News For Reasonable People

In a recent development, New York City, once celebrated as a sanctuary city, is facing a financial and logistical crisis. Mayor Eric Adams, previously a staunch supporter, now finds himself at the center of controversy as the city demands migrant shelter landlords cut costs or risk having their leases terminated. The city, grappling with a surging influx of asylum seekers and a bursting budget, is...

Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed SB4, a stringent state immigration law aimed at arresting and seeking the deportation of illegal immigrants. This move is Texas's response to the perceived inaction of the federal government on border control, especially in light of recent record-breaking illegal entries. SB4 empowers state law enforcement to arrest and jail migrants on new state-level charge...

The US is witnessing its highest-ever level of homelessness, with California leading the surge. In many cities, including Denver, the removal of homeless encampments has become more frequent. Despite these clearances costing cities like Denver nearly $600,000, they offer little more than a temporary fix, failing to address the root causes of homelessness. Experts argue that these sweeps merely rel...

The San Francisco office market continues to struggle, but it hasn’t hit the bottom yet.  Office vacancy in the city rose to new heights in the fourth quarter of 2023, according to new preliminary data from commercial real estate firm CBRE. The vacancy rate increased to 35.9%, a modest jump from last quarter’s rate of 34%. That translates to another 1.4 million square feet of occupancy loss — the...

Gavin Newsom told Seth Meyers he was 'defensive' of crime-ridden San Francisco and insisted that the problems plaguing the struggling city were exaggerated by Republicans. The California governor, who was mayor of San Francisco from 2004-11, was asked by Meyers on Wednesday night about the city, which has seen an exodus of businesses and residents amid rampant crime - particularly burgla...

AUnited States labor agency wants to force Starbucks to reopen 23 stores after it claimed the coffee chain illegally shuttered the locations to block employees from unionizing. The company shut down 16 locations in July 2022. The closed stores were located in a number of large cities, including Seattle, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago. The National Labor Relations Board stated in...

As we reported Saturday, baseball sensation Shohei Ohtani signed a $700 million mega-deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers. The guaranteed contract is the richest ever signed in any U.S. professional sport. But the two-way player received an almost identical offer from another Major League team: the San Francisco Giants, yet he turned it down. The eight-time winners of the World Series pulled out all...

San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins is taking heat for recent controversial comments that homeless people “have to be made to be uncomfortable,” a reference to the idea that regularly sweeping encampments encourages unhoused people to accept offers of shelter.  During a Dec. 4 public forum, dubbed “Take Action: San Francisco,” Jenkins was asked by KGO-TV reporter and former Chronicle co...

Cops are fleeing a major city previously declared as the nation's murder capital, with officer staffing hitting its lowest level on record, according to police data. The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, like many law enforcement agencies across the country, has faced significant departures that it's struggled to replace, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported Monday. The departmen...

You might find this hard to believe, but some places in the country are actually prosecuting the organized shoplifters plaguing retailers. For example, a pair in Parker, Colorado, known as the KitchenAid Crew just went to trial over their shoplifting spree stealing, well, you can guess. Michael Green, 50, and Byron Bolden, 37 were both convicted for felony retail theft. The documented value of the...

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu defended holding a holiday party for “electeds of color” just hours before hosting the controversial gathering inside the city’s official reception hall Wednesday. Wu admitted it was a mistake that every member of the Boston City Council received invitations to the controversial holiday party, and had already talked to those that were uninvited. “We had individual conversa...

On Friday, a Multnomah County judge issued a warrant for the arrest of an alleged fentanyl trafficker—less than 24 hours after he’d already been arrested with 11 million doses of fentanyl. The court published that warrant online this afternoon. The warrant was issued a day after Multnomah County Sheriff’s deputies raided a Northeast Portland Airbnb rental they allege was the center of a fentanyl d...

City Hall has taken steps to help migrants leave New York City by offering them free fare to anywhere in the country or world and made life tougher by limiting shelter stays. Wait times to get a bed can stretch as long as a week. Some migrants have had enough. Their city of dreams has become a nightmare. With winter coming, many have reached new lows and levels of desperation and have decided that...

