WALNUT CREEK — When they prepared for marriage a decade ago, Cheryl Dumesnil and Tracie Vickers contemplated living in San Francisco, where other gay and lesbian families would surround them, or venturing back to the suburbs where they grew up.

Their choice of central Contra Costa County made them pioneers, the first two-mom family in their leafy Walnut Creek neighborhood.

“This is Tracie’s suburban dream,” Dumesnil said inside their ranch house Tuesday, as the couple’s 6-year-old son, Brennan, quietly read a book and 4-year-old Kian marched through the kitchen, a singing troubadour strumming a white guitar. Neighbors have welcomed this family with cookies and open arms.

“So after saying I would never move back to the suburbs, here I am,” Dumesnil said.

The family of four is among nearly 1 percent of California households — about 126,000 homes — headed by same-sex couples, according to statistics from the 2010 census being released Thursday. The numbers, if they are accurate, show nearly a quarter of California’s same-sex couples are raising children.

While San Francisco remains a gay hub — the city has more than 10,000 gay and lesbian couples, compared to fewer than 300 in Walnut Creek — the census found same-sex couples in every corner of the state, and revealed that those who live in many suburban and rural areas are far more likely to have kids.

“We’re not just some special interest group concentrated in major urban centers,” Dumesnil said. “We’re actually everywhere, and just trying to live a legally protected and fulfilling life.”

Fifteen years after the federal Defense of Marriage Act banned gay marriage and seven years after San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom defiantly ordered that licenses be granted to same-sex couples, gay and lesbian families remain in the political cross hairs but also say that society is increasingly adjusting to having them — and their children — around. In turn, whether or not they were counted before, more same-sex couples are conscious about identifying themselves on census forms.

Demographers caution that the numbers may overcount same-sex couples because of opposite-sex couples who miscoded themselves on a confusing form. The errors are amplified because there are far more opposite-sex couples than same-sex couples.

Gay and lesbian couples are identified in the census when the head of a household reports living with a “husband/wife” or an “unmarried partner” of the same sex. Changes in the way the Census Bureau counts same-sex couples make it hard to accurately compare to the 2000 census, when the tally found more than 92,000 same-sex couples in California.
It is clear, however, that the number of openly same-sex couples statewide has grown substantially in the last decade.

“We do have evidence that over time, increasing numbers of people are willing to report (same-sex partnerships),” said demographer Gary Gates of UCLA’s Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law. “We’ve seen those increases being the largest outside the known gay areas. I’d expect you’d see those increases larger in the Central Valley than in San Francisco.”

Same-sex couples in the suburbs and rural areas also are far more likely than their urban counterparts to be raising children. National studies show that about 19 percent of the children of same-sex couples are adopted, Gates said. Many more are children from previous heterosexual relationships.

“That kind of pattern is much more common in conservative areas where people come out later in life,” Gates said. “The further you get away from San Francisco, the larger proportion of same-sex couples are raising kids.”

For some same-sex couples, living in the outer regions of the Bay Area still seems like being on a cultural frontier.

The census counted 138 gay male couples in Antioch last year, and found that 30 percent of them have kids. However, partners Joe Horacek and Jonathan Lee know just one other family like them living on the other side of town.

The family moved to Antioch from South San Francisco in 2004 because they wanted a bigger, more affordable house to raise their three adopted children. Horacek and Lee were among about 18,000 same-sex couples who married during six months in 2008 when gay marriage was legal in the state before voters passed Proposition 8. Living in Antioch was easier when the kids were young; their oldest children, 14 and 13, are now struggling to fit in to a community where two dads are a rarity.

“My son has encountered some negative reactions from kids on Facebook,” said Horacek, a local teacher. “We don’t want to be the ones who put the targets on their back. All kids get picked on for something, but usually it has to do with them. We’re adding this extra liability for them fitting in.”

Hosts who greet the family of five at local restaurants sometimes mistake them for two separate parties. Since their 9-year-old daughter has no mom, a principal recently asked if she could play the role for a Mother’s Day tea. Usually, a polite conversation smooths an adult’s confusion, but the couple sometimes wonders if life would be easier for their kids on the other side of the East Bay hills.

