The Bay

In California, living with parents has become necessary for many young adults trying to save money on rent. Around 37 percent of young people ages 18 to 34 are living with their parents, according to Census data. And increasingly, those living at home are from richer coastal areas. So what does that mean for black and brown people who have been historically denied access to home ownership -- the g...

Tech companies like Lyft and Uber have introduced America to a new way of working. They've touted a flexible, be-your-own boss work model -- though without benefits or worker protections. This week, California lawmakers passed Assembly Bill 5 -- a landmark bill that will extend protections and benefits for workers in the state's gig economy. But it protects workers in other industries too. Guest:...

Heritage and gentrification intersect in West Oakland's Lower Bottoms neighborhood. That's the historical headquarters of the Black Panther Party, and the last train stop in the East Bay before San Francisco. The rising cost of housing in the Bay Area is changing the character of the Lower Bottoms, and we introduce you to the podcast Out of the Blocks to hear just how. Out of the Blocks is an imme...

The tragedy of the Conception boat fire off the Santa Barbara coast has rippled throughout the diving community. Several of the 34 people who died on Labor Day were from the Bay Area. The boat and Truth Aquatics operators are highly regarded by divers. One local dive instructor who has been on the Conception wonders how a boat with such a good reputation caught fire and caused so much destruction....

The Ghost Ship trial is over, for now. The jury acquitted Max Harris, one of the two men accused of involuntary manslaughter for his role in the 2016 warehouse fire that killed 36 people. The other defendant, master tenant Derick Almena, is still locked up after a hung jury couldn’t decide whether he was guilty or innocent. The fire devastated Oakland’s artist community as the city began cracking...

Brandon Lee remains in critical condition after he was shot outside his home in the Philippines last month. The San Francisco native warned that the Philippine government had been intimidating him for working as a human rights advocate for indigenous communities in the Ifugao province in northern Philippines. San Francisco Supervisor Matt Haney recently visited Brandon in the hospital and he joine...

Our reporting on deadly police shootings that have happened in Vallejo has struck a nerve with listeners, especially those who live in the city. A police shooting will ripple throughout a community and touch everyone. Instead of city landmarks, some see spots where police violence occurred. They've written us to say they are frustrated but say this is a solvable problem. Today, we'll feature some...

Brianna Sedillo is a student at El Cerrito High School in the East Bay. After her grandfather passed away, the pressures of high school intensified for her. Her depression and anxiety kicked into high gear leaving her with few coping mechanisms to succeed in class. It's a feeling that many teenagers in school experience, and a topic that KQED's education podcast MindShift is taking on as part of i...

When the Cabellos listed their Oakland property for sale, they got offers from developers and corporate businesses. The property sits in the gentrified Temescal neighborhood, which is part of the reason they closed their business Baby World in 2017. The family was holding out for a buyer who understood the plight and the struggle that many people – like the Cabellos, who came to Oakland as politic...

This isn’t the first time Vallejo has experienced a cluster of high profile police shootings and incidents that have caused residents to demand changes. The current pleas and fight for police accountability from activists is reminiscent of 2012, when there was a spike in deadly police shootings. But it's not just police shootings people are concerned about. It’s also everyday run-ins with Vallejo...

The recent wave of protests for police accountability in Vallejo started back in 2017. That’s when Angel Ramos, 21, was fatally shot by an officer who thought he was stabbing another person during a fight. But no knife was found near him. Since then, his sister Alicia Saddler has been trying to change the narrative about what happened, which has largely been controlled by law enforcement and the c...

Willie McCoy had a hard childhood, but his dreams of making music professionally kept him alive until he was shot 55 times by Vallejo police in February after he was found unconscious his car. His death and the subsequent release of body-cam video of the police shooting has sparked protests at Vallejo City Hall, a new round of outrage different from the protests over police killings in 2012. Activ...

