Category Archives: Uncategorized

The former Patterson Mansion on Dupont Circle is now Ampeer, a 92-unit luxury resident for “highly-transient” urban professionals.

Remember when apartment buildings with pools and gyms were a big deal? Then real estate developers threw in flat-screen TVs and free wireless. Then concierge services.

And now: instant friends.

The Chronicle took a hard look at four core issues of homelessness last summer. Here’s an update on what’s changed since then and what still needs to be done.

From June 19, 2007: A controversial bill before the state legislature would preempt cities’ rights to prevent new affordable housing.

People can’t afford to be poor in Portland, Oregon. Nearly half of the households that rent in the Portland metro area pay too much. Almost one-quarter (24.3 percent) of these households are severely cost burdened, meaning half of their household income goes to keeping a roof over their heads.

On the face of it, San Francisco’s homeless problem should have improved dramatically over the past year.

After all, last summer Mayor Ed Lee formed the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing to focus on the city’s most perplexing problem.

The city spent $275 million on homelessness and supportive housing in the fiscal year that ends Friday, up from $241 million the year before.

From June 20, 2017:  Tech startups helped turn a handful of metro areas into megastars. Now they’re tearing those cities apart.

In the 1980s, I was part of a team doing research into the geography of the high-tech industry. We couldn’t find a single significant high-tech company in an urban neighborhood. Instead, they were all out in the suburbs—not just Intel and Apple in Silicon Valley,

We have a shortage of affordable housing in San Francisco.

Because housing is so artificially scarce, and therefore expensive in San Francisco, we force developers to include “below market rate” units in every housing development or pay fees.

The fallacy of composition leads people to get the connection between density and affordability backwards

Our good friend at Strong Towns, Chuck Marohn is utterly right about a great many things. But he’s committed a classic Kotkinesque blunder when it comes to evaluating the connection between density and home prices.

California’s housing crisis isn’t easing anytime soon.

This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

How America’s most progressive cities are making global warming worse.

On June 1, the US Climate Mayors—a network of more than 300 city leaders, including the mayors of the country’s five largest cities—published a commitment to “adopt, honor, and uphold the commitments to the goals enshrined in the Paris Agreement.” The cities would carry out the promises Donald Trump had abandoned.

If you’re a renter in California concerned about the high cost of living here, or looking to purchase your first home, your prospects aren’t looking up.

Projections show rents will continue to surge, especially for low- and middle-income people in places like San Francisco, Los Angeles and Sacramento, and home prices will become increasingly expensive, according to an economic analysis in the Anderson Forecast from the University of California, Los Angeles, released this month.

“It was already bad before, but it’s getting worse,”