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2 months ago | 
siliconvalley.com | Shomik Mukherjee |Harriet Rowan |Richmond Confidential
OAKLAND — Oakland leaders say about 100 city workers will be laid off or demoted this week and next as the full consequences of the city’s devastating financial crisis take shape. Individual layoff notices went out Thursday to workers who fill 77 full-time city positions, with the public works and police departments — which respectively will lose 26 and 19 positions — hit the hardest.
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Jan 22, 2025 | 
siliconvalley.com | Harriet Rowan |Richmond Confidential
In his first days in office, President Donald Trump signed executive orders that sent many federal employees reeling: looming layoffs, a freeze on federal hiring and and new back-to-office expectations for many remote workers. On Wednesday, he announced that employees in diversity, equity and inclusion roles would be put on paid leave. He’s vowed to do much more, tapping Tesla CEO Elon Musk to run a new Department of Government Efficiency.
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Dec 10, 2024 | 
siliconvalley.com | Harriet Rowan |Richmond Confidential
Alameda County and the greater Bay Area is home turf for Vice President Kamala Harris. She was born in Oakland, grew up in Berkeley and started her career as a prosecutor in Alameda County before becoming the district attorney of San Francisco. But in November, turnout for her was anemic in Alameda County and the rest of the Bay Area, while at the same time, President-elect Donald Trump picked up support, according to election results finalized by counties across the state last week.
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Oct 13, 2024 | 
siliconvalley.com | Robert Salonga |Harriet Rowan |Richmond Confidential
Backers of Proposition 36, the California ballot measure that would toughen property and drug crime penalties to combat serial theft and the fentanyl epidemic, have been on a roll with a multimillion-dollar war chest and multiple polls showing supermajority support for the initiative.
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Sep 14, 2024 | 
siliconvalley.com | Harriet Rowan |Tom Li |Richmond Confidential
Santa Clara County’s recent expansion of its public hospital system has averted closures that threatened to curtail emergency care access but also boosted its staffing of highly paid doctors and health care workers and vaulted its payroll costs to among the highest in California. That was among the highlights of a Bay Area News Group analysis of employee compensation data that counties report each year to California’s State Controller.
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Aug 9, 2024 | 
siliconvalley.com | Harriet Rowan |Richmond Confidential
Novelist Kyla Zhao, a 26-year-old Singapore native who moved to the Bay Area to attend Stanford University when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, used the extra alone time that came with stay-home orders to work on her writing. After graduation and a short stint as a fashion writer, she started working as an analyst in the male-dominated Silicon Valley tech ecosystem. Now her third novel, May the Best Player Win, is scheduled to come out this fall.
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Jul 29, 2024 | 
siliconvalley.com | Grace Hase |Harriet Rowan |Richmond Confidential
When the San Francisco 49ers first sought to move south from Candlestick Park to Santa Clara, the team quickly opened up its pocketbook, shelling out several million dollars to persuade voters to let them erect a $1.3 billion stadium in their backyard. And the money hasn’t stopped flowing since, as an in-depth look into the NFL team’s campaign finance records details how it has spent millions for more than a decade to influence the local political landscape.
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Jul 6, 2024 | 
siliconvalley.com | Harriet Rowan |Richmond Confidential
As the Bay Area bakes under extreme heat this week, many residents are sweating in homes without air conditioning. Nationwide 92% of homes have some kind of air conditioning. But thanks to the Bay Area’s normally mild Mediterranean climate and summer fog, the rate is less than half that in parts of the region.
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Jul 1, 2024 | 
siliconvalley.com | Harriet Rowan |Richmond Confidential
Every year, the U.S. Census Bureau publishes data on the age and race of the country’s residents, an important view into how the population is changing over time. The newest data, which was just released, provides insight into exactly who lives in the Bay Area. It takes into account births, deaths, and who is coming and going, to create yearly estimates of population by county, race, age and sex. Those estimates are then used to make important policy and funding decisions.
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Jun 2, 2024 | 
siliconvalley.com | Harriet Rowan |Richmond Confidential
This month San Jose got a little further from its long-time claim of being the 10th largest city in the United States. It now sits at 13th, falling another rung down the ladder since falling out of 10th place the year before. San Jose’s population continued to decline in 2023, according to the latest update from the U.S. Census Bureau. The decrease was the smallest of any year since 2017, a sign of a possible reversal after six years of population losses, a trend that began before the pandemic.
