The Bay

Veronica Aguilar crossed the U.S.-Mexico border seeking asylum from El Salvador earlier this year. She's staying with a host family in Pinole while she waits for an immigration court hearing. Today, one family's story of immigration. Guest: Farida Jhabvala Romero, KQED immigration and equity reporter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Here’s a new one: stacking homes on top of a city bus yard. The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency wants to build housing on top of its Potrero bus yard right across the street from KQED studios. Their idea is that the housing would help pay for upgrades to the facility. It's kind of a wild idea. Guest: Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez, transportation reporter and columnist for the San Francisc...

We need homes near transit. But the first time state Sen. Scott Wiener introduced a bill, SB 827, that would have required cities to approve dense housing near transit corridors, it died a quick death. This week he announced a new version. The bill, SB 50, includes changes that are supposed to help poorer neighborhoods stay more in tact and force housing into places with more wealth. Guest: Dan Br...

This isn't supposed to be your traditional tech campus. Google says it wants to build a village inside San Jose that will be open to the public, different from how most tech campuses operate. It's expected to have public parks, restaurants and other amenities. The plan, if approved, could more than double the population of San Jose’s downtown. The city council takes a big step Tuesday with a vote...

San Francisco Mayor London Breed and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff announced a $6 million donation he is making to subsidize five years of rent for formerly homeless residents who will move into a renovated apartment building in the Tenderloin next year. Benioff used the occasion to push other wealthy Bay residents to pitch in. Guest: Kevin Fagan, reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle Kevin has do...

The city of Oakland wasn't pleased when a group of homeless people moved to a vacant lot in East Oakland in October. After the city posted a notice to vacate, the homeless residents went to court to stop the eviction. Now a judge must decide if the group of mostly women can stay on city land. Guest: Sandhya Dirks, KQED reporter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Harvey Milk and the city of San Francisco gives many people the "permission" they need to fight for gay rights in other places. The Castro became a symbol of this permission and Milk's legacy has since spread across the world. Today, a day before the 40th anniversary of his death, we look at Harvey Milk’s message of hope through the eyes of one man who watched, admired and acted on that message. G...

When rain begins to fall on Butte County this week, some will be sleeping on the streets. The Camp Fire displaced tens of thousands of people, many of whom are struggling to do basic things: find shelter, see a doctor, pay the bills. Today, we'll show you how picking up the pieces is about more than finding a new home. Guests: Raquel Maria Dillon and Peter Arcuni, KQED reporters Learn more about y...

A small number of people -- spouses of H1B visa holders -- were given the right to work under a special type of visa created under President Obama in 2015. Now President Trump wants to eliminate those spousal visas. How doing so threatens Silicon Valley's competitive edge, Bay Area diversity, and immigrant families. Guest: Rachael Myrow, KQED Silicon Valley reporter. Learn more about your ad choic...

Paradise was a city where a lot of people already carried more than their share of trauma from childhood. Now, as many work to piece their lives back together they have the added weight of trauma from the Camp Fire. Our reporter was in Paradise this past summer and tells us about one woman who is now struggling with both kinds of trauma. Guest: Laura Klivans, KQED health reporter Tap here to see p...

After two fires burned right up to the edge of town in 2008, the town of Paradise made a plan. It divided itself into evacuation zones. It went so far as to hold a mock evacuation during morning rush hour. People knew what they were supposed to do if fire came back. And yet last week's Camp Fire was moving so fast that all the residents fled at once, exit routes clogged, and more people died than...

Caviar, Postmates, Uber Eats…the Bay Area’s tech family gave us food delivery apps. And there are plenty of gig workers willing to drive us this food. These delivery apps allow us to hole up in our office, work harder, faster and avoid human interaction. At least, that’s what one tech reporter fears. He says it’s not just consumers who are being conditioned by these apps. It’s the restaurants too....

