Free Republic

Author, founder of Salon.com, and Bernal Heights resident David Talbot recently made a speech at Stanford which was then published in 48HillsOnline.com decrying “Stanford douchebags”, gentrification, and Mayor Ed Lee. Talbot’s strong words for Stanford students have struck a chord up north in San Francisco, and his speech is rapidly going viral.

If you’re out on the left coast and heading out for some tasty Chipotle goodness tonight, be prepared to dig a little deeper when you pay the check. Prices are going up and it’s not just because of the cost of beef. (From the Chicago Tribune) In its weekly survey of 10 Chipotle markets, Chicago-based William Blair found that Chipotle raised prices in half of the markets that the investment firm surveyed — San Francisco, Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis and Orlando. In most markets, the price increases occurred due to the rising cost of beef.The city by the bay, however,...

California's high taxes and obsession with elitist political correctness have made the state so expensive that a fourth of residents are thinking about moving to a more reasonable state. As greedy cities, counties and other governmental bodies restrict property rights and development in the name of environmentalism, housing has become prohibitively overpriced. The young are especially hard hit. A study released today by Public Policy Institute of California found that: 60 percent of respondents worried that their children would not be able to buy homes nearby. Only one in five who want to buy a house someday think they will...

The poorest Americans, who can’t afford to buy property, are increasingly priced out of rentals. There were only 28 adequate and available to rent homes for every 100 extremely low-income renters in 2013, down from 37 in 2000, according to the Urban Institute, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization that focuses on social and economic policy. “This gap between supply and demand leaves 72% of the country’s poorest families burdened by the high cost of housing,” it found. Extremely low-income renters are households with incomes at or below 30% of the median income in that region. Not one county in the...

Struggling to live in America's $1M city: Photographer captures lives of ordinary San Francisco residents who have been forced to live in cars, trailers, garages and tents following the tech boom Photographer Wenxin Zhang moved to San Francisco in 2011 Discovered a group of people online that had been forced to find alternative means of accommodation 'I visited them alone with mutual trust,' she said The subsequent photo essay is called Goodnight Stories A recent report said that a family needs about $200,000 a year to live comfortably in San Francisco, so long as their children go to public school....

<p>Home prices have soared so high that affording housing is a problem not just for the poor but for middle-class families as well, experts say.</p> <p>"The run-up in single-family home prices is crowding out solidly middle-class households from buying," says Bruce Katz, director of the Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy at the Brookings Institution.</p>

San Francisco In my apartment building people of various income levels are stacked on top of each other. The architect and the teacher occupy one-bedroom apartments on the floor above me. They are considered middle-class and, for that matter, so am I. An affluent, well-traveled couple lives in a two-bedroom apartment on the top floor. A poor Chinese immigrant family of five is crammed into the converted storage room where half a dozen bicycles were once kept, their children often turning the foyer into a makeshift playground strewn with plastic toys. This is typical of the way we live in...

In urban centers around the country, rental prices are soaring. Cities like San Francisco, Seattle, and New York City routinely report double-digit increases that make it nearly impossible for residents to make ends meet. But it’s not just dwellers of those metropolitan areas who are having a hard time paying the rent. According to a report out this week from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, more than half of renters in America are considered to be financially burdened by their rent, meaning that they spend more than 30 percent of their income just on where they live. High...

San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone’s effort to ensure that Catholic schools are Catholic has led one-hundred San Franciscans who describe themselves as “committed Catholics inspired by Vatican II,” to take out a full page ad in the San Francisco Chronicle asking Pope Francis to force Cordileone's resignation and appoint in his place an archbishop committed to “our values and your teachings.” It is worth asking to what extent those “values” and “teachings” align. Francis, who has spoken strongly in the past against gay marriage and transgender ideology, has also called for a church that is “poor and for the poor.”...

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) — There’s no one at this new San Francisco vegetarian restaurant to take your lunch order or tell you when its ready. Instead, you’ll depend on machines for a fully automated dining experience straight out of an episode of The Jetsons. Welcome to Eatsa, a new futuristic fast food chain opening Monday in the Embarcadero (121 Spear Street) offering quick, healthy food for about $7 — a deal compared to other lunch time options in San Francisco. Customers tap their meal selections on an iPad or their smartphone and pay electronically. No cash is taken here....

If you're interested in whether rent control makes rent prices go down or not -- and plenty of people think it actually makes them go up -- then stop what you're doing right now and watch this video on San Francisco's real estate war, by my colleague Andrew Stern. The video features a heart-breaking interview with artist David Brenkus, who has lived in a rent-controlled apartment on Walter Street for 34 years. His building has been bought and now he is being evicted so that the new landlord can move in. Brenkus's rent is $735 month for a two-bedroom apartment,...

