We were feeling pretty good about the state of the California housing market after reading the PDF of the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight's most recent report. Housing prices up 18.8% in the Pacific region! California's housing appreciation up 21.07% over the year-ago period and 4.65% over the previous financial quarter! The Oakland area ranked as number 44 out of 275 urban markets in terms of price appreciation -- East Bay represent! (Silicon Valley......

So are the people behind the J.T. Leroy hoax all irritated that James Frey has gotten the bulk of the publicity -- and subsequent sales boost -- in the "Authors who misrepresent themselves to the public" press beat? Is that why Geoffrey Knoop is now giving interviews in which he admits that (former) partner Laura Albert was the one who created J.T. Leroy, wrote under that name, and duped all sorts of literati? We......

Today marks the first on-air day of the KQED winter pledge drive. The radio station's hoping to raise some serious cash in the next two weeks. We wish them luck -- and wonder how many NPR junkies will be switching over to KALW in search of an uninterrupted fix of Robert Siegel or Renee Montagne. While SFist appreciates the need for fund-raising and can certainly understand the desire to raise as much money as possible......

The Wall Street Journal's East Bay Journal showed us a little love this week with a two-part series on the residential and commercial real estate markets in the Five-and-Dime. See "East Bay: More Affordable, But Only Compared to Its Neighbors" (January 18, 2006) and "California's East Bay Area Offers Relative Bargains" (January 19, 2006). SFist is always interested to read about bargains in the area, if only because they're rarer than a morning when......

The massive gap between rental rates and mortgage rates in the Bay Area is often cited as one of the reasons the entire real estate market's headed for certain doom. Having sunk some money into said market, we're very interested in exactly what's going to go on with housing prices and rental rates, so we read the real estate press as carefully as a haruspex examines sheep guts.

The creative team behind J.T. Leroy should send James Frey flowers, since his little revelations have given the J. T. Leroy hoax story a sort of also-ran quality. However, we were pleased to see the San Francisco Chronicle finally pick up the story and give it a well-sourced local angle. First up: the local literary Who's Who with regard to who was sucked in: Dave Eggers, Susie Bright, David Wigand, Michael Ray, Michael Chabon......

In our ongoing efforts to Stick It To The Man, we threw off the shackles of local cable giants and went with Alameda Power & Telecom for all of our cable service needs. One of the pleasant side effects has been getting public access channel 31, which produces the TV show "Monster Island Theatre." To call it "the Bay Area's homage to 'Mystery Science Theatre 3000'" is to sell both TV shows short. We......

The California Building Industry Association says this is the year the big housing slowdown in California begins. Housing prices statewide are expected to rise only 5%-8%, compared to the 25%-30% we've all grown to know and love/loathe. The CBIA expects housing starts in the Bay Area -- that's the number of new units built -- to flatten out to 26,000 and 28,000 units, and prices to rise only a little. The California Association of......

So we've finally recovered from the mayhem that goes along with grabbing up calendars at Pendragon Books on January 1 (our haul -- the Alex Ross Mythology wall calendar, the Anne Taintor 2006 Engagement Calendar and the Black Ball 2006 wall calendar -- cost all of $10, or about 1/4 of what we'd have paid if we hadn't braved the sale. The bruises were worth it!) and are now ready to face the world......