Feature Pieces Archives

Is San Francisco Becoming the Bomb Cyclone ‘It Girl’?

20Nov

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Editors' Picks, Feature Pieces, Hyperlocal News + Stories, Nature + Climate Crisis

Is San Francisco Becoming the Bomb Cyclone ‘It Girl’?

Because of its microclimates, combined sewer system, and being wedged between two large bodies of water, bomb cyclones just hit San Francisco differently. It won’t stop raining until next Wednesday. Or, at least, that’s what the most current weather forecasts show: potentially a month’s worth of rain soaking the San Francisco Bay Area over the next seven days. After rapidly forming in the Pacific Ocean, the bomb cyclone — a term used in meteorology to describe a process called bombogenesis, which denotes the intensification of a cyclone in a short period of time — poised to strike Northern California and along the Pacific Northwest is expected to bring dangerous amounts of water. NorCal cities like Eureka and Mendocino will see hurricane-like winds, tidal surges, and downpours capable ...

London Breed Is Out As San Francisco Mayor. Her Dehumanizing Texts Around Homeless People Will Live On.

20Nov

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Editors' Picks, Feature Pieces, Hyperlocal News + Stories

London Breed Is Out As San Francisco Mayor. Her Dehumanizing Texts Around Homeless People Will Live On.

San Francisco is a mecca synonymous with technological innovations, envious urban green spaces — and inhumane rates of homelessness. The City’s current figures show there are more than 8,300 unhoused individuals in San Francisco, a number calculated during a 2024 count that found 3,969 were sheltered and 4,354 were sheltered. That was an increase of nearly 70% from the same figures published in 2011 at the infancy of SF's tech boom; the subsequent years afterward saw living expenses, which include housing costs, skyrocket to astronomical levels. More anecdotal guestimations — estimates that also include those who might be working and living in their vehicles — paint a bleaker picture, with the number of unhoused individuals in San Francisco close to 11,000 people struggling with homele...

Recent BART Stabbings, Data Reports Highlight Concerns Around Rider Safety — and Danger to Women

18Nov

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Culture + Travel, Editors' Picks, Feature Pieces, Hyperlocal News + Stories

Recent BART Stabbings, Data Reports Highlight Concerns Around Rider Safety — and Danger to Women

A string of recent stabbings in (and around) San Francisco BART stations — one of which proved fatal — highlight ongoing safety anxieties about the Bay Area's rapid transit agency. A 54-year-old woman was stabbed while riding a BART train by a man, who was later spotted at the Fruitvale BART station. The 34-year-old man has since been taken into custody and charged with attempted murder. According to ABC7 News, it was confirmed the suspect had a criminal history dating back to 2006 when the suspect was a minor; many of the charges were felonies. (The suspect served seven years for a 2014 home invasion robbery in Vallejo, for example.) "It was extremely scary, very, very scary..." said Wendy to the news outlet, requesting only her first name be used. She continued to say, "Knowing wh...

Fuck It, Be Selfish These Next Four Years

12Nov

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Editors' Picks, Essays, Feature Pieces

Fuck It, Be Selfish These Next Four Years

'But not at the expense of our democracy and the well-being of the most vulnerable among us.' We fought, damn hard. The hopium we poured into glasses and chilled in fridges waiting for the election results to be called on November 5th turned sour, oxidized by the truth at hand: a twice-impeached felon, outright misogynist was chosen over one of the country’s most qualified presidential candidates in modern history, who just so happens to be a women, to guide the free world. Unlike 2016, this defeat feels different. We find ourselves in an uncanny valley of sorts, the mirror in front of us unsmudged and crystalline. This is who we are. There’s no denying it. It's not it is what it is. Rather it’s more insidious: It is what it has been all along. There are just bad, horrible, trite,...

12Nov

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Essays, Feature Pieces

Yes, It Does Feel Different This Time

I haven't slept much this past week. You haven’t either. For those of us old enough to cast our ballot for the first female presidential nominee now eight years ago, the déjà vu is palpable; I can almost choke on the irony. How we all went into that day glassy-eyed and optimistic of a woman breaking the toughest, tallest glass ceiling in the developed world. She didn’t; we cried and fell into dystopianism and a sea of what-ifs. Last Tuesday felt no different — except it now entirely does. The blind naivety palpated in 2016 conceded to ugly truths by 2020. We knew what this man was capable of. How he acted around those close to him was vile. His xenophobia ran rife through his base. Grabbing women by the pussy was, by all accounts, acceptable acts from the sitting leader of the f...

