Author Archives: Niloo Nouri

People can live elsewhere instead, but we’ll all be poorer if they do.

The sweeping land use reform bill introduced recently by California state Sen. Scott Weiner, a San Francisco Democrat, died in committee this week, bringing to an end an ambitious plan to change zoning in broad swaths of the state by allowing four- to five-story buildings near all rail transit stations and major bus corridors.

Uber is pedaling full throttle into electric-bike rentals. The ride-hailing company on Monday said it is buying Jump Bikes, the first company to provide stationless bike sharing in San Francisco.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.