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This paper explores drinking by girl gang members. Sociologists and criminologists have tended to concentrate on both male gang members and their involvement in drug dealing. This pre-occupation has tended to overshadow not only the role of female gang members but also the importance of drinking within youth gangs. In spite of a growing interest in female drinking, ethnographic and qualitative research on female drinking is still much less developed than that devoted to male drinking. In analyzing the culture of drinking in the lives of girl gang members, we uncover the extent to which alcohol plays a central part in their everyday lives. Data for this paper are drawn from the results of an on-going study of street gangs in the San Francisco Bay area, in which 97 female gang members were interviewed using both a quantitative and qualitative interview schedule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like many large US metropolitan areas, the San Francisco Bay Area has experienced rapid suburban employment growth since 1980, much of it concentrated in sub-centres. This paper shows that, contrary to the co-location hypothesis, employment decentralisation has not been associated with shorter average commute distances or durations in the Bay Area. Combining statistics on shifts in modal splits and average vehicle occupancy levels reveals that parallelling the region's sub-centring trend has been a substantial increase in average commute vehicle miles travelled (VMT) per employee between 1980 and 1990. The largest increases occurred in the fastest-growing and most remote suburban centres. Using decomposition analysis, we found that increasing commute distances contributed the most to rising commute VMT per employee, and the distance factor had proportionately the greatest effect on rising commute VMT rates in the most peripheral work centres. Since shifts in commute VMT per employee are thought to be strongly associated with transport externalities, we conclude that the social and environmental implications of the Bay Area's regional growth trends deserve more public policy attention than given to date. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effects of the dot-com boom and bust on firm survival, migration and growth in other sectors. Dot-com expansion revived a slowing central city economy but also raised issues regarding displacement of manufacturing, distribution, social services and other non-profits from San Francisco's “South of Market”. This study uses the National Establishment Time Series (NETS) database to examine how the growth of dot-com businesses affected San Francisco and surrounding counties. We find that start-ups were central to San Francisco's job growth. Relocations also were a significant aspect of job change. Dot-com growth was positively associated with propensity for pre-boom information and professional services establishments and for non-high-tech manufacturing or distribution establishments to move, while arts, social services and non-profits remained in the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban aspects of local food systems, such as farmers' markets, provide an opportunity for city residents to “do” environmentalism within their own home places. What environmentalism is and how to do it, however, vary greatly with the social location of the population involved. This paper investigates the social construction of the environment through participant-observation research at two urban farmers' markets in the San Francisco Bay Area. In one farmers' market, located in a largely affluent and white neighbourhood, locally grown organic food becomes a symbol through which urban eaters can connect to wild nature. This framing provides an urban corollary to the wilderness narrative that dominates the US environmental movement. In another case, located in a low-income area, the farmers' market's largely African-American managers and vendors liken the farmers' market to environmental justice efforts. By constructing the environment as the places where the customers it targets “live, work and play”, this farmers' market emphasises race and inequality, rather than traditional environmental concerns. Both farmers' markets, however, do to some degree engage both ecology and equity in their discourses and actions. Given the importance of meaning-centred tensions to conflicts between the environmental justice and reform environmental movements, my analysis has important implications for the development of a paradigm that attends to both ecological sustainability and social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper describes findings from a pilot study of drug use and environment for Southeast Asian youths in the San Francisco Bay Area. From interviews with 31 drug-involved youths living in two low-income predominantly ethnic minority neighborhoods, smoking marijuana emerged as pervasive and highly normative. Smoking marijuana provided a means for coping with the stresses of home and community life, and located youths, moreover, within an alternative ghetto lifestyle of rap music, marijuana smoking, and youth crime, as modeled by co-resident ethnic minority peers, with which many Southeast Asian youths identified. The findings indicate the importance of the social environment as well as social status in the substance use of this group of second-generation youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The influences of urban form and transport infrastructure on economic performance show up in several contemporary policy debates, notably 'sprawl versus compact city' and in the developing world, the future of mega-cities. This paper probes these relationships using two scales of analysis. At the macro scale, an econometric analysis using data across 47 US metropolitan areas reveals that employment densities and urban primacy are positively associated with worker productivity, suggesting the presence of agglomeration economies. Congested freeways are shown to be a consequence of strong economic performance. An intrametropolitan analysis using data on sub-districts of the San Francisco Bay Area generally reinforces the findings of the macro-scale analysis. In the Bay Area, labour productivity appears to increase with size of labour-marketshed and high accessibility between residences and firms. Higher employment density and well-functioning infrastructure also contribute positively to economic performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses spatial regressions and spatial statistics to examine the changes in the distribution of Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) households within an expanded San Francisco Bay Area region. From 2000 to 2010, the density of HCV households grew disproportionately across the region, and areas of significant increase emerged in both the region’s urban cores and its rural periphery. Furthermore, the destination communities shared a set of common characteristics. In 2010 HCV households were more likely to locate in areas with lower housing prices, lower percentages of educated people, higher rates of poverty, and higher percentages of African American households when compared with the region as a whole. These findings suggest that voucher holders locate where housing is affordable. We conclude that in regions with tight housing markets, supply matters. This study also introduces housing researchers and policy makers to a methodological approach that addresses what is known in geostatistics as a change of support problem. