This week we're featuring two stories from our friends at the Bay Curious podcast. 

San Francisco’s Historic ‘Relief Cottages,’ Built After the 1906 Earthquake, Are Hidden in Plain Sight

After the 1906 Earthquake and Fire leveled 80% of San Francisco, more than a quarter of a million residents were temporarily displaced. People who had the means left the city, but many low income San Franciscans didn’t have that option. City leaders commissioned union carpenters to build small cottages to house the refugees – many of whom the city relied upon to help rebuild the city.These “earthquake shacks” gave many people their first shot at homeownership and helped the city recover. Bay Curious’s Katrina Schwartz says you can still find a few of them dotted around the city if you know what to look for.

Invasion of the Grub Snatchers: How One Rich Guy’s Russian Boars Colonized California 

Originally imported to Monterey County for sport by a wealthy landowner in the 1920s, wild boars now number in the hundreds of thousands, and they are destroying sensitive habitats and suburban lawns all over the state. Experts say the problem has gotten worse in recent years all across the state, especially after a series of wet winters has left moist soil teeming with grubs — a pig’s favorite food. KQED’s Rachael Myrow takes us on a trip to see some of the destruction, learn how the boars got here in the first place, and gather some ideas on how to get rid of them.  

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San Francisco Airport’s Fear of Flying Clinic Welcomes Nervous Passengers Aboard

If your stomach drops at the thought of getting on an airplane, you’re not alone. Millions of Americans share a fear of flying. Some psychologists say the way through it is to rewire the brain, by gradually facing the very thing that feels dangerous. But you can’t just hop on a plane whenever you want to practice. That’s where a Bay Area program hosted at San Francisco International Airport can help. For nearly 50 years, they’ve been helping uneasy travelers get back in the air. Reporter Evan Roberts brings us the story from five miles up.

San José’s Batman, Fighting for the Unhoused, Is the Real Life Superhero ‘We Need’

If you happen to be in downtown San José at night, you might spot a man in a mask, wearing a black and purple cape and toting a cart full of supplies.. This is the Batman of San José — a volunteer who has spent nearly eight years walking the city at night to help unhoused residents. He’s a far cry from the vigilantes of comic books. He isn’t swooping from rooftops, seeking revenge or delivering justice through fists. His superpower is noticing people who feel ignored, and offering them food, first aid supplies, and sometimes, being someone they can confide in. KQED’s Srishti Prabha brings us his story.

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This week marks the one-year anniversary of the Los Angeles wildfires, two of the most destructive fires in California history. We bring you an excerpt from a new podcast, The Palisades Fire: A Sandcastles Special, which documents the community-led efforts to fight the Palisades Fire. Host Adriana Cargill highlights the role of the “Community Brigade” – a first-in-the-nation model that allows trained civilians to work alongside firefighters when wildfires hit. The podcast explores whether these kinds of brigades might be replicated in other places as California continues to grapple with more devastating – and more unpredictable – wildfires.

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Luis Rodriguez credits reading and writing for keeping him resilient his whole life. He’s best known for his 1993 memoir Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A., which chronicles how he joined a gang at age 11, found himself homeless and using heroin, and wound up in the juvenile justice system. He went on to write 17 books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, and he served as poet laureate of Los Angeles from 2014 to 2017. As part of our series on resilience, host Sasha Khokha sits down with Luis Rodriguez to talk about his life and work, and what advice he has for getting through tumultuous times.

This episode first aired on July 25, 2025.

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This holiday week, we’re bringing you two joyful stories from 2025. 

Reena Esmail’s childhood in Los Angeles had two soundtracks: the Western classical music her parents loved, and the old, scratchy Bollywood tapes her paternal grandparents would play over and over. Those multicultural influences shaped what would become the driving question of her work: how do you invite people from different cultures onto the same stage to build a relationship and create music together? Composing is how Esmail has made her mark — by putting Western classical musicians in conversation with Indian artists, building bridges between violinists and sitar players, tabla drummers and western singers. She has also composed with unhoused singers from Skid Row, and her music has been performed by major orchestras and choirs all over the world. In May, as part of our series on California composers, host Sasha Khokha brought us this profile of Esmail.

Artists are often the people in our communities who bring people together in ways that are creative, spontaneous, and surprising. That’s true in the East Bay neighborhood of Point Richmond, where a local artist has created dozens of miniature fairy houses brimming with the personality of their imaginary inhabitants. In this story from April, Pauline Bartolone set out to explore these hidden treasures, and meet the person who created them.

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Have you been to every one of California’s 58 counties? Reporter Lisa Morehouse has. For more than ten years, she’s travelled around the state, profiling people at the heart of food and agriculture for her series California Foodways. On this week’s show, for Lisa’s 58th and final story, she takes us to her home county, Santa Clara, to visit a local Chinese restaurant. Over its 55-year history, Chef Chu’s has witnessed fast-paced change in Silicon Valley, and has been visited by luminaries in entertainment, politics and business. Both the family behind it, and the community it feeds, can’t imagine life without this beloved institution. 

And it's crunch time for the crews building floats for Pasadena’s annual Tournament of Roses Parade. But out of the dozens of massive, ornate, flower-covered floats, only five are built by volunteers from the communities sponsoring them. One of those communities is the foothill town of Sierra Madre, just north of Pasadena. It’s been building floats for 108 years, and 2026’s theme is special: it celebrates the first responders that helped protect Sierra Madre from the deadly Eaton Fire. Reporter Steven Cuevas gives us a sneak peek as the group races to meet their New Year's Day deadline.  

