Let’s get this out of the way. If your career is the buying, selling, developing or redeveloping of real estate, you will lose money one day. There are simply too many variables beyond your control — sometimes beyond your imagination — that can slam your project.
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Rockridge never saw it coming.
Residents and elected officials in the Oakland neighborhood said they were blindsided by the news Wednesday that a San Francisco developer had submitted plans to shutter the neighborhood’s two-decades-old Trader Joe’s store on a tree-lined stretch of College Avenue and replace it with two residential towers, the taller soaring to 31 stories.
Inexpensive single-room-occupancy dwellings were common in America decades ago, but overregulation has driven them from the housing market.
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To reinvigorate office life, large companies are relocating to mixed-use neighborhoods that offer easy access to transit, housing, and amenities.
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My internet friend Bobby Fijan is one of the founders of a mission-driven company called The American Housing Corporation. It was founded in 2024. They opened their first factory in Austin in 2025, and they’re now actively working on their first collection of modular homes.
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Construction is nearly finished for the seven-story apartment complex at 1752 Shattuck Avenue in North Berkeley, Alameda County. Leasing has started for the 68-unit development near Downtown Berkeley and the UC Berkeley campus. San Francisco-based Panoramic Interests is the project developer.
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Yesterday we spoke about the merits of fine-grained urbanism and why the direct and obvious way to achieve this is to just, you know, encourage more small-scale development. So today, let’s talk about some of the specific things that would likely need to happen in order to unlock all of the small and under-utilized sites that today are not being developed at scale.
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After a recent slump, homes and condos in San Francisco’s most desirable neighborhoods are jumping in price again.
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In trying to accomplish every objective and accommodate every interest, all at once, the state set up its housing agenda to fail.
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Outside Residence 1001 at 706 Mission St. in the Four Seasons Private Residences’ Aronson Building, a historic Chicago-style structure that survived the 1906 earthquake. Compass agent Butch Haze and Bryant Kowalczyk of Luxe Places have co-listed the unit for $5.99 million.
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Last year, six states eliminated a fire-safety code requiring apartment buildings taller than three stories to have at least two staircases. More states are exploring the move.
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Last month, we talked about how even “luxury” housing can improve overall housing affordability in a market. In that post, we spoke about a recent study that looked at the downstream effects of a new condominium tower in Honolulu. Today, let’s look at Switzerland.
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A Successful Facial Challenge to the City of Patterson’s Impact Fee Regime Offers Key Insights
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The Berkeley City Council unanimously approved the construction of an eight-story housing development on the corner of Virginia Street and Shattuck Avenue at its regular meeting Tuesday. A majority of public commenters expressed concerns about the project’s affordability, government transparency, gentrification, health and safety.
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Some nearby residents wanted to block the 110-unit apartment complex, calling it a ‘behemoth’ and ‘monstrosity.’ But council members said they want more housing in North Berkeley.
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For decades, Los Angeles business and political figures have focused their attention on creating a sleek, vibrant downtown. The common thought, as the late Eli Broad suggested, has been, “a great city needs a great downtown.”
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Regarding “If S.F. Mayor Lurie wants affordability, he should stop taxing new homes at the same rate as cigarettes” (Open Forum, SFChronicle.com, Jan. 27): I am a retired professor of city planning and an affordable housing expert. I have a few questions about these proposals.
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A lawsuit filed last month by a longtime Cambridge developer could upend the way Massachusetts builds affordable housing.
Lawyers for Patrick Barrett are suing the city in the state’s Land Court over its requirement that 20% of the space in major housing developments include affordable units, a policy known as “inclusionary zoning.”
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Washington needs to unlock capital through deregulation.
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One of the common criticisms of new housing is that it’s designed for rich people and that it does nothing to help the housing situation of average citizens. The YIMBY response to this is, “Well, yes, it does actually, because supply eases overall housing pressures and because of the filtering effect.”
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Oh boy, have we spoken a lot about inclusionary zoning over the years (see here, here, and the full list of 43 posts that I have tagged with “inclusionary zoning” here). Politicians tend to like this policy because they can present it as no-cost or “free” affordable housing. Few people have much sympathy for real estate developers, so it’s easy to just say, “Don’t worry, we’ll just get the developers to pay for it.”
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My grandmother and her nine siblings grew up in a two-bedroom apartment. At the peak, twelve people, two bedrooms, six people per bedroom. That is a housing crisis. Maybe your elders lived something like that too. Maybe you do.
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The university also welcomed more California residents, enrolling its largest-ever student body.
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Tokyo is a city of contrasts. It is both hyper-modern and steeped in tradition. It is known for art, architecture, design, and fashion, yet it’s also a city that — through its built form — makes the argument that architecture is irrelevant.
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After moving here from San Jose, illustrator Danielle Hopkins got advice from her cartographer partner and created a playful pictorial map of the Berkeley Hills and its pathways.
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Preliminary permits have been filed for new housing at the former Oxford Elementary School campus in Northbrae, Berkeley. The property at 1130 Oxford Street has been vacant since a 2020 study identified structural earthquake vulnerability. Panoramic Interests is responsible for the application, having purchased the lot from the Berkeley School District for $3 million last October.
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Would ending the capital gains lock-in for senior homeowners free up larger homes for families?
Summary: For senior homeowners, removing the cap entirely or retroactively inflation adjusting the current caps of $250,000 (single) and $500,000 (joint) to $500,000 (single) and $1 million (joint) would boost supply, improve affordability, and reduce market frictions:
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The American South has spent the past decade undergoing a quiet but remarkable cultural shift: a home attached to your neighbour is no longer a sign of low income. Until recently, townhomes and multifamily were the exclusive domain of less affluent residents, but they have rapidly become desirable to mid-market (and increasingly high-end) buyers. That’s what is happening with urban townhomes in Durham.
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(Bloomberg) — Rents got cheaper in several major cities this past year, thanks to an influx of luxury apartment buildings opening their doors and luring tenants to vacate their old homes.
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We cannot be happier to formally present our award recipients from our 2025 Design Awards, celebrating the most innovative and impactful architectural projects of the year. After reviewing a staggering number of submissions, our panel of judges selected a diverse group of visionary designs that push the boundaries of creativity, sustainability, and functionality.
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St. Paul enacted rent controls, and housing construction plummeted. Next-door Minneapolis generated a downtown boom without regulating rent.
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Patrick Kennedy, president of Panoramic Interests, told the Business Times that he wants to turn the site of a former elementary school into “the Berkeley version of the Painted Ladies.”
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“When I started development at Berkeley 35 years ago, I would go to public meetings and be compared to Hitler, Attila the Hun — I’m not exaggerating,” chuckles Patrick Kennedy, a longtime local developer. “The local paper called [an eight-story building I built] a Stalinist monstrosity and monument to civic corruption.”
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Sometimes I am an advocate for big, bold urban change. This is where I tend to be closely aligned with urbanists like Joe Berridge, co-founder of Urban Strategies. (We sat on a panel together this past October at the Council for Canadian Urbanism Forum, and I found myself agreeing with him on this point.)
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Wesley Yu had a plan to create multigenerational housing on his residential property in East Palo Alto. But after getting hit with a nearly $55,000 fee from the city, the small-scale project devolved into a legal fight — one that was eventually settled in his favor.
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From April 2014
I will underline certain characteristics of Japanese zoning that makes it different from North American practices and that I find particularly interesting.
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Will the blue state starter home ever return?
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Yesterday morning, my dad sent me the above chart from Apollo and said, “frightening, do you have one for Canada?” In 2010, the median age (not mean) of all US homebuyers was 39 years old. Today, it is 59 years old. And it has jumped significantly since the start of the pandemic.
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The AI effect in San Francisco is spilling over to the East Bay’s residential real estate scene, with some agents saying they are seeing tech money show up in the form of all-cash offers over the past several weeks.
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Canada needs livable apartments to help fix the housing crisis. To do that, it must change the rulebook for both condos and rentals
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As they look upon the United States of America in 2025, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson see a country wrought by a half-century of failed governance. They see states and cities theoretically committed to progressive futures instead bogged down in labyrinthine mires of process — a society stuck in low gear. Yet they also see opportunity to turn those failures on their heads, and to build a better society based around more responsive, efficient governance.
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Imagine mixed-use was the default zoning designation and you could start whatever business you wanted on the ground floor of your home.
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What it shows is a bunch of narrow urban properties ranging, for the most part, from 5 to 7 storeys. Some of them are old buildings, and some are new. Regardless, the point I wanted to make was that this is a scale and rhythm of building that does wonders for cities. They’re dense, they have a compact footprint, and they promote urban vibrancy.
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Republican states like Texas are undergoing building booms and positioning themselves for a demographic takeover. Meanwhile, California dithers
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State Senate Bill 79 to spur the creation of much-needed housing
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The Bay Area is aging fast and our readers are noticing. Though population aging is a nationwide — and global — trend, the San Francisco metro area, which includes San Francisco, Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo, and Marin counties, is aging faster than any other large U.S. metro area
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California is the most expensive state in the country to buy a house for a host of reasons, including a lack of inventory and high costs of building.
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A recent ranking by neighborhood and school resource site Niche placed the city of Berkeley at the top of its 2025 healthy places list, as it beat out 229 other U.S. locations.
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On a sunny day in San Francisco, along the city’s waterfront, families dived into the wacky world of artificial intelligence inside the Exploratorium museum.
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The California Association of Realtors uses its considerable political lobbying power to consistently oppose reforms to make homeownership more accessible
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What I have learned from this recent New York Times article is that if you have a company with “AI” in the name — such as OpenAI, ScaleAI, Adept AI, Hayden AI, or Harvey AI — then you probably need to lease office space in an area of San Francisco (around the Mission District) that is now being called The Arena.
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New Rochelle embraces development and makes it easy to build, leading to thousands of new apartments
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Data shows that limited supply is associated with greatest rent increases in low-income neighborhoods
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The University of California admitted more than 100,000 California first-year students for fall 2025 — a systemwide record — even as the most selective campuses extended fewer offers to in-state applicants.
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Allegations of physical violence. Police reports. Stay-away orders. Online fights waged in blog posts, on Nextdoor, in professionally produced videos and even in one-star Google reviews of local companies.
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Sofia Baig was shocked when she visited San Francisco open houses last month that were so crowded, she was bumping into people. There wasn’t enough space for the dozens vying for one rental unit.
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Bay Area nonprofit brings ‘space capsules’ to shelter the unhoused
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High home prices and elevated mortgage rates have made it increasingly difficult for Gen Z and millennials to buy homes. The median age of first-time U.S. home buyers has significantly jumped during the past decade. Because incomes have not kept pace with housing costs, many younger Americans are locked out of homeownership.
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Every great power in history lost its dominance when it gave up its industrial edge. The U.S. must act now to avoid the same fate.
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The intertwined history of single-room occupancy and homelessness in the U.S.
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The Bay Area has “unmatched strength” compared to the rest of the country when it comes to being prepared for widespread AI innovation, adoption and workforce readiness, a new report says.
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Thousand Oaks, a leafy neighborhood nestled into the base of the Berkeley Hills, boasts views of the Golden Gate Bridge, shingled lodges designed by well-known architects and serpentine streets lined with massive granite boulders.
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The courtyard at 1367 University Avenue was full of that beautiful California sunlight, of celebration, of something rare: real momentum toward ending homelessness. More than 200 neighbors, advocates, and city leaders came together on this bright afternoon in Berkeley to welcome the grand opening of the Step Up Supportive Housing Program.
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Sometimes, policies have unintended consequences or unforeseen downsides.
Other times, I’m not sure the downsides or adverse consequences are unforeseen or unintended at all.
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The Bay Area is facing a doom loop. It’s just not the one we usually think about.
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Berkeley’s Roast and Toast has gained a large fan base for its rare stretchy ice cream
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Four years ago, Josh Masimore was living alone in Texas. And he was miserable. Lonely and isolated in his one-bedroom apartment, he craved community, but didn’t know how or where to find it.
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A last-minute change allowed even denser construction than originally proposed in the city where single-family zoning was invented.
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Opponents of Light-touch Density (LTD) infill argue that it will lead to outright home price declines or, at the very least, slower home price appreciation (HPA). However, evidence from Charlotte and Seattle shows that the construction of LTD housing—such as duplexes and townhomes—does not adversely impact HPA of single-family detached (SFD) homes in the LTD infill neighborhoods compared to the HPA of SFD homes in SFD-only neighborhoods. In both cities, LTD development added tens of thousands of new homes while having no adverse effect on the HPA of adjacent SFD properties.
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First approved in 2020, the building on University Avenue, near Acton Street, includes support staff on site 24/7.
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Wellness is a way of life, and Berkeley, California, is proof that, with Niche.com crowning it the healthiest city in America in 2025. Located in Alameda County, just under 14 miles east of San Francisco, Berkeley earned its title based on its residents’ overall health, alcohol and tobacco use, obesity rates, and access to health care, including doctors, hospitals, and gyms.
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Most modular units are built out in a warehouse before being assembled like building blocks on site, which proponents say can save time and money. Some critics say the process is highly fallible and requires extreme precision.
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The design will be allowed again for smaller projects, as long as developers include other safety features.
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One perverse way to think about development is that it is a tool to transfer costs away from people who don’t want to pay for stuff to people who don’t know they’re paying for stuff.
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Cambridge is one of many local communities that require most new housing developments to include units set aside at below-market rents — in its case, 20 percent of the building, which is among the highest rates in Greater Boston — with the intention of creating more affordable homes in a city that is starved for them…..Put another way, a policy aimed at generating affordable housing may actually be preventing it.
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I’ve been writing Construction Physics since September of 2020. Over the past four and a half years I’ve written 186 essays, totalling around 600,000 words.
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Seven of the top 10 cities with the highest share of micro-housing are in the West — led by San Francisco. Roughly 15% of the local housing stock in San Francisco consists of apartments smaller than 415 square feet.
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Austin City Council members approved a code amendment that allows more units to be built using only one central staircase. Advocates of “single stair” housing say it will create more flexibility in how smaller complexes are built, making them more affordable.
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You wake up in a 3rd world jail cell. You’re only allowed to call one person you know to get you out of there. Who do you call?
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“Too many goods created a bad.”
That’s how California Governor Jerry Brown put it in 2017 when he signed a package of 15 housing-related bills, the first YIMBY-supported pro-housing bills.
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Introducing “How the System Works,” a series on the hidden mechanisms that support modern life
(Winter 2025)
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In a litigation result that will have a number of positive consequences for developers and housing advocates, the City of La Canada Flintridge (“City”) last week moved to dismiss its appeal of a closely-watched “Builder’s Remedy” case.
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The Micro Housing Market has been fragmented based on the productivity of several companies; therefore, each segment and its sub-segments are analyzed in the research report. Furthermore, the report offers 360 views on historical and upcoming growth based on volume, value, production, and consumption
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Since 2009, policymakers in Minneapolis having been implementing land use changes to encourage more housing supply. Some of these changes have included eliminating parking minimums, encouraging multi-family buildings up to 6 storeys on commercial corridors …
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The U.S. doesn’t have a housing crisis, but an affordability crisis. Roughly one-third of Americans rent, and nearly half are “cost-burdened,” i.e., they spend 30% or more of their income on housing. Since 2019, rents have increased 1.5x faster than income in most U.S. metro areas.
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Early in my career, I was “downsized” out of a job by a financially ailing organization. I had gotten married six months earlier. My wife was four months pregnant. And I had just acquired my first house.
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A California legislator wants to solve the state’s housing crisis, juice its economy, fight climate change and save the Democratic Party with one “excruciatingly non-sexy” idea.
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Nowhere in the US are apartment rents declining as fast as they have in Austin. Average rents are down 22% from their August 2023 peak.
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Here’s an interesting Twitter thread by Zoë Coombes describing the crossroads that Toronto finds itself at when it comes to housing. We know we need to build more urban housing geared towards families.
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In late 2023, construction crews demolishing an empty warehouse at 1633 Valencia St. uncovered a century-old, hand-painted ad for the “Chevrolet Six,” a “ghost sign” that became the talk of the neighborhood in San Francisco’s Mission-Bernal enclave.
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For a century, progressives have been making it harder to build new homes in prosperous areas. Workers, immigrants and the economy pay the price.
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The oldest baby boomers turn 80 in less than a year, and the senior housing market is moving from glut to shortage
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The U.S. was once the world’s most geographically mobile society. Now we’re stuck in place—and that’s a very big problem.
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Since breaking ground in 2021, Culdesac Tempe has had its share of detractors and skeptics. But none of them live there.
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“Single-stair” buildings can fit on narrow or odd-shaped lots. Seattle already has plenty.
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Housing costs– to buy or to rent– have far outpaced income growth. As a share of our income, we’re now spending more on housing than at any other point since World War II. But it seems like every time we try to build more housing it’s a million-dollar condo or upscale townhouse with luxury finishes. It’s not affordable. So what actually happens when we build that expensive housing– and can it do anything for affordability?
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Cities should do what they can to allow the smallest of interventions.
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Using beamless mass timber and vertical integration to achieve double-digit construction cost savings
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Reflections on visiting San Francisco and the current political landscape
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Theater preservationists are considering an appeal to the Berkeley City Council in hopes of blocking the project.
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In one of the first legislative exactions opinions issued since the U.S. Supreme Court decided Sheetz v. County of El Dorado, the New York Supreme Court’s Appellate Division just struck down a provision of New York City’s rezoning plan that would have imposed “Arts Fund” fees on certain landowners.
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A comprehensive national study has demonstrated a clear link between neighborhood walkability and increased walking activity among residents.
