Free Republic

A man with a needle in his arm. Streets littered with trash. Constant retail theft. Cars with broken windows from smash-and-grab auto burglaries. These are some of the images that have been used recently to describe San Francisco. But even if that narrative may have been accurate a year ago, it is now contrary to what we generally see in San Francisco today. In the San Francisco of spring 2024, you instead find commuters grabbing coffees and heading in to their offices; tourists admiring the streets comprised of unique Edwardian and Victorian architecture; friends enjoying the fresh fish at outdoor...

San Francisco, California, remains the slowest among 63 major U.S. cities in recovering from the coronavirus pandemic, according to mobile phone data. The new data from the University of Toronto’s School of Cities repeats a finding from early 2023, when San Francisco was last among 62 cities. The recovery index is “computed by counting the number of unique mobile phones in a city’s downtown area in the specified time period, and then dividing it by the number of unique visitors during the equivalent time period in 2019. For example, the March 2023 – May 2023 time period is compared to...

One of every four Oakland students - including 40 percent of its highest achievers - fled the district's public schools after finishing fifth grade in the spring, shunning the city's middle schools in favor of private, suburban or charter schools. The exodus, which crosses all ethnicities and income levels, meant a loss of at least $6 million in state revenue. But perhaps more importantly, it shows the staggering brain drain that consistently leaves middle schools heavily weighted with struggling students. It's a confounding problem for Oakland administrators: How can they improve the middle schools' test scores when the brightest students...