I was eating tandoori chicken at Shalimar Restaurant in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco on a school night when I received a call from my aunt, Yasmeen, who said my parents had been arrested.

Earlier in the morning, a dozen armed FBI agents had raided our home in Fremont, California; dragged my parents out of bed; handcuffed them while they were in their pajamas; and drove them to the county jail in Oakland. There was even a helicopter circling our house. My father later described it as being treated like a captured drug kingpin.

This piece is excerpted from Ali’s recent book.

My grandmothers were there, and begged the FBI agents in their broken English to at least explain why they were being taken. They didn’t receive an answer. My aunt deemed it best if I, the only child, drove down and figured out what the hell was happening.

It was April 2002 and I was about to graduate from UC Berkeley and head to law school. My biggest decision was choosing between UC Davis and UC Hastings. My “model minority” narrative and sheltered life, disrupted by the 9/11 terrorist attacks a few months prior, had been permanently reconfigured.

My parents had been caught up in Operation Cyberstorm, which at the time was the largest anti-​piracy sweep in the FBI’s history. Robert Mueller, then the director of the FBI, even came out to San Jose for a press conference. It was a two-​year undercover operation with more than two dozen arrests. The majority of the people arrested were alleged to be part of a highly organized criminal conspiracy involving the sale and distribution of counterfeit and infringing software.

My parents, who had owned a software-resale business, had nothing to do with the piracy ring itself. Instead, they were charged with 30 counts of conspiracy, mail fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering in what authorities described as a scheme to defraud Microsoft of millions of dollars by obtaining discounted academic software under false pretenses.

Read: When crime is a family affair

Microsoft initially alleged that it lost as much as $100 million, and the local newspaper ran with that number. Overnight, everyone heard that my parents had been scooped up in a massive anti-​piracy raid. Their faces were plastered on the FBI website for days, and people assumed I was somehow sitting on $100 million stashed away in domestic and foreign accounts.

Oh, how I wish it were true. I really could have used that money in the weeks and months that followed.

I have no desire to relitigate my parents’ case or clear their name. That’s their story, if they choose to tell it. My take on it after all these years is that my parents made dumb and questionable business decisions, but I sincerely don’t think they were Walter White from Breaking Bad, deliberately orchestrating a criminal plot. My parents, two Pakistani American immigrants who had a beef with Microsoft, spent nearly five years in jail, but the Wall Street architects of the 2008 financial crisis that ruined so many Americans mostly got wealthier and failed upward in life.

The day after their arrest, my father was able to call me from jail. “Did you do anything shady or criminal?” I asked him. “If you did, just let me know. I have to know what I’m dealing with.” Just because they were my parents didn’t mean I was going to bury my head in the sand and make excuses for alleged criminal acts.

He assured me that he had consulted with attorneys and believed everything they had done was legit. My mother eventually called, and I asked her the same. She was just as shocked as my dad to see their names on the indictment. In hindsight, my parents should have settled the case and taken a deal. But my parents believed they were being unfairly targeted by Microsoft, and didn’t want to plead guilty to something they felt was legal.

My father told me to call and retain Chris Cannon, a lawyer whom my father had hired before and, it turned out, had read about the arrests in the newspaper. I asked Cannon if he thought my parents were innocent. He said my father was a good man but reminded him of many of his other clients, who were “aggressive businessmen,” and “that gets them into trouble sometimes.” He also asked me to send him $5,000 so he could get started on the defense.

Where would I get $5,000? How long would this last? When would my parents be released? Who was going to take care of the house, the bills, the office? By then, my parents had used the proceeds of their software-resale business to launch a dietary-supplement company. Who would pay the salaries of its employees? How was I going to study and take my upcoming finals? What about law school in the fall?

I was a 21-​year-​old who was supposed to focus on my education. Instead I was in Fremont, taking care of my grandmothers and trying to pay all the bills, retain and maintain legal counsel for my parents, and raise money for their bail.

The Monday morning after my parents’ arrest, I went to their office, called the six employees of the dietary-supplement business, and told them to return to work if they were comfortable doing so. I spent the next two weeks trying to learn how to run every aspect of the business.

Read: What incarceration costs American families

Behind the office was a warehouse that received all the goods, which were mostly vitamins and health supplements, and we packed and shipped them to our customers. After my co-workers left, I would stay behind and pack some boxes as a stress-​relieving activity. I called all the existing vendors and told them I was temporarily filling in for my parents and would be their new contact. I had to find a way to maintain the payroll for everyone, including the employees in Karachi, Pakistan, who were doing all the technical work on the back end. Every employee knew that my parents had been arrested but the business was still running, so most decided to stay on.

