Michael Saltzman of the Employment Policies Institute investigates why the SF restaurant business is shrinking. “San Francisco was once known for trendy restaurants with lines out the door. Today, the city’s restaurateurs are concerned with keeping the doors open at all. Restaurant closings outpace openings by 9%, according to the Golden Gate Restaurant Association. “How…

The Associated Press breaks down a puzzling new development in California’s Labor saga: Local unions are now demanding they receive State unemployment benefits while on strike. However, CA’s post-“surplus” budget has little, if no, wiggle room for the amenity. The bill, introduced this week, would make California just the third state to do this, joining…

Image by Wikimedia Commons California labor groups have their list of priority bills and the California Chamber of Commerce has a list of “job killers” it wants to defeat. Sometimes the two lists collide. The inestimable Dan Walters comments in Calmatters. An annual political ritual was repeated Wednesday when the California Chamber of Commerce released…

A recent article in local news labels proposed Senate Bill 31 as “criminalizing homelessness” by making it a misdemeanor to take up residence on sidewalks and streets 1,000 ft. from “sensitive areas.” Past SJ councilmember Johnny Khamis clarifies why effective law enforcement, substance abuse/mental health, and housing solutions must be blended to keep our community’s…

The County’s de jure homelessness approach, nicknamed Housing First, immediately provides unhoused individuals with lodgings, no strings attached. One’s criminal background/propensity and substance abuse are questioned only so the SCC can privilege more dangerous applicants with permanent (as opposed to “affordable” or shorter-term) housing options. City Journal’s Judge Glock analyzes frightening data on SF overdoses…

Is it not a logical stance—poses Edward Ring of the California Policy Center—that building thousands of expensive local units to offer locals without preconditions, without costs, without barriers, is an unsustainable model? In the Epoch Times, Ring thoughtfully critiques the Housing First approach to the homelessness epidemic, rebutting claims made in the SJ Spotlight this…

Albert Goodwin: Apocalypse. Image by Wikimedia Commons Regular readers of Opp Now have noticed that SJ’s Housing First orthodoxy—in which the solution to basically all civic problems is new, free, subsidized, no-barrier housing costing $1m/unit—is finally giving way to saner, faster, more efficient interim shelter solutions. It’s even happening at the statewide level, reports the…

Image from Moneyball (2011) Modern progressives misunderstand what makes capitalism work, entrapped as they are in a worldview that suggests only greed can drive the sort of developments that have lifted the world out of eons of abject poverty. George Gilder, in a seminal National Review piece, posits that what makes capitalism deliver—for all—is its ability…

Critics like SJ’s Assemblymember Ash Kalra claim Newsom’s CARE Court initiative and local encampment restrictions harm an already vulnerable, stigmatized community. But Reason magazine asserts that helping people off the street and into shelter actually lowers violence involving homeless folks, and cities’ violent crime overall. Below, Reason’s data analysis of two big cities. A recent…

Image in Public Domain For this installment, Opp Now visited the office hours of three econ professor–researchers (San Jose State dept chair Matthew Holian and prof Tom Means, and Stanford prof Alvin Roth) with one big question: What books could yield the most acumen for folks digging into economics, whether as novices or savants or…

Image by DPP Law Mark Powell posits in Times of San Diego that Prop 47, passed a decade ago to downgrade certain property crimes from felonies to misdemeanors, has created a serious case of crime and (virtually) no punishment. Despite its kind intentions, Powell says Prop 47 has stuck the knife in innocent citizens, retailers,…

Over the course of the past 70 years, California cities have grown outward to create multiple new urban centers across a metropolitan landscape. Modern planners in Silicon Valley, however, can’t control this model of growth, so they have limited growth across the board, causing housing prices to skyrocket. These policies negatively impact lower-income residents—in both urban and…