2018
"The San Francisco housing market is so absurd that teachers are living in dorms — even though their salaries are some of the highest in the country"
At current salary levels, teachers in many cities across the US can’t afford to live near the schools where they teach.
In San Francisco, less than 1% of homes on the market are affordable to the city’s schoolteachers, according to a new study from real-estate website Trulia.
...More"Why America Has Ditched Homeownership to Become a Renter Nation"
I see a major shift in the real estate market as we become even more of a renter nation. Why is it happening? Is there a silver lining to this economic cloud?
...More"Editorial: California can’t spend way out of housing crisis"
Of the myriad possible responses to California’s housing and homelessness crisis, the state’s politicians have a clear favorite: spending more money. But state and local governments’ evident difficulty using existing housing funds provides reason for skepticism.
...More"Architects around the globe are exploring “vertical land” to solve homelessness"
In an example of truly thinking in three dimensions, architects around the globe are beginning to envision housing in a different way. Dubbed “vertical land,” developers are essentially utilizing scaffolding and three-dimensional printing to build homeless shelters on the windowless sides of existing buildings.
...More"America’s Progressive Developers, San Francisco Edition: Patrick Kennedy"
Homelessness has long been a San Francisco problem, and with home prices rising, it’s arguably worse now than ever. A January report on SFgate.com claimed that the city’s homeless count is close to 6,700, and a local advocacy group estimates the count at 12,000.
...More"The Extreme Geographic Inequality of High-Tech Venture Capital"
The rest aren’t rising, and spatial inequality is getting worse.
Last month a cadre of Silicon Valley venture capitalists took a much-ballyhooed tour of the Rust Belt. As the New York Times glowingly reported, this “Comeback Cities Tour” featured stops in Detroit, Flint, Akron, Youngstown and South Bend.
...More"Can Big Tech Be Tamed?"
As the tech industry grows to unfathomable proportions, San Francisco needs to grow to match it. A call to arms for a city under siege.
…Because it has suppressed the construction of new market-rate housing for decades (between 1980 and 2014, San Francisco grew by more than 170,000 residents but gained only 70,000 housing units), the city bears as much responsibility for the crisis it now finds itself in as the tech industry does.
But it has a chance to make up for its past mistakes, and in the process ensure that this doesn’t become a schizoid city, with subsidized housing on one side of the street and millionaires’ mansions on the other.
To do so, it needs to start building housing—a lot of it. Ironically, the best way to preserve San Francisco will be to change it.
...More"Welcome to Zucktown. Where Everything Is Just Zucky."
MENLO PARK, Calif. — John Tenanes, Facebook’s vice president for real estate, is showing off the company’s plans for expansion. It will have offices for thousands of programmers to extend Facebook’s fearsome reach. But that is not what Mr. Tenanes is excited about.
...More"Portland’s brouhaha over housing market economics 101"
Understanding how housing markets really work is essential to crafting solutions to our affordability problems
Regular followers of City Observatory will know two things about us: We’re keenly focused on the problem of housing affordability, and we like to treat Portland, Oregon (our local backyard) as a kind of laboratory for better understanding urban issues.
...More"The myth of “forcing people out of their cars”"
It’s about more options, not fewer.
California state Sen. Scott Wiener’s SB 827 — a sweeping approach to solve California’s housing crisis by having the state government preempt local zoning ordinances and allow for greater density near rapid transit stations and high-frequency bus stops — is one of the most important ideas in American politics today.
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