Thankfully, my parents had previously added me to their bank account. I could access the money, except we only had enough to last us about three months. While at the office, I had to field multiple panicked phone calls throughout the day. My father would call, and I’d have to calm him down, get information and instructions from him about finances, the business, and his lawyer, and relay information to him, and as soon as I had spent 30 minutes doing that, my mother would call and I’d have to repeat the process. I also had to calm my mother’s family in Pakistan, who were, naturally, terrified about their daughter being stuck in prison. I also had to take care of my two elderly grandmothers at home.

It was the only time in my life I wished I had siblings, so I could outsource some of the work and be more efficient.

As we lost everything, I felt a sense of comfort in realizing that I didn’t miss any of it. What punctured me instead was how so many lifelong friends and community members simply abandoned us overnight, and how some were outright gleeful at our misery. Someone brought several copies of the newspaper article announcing my parents’ arrest and placed them at every mosque in Fremont and Milpitas. An old family friend at the local mosque on Fremont Boulevard came early to Friday prayers and saw them outside. He was kind enough to throw them away before the congregation came.

The collateral damage of the 9/11 attacks loomed large, reaching all the way to the Bay Area. There was a chilling effect on Muslims, especially those from Black and brown communities. Rumors spread that the FBI had parked cars outside our home and were taking down license-plate numbers and following anyone who visited us. At a pretrial hearing, the government’s attorney seized on the anti-​Muslim hysteria of the moment and tried to get bail denied by mentioning that the FBI had found “documents in Arabic” in our home. Thankfully, the judge cut him off. Some of those documents were Islamic prayers from the Quran; others were religious texts in Urdu, a language entirely separate from Arabic.

Because the government had claimed our properties, I was unable to post bail for my parents. Initially, only two close family friends—whom I knew as Shaheen Aunty and Syed Uncle—were willing to step up and risk their property as collateral for my parents’ bond. They were the exception. I heard that others were whispering about my parents: “They’re just going to flee to Pakistan. Don’t help.” I tried telling people that my parents had gone to Pakistan and come back several times. They had a home, a family, and a community here, and they were willing to fight this case for years if necessary. Still, perceptions make truth, and those were heavily skewed against my parents.

Many times, I thought I’d persuaded a family member or friend to offer property as bond collateral, and then they’d balk the day before the hearing. I had to tell my parents the horrible news and listen to them deflate over the phone.

Read: Why children with parents in prison are especially burdened

One of my grandmothers and my aunt Yasmeen spent their time going through every single contact they had, calling and asking for help. They were like stockbrokers or sports agents trying to represent a hopeless investment. Working the phones was ​an utterly humiliating exercise; I sensed that some people who took my calls were simply trying to acquire gossip or indulge their appetite for drama. But desperate times called for masochistic measures.

We were running dry, and even though some family and friends loaned and gave us money, it wasn’t enough to cover the mounting expenses and debt. I extended my line of credit and assumed that the business would somehow survive and I’d be able to pay it off, but I went from having no debt to owing $50,000.

To have some cash on hand, I sold as many of our goods as I could in weekly garage sales. I also had an impressive collection of laser discs and CDs that I was able to sell on Craigslist and eBay. (My childhood wasted on movies came in handy for once!) For our first garage sale, everything we had to offer we showcased outside on the driveway, in the garage, and even inside the house. Almost everything was for sale. If someone had offered me money for a used bar of soap in the kitchen, I would have said, “Thank you! Here’s your soap, and come again!” I made posters and put them on street signs, telephone poles, and trees.

A crisis also invites people, especially strangers, to be kind and forgiving. A few weeks after my parents were arrested, an acquaintance who attended our family’s religious events got up in the middle of the night and blurted out, “We have to help them.” She woke up her husband, and told him she’d had a dream that inspired her to help our family. Coincidentally, he told her he had just had a similar dream. Over the years, they offered comfort, food, prayers, and a kind shoulder. They weren’t the only ones. After overcoming their initial hesitation and fear, some family and friends stepped up. A few community members, Muslims we had never met, offered to help just out of sympathy, or perhaps pity.

Every little piece of support helped me find a way to get my parents out of jail. My mother’s eldest brother, Masood Mamoo, asked a wealthy friend from college to put up a property as collateral for bond. Based on my uncle’s word, a random man whom I’d never met came through. My uncle Shahed—who is actually my father’s first cousin—was successful in real estate at the time, and he put up a property as well. We were able to eventually rally family members and a couple of family friends as signatories who vouched for my parents, and all of that was finally enough for the judge to grant them bail. I posted the bond nearly a year after my parents’ arrest.

My parents were able to leave prison and breathe freely. For several weeks, they lived in a halfway house in Oakland. I drove there every day to pick them up and then dropped them off before curfew in the evening. They had to reenter a life that had been completely shattered.