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The map above compares the average home size in square feet in each US state with those found in selected European countries. And the difference is quite staggering.
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In January of 1961, a college dropout named Robert Zimmerman moved from Minnesota to New York City. He slept on couches before renting a cheap apartment, and soon found a place for himself in the local folk music scene.
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Rumbling like a fault line between pavement and parkland, the decision to turn the Great Highway into Ocean Beach Park has divided the city.
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Missing Middle Housing (MMH) Interim Ordinance Passed!
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Donald Trump has vowed to close borders and deport millions. But you wouldn’t have known that from attending an immigrant founders event in the Financial District two days after the presidential election.
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The progressive stronghold in California plans to target large encampments, relying on a Supreme Court decision handed down by a conservative majority.
If you want to govern the nation, you should first be able to govern San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles.
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New housing experiments with courtyards show that this age-old design approach can still deliver for cities struggling to provide homes for families.
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West Berkeley’s sizable supply of lab space could soon grow by another quarter of a million square feet.
Burlingame-based Woodstock Development filed a preapplication with Berkeley Monday to build a 247,647-square-foot research and development space at 600 Bancroft Way by the Aquatic Park.
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Since the mid-2000s, Nashville, Tennessee, has undergone a housing boom that created thousands of new homeownership opportunities in established urban districts. Among the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan areas, Nashville now ranks second for having the most recently built, single-family, attached and detached homes for sale within five miles of the central business district.
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President Javier Milei’s fiscal ‘shock therapy’ yields lower rents overall, but some people feel squeezed
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For months, I’ve been saving up clippings for a memo on the above topic, but favorite subjects such as risk, debt, and uncertainty repeatedly jumped the queue, delaying my intended memo until the U.S. election season got into full swing, making it compelling.
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On September 19, the AEI Housing Center hosted a premiere of its nine-minute documentary on light-touch density (LTD): The Forgotten Solution to the Housing Crunch. The documentary highlighted Charlotte, North Carolina, and explained how LTD can create housing abundance by legalizing small-scale residential development that is compatible with single-family detached neighborhoods.
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In housing circles, Jerusalem Demsas has emerged as a critical voice for supply-side policy. As a staff writer for The Atlantic, she argues that lawmakers should address housing unaffordability by focusing on a severe shortage of homes.
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Many tiny-home companies are promising a crisis solution and angling for big government contracts. One is being scrutinized by the FBI in Oakland.
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In this insightful episode, Bruce Bean sits down with Patrick Kennedy, the innovative mind behind Panoramic Interests, to explore his transformative journey in urban development. Patrick shares his unique approach to building in high-density areas, his experience with modular construction, and his thoughts on how rent control and union requirements impact housing costs
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While L.A. County grapples with homelessness, elegant new housing projects in Long Beach and Venice signal the solutions — and challenges — ahead.
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Market’s Mismatch Runs Higher Than National Average, Analysis Has Shown
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The inherent problem with unfunded IZ is that its cost impedes the production of housing. It’s a preventative tax on housing when what we need for affordability is far more housing.
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Years after a fire gutted a small apartment building at 3300 Mission St., San Francisco is planning to rebuild the project as affordable housing.
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Artist and sign painter Dave Benzler lives and paints inside a teeny home in Bernal Heights with an outsize history.
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New York City has some of the world’s worst traffic, wasting its residents’ time, slowing buses, and exposing people to pollution, especially in neighborhoods with many people of color.
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Cities have always invited us to be constantly on the move. We move around to get to work, go shopping, meet friends, attend a concert, visit an art exhibition, and take advantage of all the many activities that a metropolis offers.
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The American retail giant is starting to think even bigger
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The proposed 8-story building would have 131 total units, 11 of which are considered affordable, and a ground-floor cafe.
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There are many things to love about SF; from beautiful parks, famous cuisine, beautiful architecture, and so much more. A new study evaluating the happiness of global cities has been released, and San Francisco was one of the happiest cities in the world. Of the 250 global cities, SF was one of 10 U.S. cities to make the cut.
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As the Supreme Court weighs whether cities can criminalize sleeping outdoors or in tents, Los Angeles is attempting to combat homelessness with tiny homes criticized by some as ‘inhumane.’
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For a tiny apartment in London, the solution was a shape-shifting bank of custom cabinetry built on a tight budget.
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Changes designed to encourage people to take other forms of transportation have contributed to a 40% decline in air pollution, according to city officials.
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San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and Boston are leading lights on the map of global startup ecosystems, particularly when it comes to the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence. These cities are America’s front runners in the tech race, according to a recent Visual Capitalist report that ranked the world’s top startup hotspots.
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The destructive nature of urban renewal left the U.S. too scared to build anything at scale ever again.
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Spaces feel bigger and better without cars
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Land use policy is a powerful tool to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and address climate change. So why isn’t it a bigger part of today’s climate policy debates?
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The U.S. comes with diverse options for places to live, including the most peaceful places and the cheapest cities. But nothing beats choosing to become a resident of a healthy community where people enjoy high-quality healthcare, safety, adequate employment, and physical activity, just to name a few. A healthy lifestyle not only makes one feel good about themselves but also shapes their future by reducing the risk of contracting certain diseases and increasing lifespan.
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Want to live longer? Choose the stairs over the elevator, a new review suggests.
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Niche.com has named Berkeley, CA as the healthiest city in the US. Here are just a few of the reasons why it managed to land the top spot.
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For years, San Francisco politicians and housing advocates have fought for the creation of “missing middle” housing for workers with incomes high enough to be middle class in most markets, but who are often priced out of the famously expensive city.
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The city can make three critical fixes to its 20-year growth plan: Let middle housing be bigger, allow apartment buildings in more places, and legalize car-free homes everywhere.
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Reducing the need for car travel is better for health, the environment and public safety
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It may improve your quality of life. But good luck if you lose your job.
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Accessibility-based planning minimizes the distance that people must travel to reach desired services and activities. Measured this way, increased density can provide more total benefits than increased speeds.
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More specifically, Berkeley. According to a Niche.com report on the healthiest cities in the country in 2024, Berkeley ranked first with an overall grade of A+.
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Mandating low-income housing in new developments sounds great but without subsidies, it’s a flop. We’ve known this for decades.
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Economics is useful because it can often alert us to unintended consequences. For example, rent control seems like a good way to make rent cheaper, but it can end up reducing housing supply, thus shutting new renters out of the market entirely.
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Long untouchable, fire departments are causing death and homelessness in American cities by advocating for bad policies
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San Francisco’s intrinsic allure — and the sense that it is too singular to fail — can also feed complacency
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America’s superstar cities have avoided the post-pandemic death spiral—so far, anyway.
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It’s a logical collaboration. Both want to bring good and affordable design to the masses. And obviously there are brand benefits for Muji. It’s a way to expose more people to their products.
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A neat way of looking at food trucks and tiny businesses
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Front of theater earns landmark status, but not the back where developer plans 227 units
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A large apartment project planned at the site of a former Regal United Artists movie theater in Berkeley survived objections over the building’s historic status – clearing the way for the project to move forward in the process.
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“America is a place where you live INSIDE your house, your car, your office, or maybe a mall.
Japan is a place where you live OUTSIDE, in public spaces that are made to provide you with both adventure and comfort.”
New housing is always ‘too tall,’ ‘too dense’ or just ‘not right for this neighborhood.’ Is there anywhere we can build desperately needed homes?
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The latest Homekey award from the state will create 40 units of housing on city-owned land.
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California’s perpetual conflict over housing, pitting advocates of state-level pro-development policies against defenders of local government land use authority, has often involved friction between two state laws.
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Founders and investors who moved to Miami and elsewhere are returning to a boom in artificial intelligence and an abundance of tech talent
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Thanks to soaring housing prices, the era of the 400-square-foot subdivision house is upon us.
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The four-story, 118-year-old residence has water stains on the walls from leaks. A sundeck sags precariously above a room with asbestos in the ceiling and a pantry littered with rodent traps. A storage closet sits nearly empty, its emergency supplies never replaced after an overflowing bathroom destroyed them in 2022. And a mold test kit covered in brown fungus perched for months on a downstairs windowsill.
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UC Berkeley has more than 45,000 students and has forecast adding 8,500 more in the next 12 years …
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If it’s not dead already, San Francisco’s brand is clearly on life support. It happened because officials allowed 4,400 people to destroy it. That’s the number of unsheltered people in the city’s official 2022 point-in-time count, and they have essentially held the city’s reputation hostage.
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The city maintains 907 permanent supportive housing units in buildings such as City Gardens that are dedicated for families. The city also offers more than 1,400 temporary or permanent housing vouchers and rental subsidies for families, according to the latest data from the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing.
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Homelessness is an American tragedy, but it’s not hopeless. In a recent column, I explored how Houston has become a national model by reducing homelessness by more than 60 percent.
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H e called this correction in the housing market both “real” and “healthy”; he spoke about normalcy returning in 1-2 years; and he posited that the market will be “crazy” when it does return because of a supply deficit.
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We have a great new MRU video on housing and why it’s so expensive in many dynamic cities.
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That said, in certain places land will become much more valuable, as companies choose to locate near AI centers to access the labor markets for AI researchers, or to learn about AI from the industry’s leading actors. I predict a major real estate comeback for San Francisco and nearby environs, and probably gains for Manhattan as well.
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Okay, so small lot sizes seem to help. But what else is needed? Is there a world where this is possible anywhere in the West? It’s probably hard to imagine. Conventional real estate wisdom would tell you that multi-storey retail buildings don’t work.
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The City of San Francisco has officially opened the 2021-built apartment complex as a permanently affordable supportive housing facility at 333 12th Street in SoMa. The project was developed by Panoramic Interests and grabbed headlines as the first in San Francisco to utilize the State Density Bonus program. The city purchased the development last summer, less than a year after opening.
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San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood witnessed a significant milestone last week when the City Gardens affordable housing complex officially opened its doors. This
develop1nent, located at 333 12th St., will offer 200 new units for needy families.
Turning the Suburbs into Urban Villages for a Sustainable, Accessible Future
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Priya Living, a senior living company that is steeped in Indian culture, began with a small footprint in California and now has expansion plans in the U.S. and India.
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The University of California, Berkeley, has unveiled an ambitious plan to establish an “innovation zone” in downtown Berkeley, further solidifying its reputation as a leading hub for scientific research and development in its hometown.
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Four UC-owned buildings, including two city landmarks, would be knocked down to make way for the research complex.
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San Francisco firm Panoramic Interests designed a self-contained, stackable tiny apartment. Its MicroPAD modular homes boast a total floor space of just 160 square feet, including a kitchenette, sleeping area and bathroom. The popular solution now includes 15 projects and more than 1,000 housing units.
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From farmers markets to trivia nights, we put together a roundup of events and activities held regularly in Berkeley.
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A new housing development outside Phoenix is looking towards European cities for inspiration and shutting out the cars. So far residents love it
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An ambitious plan to turn a parking lot next to the West Oakland BART station into 1,032 apartments is on life support after its developer lost the property to foreclosure last week.
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American cities have taken it on the chin over the past few years.
The Covid-19 pandemic and associated business restrictions have disproportionately affected the distinctive amenities of urban life
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Construction has officially started on 39 affordable homes with a groundbreaking ceremony at 1367 University Avenue in North Berkeley, Alameda County. The project will create housing for formerly homeless individuals, giving access to amenities, on-site services, and close access to the North Berkeley BART Station. San Francisco-based Panoramic Interests is the developer …
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Here’s why downtown Berkeley is faring better than other cities.
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Karikó, a molecular biologist, and Weissman, an immunologist, realized during a chance encounter at a University of Pennsylvania photocopy machine in the 1990s that they could combine their work to explore how messenger RNA might produce effective drugs or vaccines.
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The recent groundbreaking event for the Step Up Housing Program is the latest milestone in BOSS’ efforts to expand affordable housing for community members in need. Once complete, Step Up will provide 39 new affordable housing units for unhoused community members, with on-site services to support housing retention, long-term health and wellness, and social and community engagement.
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Blackstone, the biggest owner of commercial real estate in the world, is placing its bets on the student housing rental market as demand surges worldwide.
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The project, delayed three years, is expected to open its doors by the end of summer 2024.
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The 207-unit project at the corner of University and California Street will include 21 affordable apartments.
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As urban housing becomes ever more expensive and scarce, compact, flexible spaces are increasingly seen as a solution
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1510 Webster is the only major residential project that has broken ground in downtown Oakland since Covid began. In a changed economy — and a changed city — oWow’s Andy Ball says the firm has figured out how to make the math behind going vertical work.
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Yuta Yamasaki and his wife moved from southern Japan to Tokyo a decade ago because job prospects were better in the big city. They now have three sons — ages 10, 8 and 6 — and they are looking for a larger place to live.
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Houston is rarely held up as an example of good land use planning. The Texan city, as recently as a few decades ago, famously had a downtown area consisting largely of car parking.
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The mass-timber and concrete structure topped out earlier this month, with facade installation nearly topped out. The modular panels, built in Canada, are just part of several efficient construction methods that allowed oWow to reach this milestone less than a year after the groundbreaking last October.
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The Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes are cooling the housing market. The average 30-year mortgage rate is up to 7.5%, the highest since 2000.
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An emergency proclamation by Gov. Josh Green offers developers the opportunity to route around almost all regulations on building homes.
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“We thought of San Francisco because the community here is just unmatched,” said Hoover, citing the events, networking and fundraising opportunities in the city’s booming AI industry.
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Kennedy said that even if buildings aren’t entirely prefab modular, there is room for prefabrication of certain components to find more efficiencies.
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San Francisco is at a pivotal moment.
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Every time the real-estate market crashes, people say, “This time is different.” When there’s distress all around, it’s hard to grasp how there could ever be an upside.
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Many cities are touting the benefits of converting offices to housing to reinvigorate downtowns.
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Rents for student housing are poised to grow, with strong demand at many colleges
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The sharing economy has come to apartment buildings — and landlords have discovered a new way to attract tenants.
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Making the rounds through Houston’s homeless encampments as an outreach specialist for a local nonprofit group, he offers snacks, builds trust, and puts people on a waitlist for affordable housing. On good days he gets to tell them they’re moving into a home.
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No. But the city’s position as a knowledge industry cluster put strains on it that its political coalitions were not prepared to accommodate.
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Panoramic Interests has shared new renderings with YIMBY for the 17-story residential tower expected to rise at 2274 Shattuck Avenue in Downtown Berkeley, Alameda County.
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How Paris became one of the world’s most beautiful cities, and what we we can learn from it
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New York is undergoing a metamorphosis from a city dedicated to productivity to one built around pleasure.
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The NIMBY mindset persists in the face of evidence.
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This month, families will move into City Gardens, a 200-unit permanent supportive housing site with larger units and more bedrooms for our families.
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San Francisco Mayor Unveils Plan to Halve Homelessness Within 5 Years
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The world’s biggest, most functional city might also be the most pedestrian-friendly. That’s not a coincidence.
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The Shattuck of today is such a vibrant, fun place; more lively than ever before…I really like the work of Trachtenberg Architects who are making some of the most creative facades for their apartment complexes.
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It is a humbling experience to try to learn any new skill as an adult. But there is a particular humiliation in learning to ride a bike. Not only because biking is something everyone already assumes you know how to do and the quintessential skill you never forget.
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In a recent article in The New York Times, Anna Kodé lamented the blandness of multifamily architecture in the U.S. and posited several theories for this disappointment.
The root cause of the banality is quite simple. The answer is something that, once seen, cannot be unseen: stairs.
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The No. 1 place for startup innovation fueled by venture capital in the United States and the world by a huge margin is the San Francisco Bay Area. There’s not even a place that comes close. And when I say the Bay Area, I mean San Francisco proper, Oakland and the East Bay, and the Silicon Valley.
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Environmental laws are being used to justify oil drilling in Los Angeles, single-family zoning in Minneapolis, and the construction of the border wall.
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This post is going to be a bit of a rant, because honestly I’m pretty frustrated, and I want the rest of you to understand and share at least a little bit of that frustration.
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A California appeals court ruled Friday that a $312 million plan to turn Berkeley’s historic People’s Park into housing for about 1,100 students and more than 100 of the homeless people who regularly camp on the 2.8-acre site fails to address environmental concerns surrounding the proposed construction projects.
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From Oct 2022
Bobby Fijan, a real estate developer who likes to tweet about floor plans, recently offered this as an example of how a contemporary downtown office building could be converted into apartments.
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Generations of movie-goers are mourning the loss of a cinematic and architectural treasure, which closed around Feb. 3, weeks before anticipated.
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A tug of war is being waged over the size of the American home.
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To understand a city, start with the foundation. Floor plans from homes around the world explain how the way we live has shaped the design and architecture of urban neighborhoods — and vice versa.
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Climate change is upon us. Even with Congress finally investing in green energy, Californians face many decades of worsening wildfires and rising seas.
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Tens of thousands of homes are now more buildable, including several projects now resurrected that local parking mandates had previously killed.
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Dense Housing, Streets for People, Bike Lanes
Last week, Berkeley upzoned affluent neighborhoods for apartments and backed bike lanes on a major thoroughfare.
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Downtown Berkeley is set to lose its last operating commercial movie theater, part of a nationwide downsizing by Regal Cinemas, the second-largest chain of movie theaters in the U.S. behind AMC.
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Traffic management consultancy Inrix released its 2022 Global Traffic Scorecard and it’s making headlines around the world.
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One common argument against new housing in urban areas is that new housing equals densification, and dense places are less affordable.
