2018August
"If you want less displacement, build more housing"
The more you limit housing, the more you increase displacement
In city after city, we see the same refrain: a neighborhood is starting to attract new residents and new investment, current residents are starting to worry about gentrification.
...More"Big City Housing Doesn’t Have to Be So Expensive"
The one-story house for sale on Oak Court in Menlo Park, Calif., is 88 years old and 830 square feet, with two bedrooms, one bathroom, a detached one-car garage, and no air conditioning. Almost anywhere else it would be the startiest of starter homes. But because it’s in Silicon Valley, where the supply of housing is far short of the demand, the bungalow was listed in mid-August for $1.575 million.
...More"A non-profit funded in part by Mark Zuckerberg has laid out four visions of what the Bay Area could look like in 2070, and three of them are bleak"
… “Our communities are designed to encourage walking and biking. Many neighborhoods have car-free commercial blocks like those found in European cities…”
SPUR, a non-profit devoted good government planning in the San Francisco Bay Area, has published a paper laying out four possible visions for the region in 2070, and three of them are decidedly bleak.
...More"Can these pre-fab modular apartments help house the homeless?"
Some California cities are considering the Lego-like buildings constructed from these apartments, called MicroPads, as an easy way to provide shelter.
In late July, trucks pulled up to a vacant lot in Berkeley, California, carrying shipping-container-sized studio apartments, each already fully built inside. It took four days to stack the Lego-like apartments into a new building.
...More"This Is How People Can Actually Afford to Live in the Bay Area"
“San Francisco is known for being progressive, but has the most extreme NIMBYism in the country,” …
One study recently proclaimed San Francisco’s the highest rents on the planet.
...More"Prefab housing complex for UC Berkeley students goes up in four days"
Imagine a four-story apartment building going up in four days, and from steel.
It happened in Berkeley, a city known for its glacial progress in building housing.
Check out 2711 Shattuck Ave. near downtown Berkeley. Four stories. Four days in July. Including beds, sinks, sofas, and stoves.
...More"After backlash, developer tweaks plan for car-free 1,000 units at West Oakland BART"
A $300 million West Oakland housing development that hoped to be car-free is pushing ahead — but with the addition of some parking places.
Panoramic Interests plans to build 1,032 units with 44,000 square feet of retail space at 500 Kirkham St., a 3-acre site adjacent to the BART station. The only catch was the grand total of parking spaces that it wanted to build: eight.
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