Throughout my 20s, the sword of Damocles hung over our heads. At any moment my parents could lose their appeal and immediately be whisked to jail for several years, and I would be stuck, again, taking care of their mess. My mom says she still tells everyone, “Wajahat is our Rock of Gibraltar.” At some moments over the years, my parents have been apologetic. It’s clear they have understood that our family’s experience harmed me. Yet, to my eyes, they remained incapable of recognizing the immense, oppressive weight of it all—the heavy burden of carrying the Ali baggage. Often, the most important words we need to hear remain unspoken.

This piece is excerpted from Wajahat Ali’s recent book, Go Back to Where You Came from: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American.

​​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Go Back To Where You Came From – And Other Helpful Recommendations On How To Become American

By Wajahat Ali

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The post What I Discovered When My Dad and mom Bought Arrested appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

On a quiet cul de sac in suburban Los Angeles, the installation of Martin Guevara and Grace Kuo’s prefab accessory dwelling unit, or ADU, caused quite a stir in the neighborhood.

“It was like a block party,” said Guevara, 68. “All of our neighbors came out to watch.”

Guevara was referring to a prefab ADU designed and built by Villa Homes; the 850-square-foot home was craned over the couple’s existing home and placed into position in their backyard in the South Bay last year.

“It was in two halves,” said his daughter Melanie Guevara, 33, who lives in the ADU behind her childhood home with husband Devon Hollowood, 34. “It was already outfitted, including the appliances.”

“We were thinking, ‘Please don’t drop our house,’” Hollowood said with a laugh.

One half of the prefab ADU is installed on the Guevara-Kuos’ property in August 2022.

(Devon Hollowood )

Despite the addition of an ADU, there is still room to garden. The couple hope to add an outdoor dining area in the future.

(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

Like many people who chose to pack up and move during the COVID-19 pandemic, the couple were living in a rental house in Hawaii for three months with Melanie’s brother and his girlfriend. That’s when they had the idea for the ADU.

Melanie had just graduated from the UC Berkeley School of Optometry and Hollowood, a software engineer for Google, was working remotely in San Francisco after receiving his PhD in physics at UC Santa Cruz. While on Oahu, they considered their next steps, including where to live.

The light-filled ADU includes a full kitchen with an island the couple can use for entertaining.

(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

“In Oahu, many people had ohana suites in back of their homes for family or to rent,” Melanie said, referring to small family dwellings similar to ADUs. “Initially, I thought we could live in a little house and travel. That was the original genesis for the ADU — instead of having to rent something that’s not ours. That was my floating-in-the-ocean fantasy.”

Hollowood, who also loves to travel, took a more businesslike approach. “We were trying to dodge the housing crisis,” said Hollowood, who grew up in Walnut Creek. “We couldn’t afford anything. We didn’t have money for a down payment. But we wanted our own place and didn’t want to waste money on rent. We thought we could move into a backyard unit as a starter home.”

Guevara and Kuo, both optometrists, purchased their 1,300-square-foot home for $300,000 in 1995 and were empathetic to their daughter and son-in-law’s struggle to find housing.

With mortgage rates low in 2021, building an ADU versus the cost of rent “just made so much sense financially,” Guevara said. “And, of course, we loved the idea of them being close to us.”

Today, however, owning a home is a bigger challenge for SoCal millennials and Gen Zers, with mortgage rates at their highest level since 2002 and the median home price in Los Angeles nearing $1 million. This has left some younger people believing they will never own a home.

“So many people of our generation have student loan debt and can’t afford to buy a house,” Melanie said. “When you hear them talking about not having kids, that is partly why.”

The full kitchen features a cozy window seat. (Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

The striking changes in the housing market were not lost on longtime homeowners Guevara and Kuo, who viewed the ADU as a sound investment in a shaky financial market. “We have lived in this house for 28 years, so we could finance the ADU quickly,” Kuo said. “The ADU cost more than our house when we bought it.”

While waiting for her optometrist license, Melanie researched options in Los Angeles. She contacted several ADU companies, including Villa, which offers 10 models ranging from 440 to 1,200 square feet. After an initial video consultation, she learned that a custom 850-square-foot prefab ADU would cost $475,000, roughly $100,000 less than the bids they had received from local contractors.

The ADU is spacious enough for bookshelves.

(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

The couple liked that the designs were preapproved and that the company handled all the permitting and project management.

After they worked on the design — their particular home model is no longer available — Villa poured the foundation, and the house was trucked in and installed in the backyard by crane. Next, Villa added flooring, installed cement board siding, painted, stitched the two halves together and hooked up the various utilities.

The interiors of the ADU are sunny and bright, with a living room, two bedrooms and two baths, a laundry, a full kitchen and a cozy window seat. There is room for a small dining room table and storage in the IKEA sectional. The second bedroom can be used for guests and gives Hollowood space to work from home twice a week.

In the living room, the couple can store items in their sectional.