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While they have spurred heated debates across the internet, living in under 300 feet can be both comfortable and full of social benefits
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The most famous New Year concert in the world is performed in Vienna and beamed to millions across the world under the golden ceilings of the 19th-century Musikverein concert hall.
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The University of California has committed $312 million to turn Berkeley’s historic People’s Park into housing for about 1,100 students and more than 100 of the homeless people who regularly camp on the 2.8-acre site. The project has won approval from officials in Berkeley, after UC agreed to cover the city’s added costs for police and fire services, and from an Alameda County judge, who said it complies with environmental laws.
They are grey, rectangular and if you lumped their population of up to 2bn together they would cover roughly the same area as Connecticut, about 5,500 sq miles. Car parking spaces have a monotonous ubiquity in US life
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From 1940 to 1960, the population of the nine counties surrounding the San Francisco Bay more than doubled to 3.6 million. In a 1959 report, the US Commerce Department’s Office of Area Development projected that it would double again by 1990, and yet again by 2020, when the region was expected to house 14.4 million people.
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Gov. Gavin Newsom, newly inaugurated Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and legislative leaders are pledging decisive action on California’s homelessness crisis, which raises a pithy question: Why did it erupt during a period of strong economic growth?
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When housing advocates and developers talk about how long it takes to get permits to build housing in San Francisco, they don’t speak in increments of days, weeks or months. They speak in years.
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It’s not much — a bed with a mattress, a small nightstand, a dresser, a closet and some assorted appliances in a 160-square-foot room.
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The push for fareless transit is downstream of a larger failure: American urban elected officials have struggled to improve government services, especially infrastructure development.
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Tokyo’s low crime rates, world-leading transportation network, and affordable rents make it one of the world’s most livable cities.
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The Empire State Building was completed in 1931. At a height of 1250 feet [0], it was the world’s tallest building, exceeding the recently completed Chrysler building by 202 feet.
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What the 10 fastest-growing metro areas reveal about the world of remote work
The San Francisco Bay Area claimed the number one position on the list with 4.8% growth in 2022, driven by technology, innovation, and startup growth.
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This is an excellent video that I would encourage all of you to watch. It provides a visual look at city finances and explains how car-dependent suburbs are usually heavily subsidized by productive urban places.
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San Francisco-based Panoramic Interests could be adding another new development to the housing market in downtown Berkeley in the near future.
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This is the paradox of housing development in Los Angeles and so many other cities. The politics of the affordable housing crisis are terrible. The politics of what you’d need to do to solve it are even worse.
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To speed up permitting for energy projects, we’ll need to rethink community input.
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TOKYO — At the end of a long day at work in the offices of Japan’s professional baseball league, Asumi Fujiwara returned to her apartment and changed into pajamas
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We study the impact of remote work on the commercial office sector. We document large shifts in lease revenues, office occupancy, lease renewal rates, lease durations, and market rents as
firms shifted to remote work in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Western housing shortages do not just prevent many from ever affording their own home. They also drive inequality, climate change, low productivity growth, obesity, and even falling fertility rates.
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The Business Times continues our Hot Spots series this week, introducing you to people and projects in the region’s hottest areas. This week we stop into two crown jewels of the East Shore, Berkeley and Emeryville.
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Panoramic Interests is on quite the spree in Berkeley.
The San Francisco developer wants to raise a 17-story mixed-use building with 239 apartments and ground-floor commercial space at 2274 Shattuck Ave., an approximately half-acre lot in Berkeley’s downtown currently home to the Regal UA Theatre.
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The goal of the 2009 Sepulveda Pass Freeway Expansion Project seemed simple. A carpool lane was to be added to reduce congestion on a 10-mile stretch of Los Angeles’s I-405 freeway, the second most congested road in the U.S.
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Berkeley is adding people faster than housing units
Across the Bay Area, there are reports of overcrowding forced by sky-high rents. And in Berkeley, population growth outpaced housing growth in the last decade: On average, a single census block in Berkeley added about six people and one new housing unit.
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For creative collaboration, sometimes you can’t beat a face-to-face meeting.
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More than half a dozen affordable housing projects in California are costing more than $1 million per apartment to build, a record-breaking sum that makes it harder to house the growing numbers of low-income Californians who need help paying rent, a Times review of state data found.
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America’s leading economist of urban life says a return to the workplace is crucial, especially for the young.
“And then you go to San Francisco,” Mr. Glaeser says with an almost unseemly gusto. “San Francisco is still down 52%. The tech hub is the most extreme.”
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“We have, of course, discovered an elusive technology to allow more people to live on less land: It’s called an apartment building. And if people would like fewer neighbors competing for parking spaces, then they should rest assured that buses, trains, protected bike lanes, and maintained sidewalks are effective, cutting-edge inventions available to all.”
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“We have really little opportunity to get these kinds of buildings where we have multiple bedrooms where we can serve families,” said Coalition on Homelessness executive director Jennifer Friedenbach during a public meeting last year. “We have thousands of children in San Francisco that are experiencing homelessness, but we have very few large units. Three bedrooms. It makes a huge difference for large families, [there are] very few options for them.”
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As an emergency measure for the pandemic, New York City’s banishment of cars from certain streets saw unexpected space open up for pedestrians, restaurant tables and playing children.
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Tuesday night was District 6 Supervisor Matt Haney’s final Board of Supervisors meeting, as he just won a state Assembly seat and is off to Sacramento. But one of his final votes late Tuesday night was the unanimous approval of a $145 million purchase of the Common City Gardens Apartments at 333 12th Street (at Folsom Street), a facility with 200 family-friendly, multi-room units that will be used to house families experiencing homelessness.
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Normally, a special election for California’s State Assembly wouldn’t have much national significance — especially not an election in San Francisco, a liberal, Democratic city that’s the opposite of a swing district.
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California leaders have been talking a lot recently about wanting the state to be a haven.
For people seeking abortions who can’t get them in their home states.
For refugees from Afghanistan and Ukraine.
For trans people seeking care that might be banned where they live.
“The acquisition of these two properties will not only add 274 new homes for those who are homeless, which will help us address the crisis we see on our streets, but for the first time we will have a building dedicated to helping families,” Breed said in a statement.
…“This is practically unheard of and an incredible resource to serve families with children,” Emily Cohen, deputy director for communications and legislative affairs at HSH, said at a March community meeting.
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In a sparsely attended press conference late Thursday evening, the UC Student Housing and Development Office announced a series of major changes to the People’s Park student housing project.
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I’m not sure I’ve ever heard more discussion about a city over my lifetime than I have about San Francisco. That’s a weird thing to write, because, up until about a month ago, I’d never actually been.
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Employees may need those face-to-face meetings more than their employers do.
The number of suicides and overdoses continues to rise, and the market for counseling services and therapists keeps growing. This legacy of the pandemic, which seems to be ending after two years, is deeply disturbing
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One of the most heartening cultural developments spurred by COVID-19 has been the rising awareness of our urgent need to build, and with it a bipartisan “progress movement” aimed at studying, financing, and valorizing the builders.
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The grandiose buildings were originally inhabited by European aristocracy, but their central courtyards later turned into spaces for communal living.
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Why do states with Democratic majorities fail to live up to their values?
There’s an old stereotype in the US of a college junior who studies abroad in France for a semester and who returns obsessed with walking to cafés, biking to class and taking trains across county.
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To hear many residents, city leaders and, too often, The Chronicle’s online comment section, talk about it, San Francisco is no longer a habitable city. It is, instead, merely an archipelago of safe islands floating in an ocean of human feces and hypodermic needles.
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“Counterintuitive or not, California needs a lot more housing, and the fastest, cheapest way to get housing is to let developers build it…”
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“Moretti thinks that in the long run, there will be a loss of innovation and productivity as a result of the pandemic shift to remote work. “It’s hard to create new ideas if you’re physically isolated. It’s hard to interact with clients and ask them exactly what new things they need. Also, it’s hard to onboard new people into teams,” he says.
For this reason, he thinks most workplaces won’t remain 100 per cent remote after the pandemic is resolved…”
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Watch enough construction and it may occur to you that things have scarcely changed since Ramses II’s building spree. Yes, we have cranes, forklifts and electric saws, but so much of building still comes down to backbreaking labor
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Having some people work from home while their teammates are in the office runs counter to much of what makes organizations tick.
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“…But the front facade is amiable and warm, with engineered wooden panels framing nine square windows. This is infill pure and simple, and it will hold its own in years to come.
…At 2711 Shattuck, Lowney and developer Patrick Kennedy set out to keep things “clean and simple, as easy to construct as possible,” Lowney said.”
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From March 2021
Tech’s Great Migration: Insights to Emerging Tech Hubs Across the U.S.
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Earlier this week, Amazon announced that it plans to return to an “office-centric culture” as its baseline. Its rationale was that being in an office allows the company to better “invent, collaborate, and learn together.”
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As Lorde said: “We live in cities.”
“…
Personally, I don’t think so. I don’t think the economic geography of the US will be profoundly different in the long run, and I think the reason is that I don’t think that we can access those particular advantages that come from agglomeration remotely…
Right now, if you look at San Francisco, for example, 89 percent of office workers are working remotely. So right now people are claiming that going forward, what you define as “superstar cities,” or high-cost cities, are doomed. I’m skeptical of that, I think everything that we know from the economic geography before Covid tells us that these forces of agglomeration are quite powerful.”
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San Francisco’s median apartment rent rose 3.4% in March from the prior month, the biggest increase since the coronavirus pandemic began, according to a new report.
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The coronavirus pandemic and remote work aren’t slowing Google’s massive real estate expansion in California. The tech giant plans to invest more than $1 billion on office projects in the state this year, a sharp contrast to the dozens of tech companies that are slashing their real estate.
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“…For the San Francisco Bay Area, this “3 in, 2 out” hybrid office model solves three of the Bay Area’s four major growth inhibitors. “
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Despite downsizings by some larger tech firms, interviews and data suggest that San Francisco will likely remain a premier hub for early-stage entrepreneurs
San Francisco and Silicon Valley recorded 2,500 venture capital deals in 2020, a likely record despite the pandemic, and hundreds of new startups were formed in the City
Bay Area Council Analysis Reveals $69,000 per Tent Price Tag for Safe Sleeping Sites
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It could cut the plan-check review period for new ADUs from four-to-six weeks to as little as one day
“Modular housing and ADUs is the pathway that’s open to really make a dent in the [housing supply] problem,” says Gaisford.
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Rents in coastal superstar cities have bottomed out
“San Francisco has consistently made headlines throughout the pandemic …,we appear to have hit the turning point where the city’s price correction has officially bottomed out. In February, rents in San Francisco increased by 1.2 percent. This is the first monthly increase in San Francisco since the start of the pandemic.”
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“…While year-over-year rents dropped 26% in San Francisco, rental prices increased 1.2% in February from January, producing a median one-bedroom rent of $2,010.”
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Part of the developing transit village near West Oakland’s Mandela Station will go before city officials Wednesday as developer The Michaels Organization looks for the green light to move ahead with construction.
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There’s relatively little migration in the wake of Covid-19
Most Covid-related migration is temporary, involves moving in with friends or relatives, and not leaving a metro area
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I was speaking with a writer from the Globe & Mail today about the future of office. We were half talking about a new AAA strata office building … And we were half talking about whether or not we’re all going to return to offices.
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If progressivism can’t work there, why should the country believe it can work anywhere else?
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Private-sector plan enlists nonprofits, churches
From the fourth-floor rooftop patio on East Vernon Avenue, Los Angeles is a 360-degree panorama: to the north, the skyscrapers of downtown; to the south, the Palos Verdes Peninsula; to the west, the Santa Monica Mountains; to the east, snow-capped Mt. Baldy.
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One consequence of Covid has been plunging rents in cities across the world, as tenants flock out of city centres and the long-term rental market is flooded with former Airbnb properties. This has left tenants jubilant, and landlords panicked.
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“…Out-migration did increase in many urban neighborhoods, but the magnitudes probably would not fit most definitions of an exodus. What is certain is that hundreds of thousands of people who would have moved into an urban neighborhood in a typical year were unwilling or unable to do so in 2020.”
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Experts expected the pandemic to potentially deal a death blow to co-living, amid social distancing and fears of proximity to others.
But as the pandemic stretched on, growing demand for a sense of community to battle loneliness has spurred a surge in co-living. The industry is now poised to expand exponentially.
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I am a digital nomad. Bloomberg allows me to work from anywhere; I get much of my best writing done when I’m in Japan, working out of cafes or at a friend’s co-working space.
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One of the great generalisations we can make about the modern world is that it is, to an extraordinary degree, an ugly world.
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For years it was just another dreary piece of the downtown Los Angeles backdrop — a vacant lot between the county jail and the rusted hulk of a factory.
But since Thanksgiving, two three-story buildings, flanked by a village of trailer homes, have sprung up on the former industrial site.
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From Sept 2020
The last few months have been filled with photos of U-Haul trucks on social media and stories like this one about rents dropping due to a mass exodus from San Francisco.
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The “gentrification-industrial complex” isn’t who anti-growth progressives think it is.
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Demand for city living will surge in 2021
Dense, urban living got a bad rap this year because of the pandemic, but city living will almost certainly enjoy a renaissance in 2021.
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The process of creating prefabricated units that can be quickly assembled has shifted as developers turn to medical buildings, affordable housing, data centers and even a Chick-fil-A restaurant.
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In other cities, 64-square-foot aluminum and composite sheds are being used as quick and inexpensive emergency shelter for homeless people.
Not in Los Angeles. Here, plans to employ the minimalist structures, known as “tiny homes,” have blossomed into expensive development projects with access roads, underground utilities and concrete foundations — and commensurate planning delays.
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The latest UCLA Anderson Forecast anticipates positive economic news is on the horizon, a rosy prediction that’s based on the assumption that mass vaccinations would clear a path toward a new, productive normalcy for many industries.
…But the December forecast also offers hope of a robust recovery from the current recession.
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The 143-unit modular supportive housing project under construction on Bryant Street in San Francisco has drawn praise for the speed at which it is being built and its low construction cost.
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A year of scientific uncertainty is over. Two vaccines look like they will work, and more should follow.
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…”Housing market data for New York and San Francisco show that shocks do have observable short-run effects, driving up vacancy rates and holding down prices. But vacancies and prices tend to quickly revert to pre-shock trends and levels.”
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The Oakland Planning Commission unanimously approved a massive housing project at West Oakland BART station this week, part of the transit agency’s push for more affordable housing near public transportation.
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BART ridership may be down, but transit-oriented developments along the agency’s East Bay corridor are far from idle.
The Oakland Planning Commission on Wednesday unanimously approved the final development plans for two phases of Mandela Station, a project at the West Oakland BART station from China Harbour Engineering Co.
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The greatest urban myth of the Covid-19 pandemic is that fear of density has triggered an exodus from cities.
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Even during the economic expansion from 2009 to early 2020, Greater Boston didn’t build enough homes to keep up with demand.
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Banning new construction is a great way to push up home values and accelerate gentrification
Cities are conflicted and confused about how to protect affordability
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Reopening schools and businesses should upgrade air systems, open windows and take other measures to ensure clean air, scientists say
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Brian Rosenthal says Manhattan offices play key role in recruitment
“…having a physical space in New York is critical for the social media giant.
“So much of what we do is collaborative,” Rosenthal said. “[Software is] like writing a book together where all the plots have to connect and make sense and there are thousands of authors. It’s really hard to do if you’re not co-located in the same space and it’s important to even be able to see each other in the same space.”
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As we explored in my last post from the beginning of our republic there has been predictions of the coming demise of high-density big cities. All of them have been wrong.
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In a year that has radically altered many plans, the two to add nearly 2,000 units to West Oakland are still a go.
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East Bay TOD projects push ahead amid pandemic
Over the past decade or so, transit-oriented development has picked up steam in the East Bay with projects popping up from Hayward to Hercules – many of Then the pandemic hit, putting into jeopardy a central component in the TOD concept – mass ridership, which has plunged as social distancing, sheltering in place and working from home have taken precedence.
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According to Jane Jacobs, all four conditions must be met in order to design a successful, vibrant, diverse and attractive neighbourhood.
These are the four conditions: Primary Mixed uses…., and Density.
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It’s probably safer than you think, according to medical professionals — and could become safer in the future, if technologies the transit agency is testing now pan out.
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City Could Add over 6000 Housing Units for Unhoused in 2 Years
Can San Francisco finally solve its homeless crisis? When I saw widespread visible homelessness on the city’s streets begin in 1982 I never dreamed it would continue for forty years.
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Downtown high-rise developers will receive a huge discount during the pandemic but their savings will come at the expense of low-income housing.
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There are three main ways to lower your chances of meeting the virus up close and personal, as relates to HVAC systems. These are in my order of preference:
1. Dilute it
2. Zap it
3. Trap it
Since the advent of Covid-19, there has emerged a critique of urban density as deadly in fighting the current and future pandemics, and that the answer lies in dispersed development, otherwise known as sprawl.
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New studies in Europe and Asia suggest that riding public transportation is not a major source of transmission for the coronavirus.
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Overcrowding, not density, has defined many coronavirus hot spots. Service workers’ quarters skirting Silicon Valley are no exception.
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Timing your trip strategically, using contactless payments and not eating onboard are some of the things to keep in mind.
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In cities with tight housing markets, policymakers have struggled to help lower-income residents afford homes. New research shows that just building new housing—even expensive housing—can quickly drive down housing costs across metro areas, including in low-income neighborhoods.
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Several affordable projects in the area are assembling apartments off-site and then simply locking them into place. If they’re successful, it could cut millions of dollars off construction costs and months off building timelines.
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Projects take longer. Collaboration is harder. And training new workers is a struggle. ‘This is not going to be sustainable.’