“For the most part, no one has questioned us or given us any problems, but there are more assumptions out here that the kids have both a mom and a dad,” Horacek said. “I know that in places like Berkeley and Alameda County, in particular, conversations about different kinds of families and same-sex relationships are part of the school curriculum. Out here, it’s not necessarily the case.”

Three percent of San Francisco households and slightly more than 2 percent of Oakland, Berkeley, and Emeryville households are headed by same-sex couples, making these the Bay Area cities with the highest concentration of gay and lesbian partners. Other East Bay cities run close behind, and most of the neighborhoods outside San Francisco with the highest number of same-sex couples, according to the census, stretch along the foothills of East Oakland.

East Bay same-sex couples also are more likely to have kids than their San Francisco counterparts, though the same is also true for straight couples. A little more than 4 percent of San Francisco’s gay male couples and 19 percent of its lesbian couples have kids, compared to 11 percent of gay male couples and 22 percent of lesbian couples in Oakland.

Maya Scott-Chung and her multiracial family also chose the East Bay because she found it more diverse.

“It wasn’t just because we could afford to buy a house here, though that was a part of it,” said Scott-Chung, who lives with her transgender partner and their daughter in Oakland’s San Antonio district. “It matters to us to live in Oakland because it’s one of the most culturally, linguistically and economically diverse places in the Bay Area and probably in the world. There’s a huge number of lesbian and two-mom families here.”

Statewide, lesbian partners are also more likely than gay males to be raising children — 32 percent of lesbian households have kids, compared to 17.8 percent of gay male couples. Horacek said that being a minority among minorities in a place like Antioch can be exciting and a little frightening.

“Obviously gay people have been in relationships for centuries, but this seems to be the first generation where it’s happening in numbers, especially adding kids to the family,” he said. “We sometimes feel like we’re soldiers on the front line. Change is afoot, but still, it’s not mainstream here.”

Dumesnil said she and her wife have witnessed perceptions slowly change in Walnut Creek as they interact with straight families at school functions and in their neighborhood.

“Somebody’s got to be out here,” she said. “In a way, having the kids was the great equalizer.”

Bay Area Cities with
the highest percentage
of same-sex couples

Guerneville: 7.6 percent of all households headed by same-sex couples (176 same-sex couples)
San Francisco: 3 percent (10,384)
Oakland: 2.2 percent (3,442)
Emeryville: 2.1 percent (119)
Berkeley: 2.1 percent (961)
El Cerrito: 1.9 percent (189)
Pacifica: 1.7 percent (237)
Albany: 1.7 percent (123)
Alameda: 1.5 percent (459)
San Rafael: 1.3 percent (301)
Vallejo: 1.2 percent (497)
Santa Rosa: 1.2 percent (757)
Richmond: 1.2 percent (427)
Concord: 1.2 percent (512)
Pleasant Hill: 1.1 percent (152)
San Leandro: 1.1 percent (326)

statewide figures on households

49%
Households headed by
husband-wife married couples

6.2%
Households headed by opposite-sex unmarried partners
1%
Households headed by
same-sex partners

43.4%
Resident doesn’t live with
a spouse or unmarried partner

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Dan Walters

A few days ago, the toll for driving on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge took another jump. It will now cost motorists at least $6.75 to cross the entrance to San Francisco Bay — if they are using carpool lanes — and as much as $9.75 if they are invoiced for their crossing.

It appears the tolls are destined to climb even higher.

The iconic bridge is owned by the multi-county Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District, whose directors have directed a series of toll increases over five years. They were done to cover rising maintenance costs and — this is the most important factor — offset a decline in traffic since the COVID-19 pandemic began three-plus years ago.

It’s an aspect of a larger phenomenon that has upended the San Francisco Bay Area’s economy. Many workers, particularly those in technology and financial services, shifted to working remotely when the pandemic struck and the work-from-home tendency has persisted after the health threat eased.