If you're interested in whether rent control makes rent prices go down — and plenty of people think it actually makes them go up — then stop what you're doing and watch this video on San Francisco's real-estate war, by my colleague Andrew Stern. The video features a heartbreaking interview with artist David Brenkus, who has lived in a rent-controlled apartment on Walter Street for 34 years.

San Francisco's homeless population plummeted by more than a quarter in the past two years, the city reported Monday, a dramatic change Mayor Gavin Newsom says is a credit to his policies of cutting cash assistance to street people and aggressively moving them into housing with counseling services. San Francisco's new figures are based on a one-night homeless count, taken between 8 p.m. Jan. 26 and about 8 a.m. the next morning. It showed the city now has 6,248 homeless people living on the streets or in jails, shelters, rehabilitation centers or other emergency facilities -- a 28 percent decline...

Let’s finish out the weekend with a story about Californians being Californians, because… California. Terces and Matthew Engelhart have made quite the life for themselves out on the left coast over the past decade, having established a small chain of “organic, plant-based” restaurants which specialize in completely vegan food. They apparently attract Hollywood celebrities who are impressed not only by the business ethic of their eateries, but the “Love Farm” where they raise much of their produce, presumably in a Gaia approved fashion. They’ve published a book which explains the tenets of their “sacred enterprise” which is a must read...

US Attorney recommends 8 years in prison for Leland Yee Known as being "tough on guns," disgraced former California State Sen. Leland Yee may get 8 years in federal prison for his 2015 plea to racketeering charges. Yee, ironically known for his gun control legislation, was arrested in 2014 on a host of charges including plotting to smuggle guns into the country via Islamic terror groups. This left many gun control advocates, who up until that time held the San Francisco-based politician as a champion in the crusade for tougher gun laws, dismayed. Facing potentially the rest of his life...

WASHINGTON — After he left Wall Street to enter politics eight years ago, Representative Jim Himes, Democrat of Connecticut, began fielding the occasional question of when he intended to run for president. “It has come up in jest any number of times,” said Mr. Himes, who always has his answer ready. “There could be constitutional questions.” Mr. Himes, you see, was born in Peru in 1966 while his father worked for the Ford Foundation. That makes him one of at least 17 current members of Congress who, because of their birth outside the United States, could run afoul of the...

Because Cruz kept a repeat offender in prison, Brooks says he's not a good Christian. David Brooks does not like Ted Cruz. In an escalating series of attacks, Brooks has gone from saying that Cruz doesn't "live within the confines of reality" and is "nakedly ambitious" - a "selfish Machiavellian" - to now saying that Cruz's rhetoric is "Satanic" or perhaps "Mephistophelian." But Brooks really tears into Cruz in his latest column, arguing that his speeches are "marked by what you might call pagan brutalism." He claims that Cruz's "career and public presentation" are devoid of "the Christian virtues: humility,...

The View's Joy Behar on Tuesday insisted that, regardless of whether Bill Clinton raped a woman or Ted Kennedy drowned someone, she would vote for these liberal politicians. Behar and her fellow co-hosts were discussing how Clinton's past would impact his wife. She justified, "Republicans have voted against the Violence Against Women Act. Now, that to me, is more important than anything that Bill Clinton did or didn't do because it's what [Hillary's] going to vote for." This came after co-host Paula Faris reminded, "Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey. They say that he [Clinton] either exposed himself to them, raped them...

There's a good chance that some link to a motive can be found for every murder. Hillary Clinton and Co. said that a video was responsible for Benghazi. Satirical cartoons were responsible for the Charlie Hebdo terrorist acts. Where did Robert Lewis Dear hear about the "baby parts" if (1) he lived off the grid with no electricity and (2) since very few news outlets reported on the Planned Parenthood videos? "Craig Stephens Hicks, an atheist who killed three Muslims in North Carolina in February, was supposedly a big fan of Rachel Maddow and Bill Nye the Science Guy. It...

The left-leaning fundraising site GoFundMe has declined to accept a fundraising campaign for jailed Rowan County, Kentucky, clerk Kim Davis. Davis was jailed on Thursday for defying a federal court order to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples following the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges in June. She was ordered detained for contempt of court and later rejected a proposal to allow her deputies to process same-sex marriage licenses that could have prompted her release. She has become the symbol of religious opposition to the heavy-handed tactics of the “gaystapo” who are ramming same-sex marriage through at...