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The greatest urban myth of the Covid-19 pandemic is that fear of density has triggered an exodus from cities.
The latest data show an increase in interest in dense urban locations.
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There’s been a lot reported about San Francisco residents fleeing the city, causing rents to plummet and SF home sales finally embracing transparent pricing. But when looking at data from online real estate platforms, most of the real estate searching is still happening within the metro area and throughout California.
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“Despite economic lockdowns and the health risks recently attributed to cities, Americans on the whole are maintaining an appetite for density. The share of all searches for higher-density cities has actually increased over the first two quarters of 2020.
…Some dense cities like New York and San Francisco do not appear to be at high risk of an urban exodus, while others like Chicago and Boston show more troubling signs…”
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The tech industry is built on serendipity. If workers flee the Bay Area, what’s left?
It’s been a big week for subsidized housing in Berkeley. And it just got bigger.
On Thursday night, the city’s Zoning Adjustments Board unanimously approved a new project from Panoramic Interests for a 39-unit complex made from modular construction to house people who were formerly homeless.
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Anecdotes aside, there’s no data that people are fleeing cities to avoid the Coronavirus
The data show young, well-educated adults moving to urban centers everywhere, and no decline in interest in urban markets during the pandemic
As we’ve chronicled at City Observatory, there’s a welter of press accounts claiming that people are fleeing cities to escape the Coronavirus.
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The pandemic will likely accelerate the pull of the suburbs for families while pushing young people and businesses into more affordable urban areas.
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The global asset manager is partnering with tech-forward, multifamily operator, Common in a 575-unit portfolio expansion.
Nuveen Real Estate has selected multifamily real estate operator, Common to manage operations and leasing for two of Nuveen’s largest, class A multifamily assets.
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Lower taxes? Cheaper housing? Shorter commute? For some knowledge workers fleeing the big city amid the pandemic, the perks of relocating to a distant burg will soon grow stale.
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Inequality, spiralling rents and now remote working: the city has a number of problems but keeps growing anyway
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The movement of talented young adults to dense urban neighborhoods isn’t waning, it is widespread and accelerating, and it is powering urban revival.
Cities continue to be magnets for talented young adults The number of well-educated young adults living in close-in urban neighborhoods is increasing in every large US metropolitan area, and this trend has accelerated in recent years.
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The CEO of Adecco, one of the world’s largest employment agencies, discusses the pros and cons of working from home
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The pandemic forced schools into a crash course in online education. Problems piled up quickly. ‘I find it hectic and stressful’
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A Sidewalk Talk Q&A with the urban economist on the challenges of inclusive growth — and the opportunities of urban-tech.
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“…Cities have always worked particularly well for young people. They flock to them to build up vital social and professional networks, meet their mates and learn how the world works. Around the world there is massive unmet demand for city homes and workspace…”
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For apartment owners and managers, the pandemic means closed offices, few or no in-person tours and off-limits amenities, obliging them to market their properties without time-tested tools — at least for now.
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In the first half of the 20th century, the students at Boston’s best public high school, Boston Latin, included a brash kid named Leonard Bernstein, who would one day compose West Side Story; another boy named Thomas L. Phillips, who would build the Massachusetts manufacturer Raytheon into a bulwark of American defense; and Paul Zoll, who would pioneer the use of electricity to treat cardiac arrest while working as a doctor at a Boston hospital.
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Making a link between a city’s density and its vulnerability to epidemics may seem like an obvious connection. But it may, in fact, be off the mark.
Since the outbreak of the coronavirus (COVID-19) and its spread across the globe, places with high urban population density have seemed to be especially at risk to some observers.
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From March 2020
The global work-from-home movement intended to maintain output and efficiency during the COVID-19 pandemic could actually generate a worldwide productivity slump and threaten economic growth for many years, says Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom.
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Instead of new development, we got the Google piñata
Maybe it was the $2,070 bottle of wine. Or the junket to a hot spring in China. Or perhaps it was the John Deere tractor gifted for a vacation home in Colusa County.
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A San Francisco progressive housing group called Todco promoted a ballot proposition which would tie the creation of new office space in the city to construction of new housing. The final tally isn’t in yet but it appears Prop E might pass.
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In an expensive, decades-long effort to curb congestion in urban regions, our transportation agencies and elected leaders have overwhelmingly prioritized spending hundreds of billions of dollars to widen and build new highways.
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San Francisco is home to one of the most expensive housing markets in the US.
Still, even in a city with a median home value of $1,352,300, finding an uninhabitable shack — that’s missing a back wall — on the market for nearly $2 million is something of a shock.
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The new book Golden Gates details how California set itself up for its current affordability crunch—and how it can now help build a nationwide housing movement.
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As California’s governor vows to tackle the state’s homelessness crisis, housing “insanity” stands in the way.
SAN FRANCISCO — The average home in the United States costs around $240,000. But in San Francisco, the world’s most expensive place for construction, a two-bedroom apartment of what passes for affordable housing costs around $750,000 just to build.
Where to soak in the strange in the East Bay’s quirky college town
Berkeley has a reputation for weird. It’s also known for political activism, great food, and those smarty-pants at Cal, but the city’s inherent quirkiness pervades its past and present.
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California’s housing crisis is getting worse. The status quo is not working. But as much as we like to complain about high housing costs, traffic congestion, and dwindling open space, we remain attached to an old version of the California Dream: single-family homes with big green lawns and swimming pools out of a David Hockney painting.
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“Nearly all of the biggest challenges in America are, at some level, a housing problem.
Rising home costs are a major driver of segregation, inequality, and racial and generational wealth gaps. You can’t talk about education or the shrinking middle class without talking about how much it costs to live near good schools and high-paying jobs. Transportation accounts for about a third of the nation’s carbon dioxide emissions, so there’s no serious plan for climate change that doesn’t begin with a conversation about how to alter the urban landscape so that people can live closer to work.”
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A new report shows how cities are central to any strategy to fight climate change
Cities have the “3 C’s: Clean, compact, connected
National government policies need to support cities
Let’s describe a low carbon future in positive, aspirational terms
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Boarding homes, building codes, and neighborhood character: What “Little Women” can teach us about housing policy
Of the nine films competing for the top honor at this Sunday’s Academy Awards, there’s a few that take on issues of housing and urban policy, from the class conflicts of “Parasite” to the metropolitan decay in “Joker.”
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European cities offer a roadmap for life with fewer cars
Americans put over 13,000 miles on their vehicles every year. If car commercials are to be believed, this is all done off-roading into the woods and driving sports cars through empty, rain-slicked city streets.
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Why don’t we have more options for affordable shelter?
“It’s a largely self-inflicted problem,” said Patrick Kennedy, a Bay Area developer at the forefront of housing innovation. Restrictive building codes and expensive labor agreements drive up costs, making it hard to build affordably, he said.
His advice to state leaders?
“Look outside of the ‘affordable housing industrial complex’ which, by its very nature, has a cost structure and management structure that results in much higher costs for the product,” said Kennedy, who believes private developers can build affordable housing faster and cheaper…”
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Before Matt Horn served his first plate of smoked brisket and ribs out of an old service station at 17th and Center Streets in West Oakland on Saturday afternoon, more than 100 people were outside the building waiting to order. The scene was like a musical festival and Horn’s popup was the headlining act.
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It and other ‘superstar’ cities should be denser.
I lived in New York City for about five years and hated every second of it. My first complaint was that it was too dense. My second, paradoxically, was that it was not dense enough.
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In cities, many people think “density” means crowded neighborhoods and greedy developers, but a new show at the Skyscraper Museum tells a different story.
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Housing innovators selected for their work to make housing more affordable
Construction and Design
“…Panoramic Interests – San Francisco, California
https://www.panoramic.com/
Panoramic Interests is designing a high-density, prefab, studio apartment building. The prototype, CITYSPACE Studios, is a prefabricated affordable dwelling with units for the homeless that can be easily configured into apartment complexes on existing underutilized city-owned lots.”
Residents of the Sonoma homeless camp have lost properties through natural disasters or simply can’t afford California’s prices
On the outskirts of Santa Rosa, the first real city to emerge as you drive through the rolling wine country north of San Francisco, two new settlements hum with life.
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For decades, urban policy has focused on troubled cities—those losing population and commercial activity. But in many cities, the era of decline is over; today, we are seeing the emergence of prosperous, economically dynamic cities, often located on America’s coasts.
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San Francisco-based Panoramic Interests is looking for a joint venture equity partner to join its 500 Kirkham apartment project in Oakland.
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It is an obsession that undermines growth, fairness and public faith in capitalism
Economies can suffer both sudden crashes and chronic diseases. Housing markets in the rich world have caused both types of problem. A trillion dollars of dud mortgages blew up the financial system in 2007-08.
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“…Housing First turned that upside down, …This has been enormously successful, housing about 85 percent of the most complex folks…”
“…The vast majority of people who become homeless could be easily housed if there were housing that they could afford on their income…”
“…For everyone else, we need to focus on increasing the supply of extremely low-income housing by building very low-income housing, preserving what exists, and providing sufficient vouchers (right now, only a quarter of households who qualify get them)…”
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“…The poll finds 72 percent support for simply giving homes to the homeless — … Providing Section 8 rental vouchers for homeless people met with 76 percent approval…”
“…This polling, he continued, “demonstrates support for this type of solution is widespread…”
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San Francisco is making 151 units in two residential hotels available for formerly homeless people, a more affordable and faster option than creating new units in a city where subsidized housing costs $700,000 a unit and five years to build.
“…The city hopes the first occupants at both hotels will be able to move in by April. The Post will charge $1,300 a unit per month and the Abigail will charge $1,400. Residents will be expected to pay 30% of their income — whatever it may be — toward rent, with the city subsidizing the remainder…”
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Cars are a fact of life for the vast majority of Americans, whether we’re commuting to work or traveling to just about anywhere. But a new development outside Phoenix is looking to change that. Culdesac Tempe, a 1,000-person rental community, aims to promote a new type of walkable neighborhood by banning residents from driving or parking cars there.
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Quietly, the state’s housing crisis is beginning to take its toll on California’s 1.4 million family businesses.
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The most striking thing about Impola’s tiny homes is that they don’t immediately look tiny. Interior shots reveal luxurious details (think: rich wood countertops and exposed ceiling beams) yet the structures themselves average about 250 square feet.
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“…Bay Area startups received almost half of the venture capital invested in 2019, some $46 billion flowing into the coffers of Bay Area companies…”
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A San Francisco developer imports Chinese steel modules to install 22 graduate student housing units in only four days.
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California has a housing crisis — that much we all know — but we should not grow paralyzed by the idea that it’s politically or substantively insurmountable. Paris has turned around a comparable situation with remarkable speed.
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Cars, climate change, and cameras are just some of the tough issues city leaders need to grapple with in the coming decade
By their nature, cities are dynamic and ever-changing, shaking off the past and constantly reinventing themselves to face the future.
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“Somebody crazy not giving up” finally wins new homes
Developer Patrick Quinlan is bringing new housing to Bernal Heights, and it only took four decades to get the job done.
Rarely cheap or easy, the rental game went from an ordeal to a war zone this past decade
“…Median market rents—representing mostly newer homes that can charge double or nearly treble the census average these days—are where the real fireworks began: In 2010, a two-bedroom SF apartment on Craigslist averaged $2,893 (per historic data compiled in 2016 by Eric Fischer), or $3,396 after inflation. At the end of 2019, similar units on the same site sit at a median of $4,300, up 26.6 percent.”
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San Francisco edged out New York City in 2019 for a queasy honorarium
San Francisco might be the most expensive place in the entire world to build new housing—intimidating news for anyone holding out for the possibility of increased supply to relieve the housing crisis.
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Adrian Caratowsa was lucky.
After six years of trying and failing to score an affordable apartment in San Francisco, he won the lottery for a city-subsidized apartment in the Transbay district.
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“…For the first time in more than a decade, Oakland’s skyline has a new office tower — and many more to come.”
“…A wave of migration from San Francisco, along with local business growth, has made Oakland one of the hottest local economies in the country. Additional office projects totaling more than 4 million square feet, or room for 20,000 more employees, are under construction or planned downtown, which currently has around 80,000 jobs…”
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New rental housing measures were approved by Vancouver City Council this week. I haven’t gone through the policies in the detail (you can do that here), but they aim to increase rental housing supply by doing things such as “pre-zoning” for 6-storeys on main streets and by allowing rental apartments to be built on some side streets (up to 150m away from arterial roads).
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With six annotated takeaways for local housing policy.
Local bans on attached homes in cities are driving up energy use and helping cook the climate, the United Nations Environment Program wrote in a report published Tuesday.
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A new generation of activists seeks to revive an old urban policy, despite its troubled history.
“…Housing for low-income communities consisted of small homes and buildings, close together—rowhouses in Philadelphia, three-decker homes in New England, walk-up apartments in New York.
Rooming houses abounded. In the years since then, new housing of this nature has been zoned or otherwise regulated out of existence…”
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In the technical, secular Silicon Valley, one temple commands a following. The famous garage.
On a recent Saturday, drenched in California sunshine, I visited three. First, the garage in which Hewlett and Packard first collaborated, on a quiet suburban street in Palo Alto not far from where I live. Their company HP would go on to become the largest manufacturer of personal computers.
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Great cities, especially ones with dense, walkable mixed use neighborhoods are an economic boon to households because they save the precious commodity of time
Stories of economic progress appropriately revolve around major technological breakthroughs.
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Los Angeles (AFP) – Kay Wilson packed up her life in a hurry and moved to Los Angeles… only to find that what she paid in Pennsylvania for a nice studio apartment would only get her a 2.9-square-meter box in California.
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Patrick Kennedy knows how outlandish real estate prices in the Bay Area have become. Owner and president of Panoramic Interests, a development company, Kennedy has seen the cost per square foot of a high-rise in San Francisco go from $272 in 2001 to $833 today. Construction costs in the Bay Area are the highest in the world, he said Friday at the Commercial Economic Issues & Trends Forum during the REALTORS® Conference & Expo in San Francisco.
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State government still has to pull its weight in changing zoning laws
In 1848, it was the lustre of gold which lured thousands to California. Today, cutting-edge technology is the Golden State’s draw, especially in the Bay Area. But Silicon Valley’s limited housing supply is squeezing out locals.
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California, the land of golden dreams, has become America’s worst housing nightmare.
Recent wildfires have only heightened the stakes for a state that can’t seem to build enough new homes.
The median price for a house now tops $600,000, more than twice the national level. The state has four of the country’s five most expensive residential markets—Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Orange County and San Diego. (Los Angeles is seventh.) The poverty rate, when adjusted for the cost of living, is the worst in the nation. California accounts for 12% of the U.S. population, but a quarter of its homeless population.
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California can’t end its housing crisis without an overhaul of zoning rules.
Apple has pledged $2.5 billion to help address California’s affordable-housing crisis, the company announced on Monday. In recent years, the San Francisco Bay Area has become the most expensive housing market in America. Los Angeles also suffers from housing costs far above the national average.
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The fires and the blackouts are connected to a larger problem in this state: a failure to live sustainably.
“…If we redesigned our cities for the modern world, they’d be taller and less stretched out into the fire-prone far reaches — what scientists call the wildland-urban interface. Housing would be affordable because there’d be more of it. You’d be able to get around more cheaply because we’d ditch cars and turn to buses and trains and other ways we know how to move around a lot of people at high speeds, for low prices. It wouldn’t be the end of the California dream, but a reconceptualization — not as many endless blocks of backyards and swimming pools, but perhaps a new kind of more livable, more accessible life for all…”
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The state is plagued by two major issues: wildfires and a lack of affordable housing. Each problem exacerbates the other.
“…One solution to the state’s twin problems is to build more dense housing in urban areas: An aggressive infill-building push would lower rental prices and shift the state’s population to less fire-prone areas, as well as help reduce carbon emissions. …”
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One is an instance. Two may be a coincidence. Three annual fire seasons? In a row?
Climate change has given us this grim new time of year, and its rhythm warns us that it will not operate on a leisurely schedule. George Carlin quipped that it’s called the American Dream because you’ve got to be asleep to believe it.
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Warriors guard Jacob Evans’ welcome-to-San Francisco moment came in late August.
While calculating his expenses, he realized that, between utilities and rent, he will spend about $7,900 each month on housing. That might not seem steep for someone set to earn $1.9 million this season, but Evans grew up in a three-bedroom, two-bathroom house in Baton Rouge, La., that cost $575 a month.
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A new study shows a tantalizing connection between more walkable places and intergenerational economic mobility
City Observatory readers will be familiar with the findings of Raj Chetty and his colleagues in the Equality of Opportunity Project. In a revelatory use of big data, they used anonymized tax records to track the lifetime earnings of kids growing up across the United States.
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The city’s analysis shows that the need to build parking is catastrophic for housing affordability.
“… Mandating off-street parking, … requires a judgment that housing cars is more important than housing people.”
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Some shared quarters forgo perks while others shrink private square footage to the size of tanning bed
“…UP(st)ART compensates for teh added costs by packing residents in like crew members on a cruise ship in 30-square foot pods. They rent for about $750 a month…”
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The city of Los Angeles is spending more taxpayer money than expected to build fewer apartments for the homeless. That’s the conclusion of a new audit of Proposition HHH, the 2016 bond measure that was intended to fund 10,000 new units of supportive housing for people experiencing homelessness.
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Los Angeles is spending $600,000 per unit on building affordable and supportive housing for homeless residents.