Downtown San Francisco suffered what some call a “doom loop” of reduced in-place employment, wholesale declines in office space usage and closure of retail businesses.

Fewer commuters also translated into lower bridge toll income and very sharp drops in transit use and revenues, particularly on the Bay Area Rapid Transit system.

BART and other transit systems pleaded with Gov. Gavin Newsom and legislators for a package of state aid to offset declining farebox revenue and got a $5.1 billion, four-year commitment in the new state budget.

“Public transportation is easy to take for granted, but allowing it to collapse would have been devastating for our state’s future,” state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, said. “This budget extends a critical lifeline that will help transit agencies maintain service while making critical improvements to cleanliness and safety.”

However, Wiener added, “the future of public transportation in the Bay Area is still under threat due to pandemic-related operational deficits that, without help, will lead to severe service cuts.”

Learn more about legislators mentioned in this story

Wiener and other Bay Area legislators are proposing a $1.50 per vehicle hike on motorists who use the region’s seven state-owned bridges to provide transit systems with more operating revenue. The nonstate Golden Gate Bridge would not be affected by the proposal but, as noted earlier, is already raising its prices.

The $1.50 toll increase has been amended into a Wiener bill, Senate Bill 532, that has already passed the Senate and is pending in the Assembly, which could lead to fast track (no pun intended) approval.

Auto tolls on the seven bridges are generally $7 now, so Wiener’s bill would boost them to $8.50, roughly in line with the new Golden Gate Bridge tolls.

“Bay Area transit ridership continues to climb, but it’s not happening quickly enough to make up for the loss of federal emergency assistance,” Wiener said. “SB 532 provides critical lifeline funding for our transit systems — ensuring they have the resources they need to provide safe, reliable service for our residents.”

How, one might wonder, would raising the already stiff tolls on Bay Area bridges impact a region that is struggling to recover economically from the pandemic?

Classic economics would say that increasing their commuting costs would make San Francisco’s workers even less likely to return to their cubicles and therefore hinder downtown recovery.

However, perhaps it would merely persuade them to take BART or other transit services, thus reducing auto traffic on the bridges, which in turn would decrease revenues from the new tolls.

Dan Walters has been a journalist for more than 60 years, spending all but a few of those years working for California newspapers. He began his professional career in 1960, at age 16, at the Humboldt Times. CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics. He can be reached at dan@calmatters.org.

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See how drugs, homelessness and crime have transformed a city and what is being done about it. CNN’s Sara Sidner Asks, “What Happened to San Francisco?” on “The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper,” Sunday at 8 p.m. ET.

Tanya Tilghman moved to the Bay Area as a teenager to live with her mother. She later married, had two sons, and made a home in San Francisco’s historic Italian neighborhood of North Beach, above the tourist and financial centers.

Even when her marriage fell apart, she never considered leaving. This was her city, her people. Liberal like her, with a mix of income levels and an overall sense of community. She wasn’t worried about her growing boys taking to the streets, where she herself always felt safe.

But those streets have changed, she says. She believes actions by city hall and even groups helping the homeless have exacerbated some of the problems and the community she once felt a part of has disappeared, she says. And her son got caught up in a scene that’s hard to ignore in the city: the drug scene.

CNN

Tanya Tilghman says prison and rehab could finally help her son.

Tilghman said Roman Vardanega first tried illegal drugs early in high school when he took a prescription drug at a friend’s house.

He quickly became addicted, his mother said, and then switched to cocaine, heroin, and later fentanyl, all of which were available in the city’s seedy Tenderloin area.

Tilghman admits she was uninformed, even naïve, about the proliferation of hard drugs. But it wasn’t something she encountered every day. Then “I think it’s a lot worse now than it was when I was growing up here,” she said. “When I was a teenager we always came to the Tenderloin because we thought it was just fun and quirky and I never felt insecure as a teenager. But I also don’t remember people coming up to me and asking if I wanted to buy drugs.”