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San Jose is home to the largest Sikh temple – or gurdwara – in the U.S., and for decades, it has been a place of sanctuary and refuge. But lately, another feeling has settled in for worshippers: fear.ICE enforcement has ramped up over the past year, with some of the sharpest increases in California. And Sikhs, many who are from the Indian state of Punjab, worry their sacred spaces could become targets. South Asians aren’t always the first group that comes to mind when we talk about undocumented communities. But according to U.S. Customs and Border Enforcement, 35,000 people from India were apprehended at the border this year.  Journalist Tanay Gokhale has been out reporting in the South Asian community, and joins host Sasha Khokha to talk about what he’s been hearing from Sikh worshippers at gurdwaras and those who’ve been detained by ICE. 

And we visit CJ's BBQ and Fish in Richmond. Owner Charles Evans calls himself a "World War II baby." He was born in Richmond to parents who moved to the Bay Area from Arkansas, part of a migration of African Americans west to work in the shipyards. His dad created BBQ pits out of washing machines and refrigerators in their backyard. His mom insisted all of her kids learn to cook, clean, and sew. After driving AC Transit buses for many years, Charles opened CJ's BBQ and Fish 30 years ago, putting his own born-in-California spin on the barbeque and soul food recipes his parents taught him. For her series California Foodways, Lisa Morehouse discovered CJ’s is not just a celebration of Richmond’s Black history and Southern roots, but also a place of refuge and delicious comfort for everybody.

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This year, for the first time since it was established in 1988, the U.S. did not commemorate World AIDS Day on December 1. That’s despite more than 630,000 deaths from HIV-related illnesses in 2024, according to the World Health Organization.

This week, we’re traveling back in time, to visit a queer church that provided refuge and support to San Francisco’s gay community during the height of the AIDS crisis. We’re bringing you the first episode of a new podcast called We All Get To Heaven, which draws on sound from 1,200 cassette tapes – recordings of songs, memorials, and sermons from the Metropolitan Community Church.  It brings to life voices of loss, and of faith, of people who refused to abandon their spirituality or their queerness, and who built a community that could hold both.

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The fierce Santa Ana winds that whipped the Palisades and Eaton fires into deadly infernos also spared precious things you’d think would have been the first to burn: old family photos, children’s art work, postcards, even pages of old sheet music. Those things sometimes blew across neighborhoods, and people are still finding them as fire cleanup continues. Reporter Steven Cuevas introduces us to an Altadena resident who has made it her mission to return these fragile paper keepsakes to their owners.

And we got to the Andrerson Valley to visit a Grange hall. These community gathering places have been around for more than 150 years. Today there are more than 100 in California alone. The Grange began as a fraternal organization for farmers. Even though farming and Grange membership are down to a fraction of what they were decades ago, many rural towns still rely on Grange halls as community centers. For her series California Foodways, Lisa Morehouse visits the Anderson Valley Grange, where many residents credit this place for bringing together groups of people that were once divided.

This episode orginally aired on June 13, 2025.

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For the last few weeks, The California Report Magazine has been sharing conversations between transgender and nonbinary kids and the people in their lives who love and support them — a series called Love You for You.

As we enter Transgender Awareness Month, we shift the lens toward intergenerational stories — young people in their twenties in conversation with transgender elders whose lives trace the long arc of LGBTQ+ activism in California.

These bonus episodes carry heavier histories and more mature themes than the family conversations featured earlier in the series. They offer deeper context to the ongoing fight for safety, dignity and self-expression.

This week’s story brings together Zen Blossom, a 26-year-old Black transgender rights activist at the Transgender Gender-Variant & Intersex Justice Project in San Francisco, and Andrea Horne, a San Francisco-based actress, model and jazz singer who once performed with Sylvester, the legendary disco artist, in the 1970s.

Now a historian working on her forthcoming book, How Black Trans Women Changed the World, Andrea reflects with Zen on those who came before them and those who will come after.

Read the transcript for this episode.

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For the last few weeks, we’ve been sharing conversations between transgender and nonbinary kids and the people in their lives who love and support them — a series called Love You for You.

As we enter Transgender Awareness Month, we shift the lens toward intergenerational stories — young people in their twenties in conversation with transgender elders whose lives trace the long arc of LGBTQ+ activism in California.

These bonus episodes carry heavier histories and more mature themes than the family conversations featured earlier in the series. They offer deeper context to the ongoing fight for safety, dignity, and self-expression.

This week, we meet Donna Personna, a 79-year-old transgender Chicana artist, activist, and playwright who grew up in San José and now lives in San Francisco. A longtime drag performer and advocate, Donna has devoted decades to uplifting the LGBTQ+ community. In 2019, she was named Lifetime Achievement Grand Marshal of the San Francisco Pride Parade. She also co-wrote Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, an immersive play that brings to life a 1966 uprising in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District — when trans women and drag queens stood up to police harassment, three years before Stonewall.

In this episode, Donna speaks with Quetzali (who also goes by “Q”), a 23-year-old Latinx nonbinary organizer from Sacramento who uses they/them/elle pronouns and who is using only their first name to protect their identity. Together, they reflect on how Latinx gender-expansive identities have evolved across generations, from quiet survival in the shadows to living freely. Donna also shares how she continues to cultivate self-love and resilience in a world that still tests both — grounding today’s struggles in a lifetime of resistance, care, and optimism.

Read the transcript of this episode.

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