Alameda County’s grim homeless count numbers underline the sense residents have had for the past several years: the homeless problem is indeed getting worse.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Reforming land use regulations
From April 2017
Aguably, land use controls have a more widespread impact on the lives of ordinary Americans than any other regulation. These controls, typically imposed by localities, make housing more expensive and restrict the growth of America’s most succesSFul metropolitan areas. These regulations have accreted over time with virtually no cost-benefit analysis.
Many ideas, little consensus on housing crisis
Housing panels reveal complex issues at heart of Bay Area’s housing shortage
Everyone seems to agree that the housing situation in the Bay Area has reached a crisis — but what to do about it remains as polarizing as ever.
Doing Something Real About Gentrification and Displacement
The only thing worse than listening to suburbanites bitch about being stuck in traffic? Listening to local politicians pretend they can actually do something to Make Commutes Great Fast Again.
Return of the S.R.O., With a Twist
When Benny Ventura, a 25-year-old visual designer from Austin, Tex., moved to New York last September, he knew he would not be making enough to live alone, but he did not know anyone he could split an apartment with. Like countless other freshly minted New Yorkers, he set about looking for a room.
Millennials tell boomers ‘Yes In My Backyard’
Sacramento, especially the Downtown and Midtown areas, has the fastest rising rents in the country. As the Bay Area’s middle class gets “squeezed out in droves,” as a Newsweek article put it last year, those rents will continue rise.
“I see that increasing supply of housing is one way to combat the really crazy changes that we see in rent,” says Louis Mirante, co-chair of House Sacramento, a new “pro-housing, pro-infil, anti-rising rents organization,” is one of Sacramento’s most active YIMBYs. The movement counters NYMBY-ism, (Not In My Backyard) to support new development of housing through local political involvement.
Confessions of a “Newbie” Developer
I am an “accidental” developer of a 75-unit rental project in the Mission. I have spent 3 ½ years, $490,000 in development expenses, and $180,000 in application fees on my project without yet having a Planning Commission hearing date.
Low pay, high SF housing costs equal 1 homeless math teacher
Etoria Cheeks teaches math at a public high school in San Francisco, explaining algebra and statistics to teenagers. But it’s the math behind her housing predicament that simply doesn’t add up.
Nonprofit pledges $100 million to aid SF’s chronically homeless
In the biggest donation of its kind ever made to San Francisco, the Tipping Point Community charitable organization is pledging $100 million to try to cut the chronically homeless population in half over five years — an ambitious goal for a city that has long wrestled with a street population teeming with people with seemingly intractable problems.
Prevailing wage would make California’s housing crisis worse
From April 2017
California has a grim housing problem and nearly everyone in the state, whether they have tried to buy or rent a home or not, is aware of it. Apparently, though, some in Sacramento haven’t noticed and hope to mix in more of the poison that created the crisis in the first place.