One of her first clues that her son was deeply involved was when she accompanied him on a tour of City Hall while he was at school. It was a few blocks from the Tenderloin, and some of the homeless people on the street knew him by name, like he’d been out there hanging out with them a lot — and that’s exactly what he did by collecting his drugs.

She tried to help. Vardanega spent 11th grade in rehab but persuaded his mother to let him return. She welcomed him home, but so did the streets.

Courtesy of Tanya Tilghman

Roman Vardanega showed musical talent from a young age, his mother said, before his addiction consumed him.

By this time, their neighborhood had changed, and drugs seemed freely available even when they rode the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system home.

“The first thing I got out of the BART station was asked if I wanted to buy some medication,” Tilghman said. The ease of getting and using drugs made the city a dangerous and sometimes deadly playground for people like her son.

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020, Vardanega began living on the streets full-time. The city was shut down, residents left or stayed indoors, and at the height of the pandemic, more people died from drug overdoses than from Covid-19.

“Everyone in town started putting up tents,” Tilghman said. “The open air drug market has gotten a lot worse. And so it became easier for him to buy drugs and use them outdoors.”

And what Tilghman found puzzling was that the city just seemed to be looking the other way.

“The city’s policies absolutely harmed my son, it harmed us, and it caused him, I would say, to fall into his addiction a lot more,” she said.

“If you get caught for drugs, you most likely won’t go to jail, the cops would just let you go,” she said. “That made the situation even worse, especially for my son because he’s very young and he’s still in that party mood.”

Tilghman’s state of mind was focused on one goal: finding her son. She knew he was addicted. She knew she loved him so much it hurt. And she knew that she wouldn’t stop looking until she found him, even if it put her in danger.

She walked the streets looking at things that most people tried to avoid and looked straight into the eyes of the people who lived on the streets. Sometimes she got blank looks back. Sometimes a sympathetic ear or a hopeful hint as to where her son might be.

She didn’t find him, but so many people were like him. “What makes me sad is seeing my son’s face on everyone’s faces … out on the street,” Tilghman said.

When Covid broke out, many residents started disappearing and the tent cities exploded on the sidewalks along with the drugs, the addictions and the signs of mental illness.

Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images

In May 2020, rectangles are painted on the ground at a city-sanctioned homeless camp across from City Hall in San Francisco to encourage the homeless to practice social distancing.

Mayor London Breed declared a state of emergency in the city to set up a “liaison center” at the Tenderloin, touted as a place for addicts to seek services that can help them.

When it opened in January 2022, Tilghman hoped it might be a place her son would find himself in, and one day she went to have a look. When she got there, she heard blaring music and tried to peek inside.

“I saw people doing drugs. I could not believe it. I think this is a place where people should get help. And they actually do drugs?” Tilghman said.

A little later she pretended to be an addict and went to the center to take a closer look.

“I told them I wanted to quit drugs and that I needed help,” she said. “And they laughed at me. And the guy at the door said, “We can help you get off drugs.” “But if you need help getting off drugs, you have to come back tomorrow,” Tilghman said.

The center had an area intended to treat overdoses, but it became known as a place for taking drugs and not for other services.

“The most disturbing thing… was that the damage reduction area was more like a party scene,” Tilghman said. “If my son went there to access services because he’s a drug addict, if he saw a party scene where people were dancing and singing and taking drugs and most likely selling drugs there, there just wouldn’t be an option for him to access it.” Services. Because he was so distracted and so excited that he went and used it.”

In her opinion, the city’s laissez-faire philosophy had simply gone too far.

“If you walk into a store and steal less than $1,000 worth of merchandise and get away with it, that’s going way too far,” she said. “It’s going too far when you could smoke crack in front of a cop and the cop just looks at you and doesn’t even arrest you.”

The struggle to save her son was wearing her down. Not once, but three times, Tilghman says she was so depressed and so hopeless that she attempted suicide.

The situation is beginning to change, both for Tilghman personally and perhaps for her town.