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Much of the literature regarding the employability of African-American women focuses on how demographic factors like single parenthood, limited social capital, and low levels of education diminish their employment options. This study engages this literature by exploring the role that institutional factors, including state action and cost-cutting strategies in the workplace, play in shaping the structure of job opportunities available to high school-educated African-American women. Focusing on department store workers in the San Francisco Bay area, this case study highlights how shifts, including the increasing contingency of employment between 1970 and 2000, have constrained African-American women's experience and progress in this low-skilled workplace. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The wake of the foreclosure crisis warrants renewed attention to geographies of race and real estate. This case study of the San Francisco Bay Area shows that outlying exurban communities on the metropolitan fringe, which saw major in-migrations of communities of color over the past three decades, were hard hit by the real estate crash, after having seen substantial housing price increases during the tail end of the boom. The potential impact on wealth and asset accumulation for these communities is significant. Rather than traditional forms of segregation, this new geography of crisis suggests a form of peripheralization, where minority communities in particular were lured out to the far suburbs under structural conditions of neoliberalism, far different from the federally supported suburbanization of two generations ago. This new reality is reminiscent of the urban roots of the foreclosure crisis, and of the need to view the crisis at a metropolitan scale. [Key words: race, real estate, foreclosure crisis, San Francisco Bay Area, regions.] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study describes welfare-to-work participants in the San Francisco Bay Area, support services, experiences with the CalWORKs program, and predictors of employment status in the wake of welfare reform. Findings indicate that many are working and more Stayers and Recidivists than Leavers are using food stamps and Medi-Cal. Multivariate analysis reveals that race and financial supports were the significant factors contributing to employability, defined as the ability to secure employment despite the need to supplement earned income with welfare payments. To help people stay off of welfare, case management services are needed to help participants maintain employment and increase job skills. In addition to expanding our understanding of human behavior within the social environment of poverty, implications for practice and policy are identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focus group discussions elicited descriptive experiences of driving under the influence of gamma hydroxybutyrate (GHB), and uncovered motivations that led participants to decide whether to get behind the wheel after ingesting this illegal psychoactive substance. Of the 51 current and past users interviewed, average age 31.1 ± 7.7 years, 40% were female. All were recruited from the San Francisco Bay Area, in 2004. Factors making users vulnerable to adverse complications of driving while under the influence of GHB are also examined. Study limitations were noted. Implications for various law enforcement agencies and health professionals are derived from the data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Equity in access to opportunities is increasingly recognised as an essential component of sustainable development and transport. This study presents a spatial and temporal examination of commuting inequality between cars and public transit in the San Francisco Bay Area. Results visualised in the maps show considerable inequality and temporal changes in job accessibility and commuting time between cars and public transit as well as among locations within the metropolitan area. Results from OLS and spatial regression models indicate that, in both 1990 and 2000, greater job accessibility was significantly associated with shorter commuting time for driving alone as well as for public transit, but the degree of this association was considerably greater for public transit than for driving alone. Urban and transport development that enhances mobility and accessibility for public transit relative to cars should be strongly encouraged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current understanding of the shell mounds of the San Francisco Bay Area, now almost completely destroyed due to urban expansion, is summarized. After interpretations of how and why coastal hunter-gatherers created these sites are discussed, salient characteristics of shell mounds from the area are outlined. Because core questions concerning the meaning and function of these sites remain unresolved, a new project that integrates the results of re-analyses of older museum collections with archival records and CRM work is discussed, an approach that may have applicability in other developed coastal areas. Results of a regional analysis that relies on an assessment of site type drawn from many site records are then presented. First-time discovery of site type throughout the past 100 years is then analyzed across 20 topographic quadrangles; we conclude that the region's earliest archaeologists captured a surprising range of site type diversity, especially with respect to shell-bearing sites. A north-south pattern of shell-bearing sites is identified, micro-regional differences are characterized, and a subset of the sample is analyzed through GIS to investigate the nature of site clustering. Finally, in light of the site clustering, we present models that may help to explain shell mound occupancy and function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on efforts to prevent musculoskeletal disorders in garment workers in San Francisco Bay Area, California. Ergonomics risk factors; Proposed interventions among sewing machine operators; Description of tasks of sewing machine opertors.

Examines the passengers preferences concerning airports and airlines in San Francisco Bay Area, California. Calibration of a statistical model for the sequential choice of passengers; Use of the nested multinomial logit model; Significance of frequency and access time to airports.

Examines changes in the ratio of housing to employed residents in the San Francisco Bay area in California. Jobs-housing balance trends; Trends toward self-containment; Trends in independent indexes; Trends in residing and working locally; Associations between balance and self-containment; Balance, containment and housing prices.

This article reports on the findings of the Lesbian Relationships Research Project (LRRP), a 1993 study on the prevalence of emotional and physical abuse in lesbian relationships in the San Francisco Bay Area (Medina & Scherzer, 1993). This article reviews the literature on prevalence of domestic violence in lesbian relationships, describes the LRRP study, reports the findings from (1) the survey component of LRRP, which examined prevalence of specific abusive behaviors and respondents' help-seeking experiences, and (2) the qualitative component of the study, which asked respondents what behaviors they considered abusive, what happened when they sought help, and invited other comments. Lastly, the concepts and themes brought up from the qualitative data are discussed to suggest topics for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]