Lydia Sidhom

Sep 30, 2024 | sfchronicle.com | Lydia Sidhom |Nami Sumida

The cost of attending a private school in California just keeps rising. From 1990 to 2020, the average costs more than doubled, even after accounting for inflation. But the tuition and fees of individual schools vary greatly, with some costing upward of $60,000 and others less than $5,000. So how much does it take to attend each school? With no authoritative and centralized database of tuition costs for the 2024-25 school year available elsewhere, the Chronicle decided to create one.

Sep 10, 2024 | sfchronicle.com | Lydia Sidhom |Sarah Ravani

After her mother passed away in 2021, Teddy Gray King realized her parents’ 3,000-square-foot home in Millbrae was too big for her father. So she decided to move her 88-year-old dad into a one-bedroom cottage in the backyard of her Piedmont home. King said the cottage, also known as a granny flat or accessory dwelling unit, helped address the state’s housing crisis by adding density to her home and allowing her father to sell his Millbrae house, freeing it up for another family.

Aug 17, 2024 | sfchronicle.com | Lydia Sidhom

In Oakland, you might be caught for using someone else’s Costco membership — but not for displaying a disabled parking placard that was not issued to you. Oakland stopped actively enforcing disabled parking placard fraud completely after the pandemic. That means anyone who illegally uses someone else’s placard or displays a counterfeit one will not get fined. Citations for the infraction dropped from 931 in 2019 to 14 in 2023, a 98% decline.

Aug 14, 2024 | sfchronicle.com | Lydia Sidhom |Aviva Bechky

Picture this: You swing by a local supermarket, looking for ground beef, but can’t find it for less than $9.99. You buy it grudgingly — only to see it for half the price when you go to a different store the next week. It’s hard to figure out the best places to shop based on your budget and grocery list. So Chronicle reporters did some of the legwork. Following up on a story last month about the cheapest San Francisco grocery stores, we visited 10 East Bay markets.

Aug 12, 2024 | sfchronicle.com | Lydia Sidhom

Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, founders of the noted Bay Area venture capital company Andreessen Horowitz, announced last month on their company’s podcast that they would support former President Donald Trump’s campaign to be reelected to the White House. And the billionaires would do it with a lot of money.