(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

The family shares the backyard and enjoys gardening together, yet there is a sense of privacy thanks to the orientation of the homes.

James Connolly, co-founder and chief executive of Villa, said he was drawn to ADU manufacturing after trying to help his mother install an ADU in Northern California. “It was difficult, but I thought the concept was promising,” Connolly said. The advantage to prefab, he said, is that it is “more affordable, faster, cheaper and a more efficient use of materials.”

Connolly grew up in the Bay Area, where many of his childhood friends had been displaced by the cost of housing. “My parents bought a house for $225,000 when I was 4; by the time I graduated from UC Berkeley, it was worth about a million dollars,” he said. “Income opportunities, unfortunately, did not keep up, and it became impossible for my generation to buy a home. Eighty percent to 90% of the kids I grew up with were displaced. It was tearing families and communities apart.”

When the laws passed in 2020 making it easier for homeowners to convert garages into ADUs, Connolly said he saw it as an opportunity to help solve the housing crisis.

The exterior of the 850-square-foot prefab ADU. (Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

What Connolly finds most exciting about ADUs is their potential to keep families close. At a time when Los Angeles is experiencing a housing shortage, Connolly points out, “I believe that this multigenerational living theme is something that Americans will adopt moving forward, more like our international peers. It will be better for families. Everyone deserves to have a place that they can call home.”

Living at home for the first time since she was 18 has been an adjustment, but Melanie enjoys being near her parents. Past and present collide on the 8,400-square-foot lot, where the family members can “keep an eye on each other,” said Kuo, 64. “We cook dinner together, and Bud [Martin] and Devon often host movie nights in the living room of the ADU.”

Details inside the guest bathroom of the 850-square-foot prefab ADU. The guest bedroom also serves as an office for Hollowood, who works from home twice a week. (Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

The young couple paid a quarter of the cost of the ADU and plan to pay the mortgage as rent. Hoping to have children one day, they don’t see themselves living in the ADU indefinitely. However, that doesn’t worry Guevara and Kuo, who said they can use it for other family members who need housing.

The family is happy with the result of the ADU despite supply chain issues and a long wait for permits to be approved, even with the assistance of Villa.

The master bedroom inside the ADU.

(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

“It’s a huge life upgrade,” Melanie said. “And we can interact with my parents as much or as little as we like.”

“We’ve never lived anywhere bigger than this,” Hollowood added. “It’s perfect for the two of us.”

“We’ve never lived anywhere bigger than this,” Devon Hollowood said, with wife Melanie Guevara. “It’s perfect for the two of us.”

(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

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A court ruling has restored the right of noncitizen San Francisco parents to vote in local school board elections, giving them a say in their children’s education and reopening the door to a key democratic right previously only granted to U.S. citizens.

In 2018, San Francisco began to allow noncitizen parents or guardians with at least one minor child living in the city to vote in the San Francisco Unified School District Board of Education elections.

However, after a few elections with a relatively small number of noncitizen participants, legal challenges ensued. A San Francisco Superior Court judge ruled the practice unconstitutional in 2022. The city appealed the ruling immediately.

A year later, the First District Court of Appeal sided with the city.

“Neither the plain language of the Constitution nor its history prohibits legislation expanding the electorate to noncitizens,” Justice Mark Simons wrote in the decision. “The relevant constitutional provisions authorizing home rule permit charter cities to implement such an expansion in local school board elections.”

Thrilled To Vote Again

Many noncitizen parents who voted in local school board elections before are excited about the news.

Amos Lim poses for a portrait in his home in San Francisco on Sept. 10, 2022. | Source: Juliana Yamada for The Standard

Amos Lim, a gay father originally from Singapore, said he’s relieved to see this latest ruling, especially since the new school year is starting soon. His child is about to begin the 10th grade.

“I hope this ruling will encourage more immigrant parents to vote,” Lim told The Standard. “Having a voice at the ballot box to decide the educational goals for my daughter is very important to me.”

The next school board election is scheduled for November 2024.

“We are public school parents,” said Angela Zhou, an immigrant from China and an activist during the 2022 school board recall. “Even though we are not U.S. citizens, we should not be silenced.”

Angela Zhou, an immigrant from China and a member of the Chinese Parent Advisory Council, poses for a portrait in Chinatown of San Francisco, on July 25, 2022. | Camille Cohen/The Standard

As Zhou’s son will attend 12th grade at Galileo High School this coming school year, he will have graduated before the November 2024 school board election, meaning his parents will not be eligible to vote But Zhou’s still excited because many other Chinese American parents can weigh in.

Another well-known noncitizen parent is Siva Raj, an Indian immigrant who founded the school board recall campaign in 2022. He also voted for the first time last year after moving to the U.S. for more than a decade. Raj told The Standard that he’s glad to see the new ruling and “totally will vote again” next year.

