By Manuela Tobias, The Fresno Bee and Matt Levin, CalMatters With yellow vests and flashlights, over 200 volunteers fanned out across Fresno to count homeless people on Tuesday night. Along the railway, one group walked by a freight container with a mattress and shoes inside, and past a dirt cot...
California’s Homelessness Crisis — and Possible Solutions — Explained
By Matt Levin and Jackie Botts, CalMatters California’s most vexing issue is also its most shameful: the large and rising number of residents who lack a safe place to call home. In a state with vast amounts of wealth, more than 150,000 of its residents sleep in shelters, cars, or...
Foster Youth Need More Than Education to Build a Stable Life
For the last three years, I have been working on public policy related to foster youth. But at a recent monthly foster care policy meeting in Sacramento, where experts were discussing the needs of foster youth fortunate enough to go to college, I found myself thinking, “They’re missing the point.”...
Walters: Can Newsom Finally Fix State's Tech Woes?
California is the global capital of technological innovation, but state officials are much more adept at devising catchy names for their big “information technology” projects than actually implementing them. Take, for instance, something called “BrEZee,” which is supposed to streamline how the state Department of Consumer Affairs licenses countless thousands...
America's Real Problem? Not Enough Immigrants.
Bret Stephens, an opinion columnist for The New York Times, writes that America's real immigration problem "is that we don’t have enough immigrants." That, of course, is contrary to what President Donald Trump and other nativists in the Republican Party say. They claim, without evidence to back them up, that immigrants...