It's not North Beach, but SJ has its own legacy of Beat Literature from the 1950s. And perhaps none is more stirring than this dreamy, little-remarked passage from Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums, in which the narrator hitches a (literal and spiritual) ride on a southbound Xmas Eve train, beginning his SJ-to-LA journey from the sidings of the old Southern Pacific station downtown.

In 1769, Father Juan Crespi journeyed with Spanish officials to establish mission settlements in Alta (Upper) California. His diary, excerpted below, recalls Christmas '69 as “biting” cold—but abounding in good food, gifts, and jovial communion, between friends and strangers alike. From The Journal of San Diego History.

Recently retired Cato Institute policy analyst and Opp Now contributor Marc Joffe, in a tongue-in-cheek X post, announces that Bay Area's Rapid Transit District and Housing Finance Authority are merging. (And thank goodness: this is satire.) Their next project? A $100 billion subway that—if we're lucky—gets completed by 2057.

Maggie Angst, in a recent SF Chronicle article, discusses the proposal by the once-charming suburb to the north to install heavy restrictions on the overnight parking of recreational vehicles to decrease homelessness and increase available parking.

Tens of thousands of California (including Silicon Valley) millennials are exiting to red states—and with them, hundreds of thousands in annual income per household. NY Post’s Allie Griffin reports on a recent Smart Asset analysis.

A state audit found that California invested a staggering $24 billion over the past five fiscal years to address homelessness. That's about $42k per homeless person/year. And yet the homelessness crisis has worsened. Fiscally responsible pols ask: is our Housing First strategy all wrong? KTLA reports.

SJ State prof emeritus Dr. Elizabeth Weiss critiques—with James W. Springer in City Journal—today's anthropological trend of “social-justice ideology over verifiable facts.” Case in point? At SJSU, Weiss was censured (and blocked from research) for opposing reburying bones.

An abandoned construction site in LA’s Chinatown attracted a small group of squatters who proceeded to light it on fire—four times, this year alone. Neighbors begged the city for help, which, to the city’s credit, finally came. Early one morning, 130 firefighters responded when a conflagration spread to an apartment building. Karen Garcia of the LA Times reports.

Back in June of 2023, executives from the South Bay Community Land Trust (SBCLT) stormed the offices of the Santa Clara County Ass'n of Realtors, threatened staff, and sent one employee to the hospital with damaged hearing. Pleas from SCCAOR to the City to speak up on their behalf went, predictably, unaddressed. And now, adding insult to injury, the City just gifted the SBCLT five million cool ones as part of a misguided and economically illiterate "housing preservation" scheme. We repost, below, our 2023 Opp Now exclusive interview with Gina Zari, gov't. affairs director at SCCAOR, about Land Trust execs' invasion of their offices.

Is it possible that the billions spent on 232 service providers in San Francisco hasn’t actually reached those in need? Street homelessness might be down by 1%, but that’s cold comfort to the 8,323 people counted sleeping in shelters and city streets on a single January night. Overall, the number of unhoused folks is up 7% this year. And nobody knows where all the prevention money goes. The SF Standard’s David Sjostedt reports.

High density housing promises to radically transform the character of Bay Area cities, but will it lower prices? In his Substack R-Curious, Gus Mattammal rebuts a misreading of basic economics, brought to us by progressive Substacker Darrel Owens. Before we zone high-rises into every Palo Alto and Woodside, says Mattammal, consider Manhattan: dense, yet unaffordable. Maybe the solution is to alter the demand side of the equation, to construct world-class cities in California’s interior.