China, Singapore and India do not recognize dual citizenship, which prompts many immigrants to remain green card holders in the U.S. instead of acquiring U.S. citizenship. Except for permanent residents, other noncitizens include visa holders, refugees and undocumented immigrants.

The Legal Battle Continues

James Lacy, an attorney and conservative author from Orange County, is the leader behind the lawsuit that aims to overturn noncitizen voting.

In a statement to The Standard, he said the latest ruling denigrates the integrity of elections by devaluing citizenship as the key qualification for voting. He made an example saying foreign diplomats, like Chinese consulate staff members living in San Francisco, could be qualified to vote in local school board elections based on the ruling.

The battle doesn’t end here, he suggested.

“I will continue to litigate against noncitizen voting in California,” Lacy said. “The path may not be an appeal to the California Supreme Court, but rather a federal court case.”

The post With out Citizenship, These San Francisco Mother and father Can Vote Once more appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

News

From Ben Kesslen

April 10, 2023 | 11:31 a.m

A five-year-old girl was shot dead in the East Bay on Saturday while riding in her parents’ car to a family dinner.

Eliyanah Crisostomo’s family was driving on Interstate 880 in Fremont, California when she was shot, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

The incident happened around 6:40 p.m. Saturday, according to the Chronicle. Little Eliyanah, just two weeks shy of her sixth birthday, was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance, where she was pronounced dead. No suspects have been named.

Eliyanah Crisostomo, 5, was killed while riding in her parents’ car.Twitter

Little Eliyanah was just two weeks away from her sixth birthday.Facebook

No suspects were named in the little girl’s death.Santa Cruz Police Department

The family was out for a birthday dinner at the Outback Steakhouse in Milpitas, California.

“She died within 30 seconds of the incident,” said a GoFundMe campaign organized on behalf of the family.

“Eliyanah was a fun-loving little girl who loved life, had a generous heart and bonded closely with her three siblings, especially her brother who was 11 months apart,” the site reads.

“Both were so looking forward to Easter before the family was torn apart by this tragic event. Eliyanah would have been 6 years old on April 21st.”

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Dear parents across America: Keep your child away from San Francisco.

Dear parents, does your child seek protection from criticism about their drug use, does it suffer from an intellectual disability or does it simply want to live “off the grid”, free from the constraints of societal norms? You shouldn’t be coming to San Francisco.

Be warned: San Francisco officials have been donating taxpayers’ hard-earned money to unaccountable nonprofits in the homelessness and drug addiction sectors to administer programs on their behalf, which has ultimately been ineffective.

Mayor of London Breed speaks at the Women’s March rally on January 18, 2020 in San Francisco, California. (Photo: Sheila Fitzgerald/Shutterstock)

Our Mayor, London Breed, and our Board of Directors (our City Council), which allocates spending, disregard accountability; The town hall refuses to recognize the unscrupulous waste of money. Your child will not receive meaningful care from the city, nor a safe environment in which to rehabilitate, get clean, find a job, or find an apartment. Recently released statistics paint a very bleak picture for those who come (or are lured) to San Francisco to escape a difficult home environment. This is my appeal to parents across America: keep your child from coming to San Francisco.

News reporters, concerned citizen journalists and civic organizations regularly conduct interviews to solicit comments directly from the homeless and drug addicts on the street. Those affected say that many of them have been forced from their homes by their families. Most tell us they understand that San Francisco is the place of choice because our city accepts homelessness, lax law enforcement, monthly financial support, and easy access to cheap medication. California also has a law (Prop. 47) that classifies theft of goods under $950 as a misdemeanor, essentially stating that stores can be looted and theft is not a criminal offense. So I ask you: How long before your child is living in a tent – maybe a camp – in filth, garbage and hazardous waste, being sexually abused or trafficked to take their drug of choice and stealing from our local businesses, with their life then being subsidized by local San Francisco taxpayers?

Unfortunately, people die every day on the streets of San Francisco and in shelters from fentanyl and other highly addictive, dangerous drugs. Overall, more people have died from a fentanyl overdose than from Covid. There is practically no meaningful treatment of street drugs here. none.

The greatest achievement in San Francisco is bringing your child home. Polls and data have consistently found that the best plan is to actually provide individuals with a ticket to get out of town and live with their loved ones through the Homeward Bound program. Statistically, this means that all other treatments and solutions for San Francisco’s distressed, addicted, and homeless people have been unsuccessful. Under a plan devised by former mayor (now governor) Gavin Newsom, Homeward Bound covers travel expenses to transport individuals home. From March 2023, current Mayor London Breed is expanding access to this scheme.