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It is systematic barriers, not pure preference, that prevent lower-income families from moving to areas of high opportunity, according to research released by Brookings at a Sept. 19 event. This new research from Harvard University’s Opportunity Insights serves as a reminder of the importance of affordable housing in areas of high opportunity.
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Nob Hill, in the ritzy centre of San Francisco, was named in old-world slang after its wealthy, well-connected residents. Many people here are among the highest earners in the world.
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The more cities grow, the more productive and prosperous they become.
Can urban areas grow too much? The answer is subject to people’s lifestyle preference, based on where they want to live and what tradeoffs in time and money they’ll accept. But according to one theory, the answer, economically speaking, is no.
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A new report has named Oakland and the East Bay to a list of metro areas attracting outsized amounts of capital across the U.S.
“…Oakland itself has almost 7,000 housing units opening this year, with thousands more in the pipeline, and the city has attracted the full attention of big-name tenants like Kaiser Permanente and Square. Kaiser announced plans earlier this year to build a $900M headquarters in Uptown, while digital payments company Square leased all 356K SF of Uptown Station down the road.”
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“A lot of our problems are self-inflicted. If the cities were serious about producing housing, they can have as-of right development for certain types of projects, they could zone areas close to transit for form-based approval,” Kennedy said.
“A large part of the problem is the failure of city governments to build more housing. We’re seeing a new kind of homeless individual, which is someone who used to be housed but is pushed off the housing ladder by the housing shortage caused by our economic boom.”
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Implementing healthy habits isn’t just a boon for personal health, but for professional and business health as well. Staying lean, choosing the right priorities and being committed to education is advice that is just as helpful from a business mentor as a personal trainer.
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“…A flood of recent research has shown that parking requirements poison our cities, increasing traffic congestion, polluting the air, encouraging sprawl, raising housing costs, degrading urban design, preventing walkability, damaging the economy, and penalizing everyone who cannot afford a car.”
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SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX 5) — The housing crisis has crept its way into every corner of life in California.
You see it on the street if you walk to work in the San Francisco or if you’re slogging through a super-commute to the South Bay. It’s personal–what could be more personal than your home? Or lack thereof?
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…“The country as a whole would be better off if more Americans had more housing options close to their jobs”
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It’s the epicenter of the tech industry and the wealthiest, most progressive state in the union, but homelessness is surging — and no one can agree on how to fix it
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In cities across the U.S., multifamily developers are finding that building less is doing more.
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San Francisco, California, has been the birthplace of many inventions, dating all the way back to the 1800s. Today the city continues to build its reputation for business, making it not only a hub for innovation and collaboration but also home to some of the country’s most talented leaders.
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From ancient Rome to modern Atlanta, the shape of cities has been defined by the technologies that allow commuters to get to work in about 30 minutes.
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“Last week the Oakland Planning Commission approved a mammoth mixed-use housing development near West Oakland BART, which will create more that 1,000 new apartments next to one of the Bay Area’s busiest transit hubs.”
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…”a BART extension is expected by 2026…”
Google unveiled details of its massive plan to remake the area around San Jose’s downtown Diridon Station, a key step in its bid to transform 60 acres and become the largest private employer in the Bay Area’s biggest city.
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“A huge new residential development encompassing an entire city block in West Oakland was unanimously approved by Oakland’s Planning Commission on Thursday, with plenty of community support….”
“The project drew resounding support from West Oakland residents, business owners, and community leaders at Wednesday’s meeting. Of the 35 people who signed up to speak, no one opposed it.”
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“A $650 million 1,032-unit apartment complex meant to pay homage to the west sides’s vibrant jazz and blues scene of the 1940’s and 50’s is on track to break ground near the West Oakland BART station early next spring.”
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“…Ronnie Stewart, executive director of the West Coast Blues Society said that Panoramic ‘bent over backwards’ over the last three years to hear from the local black community…”
“We are going to focus on the only-in-Oakland experience — we don’t have any spaces for chain retailers, so we will be focusing on local small businesses, pop-up stores, barber shops…” said Kennedy …
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“One of the Bay Area’s most forward-thinking transit-oriented developments just got the green light from Oakland’s Planning Commission.”
“To Panoramic Interests’ owner, Patrick Kennedy, 500 Kirkham represents a milestone in more than just height and unit count.”
“It’s a green light in our quest to invent an urban neighborhood that is entirely dedicated to bikeable, walkable and BART-able characteristics,” Kennedy said.
“We want to reinvent Greenwich Village in Oakland.”
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When it comes to the economic status of cities, there is no shortage of conflicting messages—and conflicting facts. On the one hand, we hear about the dominance of superstar cities and tech hubs in the competition for talented workers, high-end knowledge jobs, and high-tech startups.
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Media Ignores Driving Force Behind Rising Housing Costs
Homeowners opposing new multi-unit housing drive urban gentrification. As I detail in Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America, from San Francisco’s Bernal Heights, Noe Valley, Alamo Square and Haight-Ashbury to Los Angeles’ Highland Park to New York City’s Park Slope and neighborhoods throughout Cambridge, neighborhoods become expensive by not allowing new housing rather than via “luxury development.”
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Matthew Gardner, the chief economist at Seattle’s Windermere Real Estate, earlier this year digitally superimposed a map of Paris atop a map of Seattle for a talk he gave about how outdated single-detached zoning is. It’s a familiar theme for Sightline readers who have been tracking our arguments about housing shortages and climate change.
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Many communities around the Bay Area are struggling to figure out how to solve the regions housing needs. One San Francisco developer thinks going smaller is the answer.
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Facts are stubborn things: And they don’t support the folk wisdom equating gentrification with displacement.
There’s a palpable and growing amount of cognitive dissonance between the accepted conventional wisdom about the intrinsically evil nature of gentrification, and a body of careful detailed research that shows that its either not bad, or actually produces measurable benefits. That cognitive dissonance is on full display in CityLab’s recent reporting on a new study of gentrification in New York.
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SF Homeless Project: 24 hours inside San Francisco’s crisis … Supportive Housing: $700,000 a unit.
San Francisco spends more than $300 million a year fighting homelessness. Yet it’s not working – at least not enough. Amid a housing shortage, rampant drug addiction and a failing mental health care system, the everyday crisis on our streets has intensified.
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It’s a demonized group, yet there are few solutions for the housing shortage that don’t at least partly involve more development.
The developers are coming. They’ve got the politicians in their pockets and the gaudy architectural plans in their hands. They will gorge on the entire city. And they won’t stop until peak profit has been wrung from every patch of land.
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No vacancies at housing startup despite skepticism
Podshare, the Southern California-based startup that rents out “pods” consisting mostly of a bunk bed for $1,200 per month, continues to make headlines for its San Francisco expansion, many of them decidedly negative.
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It’s called ‘transit-oriented development’ — building dense housing near and around public transportation. It’s one way to mitigate the Bay Area’s housing crisis, and it’s on the rise at BART stations.
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“…Sydney is in the grip of an apartment building boom, with 30,880 multi-unit dwellings built last year…
This oversupply has left some areas struggling to find tenants…”
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Faster suburban population growth doesn’t signal a preference for suburbs: Here’s why
Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported suburbs growing faster than cities. The article, “American suburbs swell again as a new generation escapes the city.” The article looks at Census data showing that some of the nation’s fastest growing cities are sunbelt suburbs.
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From October 19, 2017
The Young and Restless—25 to 34 year-olds with a bachelor’s degree or higher level of education—are increasingly moving to the close-in neighborhoods of the nation’s large metropolitan areas. This migration is fueling economic growth and urban revitalization.
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“…PodShare is looking to answer the shortage of affordable housing in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles by renting dormitory-style lodging and providing tenants a communal living experience…”
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Shocking almost no one, nine of the 15 most expensive metropolitan areas in the United States are in California, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. But one major reason for this may surprise you: The state has an overregulation problem that’s contributing to the housing affordability crisis.
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Donald Shoup, distinguished research professor of urban planning, shared his expertise on parking pitfalls and reforms in a wide-ranging conversation on the American Planning Association’s “People Behind the Plans” podcast.
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The “return to the city” movement is dead — or so say some news outlets after data from Brookings showed population growth in the suburbs outpacing that of cities, especially among millennials.
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“…One unit costs about $700,000 to build and about $12,000 a year to operate, according to the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development…”
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In the years immediately after the last housing market crash, a narrative took hold in mainstream media that there had been an inexorable, immediate, and permanent change in how we build our cities.
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New report Foot Traffic Ahead finds walkable urbanism isn’t just sustainable and enjoyable, but more profitable
What if I told you there was a way to develop U.S. cities that was better for social equity, created more jobs and economic activity, resulted in better transit access, and improved the environment, all while guaranteeing better economic returns for developers and investors?
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Smart Growth America/LOCUS today released Foot Traffic Ahead 2019, a report which ranks the 30 largest metros in the United States based on the percentage of office, retail, and rental multi-family space each has in their walkable urban places.
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A new report confirms the growing market for walkable places
George Washington University and Smart Growth America have a new report on the economic value of and growing market for walkable places.
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At a May 21 forum hosted by the San Francisco Business Times, panelists Scott Anderson, president of Pankow Builders, Katie Brandtjen, partner at EisnerAmper, JP Walsh, finance director at Panoramic Interests, and Michael P. Muzzy, partner at Lubin Olsen, discussed how investors, businesses and local economies can benefit from investment in qualified opportunity zones.
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“…A new report has ranked the San Francisco metro area the second best in the nation for job-seekers, only topped by San Jose…”
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“…Kaiser’s consolidation will free up a significant amount of space for other growing companies, according to Colin Yasukochi, research director at real estate brokerage CBRE.
It opens up additional office space for tenants seeking a lower-cost alternative” to San Francisco,” he said. “There’s a stronger likelihood that more jobs will be located in Oakland.”
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From May 2018
Why are California housing costs so high? At its most basic level, it’s a story of supply and demand — lots of people want to live here, and there aren’t enough homes to go around.
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“…But advocates for affordable housing should be jumping up and down and screaming for the construction of more high-end apartment buildings to ease demand for existing homes.
Those new buildings are filled with people who would otherwise be spending Saturdays touring fixer-uppers in neighborhoods newly named something like SoFa, with rapidly dwindling populations of longtime residents…”
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Rising populations and limited housing options have created an unprecedented affordability crisis in America’s urban cities. Randy Shaw, author of “Generation Priced Out: Who gets to Live in the New Urban America,” joined THINK to discuss the policy change that could save America’s cities.
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Friends, neighbors, it’s good to see all of you. I know you, you know me, and just seeing all of your faces at this city council meeting reminds me why I love living in this town. Because I feel comforted by stasis and regularity, both fed by ignorance, and which combine to perpetuate injustice.
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“…Unlike some mega-projects in Oakland, the Kirkham Street venture has received little opposition, city staff said.
That is partly because the development is being built on a vacant lot, but also because city staff say they have been working closely with the developer, Panoramic Interests, to meet the community’s needs…”
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New research shows new apartments drive down rents in their immediate neighborhood, disproving the myth of “induced demand” for housing
If you’re a housing supply skeptic, there’s one pet theory that you’ve been able to hang your hat on, in the face of a barrage of evidence that increasing the supply of housing helps hold down, or even drive down rents.
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Finland is the only EU country where homelessness is falling. Its secret? Giving people homes as soon as they need them – unconditionally
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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.
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California lawmakers appear increasingly willing to advance every response to the housing shortage that does not entail building housing.
The latest example is legislation by Assemblyman David Chiu, D-San Francisco, to cap rent increases across the state, which the Assembly took the remarkable step of passing Wednesday.
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Like college debt and climate change, the housing affordability crisis is generational warfare.
The numbers in California tell a dire story these days: In 2018, despite low unemployment and high wages, the state’s population grew at its slowest rate in history. Fewer people are coming and more people are leaving because it’s very hard to find a place to live.
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Decades after BART rolled through West Oakland, along 7th Street, destroying what was once a vibrant, black, entertainment and commercial business district, local developer, Panoramic Interests, is planning to replace the devastation with a new and vibrant community of housing and small businesses.
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I just got back from a few days in New Orleans, where I stayed—as most tourists to that city do—in the French Quarter. The name is actually a misnomer from the particular perspective of an urban planner: most of the historic architecture in the French quarter dates to a period of Spanish rule from 1763-1801, and much of the urban design suggests a strong Spanish influence.
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With house prices out of reach, where will the van dwellers go?
In a quiet neighborhood near Google’s headquarters last month, rusty, oleaginous sewage was seeping from a parked RV onto the otherwise pristine street.
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Blame policy, demographics, and market forces
The United States is facing an affordable housing crisis.
Nearly two-thirds of renters nationwide say they can’t afford to buy a home, and saving for that down payment isn’t going to get easier anytime soon: Home prices are rising at twice the rate of wage growth.
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When Paul Wickboldt moved to the Bay Area from Boston more than two decades ago, he settled in Walnut Creek for the same reasons many families choose the suburbs: good public schools, safety, a backyard for the kids to play in, and the pleasure of knowing his neighbors.
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From August 2018
In the coming years, an increase in Millennials forming households will create robust demand for both single family homes and apartments. Why inadequate supply over the long term may bode well for apartment REITs.
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With research suggesting that companies can save money, boost morale and attract top candidates by offering work-at-home options, why are some employers calling their telecommuters back into the main office?
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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.
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“…The practical implication is that we shouldn’t be talking about housing affordability in isolation.
We should really be talking about “affordable living” rather than “affordable housing.”
If your rent is low, but you have to spend a disproportionately large share of your income on transportation, then your living situation isn’t affordable…”
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“…This year, eight major tech companies are expected to hold initial public offerings. The first, Lyft, took the public-market plunge last month.
Yesterday, Pinterest did. Airbnb, Instacart, Palantir, Postmates, Slack, and Uber remain.
Amazingly, all but Palantir are headquartered in San Francisco, currently home to only five other public software companies—Dropbox, Salesforce, Square, Twitter, and Yelp…”
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A huge influx of both apartments and people will hit West Oakland BART station in the coming years, and it could start at 500 Kirkham St.
Developer Panoramic Interests will seek final approvals from the Planning Commission this spring for its 1,032-unit project, a go-ahead that would come after three redesigns, a fight over parking and years of planning.
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SB50 Opens Gentrified Neighborhoods to Working and Middle-Class Residents
California’s SB 50, with lead co-sponsors Senators Nancy Skinner and Scott Wiener, expands housing opportunities for working and middle-class tenants who have been priced out of cities. So why do many tenant groups oppose the measure?
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“…five fundamental forces shaping the future of society…”
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“…The Chronicle reported earlier this week that tech companies have leased 2.2 million square feet of San Francisco office in the first three months of this year.
That’s enough space to fill nearly two Salesforce Towers. And that’s in only three months…”
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“The program has already drawn investors to distressed areas of the Bay Area.
In Oakland, developer Patrick Kennedy is proposing 1,000 plus homes next to the West Oakland BART station. Once the area was deemed an opportunity zone, he was able to tap into capital that otherwise wouldn’t have been interested, he told the Business Times in November.
“It’s… a way to persuade the haves to invest in an area with the have-nots in a way that benefits everybody,” Kennedy said at the time.”
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SF’s $3,690 median rent on a one-bedroom apartment is global peak
In mid-2018, an analysis that deemed San Francisco’s rents the highest in the world made international headlines. While the claim wasn’t entirely accurate, it provided a vivid illustration of how much market-rate rents have expanded in SF.
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SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) – Welcome to the Bay Area — where you (mostly, your rent) can only go up from here!
If you thought rent in San Francisco couldn’t get any higher — you were very wrong.
Apparently San Francisco rent has reached a new peak of $3,690, according to home and apartment rental app Zumper.
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Winter 2018
“…San Francisco represents the third type of housing market in which the price of housing is considerably above the minimum profitable production cost…”
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“…THE U.S. HAS TWO HOUSING AFFORDABILITY PROBLEMS. RENT CONTROL WON’T FIX EITHER OF THEM.
The first affordability problem is that the nation’s poorest 20 percent have too little income to afford minimum quality housing without receiving subsidies. That’s not a failure of housing markets, …
The second, more challenging affordability problem is that over the past 40 years, the U.S. hasn’t built enough housing in the locations where people most want to live…”
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Discoveries from a depressing scroll through Craigslist
Aa Bay Area renter, I often find myself diving into the darkest corner of the housing section on Craigslist to see if it’s worth moving out of my current rental situation.
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The treasures of our landscape are wide-ranging, from the obvious towers to such easy-to-miss gems as a snake-like laboratory building set against a forested hillside or an 1888 opera house reborn through a bootstrap restoration.
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“…The potential impact of unlocking these tax benefits on long-term returns is massive.
For example, after 10 years an investor could see an additional $44,000 for every $100,000 of capital gains invested into an Opportunity Fund by December 31, 2018, compared to an equivalent investment in a more traditional stock portfolio generating the same annual appreciation…”
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“…The law permits an investor to roll over capital gains — proceeds from the sale of stocks or a home, for instance — into an opportunity-zone fund. The fund can then put the money in a zone by investing in, say, a condo project or affordable-housing units.
An investor who keeps money in a such a fund for 10 years is able to exclude 15 percent of the original capital gain from taxation. And — potentially much more lucratively — the investor would not owe taxes on any gains that accrued if the investment increased in value in that time…”
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“…California has a real crisis that it has rarely treated as such. It’s the housing shortage, which has given the state the nation’s highest poverty rate and nearly a quarter of its homeless population.”
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Distressed America is Wall Street’s hottest new investment vehicle.
Hedge funds, investment banks and money managers are trying to raise tens of billions of dollars this year for so-called opportunity funds, a creation of President Trump’s 2017 tax package meant to steer money to poor areas by offering potentially large tax breaks.
