The nine-county Bay Area, currently home to 7.7 million people, is projected to add another 2 million new residents by 2040. Such growth comes with opportunities for innovation, vibrant communities, and a sustainable urban consolidation of people and resources.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
How to fix a Housing Crisis
California finally is beginning to consider solutions to its housing crisis that are on the same scale as the problem.
The state is desperately in need of more housing. Home prices are the highest in the continental United States, and population growth continues to outstrip construction.
Why Can’t We Get Cities Right?
The waters are receding in Houston, and so, inevitably, is national interest. But Harvey will leave a huge amount of wreckage behind, some of it invisible. In particular, we don’t yet know just how much poison has been released by flooding of chemical plants, waste dumps, and more.
D.C.’s latest twist on upscale urban living: A dorm for grown-ups in a historic mansion
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.
Supportive housing in short supply, but tiny homes may fill need
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.
Oregon May Strip Portland of Its NIMBY Powers
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.
Despite money and effort, homelessness in SF as bad as ever
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.
The Unaffordable Urban Paradise
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,
I Fought the Market and the Market Won [UnintendedConsequences]
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.
Downzoning won’t make housing cheaper
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.