In February, Vallejo police officers shot a young black man 55 times after he was found unconscious in his car. Another was killed last year after an officer tried to stop him for riding a bike without a safety light. Fatal police shootings of Black and Latino men are drawing attention to the small, diversely-populated suburb of Vallejo, which has been largely ignored by most media and activists,...

A San Francisco native was shot in the Philippines earlier this month in what friends and family believe was an attempted extrajudicial assassination by the Philippine government. Brandon Lee became an activist through San Francisco State University's League of Filipino Students. Lee moved to the Philippines in 2010 to work as a paralegal and human rights advocate for indigenous communities in the...

More than 34,000 people are homeless in the Bay Area. There's not enough housing or resources to help them all. Some have friends or family who have been searching for their loved ones to bring them home, but finding someone who is homeless is very challenging. They're always on the move. They don't often have access to a phone. And even after finding that person, they might not be ready to go hom...

Latinos this week have expressed fear, anger and unity after a gunman shot and killed 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. The suspect wrote a racist manifesto blaming immigrants and Hispanics for economic changes in the U.S. The massacre in Texas followed the Bay Area’s own mass shooting last month in Gilroy, a city that is majority Hispanic. Since then, many Latinx people have shared how th...

The three victims from the Gilroy Garlic Festival were young -- ages 6, 13 and 25. Many of the victims from the shootings in El Paso and Dayton were also young. And it was children, teenagers and young adults who joined the debate for gun control, notably after the Parkland, Florida school shooting in 2018 where 17 students and staff members were killed. Here in the Bay Area, high school students...

After the shooting at the Gilroy Garlic Festival on July 28, a local newspaper photographer criticized how media quickly descended on the small city in south Santa Clara County in ways we've seen too many times: cameras, lights satellite trucks, neatly-dressed journalists. To Robert Eliason, it felt cold, transaction and distanced. "I'm press, but I'm not really press," he wrote on his Facebook pa...

Google pledged $1 billion earlier this month to help ease Silicon Valley's housing crisis. That crisis is playing out in Google's home city of Mountain View, where city leaders want to ban RVs from parking overnight on city streets. RV dwellers say they have nowhere else to go. But some Mountain View residents say they're concerned about waste, parking availability and public health. The city plan...

A San Francisco nurse named Bobbi Campbell was the first person to publicly announce he had a cancer associated with AIDS in 1981. Around this time, he convinced a Castro drugstore to display pictures of his lesions to educate other gay men in the city. This was the beginning of an activist-led campaign to alert the gay community of a new disease that has since affected millions around the world....

Can an artist’s original intentions withstand the test of time and modern sentiment? A mural at George Washington High School in San Francisco that intended to depict America's founding father in true light and criticize the country's racist past has sparked debate for decades. Some have described the mural as degrading; others have called it historic. After years of contention, the S.F. school bo...

President Trump on Monday announced that federal immigration officers were gearing up for deportations next week. Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf responded by urging her community to be prepared. It’s unclear whether the federal government is even capable of widespread raids or deportations, and who exactly they're targeting. Trump administration officials have said their immigration policies are meant...

San Francisco's Juneteenth, a commemoration of the end of slavery, is one of the largest gatherings of African Americans in California every year. This year's Juneteenth parade was named in honor of Rachel Townsend, a leader in San Francisco's black community who died of sudden illness in 2018. Townsend was active in San Francisco and Oakland politics and fought to keep Juneteenth in San Francisco...

Environmental activists in San Francisco have long called for the city to have its own public power system. The idea never took off until PG&E went bankrupt, again, in January. The private utility company owns most of the power grid that delivers the city's power, but S.F. leaders worry PG&E will raise rates and prioritize profits over reliable, safe power. Now city leaders are looking at buying P...

Formerly incarcerated people who can’t find work after prison face a 50 percent chance of returning to prison. Those who do find work have a better chance of staying out. San Quentin State Prison, California’s oldest prison, has several programs such as arts, continuing education and electronics training to help inmates prepare for life outside its walls. One of these programs, Quentin Cooks, help...