Author Archives: paninterests

San Francisco was the only U.S. city to rank in the top 10 of cities forecast to see the highest office rental rates over the next two years, according to a new forecast from Cushman & Wakefield.

According to the forecast, Jakarta, Sao Paolo and San Francisco will be the top cities for growth in 2013 and 2014.

While some markets and regions will experience increased activity later in 2013, noteworthy growth is not expected in the majority of locations until 2014 and beyond.

The LifeEdited apartment in Manhattan’s SOHO neighborhood is a tiny 420 square foot apartment with a remarkable multifunction living space that can be configured into six different rooms. A moving wall and hideaway furniture can be arranged to create sleeping quarters for 4, two separate offices, or a dining room that can seat up to 12 people. The apartment is the brainchild of TreeHugger founder Graham Hill, who completely remodeled the flat after buying it in 2010. Hill demonstrates the many features of his apartment in this video tour by *faircompanies.

The above image was taken from an article in a Wall Street Journal article about the book “Life at Home in the 21st Century.” The UCLA group responsible for the book followed 32 middle class Los Angeles families around their homes, tracking their every move to see how people actually live nowadays. This image shows ”the location of each parent and child on the first floor of the house of ‘Family 11′ every 10 minutes over two weekday afternoons and evenings.” In other words, primetime for their waking hours at home.

Imagine stepping into a house 25 times smaller than your current abode. For the average American, that would amount to 100 square feet, a space so tiny it feels like it belongs in a tree.

That’s the way Jay Shafer has come home for the past decade. Shafer is considered something of a patriarch of the tiny house movement, a small but growing band of people who drastically shrink their living space in hopes of living a cheaper, less wasteful, and happier life.

Scroll to bottom of page and click link for video dated December 6, 2012.

San Francisco is expected to reign as the nation’s top real estate market for investment, development and homebuilding in 2013, according a recently released annual report from the Urban Land Institute.

In Jeff Speck’s excellent new book, Walkable City, he suggests that there are ten keys to creating walkability. Most of them also have something to do with redressing the deleterious effects caused by our allowing cars to dominate urban spaces for decades. I don’t necessarily agree with every detail, and my own list might differ in some ways that reflect my own experience and values. But it’s a heck of a good menu to get city leaders and thinkers started in making their communities more hospitable to walkers.

When San Francisco’s planners recently considered a proposal to build tiny apartments in the city, opponents of the plan began calling the spaces “Twitter apartments.” The name was a reference to their micro size — these apartments will be as small as 220 square feet, about the size of a parking space — but it was also a knock on their presumed techie tenants. The micro apartments will rent for $1,300 to $1,500 a month — crazy in most places, but a steal in San Francisco, where regular person-sized studio apartments now go for an average of more than $2,000 a month. The high price means that they’ll mainly be snapped up by young tech workers.

Panoramic Interests is weeks away from finishing up Smartspace SoMa, the firm’s first, 23-unit, micro-apartment building at 38 Harriet St. in San Francisco’s South of Market district.

Step into an alleyway in the Northeast Washington neighborhood known as Stronghold, and you will see a vegetable patch, a campfire, a view of the Capitol and a cluster of what neighbors call “those tiny people, building their tiny houses.”