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Addressing housing directly is cheaper than relying on cops and emergency rooms.
“…it’s cheaper to give homeless people homes to live in than to let the homeless live on the streets and try to deal with the subsequent problems.”
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From Dec 4, 2015
‘When the lights go down in The City, and the sun shines on the Bay…’ Convergence, collaboration and community? JL
Dan Kopf reports in Price Economics:
Across the entire country, the proportion of people with roommates has increased from 6.8% in 2000 to 7.7% in 2014, a 13% increase. In San Francisco, the roommate rate went from 23.3% to 28.1% in this same period, an increase of 20.6%.
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“… We need to consider new innovations and strategies to help tackle housing challenges …This report explores options that have been tested in other markets and considers how they might contribute to making more housing affordable—or rather, attainable…
Case studies are grouped into four categories: 1. Micro Living… 2. Shared Space… 3. Home Unbundling… 4. Equity Options…”
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Newly elected California State Treasurer Fiona Ma is on a mission to support the governor’s effort to build more housing in California through the new opportunity zone program.
…
“The good news is … we want to fully conform with the federal government in terms of opportunity zones,” Ma said as the keynote speaker at the Opportunity Zone Expo in downtown Los Angeles.
As proposed, nearly 800 residential units could be built at the base of the West Oakland BART station, with a 30-story, 500-unit residential building rising up to 320 feet in height at the corner of 7th and Mandela, a 7-story mid-rise building with 240 below market rate units (and 22 market-rate duplexes fronting Chester), and a 100-foot-tall office building at the corner of Mandela and 5th.
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How people get to work, and the geographic distinctions between trends in those choices, reveals some of the country’s more ominous traits, including the trend Richard Florida calls “the new urban crisis.”
Richard Florida digs deeper into data recently released by the American Community Survey to make the case that how people move around cities is a key feature of the country’s “deepening economic and political fissures.”
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A lot of start-ups have promising ideas, but the fundamental problem of affordability seems beyond their reach.
Billions have been flowing into a corner of the tech industry focused on the housing market. And now there are start-ups to help landlords manage properties, or homeowners manage sales, or tenants manage their packages.
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While Bay Area neighbors try it, the city remains reluctant
“…One development company, Panoramic Interests, has been advocating for the city to give their version of tiny homes a try to little avail.
Owner Patrick Kennedy pitched his vision of affordable housing—apartments that are modular and can stack on top of each other to fit more in one location—to SF officials in 2015. But officials denied it, as the project would involve units being built overseas (though assembled here by local workers).
“The problem with the tiny-home thing is you just can’t get the density,” Kennedy said. “Vacant land in cities is too valuable to put one-story buildings on. It’s not a long-term solution.”
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…”“If you look at Oakland and where a substantial amount of the growth is going to occur, it’s going to happen in the center of the Bay Area, which is here,” said John Protopappas of Madison Park Financial, one of the city’s most prolific developers…”
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2017-2019 — Oakland sees highest rent growth of any city in the Bay Area
“… While every city saw an increase to varying degrees, Oakland, Berkeley and Menlo Park saw the largest percentage spike in rental prices since the beginning of 2017.”
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The Bay Area would likely be denser – and a lot more urbanized.
When it comes to housing, the Bay Area is a pillar of market distortion. People gravitate to the metro because it is among America’s top economies.
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“Apartments mean less widespread disruption and demolition
The space efficiency of apartments is actually a boon if you’re looking to avoid widespread neighborhood disruption and minimize demolitions of existing homes…”
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The city of Minneapolis just launched a quiet revolution when the city council voted to abolish single-family zoning. This is an excellent move. Cities around the country should follow suit.
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Seattle is building more apartments than just about anywhere, and now 1 in 10 units across the city are sitting empty. Landlords have responded by lowering rents slightly and offering more perks to get tenants in the door.
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Seattle says “yes.”
If Seattle had not built lots of housing during the past few decades, its rents and home prices may have approached San Francisco levels of unaffordability.
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“…Big Tech needs hundreds of thousands of new employees, which means it needs somewhere to put them. This isn’t a matter of reconfiguring a floor or two at corporate headquarters. It means building new campuses around the country….
But even in its Bay Area backyard, which is a mess of traffic congestion and housing prices at levels even well-paid engineers can scarcely afford, there is a boom that, if anything, is accelerating…”
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“…San Francisco developer and ULI member Patrick Kennedy’s firm, Panoramic Interests, recently completed an all-steel module complex at 2711 Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley, California. Shattuck Studios is a 22-unit, four-story, 30-module structure that Kennedy says he undertook…”
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A milestone upzoning plan in Minneapolis capped a year that saw pro-housing forces duel NIMBYs in cities nationwide.
A few weeks ago, Minneapolis made zoning history when its city council endorsed a comprehensive plan that would enable denser housing development across the city.
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Bob Tillman has spent nearly 5 years and $1.4 million trying to convert his laundromat into new housing.
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“…This year, developers delivered just under 2,263 homes in new multifamily buildings…
That is less than half of what came on the market in 2016 when 4,895 homes were completed and just over half of 2017’s count of 4,270 homes…”
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Conspicuous non-consumption is really faux environmentalism; climate change is a social problem, not a personal one
We’re in the midst of the holiday shopping season, a potent reminder of how consumerism dominates so much of our lives.
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Urban planner Alain Bertaud’s new book, Order Without Design, argues that cities are really shaped by market forces, not visionaries.
Housing Supply:
“I compare it to food: You can’t solve a famine by simply mandating that everyone eat 2,000 calories a day. That’s absurd. You have to bring in more food. In the same way, cities like San Francisco have to increase the supply of floor area, and let consumers determine the size of units.”
Zoning rules that severely restrict home construction cut off millions of poor people from jobs and affordable housing. The Minneapolis reform is the most extensive reduction in zoning achieved by any major American city in a long time.
Yesterday, the City of Minneapolis struck a major blow for both property rights and affordable housing by enacting the most extensive reduction in zoning restrictions adopted by any major US city for a long time. Henry Grabar of Slate summarizes this welcome development:
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Here’s what a plan to tackle climate change, density, and affordability looks like
…Minneapolis 2040 believes the solution is simply more: more construction, more high-rises, and more triplexes
…the plan would allow triplexes to be built across much of the city—and allow even denser developments in transit zones
…the new rules would allow developers in most residential areas to build four stories high.
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San Francisco has become the first major U.S. city to propose removing all parking minimums, with legislation introduced in October, Quartz reports.
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So we’d better figure out how to get along
“…There’s a lot of talk about whether the Bay Area can sustain more growth, whether San Francisco and its other cities simply don’t have room for all the workers tech companies hope to hire…
The truth is that it is difficult for tech companies to grow elsewhere…”
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As cities wake up to their housing crises, the problems with single-family-home residential zoning will become too egregious to ignore.
In my neighborhood in San Francisco (or, more accurately, my parents’ neighborhood) there’s a plan afoot to build 42 units of new housing in two parking lots, just steps from a light rail line.
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“Any gain you have during the hold period of the fund, that’s tax-free, which is pretty remarkable …”
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YIMBY Action’s mantra is to build as much new housing — all kinds of housing — as fast as possible. And they’re not afraid to anger anyone who might get in their way
Just hours after Mayor London Breed was sworn into office earlier this year, about 50 members of YIMBY Action crammed into a cafe at Ninth and Mission streets for their monthly membership happy hour.
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Lowbrow housing options that used to ensure against homelessness are now illegal in many cities.
Some progressives blame high housing costs on inequality. But in the 1920s, inequality was as significant as it is today, if not more so.
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While downtown Oakland has lured major investments from big-name investors, West Oakland was largely overlooked — until now.
New York Life Real Estate Investors is among the first institutional investors to place a bet on West Oakland.
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Modular building provider CIMC Modular Building Systems Holding Co Ltd is taking its expertise to the United States, by building student accommodation for postgraduates at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Special rapporteur cites SF and Oakland along with worst slums in the world
In January, United Nations Special Rapporteur Leilani Farha visited Oakland and San Francisco as part of a fact-finding mission about housing and expressed shock and horror at the living conditions of homeless residents in one of the wealthiest societies in the world.
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People spend more money when cities are less vehicle-oriented.
You’ve probably seen the term “walkability” thrown around in relation to cities, neighborhoods, and even apartments.
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“…1. Oakland: West Oakland, Uptown, Jingletown, and Coliseum Industrial…”
Much has been reported on the creation of Opportunity Zones and even more on their tax advantages, but, less has been written about the specific Opportunity Zones that are now found in all 50 states and US territories.
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San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley take pride in their progressive values. But all three cities maintain land-use laws that are exclusionary. Each bars new apartments from being built in many neighborhoods, effectively pricing out a new generation of working and middle-class families. How could this happen?
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“…While rent control appears to help current tenants in the short run, in the long run it decreases affordability, fuels gentrification, and creates negative spillovers on the surrounding neighborhood…”
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There is a persistent, agreed upon fiction that San Francisco can house its homeless by itself.
To address this delusion, an honest reckoning is needed. For years all our mayors and staff have competently and diligently addressed this as their top priority, yet we remain exactly where we were over 20 years ago when Mayor Willie Brown committed truth by saying that it was an intractable problem.
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Tiny apartments are going big.
The co-living startup Starcity, which builds small apartments with shared kitchens and living rooms, plans to start construction next year on over 1,000 new homes in San Francisco and San Jose.
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From Aug 2016
San Francisco and other large American cities are facing a massive housing affordability problem, with rents spiraling beyond the reach of ordinary people. A fascinating article from the Financial Times argues that Japan may have found a solution to the problem.
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Could there be a more apt place to observe “The Transforming City” than Detroit?
On behalf of Rip Rapson and my colleagues at the Kresge Foundation, welcome to Detroit. If you travel to Detroit regularly, as I have over the past 15 years, you see that Detroit changes quickly.
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The severity of the nationwide homeless crisis in Southern California—with an estimated 53,000 people homeless on any given night in Los Angeles, according to the Los Angeles Mission—is impossible to ignore.
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Study suggests Americans who live in compact counties live longer, on average, than those who reside in more sprawling ones
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It used to be that $3,000 studios and $5,000 two-bedrooms were average among new apartments in San Francisco. Now those monthly rents are migrating to Oakland.
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Early city planners dreamt up elaborate ideas for America’s cities. But in their dreaming, they had forgotten the people their plans were drawn for.
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A careful study of evictions in San Francisco says “No.”
There’s a widespread belief among some neighborhood activists that building new housing triggers displacement.
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Patrick Kennedy, the owner of San Francisco-based development firm Panoramic Interests—which in June 2015 completed the first high-rise micro-unit building in the U.S. with The Panoramic in San Francisco—has an unusual take on housing.
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The more you limit housing, the more you increase displacement
In city after city, we see the same refrain: a neighborhood is starting to attract new residents and new investment, current residents are starting to worry about gentrification.
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The one-story house for sale on Oak Court in Menlo Park, Calif., is 88 years old and 830 square feet, with two bedrooms, one bathroom, a detached one-car garage, and no air conditioning. Almost anywhere else it would be the startiest of starter homes. But because it’s in Silicon Valley, where the supply of housing is far short of the demand, the bungalow was listed in mid-August for $1.575 million.
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… “Our communities are designed to encourage walking and biking. Many neighborhoods have car-free commercial blocks like those found in European cities…”
SPUR, a non-profit devoted good government planning in the San Francisco Bay Area, has published a paper laying out four possible visions for the region in 2070, and three of them are decidedly bleak.
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Some California cities are considering the Lego-like buildings constructed from these apartments, called MicroPads, as an easy way to provide shelter.
In late July, trucks pulled up to a vacant lot in Berkeley, California, carrying shipping-container-sized studio apartments, each already fully built inside. It took four days to stack the Lego-like apartments into a new building.
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“San Francisco is known for being progressive, but has the most extreme NIMBYism in the country,” …
One study recently proclaimed San Francisco’s the highest rents on the planet.
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Imagine a four-story apartment building going up in four days, and from steel.
It happened in Berkeley, a city known for its glacial progress in building housing.
Check out 2711 Shattuck Ave. near downtown Berkeley. Four stories. Four days in July. Including beds, sinks, sofas, and stoves.
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A $300 million West Oakland housing development that hoped to be car-free is pushing ahead — but with the addition of some parking places.
Panoramic Interests plans to build 1,032 units with 44,000 square feet of retail space at 500 Kirkham St., a 3-acre site adjacent to the BART station. The only catch was the grand total of parking spaces that it wanted to build: eight.
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There’s an ancient Indian parable called the Blind Men and the Elephant. It was most famously introduced to the West in verse by 19th-century poet John Godfrey Saxe.
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More supply is driving down rents in the Rose City
According to Apartment List.com, rents for one bedroom apartments in Portland have declined 3 percent in the past year. It’s a solid vindication of the standard predictions of economic theory: adding more supply (building more apartments) helps drive down prices.
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Location, location, location.
Rental markets are heating up all over the continent, but there are specific cities that are feeling the brunt of this phenomenon.
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If we believe that cities provide economic opportunity, produce fewer carbon emissions per capita than urban sprawl, that cities are more energy efficient, that they have less impact on oceans, lakes, rivers, and streams, that cities afford people of a wide variety of ethnic, economic, and cultural backgrounds to live close to each other and learn from one another, then we should believe that more people ought to be able to live in cities.
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Groundbreaking research presents credible estimates of the total parking supply in several American cities, and it’s not pretty.
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Build expensive new “luxury” apartments, and wait a few decades
One of the most common refrains the the affordable housing discussion is “developers are targeting the high end of the market” and new apartments are just unaffordable. Left to its own devices, we’re told, there’s no way the market will build new housing affordable to the nation’s low and moderate income households.
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The entertaining rooms meant to make us social actually foster isolation
For a recent study, UCLA-affiliated researchers in fields ranging from anthropology to sociology used cameras to record in great detail how 32 dual-income families living in the Los Angeles area used their homes.
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It’s no secret rent in San Francisco costs an arm and at least one leg as the West Coast city usually lands at the top of lists ranking the most expensive places to live in the nation.
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Too many Californians want to ignore the cause of homelessness; the answer is obvious in the Bay Area
Homelessness arises from a lack of homes. That conclusion of a recent UCLA study would seem intuitive, given that lacking a home and being homeless are one and the same. But the connection between the state’s gaping housing shortage and its spreading homelessness still strikes too many Californians as a great controversy requiring endless debate.
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The rising cost of housing in many American cities has led to an affordability crisis for residents who find themselves either rent burdened or living with roommates out of necessity rather than preference. Single-room occupancy housing (SROs), commonly understood as smaller-than-average studio apartments sharing common kitchen or bathroom facilities, may offer a tool for increasing the supply of affordable housing and reducing homelessness in high-cost markets. Unlike apartments shared by roommates, each SRO unit is individually leased.
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It is a great time for anyone looking to rent an apartment: vacancy rates are rising and there are little or no rent increases in many major cities.
For landlords, though, the U.S. apartment market suffered its worst spring since 2010, near the depths of the housing crisis. Driving this dynamic is a flood of new apartments and weakening demand.
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Sky-high housing costs are a significant factor behind California’s homeless crisis, according to a new analysis from UCLA.
In a study contained in the latest UCLA Anderson Forecast, released Wednesday, UCLA found that higher median rent and home prices are strongly correlated with more people living on the streets or in shelters. The research backs other studies that have found a similar relationship.
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Panoramic Interests recently broke ground on a new $100 million, SoMa apartment building at the corner of 12th and Harrison streets in San Francisco.
The development firm, known for its micro and efficient floorplans, has nearly 300 units under construction in San Francisco and Berkeley and is close to leasing all the units to what’s become the firm’s go-to tenants: college students.
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Everyone thinks California is our most progressive state. And why not? It imposes the highest tax on the richest one percent. It is aggressively implementing Obamacare. And it is standing up to President Donald Trump on everything from immigration to the environment.
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Developer Panoramic Interests strung a huge banner across a 6-story apartment construction site in Berkeley proclaiming: “Fire Safety & Security First” with a list of the building’s security features and a phone number to call if anyone sees anything suspicious.
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The Berkeley City Council went on record Tuesday solemnly urging the governor to declare homelessness a statewide emergency while noting its own “comprehensive” efforts to grapple with the housing shortage. At the same time, the council formally objected to legislation that might allow new apartments to encroach on the ocean of asphalt surrounding the North Berkeley BART Station.
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In an interview, the guru of progressive parking policy reflects on his decades of research and writing, which transformed how cities look at the curb.
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I don’t know how I got to California. But I appeared here some weeks ago, in the form of an insect, like my protagonist in “The Metamorphosis.” And I’m glad I did. If I’d known weather like this in my lifetime, I might not have died of tuberculosis in Prague in 1924, at age 40.
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San Francisco has an estimated 80,000 students but an inventory of only 9,000 beds, creating a significant shortfall, resulting in the construction of another 600-plus beds in the form of City Gardens.
SAN FRANCISCO—With a significant shortfall in housing in general, but also in student housing, the city is desperately in need of quality projects to plug the gap. Fortunately, another 600-plus beds are on the way at 333 12th St.
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It is painfully evident that California is experiencing an extreme housing shortage, and I believe the solution is to build more housing, not to punish small landlords who are already providing solutions. If the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act is repealed and new construction falls under rent control, many developers may simply exit the market, which would further exacerbate the problem.
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The nation’s housing policy for the poor can feel like a giant lottery. Sometimes it actually is a lottery.
