Featured Stories

Sustainable Chinatown

Cindy Wu is working to green Chinatown’s buildings while keeping its culture and protecting its low-income residents from tech-fueled gentrification.

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Coming Home 

​​A Legacy of Dairying in Marin Comes Full Circle
“It’s been so long coming it’s hard to believe,” Jim McIsaac says of finally being able to own the land his family has rented for four generations.
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The Edge

California has always been this place where striving Americans and people  from all over the world have come...seeking.

How resilience will shape the future of building design

By Molly Miller
Hurricanes, flooding droughts, wildfires, landslides and terrorism.
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These are the issues we’ll be addressing next in green design — if you buy into the theory that the U.S. Green Building Council’s ubiquitous LEED program helps predict future trends. Past LEED pilot credits have revealed issues we’ve neglected, such as water, transit, acoustics, ergonomics and lighting pollution.

 Solar Gives Fresno Union Apprentices A Foot in the Door 

By Molly Miller
At 3:30 in the morning, Norma Alvarado leaves her home in the Tower District neighborhood of Fresno and drives almost two hours to Bakersfield. She wears steel-toed shoes and she brings her hard hat, her tool belt and her lunch.
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She clocks in at 5:25 a.m. and starts her day at a safety meeting with 119 other workers from the Fresno Ironworkers Union Local 155. 

Power to The Apes

By Molly Miler
Like many Americans, the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, Stephen Moore, recently made his way to the summer blockbuster film Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. As he reflected on the film in the National Review Online, he was struck by the role energy played in the plot.

​“I wonder how many Americans got the subtle message here: Energy is the master resource,” he asks. “Without it, we return to a Stone Age existence. Life in its absence is nasty, brutish and short.”