Feature Archives

On April Fool’s Day, protesters blocked an Apple bus attempting to cross the High Street bridge between Oakland and Alameda. On the same morning in San Francisco, a Google bus was surrounded at 24th and Valencia streets. On April 2, protesters disrupted the tech bus pick-up zone in front of the MacArthur BART station in Oakland. An Apple, Google, and Yahoo bus were all surrounded and blocked. On April 3, a Google bus was blocked at Center and 7th Street in West Oakland. On April 6, Google venture capitalist Kevin Rose's home was picketed in San Francisco.

Steve Pleich writes: There has been much discussion over the last several months concerning the wisdom of having a fully functional Needle Exchange Program in our community. Many have expressed doubts about the public health benefits of such a program, but a clear-eyed and dispassionate analysis of those benefits has been subsumed by an overriding public safety concern.

In 2013, the Santa Cruz City Council approved a number of new ordinances that disproportionately affect homeless and low income people. Local ordinances now govern such behavior as "loitering" on traffic medians and "disorderly" conduct in parks, which has been redefined and may now result in a 24-hour stay away order. Additionally, the amount of space artists, activists, street vendors and performers may use in downtown Santa Cruz has been significantly reduced.

Santa Cruz Sentinel photographer Dan Coyro has called members and supporters of the Santa Cruz Eleven "roaches" and "street vermin" in recent public statements, in addition to making comments disparaging the local needle exchange program, and calling the homeless "bums" while blasting their photo on social media. The Santa Cruz Sentinel is considered by many to be the newspaper of record in Santa Cruz County, which has some questioning the ability of Coyro to function objectively at his position.

At some point late in the night after the Oakland City Council voted to continue with the Domain Awareness Center on March 5 — albeit a significantly scaled-down Port-only version of the surveillance center — a group calling themselves the Technophobic Women's Action Team (T.W.A.T.) staged camover actions against stoplight cameras at two intersections in West Oakland.

Brigada Anti-Gentrification writes: [O]n February 28th, the windows of Vanguard Properties in the Mission District were smashed out. Vanguard thought it was pretty funny to build some luxury condos on 24th.... Vanguard thought it was pretty funny to buy foreclosed houses in Oakland and flip them at a profit. We think it's more funny to bring the fight to the developers themselves.

On February 26, about 150 tenants and community supporters, including Eviction Free San Francisco, rallied at 24th/Mission BART Plaza for a “March On Greed” to the office of serial evictor Kaushik Dattani. The rally, march, and protest was the latest in a growing number of grassroots events responding to the rapid pace of evictions and gentrification during this latest real estate boom. Eviction Free San Francisco is an entirely volunteer organization of tenants and their supporters using mutual aid and direct action to resist evictions and preserve our homes.