For $1,200 a month, Patricia Torres and her family were renting a bedroom, a share of time in the bathroom, one vegetable drawer and one shelf in the fridge, and two cupboards over the stove. They rented not so much a home as a fraction of one.
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California’s housing crisis is centered in the Bay Area, and the region’s booming economy is increasingly inequitable and unsustainable.
That’s the message of two recent studies by two very different organizations. State legislators and local officials shouldn’t need any more evidence to take urgent action.
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In Los Angeles, a city known for its cars, high-end buyers increasingly want homes within steps of bars, restaurants and sports venues
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Homelessness in America has reached crisis levels and I am determined to do everything in my power to fix the problem as long as it doesn’t involve changing zoning laws or my ability to drive alone to work or, well, changing anything, really.
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What does Fruitvale tell us about gentrification and displacement?
Gentrification solved, or at least prevented.
That was the celebratory headline announcing a recent study from UCLA’s Latino Politics and Policy Initiative, looking at changes in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood.
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Which is in the greater public interest of San Francisco: Making substantial progress in finally providing housing for homeless people, or fully preserving the occupational prerogatives and political influence of the building trades unions?
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SB 827 may have been great economics, but it was poor politics.
The recent defeat of SB 827—California State Senator Scott Wiener’s bill that would have legalized apartment construction in area’s well served by transit—
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Distrust and empowering everyone to equally be a NIMBY is a recipe for perpetual housing problems
The recent defeat of SB 827–California State Senator Scott Wiener’s bill that would have legalized apartment construction in area’s well served by transit–was the subject of a thoughtful post-mortem in the Los Angeles Times: “A major California housing bill failed after opposition from the low-income residents it aimed to help. Here’s how it went wrong.”
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When a region is fortunate enough to host the birth of a new industry, its population tends to increase. New jobs are created, attracting workers from outside the region who may bring their families. Those new employees need goods and services, which, in turn, attracts more workers and their families to arrive.
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There’s plenty of talk about “greedy developers” being the cause of our housing crisis but the people making out in this crazy market aren’t builders, but existing homeowners.
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People can live elsewhere instead, but we’ll all be poorer if they do.
The sweeping land use reform bill introduced recently by California state Sen. Scott Weiner, a San Francisco Democrat, died in committee this week, bringing to an end an ambitious plan to change zoning in broad swaths of the state by allowing four- to five-story buildings near all rail transit stations and major bus corridors.
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Uber is pedaling full throttle into electric-bike rentals. The ride-hailing company on Monday said it is buying Jump Bikes, the first company to provide stationless bike sharing in San Francisco.
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At current salary levels, teachers in many cities across the US can’t afford to live near the schools where they teach.
In San Francisco, less than 1% of homes on the market are affordable to the city’s schoolteachers, according to a new study from real-estate website Trulia.
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I see a major shift in the real estate market as we become even more of a renter nation. Why is it happening? Is there a silver lining to this economic cloud?
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Of the myriad possible responses to California’s housing and homelessness crisis, the state’s politicians have a clear favorite: spending more money. But state and local governments’ evident difficulty using existing housing funds provides reason for skepticism.
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In an example of truly thinking in three dimensions, architects around the globe are beginning to envision housing in a different way. Dubbed “vertical land,” developers are essentially utilizing scaffolding and three-dimensional printing to build homeless shelters on the windowless sides of existing buildings.
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Homelessness has long been a San Francisco problem, and with home prices rising, it’s arguably worse now than ever. A January report on SFgate.com claimed that the city’s homeless count is close to 6,700, and a local advocacy group estimates the count at 12,000.
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The rest aren’t rising, and spatial inequality is getting worse.
Last month a cadre of Silicon Valley venture capitalists took a much-ballyhooed tour of the Rust Belt. As the New York Times glowingly reported, this “Comeback Cities Tour” featured stops in Detroit, Flint, Akron, Youngstown and South Bend.
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As the tech industry grows to unfathomable proportions, San Francisco needs to grow to match it. A call to arms for a city under siege.
…Because it has suppressed the construction of new market-rate housing for decades (between 1980 and 2014, San Francisco grew by more than 170,000 residents but gained only 70,000 housing units), the city bears as much responsibility for the crisis it now finds itself in as the tech industry does.
But it has a chance to make up for its past mistakes, and in the process ensure that this doesn’t become a schizoid city, with subsidized housing on one side of the street and millionaires’ mansions on the other.
To do so, it needs to start building housing—a lot of it. Ironically, the best way to preserve San Francisco will be to change it.
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MENLO PARK, Calif. — John Tenanes, Facebook’s vice president for real estate, is showing off the company’s plans for expansion. It will have offices for thousands of programmers to extend Facebook’s fearsome reach. But that is not what Mr. Tenanes is excited about.
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Understanding how housing markets really work is essential to crafting solutions to our affordability problems
Regular followers of City Observatory will know two things about us: We’re keenly focused on the problem of housing affordability, and we like to treat Portland, Oregon (our local backyard) as a kind of laboratory for better understanding urban issues.
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It’s about more options, not fewer.
California state Sen. Scott Wiener’s SB 827 — a sweeping approach to solve California’s housing crisis by having the state government preempt local zoning ordinances and allow for greater density near rapid transit stations and high-frequency bus stops — is one of the most important ideas in American politics today.
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Legislation would allow more home building along transit routes to reduce gas-guzzling commutes. Some who support the goal have denounced the method.
SAN FRANCISCO — It’s an audacious proposal to get Californians out of their cars: a bill in the State Legislature that would allow eight-story buildings near major transit stops, even if local communities object.
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From Oct 2017
How does a growing, prospering city stay affordable for all kinds of people? At the most basic level, when there aren’t enough homes, prices will keep rising. And when there are plenty of homes, it helps prices stay down.
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One of Oakland’s largest housing proposals with 1,032 apartments and zero parking for residents is facing pushback from the city.
Developer Patrick Kennedy of Panoramic Interests wants to build three buildings on a lot at 500 Kirkham St. next to the West Oakland BART. The project includes a 23-story tower that would rise to 233 feet and be the tallest building in West Oakland.
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Through advocacy, influence and engagement, Central City Association (CCA) enhances Downtown LA ’s vibrancy and increases investment in the region, and we strongly believe that micro-units can contribute to this effort.
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People are leaving San Francisco in droves as the cost of living reaches a new high.
A recent report from real-estate site Redfin revealed that San Francisco lost more residents than any other US city in the last quarter of 2017.
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Minneapolis is considering inclusionary zoning (IZ), but has qualms based on Portland’s experience. Ironically, a non-existent Minneapolis IZ program was a key part of the argument for adopting Portland’s IZ law in December 2016.
Parts of this commentary are going to seem like a major-league distortion in the space-time continuum, so let’s start with a simple fact: the City of Minneapolis doesn’t have an inclusionary housing requirement–it never has.
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Why housing is a liberal imperative.
Here in the liberal East Bay, we’re proud of our inclusiveness and openness. Most of us are disgusted by President Trump’s efforts to target undocumented immigrants and break apart families.
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In a rare interview, German designer Dieter Rams has called for a return to well-made, long-lasting products, even if it comes at the expense of design innovation.
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Silicon Valley continues to lead the country in innovation, according to the latest update to the Silicon Valley Leadership Group’s comprehensive report on regional competitiveness and innovation.
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Now the city wants the laundromat studied to see if it is a historic resource.
To understand how difficult and expensive it is to build housing in San Francisco, observe the case of Robert Tillman. Tillman owns a single-story laundromat in the city’s Mission District. Since 2014, he has been attempting to develop his property into a 75-unit apartment building.
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Despite massive job growth, just 25 percent of workers drove themselves in 2017.
Seattle is among the fastest growing cities in the U.S., thanks largely to Amazon’s addition of 35,000 employees since 2010. For all the economic benefits that come with growth, it has also created a variety of civic headaches, crippling traffic chief among them.
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Just wait a decade. (Unless we do something about it now.)
Actually, there’s good and bad news about the future of housing in the East Bay.
First, the bad news: Experts say there’s a possibility that the housing situation could get worse.
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‘Inclusionary zoning’ laws create a vicious circle of higher prices and reduced demand.
As housing prices recover from the Great Recession, municipalities across America are considering laws that will raise the cost of homeownership.
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The state housing department released its first list showing how many California cities and counties are meeting their local homebuilding goals.
The conclusion: More than 500 local jurisdictions — 98 percent of those in the state — are failing.
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Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez roams greater L.A. with Times photographer Francine Orr and videographer Albert Lee and describes a scene of despair among the homeless…. Beginning at Central Avenue and heading west, I counted 16 tents on the south side of 5th Street. My longtime traveling companion, Times photographer Francine Orr, counted 15 tents on the north side of the street.
One block, 31 tents.
A recent article in the Daily Cal highlighted a new housing package introduced by State Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco. These policy changes include SB 827, which encourages dense housing near high-quality transit corridors by overruling some local zoning laws regarding parking requirements and building heights,
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In 2017, San Francisco had the dubious distinction of being the second most expensive city to build in – in the world. Turner and Townsend studied 43 global markets and found that New York and San Francisco topped the list of the most expensive construction markets, costing respectively an average of $354 and $330 per square foot to build.
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Less than a week after calling for a multibillion-dollar fund for infrastructure, arts and affordable housing, Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg proposed Tuesday spending $21 million over the next three years to subsidize construction of hundreds of small homes to help shelter the city’s growing homeless population.
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Economists put the profession’s conventional wisdom to the test, only to discover that it’s correct.
Rent control is one of the first policies that students traditionally learn about in undergraduate economics classes. The idea is to get young people thinking about how policies intended to help the poor can backfire and hurt them instead.
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Trulia economist tells the story behind the numbers
Bay Area housing trends are easily summarized: As the supply of available homes dries up, prices go up. It’s the law of supply and demand.
But why is the housing supply — insiders use the term “inventory” — so tight to begin with? And what can be done to expand the supply?
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Joe Cortright presents the antidote to an emerging narrative about the shifting lifestyle preferences of young adults (i.e., Millennials).
There’s been no shortage of recent news reporting data showing young people leaving urban areas—news taken by some as a signal that the end of the back to the city movement of the past decade and more is coming to a close.
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The young and restless are continuing to move to the nation’s large cities
One trend that highlights the growing demand for city living is the increasing tendency of well-educated young adults to live in the close-in urban neighborhoods of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas.
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Nearly two years after a smattering of tiny homes popped up in the Bay Area as a peculiar new way of housing homeless people, the technique is exploding from one end of the region to the other.
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In a normal year, the 207,000-square-foot lease that software company Okta recently signed at 100 First St. would be a cause for celebration, an excuse for the city’s economic development staff to issue a press release highlighting all the jobs coming to San Francisco.
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The so-called “peak millennial” conjecture. Is it right? What does it mean? Should I care?
Time has published an article, based largely on the research of UCLA demographer Dowell Myers, proclaiming that US cities are hitting “peak millennial.” We’ve beencritical of the peak millennial claims in the past.
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Homelessness has shot up in California and elsewhere on the West Coast over the past two years, a federal report said Wednesday, as rising rents and other housing pressures forced more people from the margins onto the street.
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LOS ANGELES (AP) — The nation’s homeless population increased this year for the first time since 2010, driven by a surge in the number of people living on the streets in Los Angeles and other West Coast cities.
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California’s recently passed Senate Bills 2 and 3 will raise several billion dollars in funding for affordable housing over the next ten years. But the Department of Housing and Community Development estimates we face a current shortfall of over two million units affordable to households traditionally served by these programs.
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(Click here for printable pdf version: https://www.panoramic.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Business-Times-Go-West.pdf
Every weekday, hundreds of thousands of riders pass through West Oakland’s BART station on their way to San Francisco. Only a handful get off.
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More than 100 Chinatown tenants took to the streets Wednesday to protest what they characterize as the latest attempt by real estate speculators to drive out low-income Chinese immigrants and replace them with more affluent renters willing to pay over $1,100 for an 80-square-foot room with no bathroom or kitchen, roughly double what existing residents pay.
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From granny pods to morphing apartments, the future of shelter is evolving
Think about the shape of home. Is it a three-bedroom, single-family dwelling with a scrap of yard? Maybe it’s you and your spouse and your kids—or maybe you share it with a handful of roommates. Or you cram yourself, your bicycle and your cat into a city studio where the rent is, naturally, too damn high.
From Home One Website-Video
We’re creating a public service campaign to build support for affordable housing. We believe that all hard working Americans are entitled to a good, safe, and secure home. We want to educate people about the housing crisis and move them with powerful stories about people whose lives have been transformed by affordable housing opportunities.
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…That was in Sunnyvale, which sits in the heart of a Silicon Valley that did not exist when I was a kid. My Uncle Pete was a mail carrier, my Aunt Mimi was a homemaker, and they lived only a mile or two from where, three months ago, a house sold for nearly $800,000 above the asking price.
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From May 2016
New York City’s zoning code turns 100 this year. That may not sound like cause for celebration — except maybe for land-use lawyers and Robert Moses aficionados. Yet for almost every New Yorker, the zoning code plays an outsize role in daily life, shaping virtually every inch of the city.
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RICHMOND — A “MicroPAD” delivered in front of City Hall on Tuesday by a San Francisco developer with long ties to Berkeley is being pitched by local officials as “a bold move to reduce homelessness.”
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RICHMOND (KRON) — On any given night, there are about 1,600 homeless people on the streets of Contra Costa County and getting roofs over their heads has proven difficult like in most areas.
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RICHMOND (KPIX 5) – An East Bay city is looking to take people off the streets by creating tiny homes for the homeless, but some say it won’t even make a dent in dealing with the issue.
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From October 2015
ULI Case Studies showcase innovative approaches and best practices in real estate and urban development.
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From Oct 21, 2017
Homelessness is on the rise in Los Angeles. James Brown got his own home there five years ago, and reflects on his two decades living on the streets.
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Slowly, the rhetorical battle is being won, as affordable housing advocates acknowledge more supply matters
There’s been a war of words about what kind of housing policies are needed to address the nation’s affordability problems.
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SAN FRANCISCO — The fires that ravaged Northern California in October claimed lives, weakened communities and scarred one of the West’s most distinctive landscapes. The destruction of an estimated 14,000 homes in the wine country north of San Francisco will worsen a severe housing shortage in a region where rents and housing values are already sky-high.
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Just as California voters might overturn the state’s heavy-handed restrictions on new rent-control units, Stanford economists Rebecca Diamond and Tim McQuade presented a paper in October making the provocative argument that San Francisco rent control ultimately drove rents up citywide since 1995.
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A new study of San Francisco’s rent control shows it raises rents for some
Rent control is a perennially contentious issue. Many housing activists see it as a logical and direct way to make housing more affordable. Economists are almost unanimous that it makes things worse by promoting disinvestment and decreasing supply.
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“For Rent” signs are popping up all over Portland, signaling an easing of the housing crunch and foretelling falling rents
A year ago, in the height of the political season in deep blue Portland (in a county which voted 76 percent for Hillary Clinton) only one thing was rarer than Donald Trump lawn signs: For Rent signs.
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From Sept 2015
Rob Justus has just finished another apartment complex in East Portland — 78 one- and two-bedroom units that rent for $395 to $775 a month. The building cost developer Justus and his bankroller, the nonprofit Portland Habilitation Center, about $5 million to build.
What’s remarkable about the new development, at Southeast 171st Avenue and Division Street, is the math. Justus built at a little under $65,000 per apartment. As a result of keeping building costs low, PHC is able to charge rents that are about half the market rate for comparable apartments in that neighborhood.
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The formal application to convert the former Sports Authority building at 1690 Folsom Street into a full-service Target has been filed with Planning.
The conversion wouldn’t require an expansion of the 40,000-square-foot building nor a major change to the building’s façade, save new signage.
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The high price of affordable housing
It’s a problem that isn’t going away: the so-called “affordable” housing we’re building in many cities–by which we mean publicly subsidized housing that’s dedicated to low and moderate income households–is so expensive to build that we’ll never be able to build enough of it to make a dent in the housing affordability problem.
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Global housing stock has not expanded quickly enough to keep up with a surge in demand, but cities can focus on three supply-side solutions to make progress.
One feeling unites billions of people in cities around the world: a sense of sticker shock whenever they attempt to find a new home. From London to Lagos, housing costs are creating financial stress for a large share of the world’s urban residents.
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Neighborhoods are always changing; half of all renters move every two years.
There’s a subtle perceptual bias that underlies many of the stories about gentrification and neighborhood change. The canonical journalistic account of gentrification focuses on the observable fact that different people now live in a neighborhood than used to live there at some previous time.
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Governor Jerry Brown just signed fifteen affordable-housing bills into law. A few might do a little good. Two senate bills will raise a bit of money. Senate Bill 2 will charge you a recording fee of up to $225 on any transaction not already subject to a transfer tax (e.g. a mortgage refinance) and Senate Bill 3 is a $4 billion housing bond.
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The cost of housing is so high in California, it’s pushing millions of people into poverty.
This isn’t hyperbole. When the cost of living is weighed, California has had the highest poverty rate in the country for years — more than 20 percent of residents, or nearly 8 million people.
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They see themselves as progressive housing activists. Critics call them stooges for luxury developers. Meet the new band of millennials who are priced out of cities and shouting: ‘Yes in my back yard’
When a woman stood up and waved a courgette in the air at a City of Berkeley council meeting this summer, complaining that a new housing development would block the sunlight from her zucchini garden, she probably felt confident that the community was on her side.
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California leads the nation once again in a statistic no state wants to boast about. When the cost of living is factored in, the Golden State has the highest poverty rate in the country.
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What could really help is deregulation, but residents aren’t likely to get it from Democratic lawmakers.