Who pays that? taxpayers do. I do. My hard-earned money goes to the city in the form of property taxes, business taxes, sales taxes, hotel occupancy taxes, parking meters, gas taxes, bridge tolls, and more. We residents are exhausted, we are overwhelmed, and the high costs of homelessness, addiction, drug overdose, and emergency care programs account for a very significant portion of our city’s budget while other agencies, departments, programs, and resident/business and student needs struggle for funding.

Fiscal 2023-2024 deficit forecast at $760 million; for 2024-2025 it will be significantly higher.

Last May 2023, an official meeting of the San Francisco Mayor and Board of Directors (City Council) was held outdoors, but ended early amid a rowdy crowd. Finally, a deranged person from the crowd threw a brick at the mayor. The brick thrower was a 26-year-old transgender woman whose mother had sent her to San Francisco from Texas just a few months earlier. The mother issued a statement to the media shortly afterwards about the violent incident, admitting she knew her daughter was suffering from bipolar disorder – and saying she hoped “San Francisco would take good care of her.” The daughter is currently in prison and faces charges of attempted murder. This is precisely why our roads have become dangerous. For this reason, San Francisco cannot continue to be a city where “difficult” children are sent; we are not a rehabilitation center; We don’t take care of your child.

Our city is in deep trouble on many fronts and moving your child here to depend on local taxpayer funding is unfair, reckless and truly irresponsible and can be deadly. Please talk to your child, your extended family, the health professionals and find an alternative to San Francisco. Please.

The post Pricey Mother and father Throughout America: Hold Your Youngsters Away From San Francisco appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

San Francisco is arguably America’s most progressive city, so the lopsided recall of three school-board members on Feb. 15 stunned political observers across the country. Voters ousted Alison Collins, Gabriela López and Faauuga Moliga by margins of 59%, 48% and 42%, respectively. Other members were spared because they weren’t on the board long enough to qualify for a recall vote.

It’s not hard for anyone outside of the social-justice-warrior hothouse to understand what happened. Instead of trying to get the city’s schools running after the COVID-19 shutdowns, the city’s school board championed symbolic, far-left political issues that even most San Franciscans — including its liberal political leaders — found distasteful.

“My take is that it was really about the frustration of the Board of Education doing their fundamental job,” said Mayor London Breed. “And that is to make sure that our children are getting educated, that they get back into the classroom. … They were focusing on other things that were clearly a distraction.”

That’s spot on. As the pandemic raged, the board was fixed on renaming 44 San Francisco public schools. It abandoned the effort in April 2021 when the blowback became too much to handle. The effort was absurd, as the board sought to remove names of figures including Abraham Lincoln, naturalist John Muir and Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

To highlight the idiocy, the board tried to change the name of Alamo Elementary School after it “mistakenly assumed that (it) was named for the Texas battle and not for the Spanish word for ‘poplar tree’,” SFist reported. The board also tried to paint over a historical Works Progress Administration mural at George Washington High School — an act that brought comparisons to the Taliban.

More substantively, the board changed a merit-based admissions policy at a top high school and replaced it with a lottery system to promote diversity — something that annoyed the city’s large Asian American community. Most of these battles resulted in litigation — not to mention contentious public meetings centered on the imperfections of 18th century founders.

This ideological insanity obviously diverted attention from basic educational concerns. The city’s schools remained closed. The board and its allied teachers’ union seemed to be in no rush to resume regular schooling, thus allowing the city’s students to fall further behind in their studies. Parents seen with anger, which culminated in the rare recall campaign.

Even political analysts on the mainstream left viewed the vote as a wakeup call for progressives, seeing it as a chance for them to understand that, fundamentally, public schools are about educating students rather than pushing for vast cultural change. But the reactions of the losing parties suggest that they remain in their ideological slumber.

“Don’t be mistaken, white supremacists are enjoying this. And the support of the recall is aligned with this,” López tweeted after her loss. The teachers’ union continued to chide venture capitalists and billionaires, who helped fund the recall campaign. Left-wing commentators saw the vote as the result as part of a conservative political campaign — never mind that Republicans comprise less than 9% of San Francisco’s voter registrations.

The San Francisco recall proves that parents everywhere want their schools to provide quality education — and that elected officials should knock off the fringe nonsense.

The post Even dad and mom in liberal San Francisco have limits – Press Enterprise appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

SANTA ROSA (CBS SF/BCN) – Sonoma County officials announced this week they are ramping up efforts to recruit foster parents and adoptive families to address a shortage of foster homes in the county.

County officials announced an expansion of a partnership with the national group RaiseAChild to recruit families willing to take in foster children, according to a news release issued Friday.

READ MORE: UPDATE: Kidnapped San Jose Infant Brandon Alexis Cuellar Found; 3 Suspects In Custody

The county has entered into a $25,000 contract with RaiseACild for a year-long campaign of community events and multimedia promotions to raise awareness of the needs of local children in foster care.

