Author Archives: Niloo Nouri

Can’t afford housing in your expensive city? The solution for many is to move out.

America’s 10 most expensive metros have a lot going for them. They’re big. They have plenty of jobs. And for many residents, they’re desirable places to live.
But there’s a catch: the cost of housing has become so expensive that lower-income households are getting squeezed out.

Rents and home prices have soared in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Oakland, Orange County, Calif., San Francisco, San Jose and Washington, D.C.

One of the greenest, most environmentally friendly moves that big cities like New York or San Francisco or Chicago can make is to increase housing density and allow more people to live in them. And yet, bizarrely, few people seem to think of this as an “environmental” policy.

But it is! And it’s hugely significant. In fact, we can illustrate just how significant by taking a closer look at San Francisco’s new solar law.

British firm, Bill Dunster Architects, have always been committed to low carbon building and development. Now, their latest design named ZEDpod, is an idea to build affordable homes over existing parking lots.

In places where there are existing parking lots, the ZEDpod can easily be installed, and because it’s a pre-fabricated design, a pop-up village could be installed in a weekend.

The ZEDpod is zero-carbon, zero-waste, and would have no annual energy bills. They’ve integrated solar photo-voltaic panels (ZED Roof), which in enough numbers can create a solar farm without the loss of agricultural land, allowing enough power to be generated to operate the homes and charge electric cars, bikes, etc.

FROM NOV 25, 2015

Imagine living with all of your belongings and family members in a room in which you can nearly touch both walls with your arms outstretched.

That’s how many families get by in the city, and the vast majority—88 percent— are headed by the working poor who have jobs in industries such as hotels, sales, construction and restaurants. That’s just one of the findings in the 2015 SRO Families Report, published by the SRO Families Collaborative.

San Francisco’s housing system is broken. The only way to fix it is through a radical change in our housing policy: a change that encourages (a lot of) building.

Failed public policy and political leadership has resulted in a massive imbalance between how much the city’s population has grown this century versus how much housing has been built. The last thirteen years worth of new housing units built is approximately equal to the population growth of the last two years.[0]

California State Assemblymember Richard Bloom (D-Santa Monica) has set his sights on tackling the dire shortage of homes—and the resulting affordability crisis—currently facing the state.

Bloom, whose district includes Malibu, Santa Monica, West L.A., Brentwood, and Beverly Hills, currently has three bills pending—A.B. 2501, A.B. 2299, and A.B. 2522—that seek to lower barriers to new housing production in cities throughout California.

A new generation of tech millennials values location over square footage, and housing unit sizes are shrinking across the country.

Since the 1980s, cities around the country have been contracting serious cases of Silicon Valley envy. Everyone, it seemed, was looking for the magic formula to create their own high-tech incubators with educated, upwardly mobile work forces that would drive their cities to modernize and grow.

A new plan for low-rent apartments takes advantage of all that unused space devoted to cars.

In Munich, the days when parking space was allowed to gobble up large chunks of city land may be ending. Like most thriving Western metros, Germany’s third-largest city is desperate for new housing but doesn’t have a whole lot of undeveloped space left. The answer, say Munich’s governing Social Democrats, is to build above parking lots, burying the city’s land-hogging car spaces under buildings filled with affordable housing.