On Friday, the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office announced its biggest fentanyl bust to date, after raiding two houses in Northeast Portland and Oregon City on Thursday and finding the equivalent of over 11 million doses of fentanyl. It was “one of the largest illegal fentanyl seizures in state history,” according to a Dec. 9 statement from the sheriff’s office. But the fate of the alleged ringlea...

A day after walking out on a Village Board meeting, four Dolton trustees at odds with Mayor Tiffany Henyard held a special meeting Tuesday to approve a tentative tax levy and talk about a village that remains divided. Meeting at a Dolton Park District facility with about two dozen residents attending, the trustees said they are trying to be good stewards of taxpayer money, but are being kept in th...

The Legislative Analyst Office, the California legislatures nonpartisan fiscal and policy advisory [www.lao.ca.gov] stated that Newsom should consider declaring a budget emergency to tap into the state's rainy-day fund. The outlook means California could also be facing deep budget cuts by next summer, when the state's updated spending plan is due. Let’s get one thing straight. Newsom has...

TV cameras were rolling as the mayor's office made headlines Wednesday by giving the go-ahead to dismantle a huge RV encampment on Forest Lawn Drive, but initially said there were no plans clear any of the other hundreds of other RV encampments across Los Angeles. "I think there are other solutions," Mayor Karen Bass told the I-Team. "The RV situation is very complicated."...

Sidewalk vendors in San Francisco's Mission District came together Friday to push back against a temporary ban. The small business owners say the temporary ban on street vendors in the neighborhood is crippling them. Several members of the city's street vendors association marched from Mission Street to San Francisco City Hall They agree Mission Street has become violent and even deadly...

 Much of the land along the Columbia Slough in North Portland is known for its long history of industrial use, and its resulting high likelihood of contamination. “I’ve started calling this area a 'brownfield sandwich,'” said Dale Svart, who lives near the plot of land in North Portland that the city soon expects to house nearly 200 homeless people. It’s across the street from a wastewat...

Remember that SF Office of Reparations that once considered $5 million lump-sum payments to Black San Franciscans? Now the city can’t even afford the $2 million a year to run that department, and the office is gutted in Mayor Breed’s budget cuts. Very early in 2023, it made headlines nationwide that a soon-to-be-formed SF City Hall department called the Office of Reparations was possibly consideri...

California is set to implement a new law on January 1, 2024, which mandates that stores selling children’s items must include a gender-neutral section. This law targets retailers with at least 500 employees across their various store locations. These stores are required to display a reasonable selection of childcare items and toys in a way that does not conform to traditional gender marketing norm...

A San Francisco home has been sold at half its original listing price, crystallizing the stark real estate climate in the city and in the U.S. The home in the Russian Hill neighborhood sold for $9,990,000 on November 9, after being listed in October 2022 at $19,995,000. The house sat on the market for almost a year before selling at almost half the original list price in a city that is becoming em...

When you pull up to Mark Dahl's home in Southeast Portland, it's clear he's proud of his property. His yard, decked out in holiday decor, is meticulously maintained. "It's a pretty area," said Dahl. "We moved here basically because of the housing affordability at the time." But after more than three decades in his house, Dahl has regrets. "My truck has...

CVS is shutting down its location in San Francisco's Lower Haight neighborhood, the pharmacy chain said Wednesday. The store at 499 Haight St. will close on Jan. 11, Amy Thibault, a spokesperson for CVS Pharmacy, told The Standard. Employees are being offered other roles at the company, and prescriptions will be transferred to the CVS at 701 Van Ness Ave., around one mile away. The closure is...

Conservatives are outraged after two people charged with burning down a Wendy's restaurant in Atlanta in the summer of 2020 were fined just $500 each. Prosecutors said Chisom Kingston, Natalia Hanna White and John Wesley Wade set a fire that destroyed the Wendy's in June 2020 amid protests sparked by the fatal shooting of Rayshard Brooks, a 27-year-old Black man, by a police officer duri...