I’m Screaming Over This Conservative YIMBY Group Blocking Prominent SF Troll

5Nov

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Editors' Picks, Feature Pieces, Hyperlocal News + Stories, News to Know

I’m Screaming Over This Conservative YIMBY Group Blocking Prominent SF Troll

The editor-in-chief of SF's right-leaning publication, who's synonymous with online trolling, was recently blocked by GrowSF — the political committee also behind The Bold Italic. The conservative PAC GrowSF has continued its trajectory as a hyperlocal eyesore since launching in 2021 with the mission to inject “moderate ideals” into the San Francisco political landscape. Those objectives have proven to be far more right-leaning than centered. The Marina Times, basically San Francisco’s iteration of Breitbart — a “moderate” publication helmed by Susan Dyer Reynolds, the faceless social media avatar with a history of attacking people online — cheered when The Bold Italic was acquired by GrowSF in December of 2022, claiming the acquisition was a “win” for local journalism. That pub...

Your Last-Minute San Francisco Election Guide for 2024

5Nov

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Editors' Picks, Feature Pieces, Hyperlocal News + Stories, News to Know

Your Last-Minute San Francisco Election Guide for 2024

Today's the day we've all been losing sleep over and stress-eating about and doom-refreshing election models and polling figures for — it's Election Day, y'all. November 5th, 2024, will go down as one of the best days of our lives ... or one of the worst days of our lives. There's no gray area. We'll either finally put an end to fascism and the idea of power-over as a democratic means of leadership, or we'll bend the knee to its omnipresent, overpowering pressure on society. We'll either see our country's first-ever women President-Elect or we will shutter and shiver at the reality of another Trump administration running amock. But what can you do to help safeguard our country's democracy? Vote, knucklehead! What can you do to ensure California remains the country's progressive bellwet...

Yes, You Can Still Rent the SF Bay Area’s Version of ‘Coffin Homes’

23Aug

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Editors' Picks, Feature Pieces

Yes, You Can Still Rent the SF Bay Area’s Version of ‘Coffin Homes’

When these glorified pods came onto the scene in the summer of 2022, people remarked how wildly inhumane they seemed — and, to boot, they were $800 a month to rent. Talk to anyone in the Bay Area for more than four minutes, and there’s an exceptional chance that the conversation will turn toward the state of housing in the area. During a fleeting moment amid the pandemic’s height from mid-2020 and early 2021, there was hope astronomical rent prices and home prices could go down. And stay down. Time show shown that was only an ephemeral longing — one that evaporated into record-high inflation rates, the pop of “pandemic pricing,” and real estate climbing to new, out-of-reach altitudes. In fact: Home prices in the Bay Area have gone up on average, 17% across the board since 2021. (Santa Cl...

From Corporate Sponsorships to ‘Trickle-Down Spending,’ a Look Behind the Economics of San Francisco Pride

3Jul

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Editors' Picks, Feature Pieces, Queerness

From Corporate Sponsorships to ‘Trickle-Down Spending,’ a Look Behind the Economics of San Francisco Pride

With San Francisco Pride 2024 in the rear-view mirror, it's a suitable time to look into how SF's largest event (by attendance) is funded and how the nonprofit behind it intends to see the event into a more sound financial future. On a picturesque afternoon on June 27th, 1970, between twenty and thirty then-described “faries” marched through Polk Gulch — San Francisco’s most prominent gayborhood until the 1970s — in the city’s first-ever gay pride celebration, the “Gay Liberation March.” Two years later, San Francisco would become the first major metropolis in the United States to have an entire city-recognized committee tasked with organizing gay pride celebrations: the San Francisco LGBT Pride Celebration Committee, which we know more colloquially now as the nonprofit, San Francisco...

On My First Months-Long Mental Health Breakdown in San Francisco

5Jun

By Matt Charnock2 Comments

Editors' Picks, Essays, Feature Pieces

On My First Months-Long Mental Health Breakdown in San Francisco

What began as a series of ruminations spiraled into months defined by intrusive thinking that left me exhausted, demoralized, and with a new diagnosis. “If we titrate any further up, we’ll have reached the recommended medical maximum limit for sertraline,” my psychiatrist tells me. His voice is harmonic and consoling. There’s a sense of deafening pragmatism. “We can try increasing the dosage, but I recommend journaling your moods over the next four to eight weeks, so we can see how you’re adjusting.” The past three months felt like suffering the tiniest of deaths. March was when I noticed things around me were in flux, but they weren't ashen; the acrid taste of chard carbon is a sensation I associate with depressive spells. Flowers still had color, vivacious as ever. I found small joys...