Fifty to 75 local children are in temporary housing in the county, most at Valley of the Moon Children’s Center — the county’s emergency shelter for youth — according to Meg Easter-Dawson, program development manager for the county’s Department of Human Services’ Family, Youth and Children’s Division.

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“We are experiencing a shortage of foster homes for the children and teens in need,” Easter-Dawson said in the statement. “Valley of the Moon Children’s Center is meant to only provide temporary housing for up to 10 days. But we have children, especially teens, who must stay much longer because we don’t have a foster home for them to go to. Not having a stable foster home just furthers their trauma and makes it harder for them to heal.”

Learn more about the benefits of becoming a foster or foster-to-adopt parent by attending a free informational meeting on Zoom. The next webinar in English will be held on Thursday, May 12 at 6 pm and the next webinar in Spanish will be held on Wednesday, May 11 at 6 pm

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For more information, see Advocate@RaiseAChild.org or call (877) 417-1440. More events and information are on the nonprofit’s website.

© Copyright 2022 CBS Broadcasting Inc. and Bay City News Service. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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SAN FRANCISCO – The San Francisco Bay Area has the highest rates of commercially sexually exploited youth in the United States, according to the FBI, and about 98% identified were involved with the child welfare system.

Not only that, but according to a 2017 report, data from 22 agencies serving trafficking survivors in San Francisco, housing and shelter were among the top service gaps reported for youth ages 10-17.

And in fact, researchers have found that key barriers to housing include a lack of available beds, a lack of specialized support services at shelters and short-term residential care or group homes, restrictive policies that prohibit youth from returning to shelters, a lack of adults who are willing to care for older youth, and lack of adults who have the knowledge, training, and skills to support youth who have experienced complex trauma.

So, the San Francisco Department on the Status of Women partnered with the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center, Freedom Forward, Family Builders, Huckleberry Youth Programs, and West Coast Children’s Clinic to create a family-based foster care pilot for these children.

That’s why the program, called Family and Me, or FAM, is seeking foster care parents.

Interested caregivers can visit joinfam.org to learn more about the program.

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In early March 2020, Sheridan Block, 30, had just finished a year abroad in Marseilles, France, as a volunteer English teacher to refugees. She flew home to Jacksonville, Florida, to spend time with her maternal grandparents—her grandfather was recovering from health issues at the time. Her plan was to stay a few months to help care for them while also saving money, paying off some student debt and credit card bills before returning abroad.

Then, the pandemic hit. “It was kind of a spiral,” says Block.

In exchange for living rent-free, she helped drive her grandparents to appointments, ran errands, cooked and did chores around the house. She ended up staying nearly two years. “I was able to save enough money to pay off all those debts that I had to finance a car and then ultimately to move out,” she explains. It was beneficial financially, she says, and good to be close to family, but it required her to adjust her ideas of what adulthood should look like.

Block is among a growing group of ‘boomerang kids’ – adult children who return to their parents or grandparents’ homes after moving out. This group of adults is on the rise – and not just because of the pandemic. In July 2020, 52% of young adults in the US resided with one or both of their parents, according to a Pew Research Center analysis – the highest percentage the United States has seen since the end of the Great Depression, in 1940. In the UK, the proportion of single, child-free 20-to-34-year-olds living with their parents went up 55% between 2008 to 2017, according to research from Loughborough University.

In Western cultures particularly, moving away from home has traditionally been considered a crucial step in becoming an independent adult. But as the number of boomerang kids continues to rise in countries such as the US, UK and Canada, this may be set to change – and with it, our notion of what the stages of adult independence look like.

An upward boom

When she moved in with her grandparents, Block noticed she was far from alone among her peers.

“I found that a lot of friends, and even some dates I went on, were kind of in the same boat,” she says. “I had met one guy [on a date] who moved from San Francisco back in with his mom in Jacksonville. That’s just a reality now, to do whatever you’ve got to do to save money.”

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HomeLight’s latest report confirms that the value of accessory homes (ADUs) has increased nearly 40% since pre-COVID, with 61% of agents agreeing that the most common use is to house homeowners’ parents; Meanwhile, golf community real estate has grown in value by 48%, driven by the increased interest shown by 30- and 40-year-olds in the game during the pandemic

SAN FRANCISCO (PRWEB) October 18, 2021

HomeLight, the real estate technology platform that is transforming the home buying and selling process for the top real estate agents and their clients, today released its Top Agent Insights 2021 Year-End Report, surveying over 1,000 top real estate agents on key drivers that will shape tomorrow’s living real estate market.

As the market settles into a quieter fall season – 62% of brokers report bidding wars have decreased compared to just 3% last quarter – new trends in multigenerational housing, the growing popularity of accessory housing (ADUs), and more and more young people, those who move to golf communities once known for retirees have emerged. The report paints a curious picture of how the pandemic has changed the meaning of “home” for retirees, their families and millennials after the housing craze.

