Hyperlocal News + Stories

There was no train service between the Pleasant Hill and Concord stations for a good amount of time yesterday. Temperatures continue to soar and break records and leave us all contemplating the best means to cool off. Thousands of PG&E account holders, too, are still contending with occasional power outages as the California grid operator deals with huge spikes in energy pressure. But what wasn’t likely on your heat wave bingo card was BART suffering service delays — because the track, itself, literally bent under Tuesday's sweltering heat. According to the rapid transit agency, the railroad trail between the Pleasant Hill and Concord stations warped slightly amid the day’s 110-degree heat. “Out of an abundance of caution,” BART suspended service between the two so that crews co...

I'll never get tired of watching the sun dip below the Golden Gate Bridge. I was born in Texas; I was raised in Texas; I lost my virginity in Texas. I'm used to the heat — temperatures that climbed so high that black leather interiors and seat belts doubled as branding instruments.  Moving to San Francisco was an exercise both escaping the insufferable heat and pursuing a career in journalism. Though the latter has proven objectively successful — I now own a digital publication, albeit one very much in its infancy — the former remains increasingly elusive. Since 1970, San Francisco has warmed by 2.9 degrees; a 1.7 degrees increase in San Jose is now a reality; California, as a whole, warmed 2.9 degrees on average, as well. Heat spells like the one we're currently wrapped in righ...

We love to see it. San Francisco's article-worthy tepid summer temperatures have gone out the window. The past few days have seen the City by The Bay — a metropolis usually graced with cool weather, courtesy of Karl The Fog and its coastal microclimates — stricken with 90-degree plus temperatures. In an effort to help locals cool down, the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department announced on social media today that the neighborhood pools it manages will be open and free to the public today and tomorrow. "Our neighborhood pools will be free and open for families to cool off in the afternoons today, September 6, and tomorrow, September 7," the City department tweeted Tuesday, September 6th. Of the nine neighborhood pools in San Francisco, eight of them will be open at some p...

When we moved to California, we were mostly starting from scratch. We knew it would be a temporary stay, but not so temporary that we would live the way we lived when my husband was in grad school, with furniture from our roommate’s mom’s basement. Besides, even if we’d wanted to, we didn’t have anyone on the West Coast to take furniture from. Our Bay Area contacts were a few friends from college and cousins who were either too old or too young to want to hang out with us for more than the occasional birthday dinner. We’d gotten married earlier that summer for the first time, it really felt like it was just the two of us. Our arrival in California was a cleaner slate than we’d anticipated. UPS lost two bags of clothes in the move — my husband’s suits and dress shoes, and all of my casua...

[Insert three waving hand emojis] Over the past decade, hyperlocal publications about San Francisco have gone the way of wooly mammoths — which is to say they’ve evolved into susceptibility. The introduction of financial stressors or left-of-center cadences or stories that existed outside the proverbial fray of traditional publishing would, more often than not, throw them off their collective rocking chairs, each one falling into any semblance of destitution.  In a last-ditch effort to rescue whatever archive was amassed during said outfit’s lifetime, a large, corporatized syndication would swoop in (with a massive check) and promise to save the day (without any real plan in place). Inevitably, the purchaser learns they don’t know what to do with the bought assets… because they were ne...