The Tenderloin Linkage Center, later renamed the Tenderloin Center, closed last December. Tilghman has found new support and a mission working with Mothers Against Drug Addiction and Deaths. A new district attorney took office after the previous one was removed by constituents who perceived him as soft-spoken about crime. Tilghman’s son Vardanega got into trouble with the law, served a prison sentence and was sent to a court-ordered rehab program.

For Tilghman, incarceration is a good thing for him — it keeps him alive, off the streets, and gives him a chance in a treatment program.

San Francisco is still beautiful to her – with the Golden Gate Bridge, the Presidio and Fisherman’s Wharf, the Italian enclave of North Beach. But it’s gotten even scarier, and she thinks part of the blame lies with the politicians whose job it is to clean up the streets.

“I’m liberal,” Tilghman said. “My politics have stayed the same and things have gone crazy around me.”

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Tiger Global Management, the New York-based investment powerhouse, is raising a new $ 3.75 billion venture fund called Tiger Private Investment Partners XIV, which is slated to close in March, according to a recent letter to its investors.

Despite its title – partners may be superstitious – the fund is Tiger Global’s thirteenth venture fund, and it follows the company’s twelfth venture fund, which closed exactly a year ago and also has $ 3.75 billion in capital commitments Has.

A company spokesman declined to comment this morning on the letter or Tiger Global’s broader fundraising strategy.

It’s a lot of capital to target even in the midst of a sea of ​​huge new venture vehicles. New Enterprise Associates closed its newest fund for $ 3.6 billion last year. Lightspeed Venture Partners announced $ 4 billion in three funds shortly thereafter. Andreessen Horowitz, the youngest of the three companies, announced in November that it had closed two funds totaling $ 4.5 billion.

At the same time, Tiger Global apparently has a strong argument to introduce potential limited partners. In the past year alone, numerous portfolio companies went public or were taken over.

Yatsen Holding, the nearly five-year-old parent company of China-based cosmetics giant Perfect Diary, went public in November and is now valued at $ 14 billion. (Tiger Global’s involvement didn’t deserve a mention in the company’s regulatory filings.)

Tiger Global also tacitly invested in cloud-based data warehousing company Snowflake, and while it wasn’t big enough to be included in the company’s S-1, even a tiny ownership stake would be valuable as Snowflake is now on Estimated $ 85 billion.

Tiger Global backed Root Insurance, a nearly six-year insurance company based in Columbus, Ohio that went public in November and currently has a market cap of $ 5.3 billion. Tiger owned 10.3%, which went into the offer.

The story goes on

As for mergers and acquisitions, Tiger Global saw at least three of its companies swallowed up by larger tech companies in 2020, including selling all of Postmates’ shares to Uber for $ 2.65 billion; the sale of $ 7 billion in cash and stock of Credit Karma to Intuit; and the sale of Kustomer, which focused on customer service platforms and chatbots, to Facebook for $ 1 billion.

Tiger Global, with roots in hedge fund management, launched its private equity business in 2003, led by Chase Coleman, who previously worked for Tiger Management for hedge fund pioneer Julian Robertson; and Scott Shleifer, who joined the company in 2002 after three years with the Blackstone Group. Lee Fixel, who was supposed to be an important contributor to the business, joined in 2006.

Shleifer focused on China, Fixel focused on India and the rest of the company’s support team (which now employs 22 investment professionals) helped find business in Brazil and Russia before it began to look more aggressively on opportunities in the US focus

Each investment decision was ultimately made by each of the three. Fixel left the company in 2019 to start his own investment firm Addition. Now Shleifer and Coleman are the sole decision makers in the company.

Whether the company will eventually replace Fixel is an open question, though it doesn’t seem like the plan. Tiger Global is known for encouraging investors into its operations rather than hiring outsiders, so a new top lieutenant would almost certainly come from its current team.

Meanwhile, the company’s private equity arm, which has written everything from Series A (Warby Parker) checks to checks for hundreds of millions of dollars, currently manages $ 30 million in assets compared to its 49 Billions of dollars, the Tiger is being handled more broadly.

A year ago, Tiger Global, which has 100 employees, reportedly managed assets of $ 36.2 billion.

