A Race-Based Slush Fund in San Francisco

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Good morning,

Today, we’re looking at a race-based initiative in San Francisco, private credit funds, and a small, book-loving town in Wales.

Write to us at editors@city-journal.org with questions or comments.

Free doulas for “African American birthing people.” “Afri-centric” mental-health. African ancestry DNA testing. These are just some of the services to which San Francisco’s Dream Keeper Initiative will grant money.

The program originally launched in 2021, when San Francisco’s then-Mayor London Breed promised to “make a difference” for “African Americans in the city.” Dream Keeper helped black residents with down payments, recruited black educators to teach black students, and funded “Black trans-serving organizations.” But the program was riddled with oversight problems, and Breed eventually froze its funding.

Last year, Mayor Daniel Lurie relaunched Dream Keeper, approving $36 million for a number of organizations. “The Lurie administration’s list of RFP 100 recipients, published last month, shows that the city is still committed to identity politics, with payouts for a ‘culturally affirming wellness’ initiative, programming ‘rooted in a Black feminist healing framework,’ and other dubious social-welfare initiatives,” Christopher F. Rufo and Haley Strack write.

Read about some of the groups receiving funding, and why Rufo and Strack suggest that the Trump administration might want to pay attention.

After the Great Recession, new regulations made it harder for banks to lend money. That enabled the rise of private credit funds, which today control more than $1 trillion in assets and constitute more than 15 percent of private company debt.

In recent weeks, private credit has come under stress. Investors have asked to withdraw billions of dollars and funds have been forced to sell off loans. Meantime, private credit firms have seen their share prices tumble. These developments have led some to argue that private credit is an unnecessary innovation that could take down the financial system.

Not so, Judge Glock argues. “Most private credit funds are semi-liquid, meaning that investors can withdraw their investments—much like withdrawing a deposit from a bank. But unlike a bank, these funds have withdrawal caps, usually set at about 5 percent of all assets in a fund per quarter,” he writes. Those caps make the funds less likely than banks to be forced into asset fire sales or suffer devastating runs.

Read more about how critics of private credit get it wrong.

Hay-on-Wye, a town in Wales, has a population of just 1,675. Until the 1960s, it was known for its cattle and sheep markets. Today, it’s known for books.

That’s largely thanks to Richard Booth, who began selling books at an antique shop he bought in 1962. “Unlike most booksellers, who buy only what they think they can sell, he bought everything he could find,” Theodore Dalrymple writes in City Journal’s winter issue. “He toured—indeed, scoured—the country for books, purchasing them by the truckload and eventually importing them by the container-load from America. He bought entire libraries in Europe.”

There are fewer bookshops in Hay now than there used to be, but Dalrymple says the town remains a book-lover’s paradise: “I often think that, if I had my time again, I would choose to live there: millions of books in the middle of surpassingly beautiful countryside.”

Read more here.

“I’ve said about certain NBA players, ‘Shut up and dribble,’ because I don’t want to hear their views on the political fashion of the day. The same thing applies to sportswriters: ‘Just cover the game.’ But then I tend not to read much sports journalism these days, because much of what I do read is so poorly written, often with a poor understanding of the history of the particular sport being covered. Usually just reading the box score and watching some highlights suffices.”