Steven Greenhut

California has one of the world’s most spectacular coastlines, which meanders 1,100 miles from Imperial Beach to Crescent City. And, of course, everyone wants to “Save Our Coast” and assure public access to beaches, which is why Californians voted 55% to 45% in 1972 for Proposition 20. It promised to protect ...

Under reformist mayor, San Francisco continues to self-correct San Francisco has long been a whipping post for conservatives who like to portray it as the case study for progressive zaniness, an ever-present example of the kind of public policies that other cities ought to avoid. The city has often deserved ...

Three years ago, my East Coast relatives flew to San Francisco for my daughter’s wedding. At the time, national publications were having a field day depicting the city as a pit of decay filled with poop-covered sidewalks and rampant homelessness. My relatives were primed to see an urban landscape beset ...

It’s easy to think that urban policy is solely about big cities and their surrounding suburbs, much in the way that one would naturally believe that farm policy is solely about farm regions. A quick perusal of the statistics suggests that America is indeed an urban nation despite its vast ...

Don’t blame Big Oil for California’s failed insurance system by Steven Greenhut  |  April 30, 2026 The Southern California News Group, of which I am a member, once interviewed Sen. Scott Wiener about his bill to decriminalize the use of some psychedelics. We questioned the obvious inconsistency between his anti-prohibition stance ...

As policymakers search for answers to the growing challenges facing America’s largest cities, a new study from the Pacific Research Institute – the California-based, nonpartisan, free market think tank – suggests they may be looking in the wrong places. PRI’s Free Cities Center today released Urban Policy Beyond the Nation’s ...

The “landmark” measure — imposed at the behest of environmentalists and agricultural interests — was designed to stop urban sprawl, protect open space and promote transit use. “Observing the loss of farmland and greenspaces, as well as poorly planned development in other states, Oregonians saw that they could no longer ...

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong — and a lot that’s right — about building a high-speed rail system that speedily transports people across vast tracts of land. Some family members recently returned from a trip to Japan, where they traveled the country on the Shinkansen network of bullet trains. Begun in 1964, the ...

Now that many populist Republicans have largely abandoned free-market conservatism, it’s getting hard to distinguish dopey Democratic policy ideas from dopey Republican ones. Apparently, the Horseshoe Theory — where each end of the political spectrum is separated by the distance between the ends of a horseshoe rather than at the ends ...

For those who missed the internationally publicized brouhaha, a tabby named Kit Kat had lived in the city’s Mission, where he sauntered into bodegas and bars. Dubbed the Mayor of 16th Street, Kit Kat was by all accounts a charming character. Then on October 27, the unthinkable happened: a Waymo self-driving taxi ...