More than a third of real estate agents saw an increase in ADUs in the past year, according to HomeLight. The value of ADUs has increased nationwide by 38% since pre-COVID times, from $ 47,597 to $ 65,908.

• This trend is more pronounced in the Pacific and mountain regions, where ADUs have historically been used as an affordable housing solution and 64% and 47% of agents, respectively, have seen an increase in these units since March 2020. The value of an ADU is highest in the Pacific region, adding an average of $ 116,931 to properties.
• Surprisingly, ADUs are also gaining in importance in regions where they have not always been so popular, such as the Midwest. The ADU value rose the most in the Midwest of any region nationwide, showing an average increase of 54% compared to 38% nationwide.
• The two most common uses of an ADU in Germany are to accommodate the owner’s parents living there (a trend cited by 61% of agents) or to support adult children who need temporary accommodation for financial reasons (35%). In third place are short-term tenants (tourists or vacationers). 32% of brokers state that these guests are likely to have ADUs in their market.
• Parent living is by far the most common use. This applies to all regions, although it’s a particularly prominent trend in the southern part of the US, where 67% of agents report that local homeowners often have parents who live in their ADU.

“We’re not seeing an influx of ADUs being used for short-term rentals, but we do have many buyers wanting an ADU for their aging parents,” said poll participant Aaron Kinn, a top real estate agent on the HomeLight network that serves the Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex in Texas. “This has been a common concern of many of our buyers since the outbreak of the pandemic in early 2020. They assume the room will be perfect for in-laws, and if not – it would be perfect for a second office location away from the others “of the house.”

As the report shows, an increasing number of near-retirees are withdrawing with their children in an effort to increase the popularity of multi-generational homes exclusively for older adults.

• The value of a property in a golf community has increased nationwide by 48% since March 2020, from $ 16,174 to $ 24,002.
• The Northeast and Midwest saw the highest increases in value that a Gulf community location adds to a property at 57% and 55%, respectively.
• Nearly a third of agents in the Pacific and mountain regions also say that in the past year, people in their thirties and forties were more likely to adopt the country club lifestyle than they did before COVID. Around a fifth of brokers in the Midwest have also noticed this unexpected trend – and how buyer preferences in their market have changed.

“There is a growing interest among younger people to settle near a golf course or golfing community,” said survey participant Kim Batterman, a top real estate agent on the HomeLight network in Appleton, Wisconsin. “In the past few years it was mainly people in partial retirement or retirement who wanted this type of property.”

Other important findings from the HomeLight Top Agent Insights annual report 2021:

• 85% of real estate agents say they are optimistic about the state of the real estate market.
• 95% of agents nationwide report the seller’s market conditions.
• The proportion of brokers who say property prices are rising in their market fell from 95% to 53%.
• Almost 50% of agents say price cuts are now more common in their market.
• In the past year, 51% of real estate agents saw that more properties were listed in their market on platforms such as Airbnb, VRBO or Homeaway.
• The value of outdoor fireplaces has increased 72% from $ 3,337 to $ 5,753 since March 2020. The Pacific region saw by far the most dramatic increase in the value of outdoor fireplaces, from $ 4,254 to $ 9,497, a whopping 123% increase.

For all results, download the full report.

Survey methodology

HomeLight’s Top Agent Insights 2021 full year report was released between September 1st and September 1st. January 2021 through an online survey of 1,029 top real estate agents across the country. Realtors were selected to participate in the survey based on the same performance data HomeLight uses to identify top real estate agents for over a million home buyers and sellers across the country.

About HomeLight

HomeLight is building the future of real estate – today. Our vision is a world where every real estate transaction is easy, safe and satisfactory for everyone.

The best real estate agents rely on HomeLight’s platform to deliver better results to home buyers and sellers at every step of the real estate journey, whether it be to enable a cash-only offer to free up the liquidity of their existing home to buy a new one, or to create security through a modern locking process. Every year, HomeLight enables thousands of brokers to sell billions of dollars in residential real estate on its platform.

Founded in 2012, HomeLight is a privately held company with offices in Scottsdale, San Francisco, New York, Tampa and Seattle, backed by prominent investors including Zeev Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Group 11, Crosslink Capital, Bullpen Capital, Montage Ventures , STCAP, Citi Ventures, Google Ventures and others.

Further information and images: homelight.com/press

You can find the original version on PRWeb at: https://www.prweb.com/releases/two_surprising_forces_shaping_todays_retirement_plans_young_people_moving_to_golf_communities_and_homeowners_building_adus_for_their_parents_according_to_homelight/pr .18

The post Two Stunning Forces Shaping At this time’s Retirement Plans: Younger Individuals Transferring to Golf Communities and Householders Constructing ADUs for Their Mother and father, In keeping with HomeLight appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.