compassion. None of these trade-offs were ever necessary, yet Asian Americans, with the least inherited wealth and political power to absorb the cost, keep being asked to foot the bill.
LAUSD's Looming Insolvency Crisis
The same board that laid off 3,200 workers in February approved $1.13 billion a year in union raises in June, just four days after the county warned in writing it couldn't afford them. Now, with a new superintendent barely in the job and a mid-August deadline looming, LAUSD is one misstep from the fate of Oakland, Sacramento, and a growing list of California districts that lost control of their…
A Big Win for San Francisco's Budget—With Bigger Tests Still Ahead
San Francisco closed a $643 million deficit and passed a $16.9 billion budget weeks early, banking over $1 billion in reserves and reaching a deal in record time. It's a real win after years of chaotic budget seasons, but with next year offering less cushion, the harder tests are still to come.
California Just Lost 10,000 Jobs to Texas—Again
A shipyard that could have anchored tens of thousands of good jobs in Solano County is going to Brownsville instead. It is the latest entry in a pattern California refuses to break: we make it too hard to build here, so the builders go somewhere else, and working families pay the bill.
A Primer: The Labor and Public-Interest Coalition Against Prop 40
Prop 40’s wealth tax would levy a one-time 5% tax on roughly 200 billionaires to fund healthcare and schools—yet the teachers, doctors, clinics, builders, housing advocates, and law-enforcement groups it claims to help have joined to oppose it. They argue that a one-time, volatile tax makes their funding less stable, not more. The state’s own analyst projects it would cost California income-tax…
The Nonprofit Behind San Francisco's Pay-to-Play Scandal Wants Another Supervisor Seat
Young Community Developers has cycled through three leaders since 1998—the first is now facing 29 felony bribery charges, the second became District 10's supervisor while quietly running a for-profit LLC tied to the nonprofit, and the third, current CEO DJ Brookter, is running for that same seat with his predecessor's endorsement. Along the way, Brookter has repeatedly sat on the civilian boards…
The Merchant and the Lawyer
Asian and Jewish Americans built, funded, and fought for the coalition that won the Civil Rights Movement, and are now the only two of its peoples the coalition has abandoned in return—first during the wave of anti-Asian violence in 2020-2023, and now amid a surge of lethal antisemitism. But a story of Chinese-Jewish solidarity in 1950s San Francisco speaks to the promises and possibilities of…
LA's Council Voted No on Oversight, Yes on a Lighter Schedule
After a year of hearings, LA's Charter Reform Commission recommended police oversight, a bigger council, and ranked-choice voting. The council shelved all three for "more study." The one measure it fast-tracked to the ballot lets members meet as little as once a week while keeping their $244,727 salary intact.
Bribes and Blind Spots: SF's Corruption Problem
San Francisco's recent scandals split into two failures: a proven bribery ring the FBI spent six years unwinding, and officials who failed to recuse from money touching their own decisions. Both move through the same two chokepoints — contract awards and project approvals — and both were caught by luck, not by design.
How a Honduran Trafficking Network Captured San Francisco's Fentanyl Trade
A Honduran trafficking network came to dominate San Francisco's fentanyl trade. City officials knew for years and didn't act. The federal workaround that finally followed cut deaths — but it only pulls street dealers off the corner. The cartels supplying the fentanyl, and the managers running the network, are still almost untouched.
The Campaign to Kill American AI Runs Through San Francisco
The movement opposing data centers looks like grassroots environmentalism. But a federal grand jury and two new research reports show it is also a coordinated foreign influence operation, with documented nodes in the Mission District, Oakland, and a San Francisco foundation boardroom.
California's Encampment Fire Crisis
A 2018 ruling froze encampment clearance across California for six years. A 2024 Supreme Court decision lifted it, but the fires kept climbing. Cities like Oakland have since formalized the pattern into policy, mapping 95% of the city off-limits to encampments and leaving the rest — concentrated in the working-class, majority-Black and Hispanic Flats — to absorb what's left.
A Quarter of SF's Overdose Deaths Happen in City-Funded Housing
San Francisco spends $700 million a year on homelessness, yet 26% of the city’s drug overdose deaths occur inside its permanent supportive housing, which houses just 1.5% of the population. The oversight commission voters created in 2022 to watch this system has never conducted a single performance audit, and the city has never once terminated a nonprofit contract over safety or performance…
California Legalized the Housing. It Just Didn't Get Built.
California has legalized duplexes, lot splits, and apartments on millions of parcels where they were long banned — and almost none of it is getting built: SB 9 produced 266 projects out of 6.1 million eligible parcels, and its companion laws for commercial and faith-owned land recorded essentially none. Cities blunted the laws with local ordinances, and the state's enforcement rarely goes past a…
California's Primary Has Ushered a New Mandate: Time to Move Beyond Ideology to Governing Competence
California's June 2026 primary saw voters favor candidates focused on governing competence over ideological messaging, with San Francisco's moderate coalition consolidating around Mayor Daniel Lurie as the progressive machine fractured. A one-time tax on the state's wealthiest residents could be the first statewide test of whether that shift extends beyond the city.