People from the Bay Area or those who live here are a proud bunch. But how do you define this magical place? Do you use geography to draw the boundaries? Maybe it’s about sports teams and their fan bases or where BART goes? The hosts of the Bay Curious podcast at KQED explore the many ways we define the Bay Area. Guest: Jessica Placzek, KQED Bay Curious reporter-producer Learn more about your ad c...

Resistance. That's been the call of many, including those in the Bay Area who have led the country in resisting President Trump’s attacks on marginalized people and the state’s liberal ideals. We'll hear from those who turned up at the polls, and others who didn't. Guest: Monica Samayoa and Guy Marzorati, KQED reporters See all election results from KQED News. Learn more about your ad choices. Vis...

School bond measures almost always pass. More money for schools – and by extension, kids – seems like an obvious yes. But less attention is given to how that bond money gets spent and who is on the receiving end. One powerful lobbying group, nicknamed CASH, helps school districts get bonds passed. But critics say the arrangement is short-changing schools – and taxpayers. Guest: Brian Krans, Bay Ar...

About 1,000 Google employees walked out of work Thursday and staged a rally on the company's main Mountain View campus. The impetus was a New York Times report published last week about dozens of sexual misconduct allegations and some very large exit packages for accused executives. At the rally, our reporter captured some of what was shared before being asked to leave. Guest: Sam Harnett, KQED Si...

Gab.ai is like Twitter without any restrictions. Gab is also where a man named Robert Bowers posted comments before allegedly shooting and killing 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue. Today: what Silicon Valley is doing to prevent hate speech online. Guest: Rachael Myrow, KQED reporter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are you embarrassed to share your salary? Yeah, a lot of us are. Software engineer Jackie Luo makes the case that we can’t improve the pay gap (for women or people of color) in industries like tech without being more transparent. So, she asked men in tech to share their salaries via Twitter. And thousands did. Guest: Jackie Luo, software engineer at Square Read Jackie's full story "I Know the Sala...

A big construction site of new housing went up in flames early Tuesday morning, and people immediately suspected arson. Some Oaklanders say it's motivated by anger against gentrification. The five-alarm fire in West Oakland isn't the first time new construction has burned lately. Guest: Raquel Maria Dillon, KQED News reporter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We don't often hear about priests abusing their adult parishioners. As advocates renew calls for accountability for priests accused of abusing children, we hear the story of a woman in Santa Clara who came to her priest for help overcoming sex addiction. She says he abused her and sent her to an exorcist. Guest: Matthias Gafni, Bay Area News Group investigative reporter Read the full story here. L...

A Twitter fight between two of San Francisco's biggest, and wealthiest, tech leaders says a lot about the city's problem with homelessness. Proposition C calls for taxing the city's most profitable companies to double the $300 million already spent on homelessness. You might be surprised by who supports and opposes it. Guest: Guy Marzorati, KQED politics and government reporter Learn more about yo...

John Carlos and Tommie Smith both won medals in the same track event at the 1968 Olympic games in Mexico City. On the medal stand, both raised clenched fists in a salute to Black power. The backlash that followed cost them the rest of their running careers and years of difficulty outside of sports. Fifty years later, the prevailing attitude toward their protest has changed, and the movement lives...

Power is important. Both the kind that lets us switch on the lights and the kind that gives people the ability to make decisions for us. Tens of thousands of Northern California residents lost power over the weekend after PG&E cut electricity for safety reasons. That comes one year after fires tore through the Northern California and PG&E was blamed -- in part for NOT cutting power. We discuss wha...

Oakland sure has a lot of vacant properties, despite being in the middle of a housing crisis. In November, voters will decide whether the city should tax owners of those properties to help raise millions of dollars for homeless services. But how Measure W defines what 'vacant' means isn’t exactly clear. Guest: Farida Jhabvala Romero, KQED race and equity reporter Learn more about your ad choices....

New homes are popping up in Santa Rosa one year after the Northern California fires. Some are rebuilding in the exact same spots. Others are worried about losing everything again when the next fire comes, including firefighters who live there. They know more than anyone about these risks, so what would a firefighter who lost their home do? Guest: Lauren Sommer, KQED science reporter Learn more abo...