According to the company’s investor letter, the company’s gross internal return for its 12 previous funds is 32% while the net IRR is 24%.

Tiger Global’s investors include a mix of sovereign wealth funds, trusts, trusts, pensions and its own employees who, taken together, are currently considered the company’s largest investors.

Tiger Global’s biggest wins to date included a $ 200 million bet on e-commerce giant JD.com, which grossed the company $ 5 billion. It also settled more than $ 1 billion on China’s online services platform Meituan, which went public in 2018, according to WSJ.

Tiger Global also reportedly raised $ 3 billion from the majority sale of India’s Flipkart to Walmart in 2018, although the Indian government has recently attempted to reclaim $ 1.9 billion from the company, claiming it did have outstanding taxes on the sale of their stake in the company.

A finding that might surprise even Tiger Global’s investors, who are affiliated with the related fitness company Peloton, which at the time of Peloton’s 2019 IPO (a deal that Fixel allegedly brought to the table with Flipkart) was 20% owned. With the addition of new users during the pandemic, Peloton – which was valued at $ 4 billion by private investors and instantly doubled as a public company – now has a market cap of $ 48.6 billion.

Tiger Global has invested its current fund in around 50 companies over the past 12 months.

The latest bets include Blend, an eight-year-old San Francisco-based digital lending platform, which yesterday announced $ 300 million in Series G funding, including Coatue, with a post-money rating of 3.3 Announced billions of dollars.

It also spearheaded the newly announced $ 450 million Series C Round for Checkout.com, an eight-year-old London-based online payments platform now valued at $ 15 billion. And it wrote a follow-up check to Cockroach Labs, the nearly six-year-old New York-based SQL distributed database that has just raised $ 160 million in Series E funding valued at $ 2 billion just eight months after raising $ 86.6 million Round D.

Another of their newest and biggest bets is focused on the online education platform Zuowebang in China. Back in June, Tiger Global spearheaded a $ 750 million Series E round at the company.

It came back last month, spearheading a $ 1.6 billion round in the distance learning company.

Pictured: Scott Shleifer, Partner and Head of Private Equity at Tiger Global Management, right, speaks to an attendee during the UJA-Federation of New York Wall Street Dinner in New York, on Wednesday, December 14, 2011.

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SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) – Parklets have become a staple outside of restaurants and bars in the San Francisco Bay Area during the pandemic. While they have been a lifesaver for many businesses, they are also vulnerable to fast-paced automobile traffic.

On Monday, a driver crashed into the parklet at The Napper Tandy, an Irish pub and restaurant on South Van Ness and 24th Street. It happened just after 6:30 p.m.

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John Angelico, a witness to the aftermath, shared photos with KPIX 5.

According to the San Francisco Police Department, two people with non-life threatening injuries were rushed to the hospital.

Drugs and alcohol weren’t a factor in the crash. The adult male driver was quoted and released from the scene, according to the police.

“When you eat out you don’t even think of it, but when you see this picture you are definitely more careful,” said Carmen Sosa, who lives nearby.

The parklet on The Napper Tandy’s South Van Ness page has now been completely removed.

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“In the long term, we’re thinking about traffic increases, people are on the move, and more about those things – with a Prius you could do over 9 out of 10 of these things,” said San Francisco Small Business Alliance founder and president Rory Cox .

Cox also owns the YuBalance gym. He decided against building parklets.

“The idea is very cool because you have an extended space in front of your company. It is good for advertising to see how people eat, drink, or in our case, exercise. It’s a really good advertiser, but we’ll be safe again for our employees and our customers, ”he said.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this type of collision.

In October, an elderly driver slammed into an outdoor dining area in San Jose, injuring 8 people. One woman died from her injuries.

In December, a car crashed into a parklet in San Jose’s Willow Glen. The crash overturned part of the cement blockade.

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“Will I perhaps keep an eye on the passing traffic or sit in a different section of the parklet that is not as prone to passing traffic?” thought about Sam Jackson. “But I really enjoyed the parklets here in San Francisco.”

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