Democrats in Sacramento celebrated earlier this month when they passed a raft of bills intended to redress California’s so-called housing crisis. Sorry to spoil the party, but their legislation will do little to address the real problem and could even make things worse for poor and middle-income residents.
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California Gov. Jerry Brown on Sept. 29, 2017, signed into law two bills – SB 167/AB 678 (Sen. Nancy Skinner/Assembly Member Raul Bocanegra) and AB 1515 (Assembly Member Tom Daly) – that significantly reform California’s Housing Accountability Act (HAA or Act), Cal. Gov. Code §65589.5. These reforms are among the most important of several housing bills signed by the Governor that the California State Legislature enacted in the closing days of the 2017 session.
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“San Francisco’s anti-developer politics have dug it into a self-perpetuating cycle of self-righteousness and displacement.”
“You can’t build your way out of a housing affordability problem.” That’s conventional wisdom. I hear it all the time: Prosperous, growing, tech-rich cities from Seattle to the Bay Area and from Austin to Boston are all gripped by soaring rents and home prices.
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If you live in a coastal city like New York, Boston or San Francisco, you know that the cost of housing has skyrocketed. This housing crisis did not happen by chance: Increasingly restrictive land-use regulations in the last half-century contributed to it.
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To house an ever-larger homeless population, San Francisco may have to think smaller.
Amid a growing homelessness crisis, San Francisco does not have enough supportive housing to accommodate everyone who needs it.
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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.
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Those chipmunks in your yard are survivors
The chipmunks in your yard might be healthier and happier than their counterparts in rural areas, says a Laurentian University researcher.
Albrecht Schulte-Hostedde, a Canada Research Chair in applied evolutionary ecology, said his recent paper published in Oxford University’s Behavioural Ecology, suggests that chipmunks in the city live a surprisingly different life than their relatives in the country.
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3 housing solutions that could impact global problems
Homelessness, lack of affordable housing, natural disaster damage — these are all global problems that can be alleviated through creative housing solutions.
Three types of homes that problem-solvers such as Brad Pitt and Patrick Kennedy are employing to help are tiny houses, micro-units and shipping container homes.
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Meanwhile, rents are up 43 percent in ten years
If housing in San Francisco was as plentiful as data about housing in San Francisco, most renters would be on easy street.
The rental site ApartmentList crunched some census numbers in over 400 cities going back to 2005 to figure out, which metros kept up with construction relative to job growth and which ones were lying down on the job.
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And no amount of hand-waving about “land values” changes that.
Few public policy issues can match urban housing politics for its incendiary combination of passion and misconception. To wit: the confounding idea that relaxing regulations and fees to decrease the cost of homebuilding won’t make homes more affordable.
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Allowing multi-family housing in all residential zones, and aggressively promoting private bidding lowers housing costs
…Vienna is often mentioned as a model for how American cities might do a better job of providing more widespread affordability. While tantalizing, many of the descriptions of the secrets of its reported success are cryptic and incomplete.
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Christopher Thornberg’s “Stop Dissin’ the Housing Market—Set it Free!”, which recently appeared on these pages, is just what California’s housing markets need. Hail to this Beacon Economics PhD! Want more housing? as Thronberg asks: Stop messing with markets!
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From July 6, 2017
A big part of my job is to “spec and mass” potential new large scale developments for developers who are considering building in LA at a particular site. Understanding the code and limitations makes it pretty easy to understand why no developers in the city seem to be making the lower cost units everyone wants.
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Patrick Kennedy gave a tribute to Betty Olds at her retirement party eight years ago. Olds died on July 16, but, Kennedy says, what he said applies as much today as it did then.
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Advocates and cities see challenges and opportunities in tiny homes’ path to the mainstream
“Of course, ‘tiny home’ is a term that has no meaning.” Dan George Dobrowolski firmly believes that the best spaces are small spaces.
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From Los Angeles to London, civic leaders are searching for creative ways to combine technology and high design to shelter their cities’ growing homeless populations. In Sacramento, where tent villages have brought unwelcome national headlines, a home-builder-turned-councilman and an ambitious MIT-trained developer believe they may have the answer to solving the housing predicament.
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High housing costs continue to be at the center of policy debates in Los Angeles—and across much of the state. This intensifying focus is warranted now more than ever given how the crisis has moved from simply eating up the disposable income of residents to slowing overall employment growth in coastal economies – something driven by a lack of available workers, which in turn is driven by the housing shortage.
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I have bad news for those who oppose new housing, support suburban sprawl, enjoy subjecting working people to long commutes, and who think preserving gas stations is more important than allowing kids to grow up in vibrant cities: YIMBY’s from across the country are gathering in Oakland this week.
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Richard Florida, urban studies professor at the University of Toronto and author of “The New Urban Crisis” discussed how cities are increasing inequality and how pockets of concentrated wealth and poverty are squeezing out the middle class.
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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.
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After an hour of debate, Herb Perez had had enough. Perez, a councilman in the Bay Area suburb of Foster City, was tired of planning for the construction of new homes to comply with a 50-year-old state law designed to help all Californians live affordably.
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YIMBYs! Socialists! The only thing the Bay Area’s tenant activists hate more than high rent is each other.
Local politics is always, in one way or another, about housing. In San Francisco, a deep blue city whose fault lines long ago ceased to resemble America’s, that politics is a vitriolic civic scrimmage, where people who agree about almost every national issue make sworn enemies over zoning, demolition, and development.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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,
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From June 14, 2017
How many Nobel laureates (or NL, in UC–Berkeley parking parlance) does it take to break America’s automobile dependence?
On June 1, the U.S. 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.
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The good news in University of California Los Angeles’s new Anderson Forecast—the Anderson School of Management’s regular assessment of how jobs and housing will shape up in California and the larger United States—is that California cities are building more housing than expected.
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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.
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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.
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The project by the San Francisco studio Panoramic Interests is designed to address the issue of the city’s many homeless residents
One of the things that shocks first-time visitors to San Francisco is the number of homeless people that crowd the California metropolis, which has historically welcomed the least well-off.
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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.
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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,”
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From January-Mach 2017
The arrival of vast amounts of speculative capital in big cities around the nation and world during this century has fed a tremendous urban building boom.
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From January-March 2017
There is no doubt that public policy needs to grapple with the challenges that our low-income households face in gentrifying neighborhoods, and the ways in which racial discrimination and inequality affect the causes and consequences of those challenges.
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When you build a city that enables people to drive less, they spend less on cars and gas and have more to spend on other things.
Here is my 2007 report, published by CEOs for Cities, which describes Portland’s Green Dividend–the additional income that Portland area residents have to spend because they drive fewer miles than the typical American urban dweller.
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New housing developments have been rising in Mountain View at a rapid rate, but the city still faces an essential Silicon Valley conundrum: With going rates starting at nearly $3,000 a month for a new studio apartment unit and climbing
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TUSTIN First off, don’t call it a “tiny house” — at least in the presence of its promoter.
This cozy, 160-square-foot abode is a MicroPAD, shorthand for Prefab Affordable Dwelling. And it’s more than just cute, said Patrick Kennedy, who began marketing the diminutive habitat this year. It’s an answer to homelessness, he said.
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In Omaha, Nebraska, $160,000 snags you a 3-bedroom home, but in San Francisco, it simply gets you a storage locker.
Such was the case on May 20 when residents at the Lumina, a luxury condominium development in San Francisco’s trendy South of Market neighborhood, participated in an online bidding war over storage units up for auction.
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A new way for San Francisco to create entry-level housing is taking shape in an old building on a forgotten block — an old bathhouse on the edge of the Tenderloin.
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From April 2017
As a mother of two children and wife to a steadily employed husband, Brianne Reynolds considered herself to be a typical, hard-working American. In addition to taking care of her kids during the day, she worked the night shifts at a local grocery store as a custodian in order to pay the bills.
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TUSTIN, Calif. (FOX 11) – There’s enough space for a bed, desk and chair, a kitchen with a microwave and refrigerator, as well as a shower, sink and some closets — all in 160 square feet.
These MicroPad units could be the solution to the city’s homeless problem, providing stackable, interlockable, apartment spaces for people otherwise on the streets.
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Miranda is one of an estimated 7,500 people who call San Francisco streets her home.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The other day I wrote a Bloomberg View post about how California is waking up to the problem of NIMBYism – development restrictions that limit economic activity and make cities less affordable. Ground Zero for this struggle is the Bay Area, San Francisco in particular.
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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.
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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.
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The union representing construction workers, State Building & Construction Trades Council of California, also known as the Building Trades, is the most powerful group influencing the Legislature’s response to the housing crisis. It has worked to make sure union-level pay, known as “prevailing wage,” is a consideration in any major housing bills.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Inclusionary zoning programs are too small to make a dent in housing affordability
…inclusionary zoning requirements essentially shift the cost of housing subsidies onto new development, they raise its cost, and likely reduce the number of units that get built–which tends to aggravate housing shortages and further accelerate prices.
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At a time when rents are soaring and development is more contentious than ever before, a little-known city agency is rethinking its role in neighborhood planning.
For decades, activist homeowners have held virtual veto power over nearly every decision on Seattle’s growth and development.
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Younger residents are more likely to support new housing projects than older groups in the Bay Area, according to an annual poll from the Bay Area Council.
Seventy percent of millennials were in favor of building more housing in their own neighborhood, while only 57 percent of residents age 40 to 64 supported additional homes near them.
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Bay Area is mecca for people ages 18-34, and a plurality of them live with their parents
According to the real estate site Realtor.com, San Francisco and San Jose are the ninth and tenth most popular city for Millennials. (Here defined as those between 25 and 34.)
Longstanding activists surprised, encouraged by micro-dwelling and ‘Pathways’ project.
Berkeley’s new, progressive-majority City Council is moving quickly to prioritize homelessness issues — and advocates say it’s almost too good to be true.
“They’re hoping it’s going to happen, but they don’t believe it,” said homeless resident and activist Mike Lee, on some of Berkeley’s recent policy proposals.
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Last month, the city councils of Oakland and Berkeley approved initiatives to develop modular units to house homeless individuals; however, despite San Francisco’s own efforts to manage its homeless population amidst a housing crisis, the city isn’t taking the same steps as its East Bay neighbors.
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Our 25 expert judges combed through more than 1,000 entries from around the world to find the most innovative ideas to make the world better.
Here they are: the winners of the first-ever World Changing Ideas Awards. We sifted through more than 1,000 truly impressive entries to find the ones our panel of judges thought were the best combination of creative problem solving and potential to change our world for the better.
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Developer Patrick Kennedy wants to go mega with micro-units near the West Oakland BART station.
His firm, Panoramic Interests, has proposed building up to 1,459 small apartments on a roughly 3-acre site at 500 Kirkham St. — a five-minute walk from the train station.
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As housing prices continue to rise, the issue of how to house homeless and lower-income individuals and families becomes increasingly important.
Many cities are planning or enacting legislation to fund these projects and pave the way for faster development of affordable housing projects. Microunit housing has been floated as a potential solution for years.
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To tranSForm the sector, action is needed in seven areas or through broader adoption of mass-production approaches.
The construction industry employs about 7 percent of the world’s working-age population and is one of the world economy’s largest sectors, with $10 trillion spent on construction-related goods and services every year.
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Construction industry productivity in the U.S. is lower today than it was in 1968—and it won’t pick up unless it can embrace modernization.
…the global housing and infrastructure crises are largely a product of a backwards construction industry—and things won’t get better until we bring it into the 21st century.
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After fourteen seasons, Discovery Channel’s always entertaining “Mythbusters”series ended last year. If you didn’t see the show-and it lives on at Youtube, of course–co-hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman constructed elaborate (often explosive) experiments to test whether something you see on television or in the movies could actually happen in real life.
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From Dec 15, 2016
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) estimates that the number of homeless individuals has fallen by 13 percent since 2007. However, homelessness remains a huge problem for many cities across the country. Cities ranging from New York to Seattle to Dallas find themselves confronting homelessness crises.
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Prime opportunity for local micro developer’s prefab module homes
In January, newly seated Berkeley City Councilmember Ben Bartlett showed interest in commissioning 100 of San Francisco developer Patrick Kennedy’s experimental MicroPAD homes to accommodate Berkeley’s homeless.
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The housing crisis facing San Francisco and many other American cities — driven by changing demographics, a booming economy, and high development costs — may be addressed by creating an alternative to the disappearing residential hotels.
For much of American history, the residential hotel served a vital need, providing basic, market-rate, affordable urban housing. Located in central locations, residential hotels served tens of thousands of people of varied means and backgrounds.
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Berkeley City Council votes to explore housing homeless in prefab mini-apartments.
The Berkeley City Council voted to explore housing low-income and homeless people in prefab “micro-unit” assisted-living buildings run by non-profits and built by private developers.
Panoramic Interests displayed one of these units, which the developer has branded “MicroPADs,” near Civic Park last month, inspiring curiosity in passing Berkeley residents.
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The city wants to erect a tower made of stacked, prefab 160-square-foot apartments.
If Berkeley gets its way, its homeless population could someday be living in 160-square-foot “microunits”—sort of like comfy shoe boxes that can be stacked into larger structures.
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Tiny apartments may be a solution to a big problem in the Bay Area.
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Where others cities will not venture, Berkeley dares to go. That’s how city councilman Ben Bartlett views City Council’s unanimous vote Tuesday night to move ahead and explore the possibility of building tiny housing units aimed at the homeless and those on very low incomes.
...MoreAt City Observatory, we try to stick to a wonky, data-driven approach to all things urban. But numbers don’t mean much without a framework to explain them, and so today we want to quickly talk about one of those rhetorical frameworks: specifically, how we talk about driving.
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Welcome to the 21st-century world of microhousing
In San Francisco, Small Spaces With Places to Escape
Mission and Ninth streets in San Francisco’s South of Market district is one of those corners that testify to a rapidly changing city.
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Suppose there were a way to pump up the economy, reduce inequality and put an end to destructive housing bubbles like the one that contributed to the Great Recession. The idea would be simple, but not easy, requiring a wholesale reframing of the United States economy and housing market.
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If you suggest there’s a housing crisis in the Bay Area or other major US cities, you’ll probably get a chorus of agreement. But suggest that the solution requires building more housing, and you’re kicking a hornet’s nest.
The ones currently doing the kicking are the YIMBYs, a loosely allied collection of pro-development housing advocates whose name plays on the acronym NIMBY (“Not In My Backyard”),
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The Micropad is looking to solve the homeless crisis with stackable living units.
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160-square foot units could help thousands in Sacramento area
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (KCRA) —Thousands of people in Sacramento need a place to sleep every night. Elected officials said homelessness is a crisis in the capital city.
Council member Jeff Harris is now proposing a tiny solution to solve a big problem. The “micropad” concept rolled in front of Sacramento City Hall Monday afternoon.
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SACRAMENTO — The city of Sacramento is exploring a way to reduce the number of homeless living on the streets, giving them small dorm-style bedrooms to live in. They’re called MicroPADs, which stands for Prefab Affordable Dwelling. From now till Wednesday, one will be on display at City Hall.
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Though national apartment rents are growing less quickly, they still exceed the average American’s budget in some cities. One way developers are working to address this imbalance is by building micro-lofts.
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When something small does very big things.
There are more than 7,000 people currently living on the streets of San Francisco, but the solution to the city’s homelessness crisis could come in the form of a 160-sqaure-foot apartment dubbed the MicroPAD.
“Citizens here in San Francisco identify homelessness as the number one problem in the city, yet the government seems to have great difficulty in making apparent progress,” says Patrick Kennedy,
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… 2. San Francisco, California
The “City by the Bay” grabs the second spot for worst places to own a car. Being stuck in traffic costs the average commuter in San Francisco $1,600 per year. That cost includes both the value of the time spent in traffic and the cost of gas. San Francisco is also one of the 10 worst cities for motor vehicle thefts per resident, another reason to forgo car ownership.
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On the corner of Milvia Street and Allston Way, a demo of a 160-square-foot modular unit shows a potential living environment for Berkeley’s long-term homeless and low-income population.
The outside of the unit — designed by San Francisco-based Panoramic Interests — reads “CITYSPACE MicroPAD,” which stands for Prefab Affordable Dwelling.
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Patrick Kennedy, the owner of the development company Panoramic Interests, thinks he has a partial solution to the Bay Area’s chronic homelessness problem and invites Berkeley to take a look at that solution in the form of a prototype currently installed next to City Hall.
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A Dutch company has built a splashy high-rise hotel in Poland—and shipped it in 210 pieces to New York.
The 20-story, 300-room project at 185 Bowery by hotel developer and operator citizenM is the biggest modular-construction hotel project ever in New York.
...MoreBlocks away from the fire-gutted Ghost Ship warehouse in Oakland sits a tiny, two-bedroom in-law unit with mildewed walls and no heat, perched atop a rickety garage. Water pools beneath chipped bathroom tiles, and mold forms spiderweb patterns amid the dog posters and Baby-Sitters Club books in an otherwise tidy girl’s bedroom.
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The problem of homelessness is a real issue across the globe, and providing adequate housing solutions for these poor people is a very demanding task. San Francisco might soon get an innovative solution to the problem though, in the form of modular housing units designed and built by the local company Panoramic Interests.
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Homelessness is as big an issue in San Francisco as any other major city, but local firm Panoramic Interests has designed a self-contained stackable tiny apartment that it promotes as a viable solution. MicroPAD modular dwellings comprise a total floorspace of just 160 sq ft (14 sq m), but include a kitchenette, sleeping area, and bathroom.
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To address the growing problem of homelessness in our cities, Panoramic Interests has developed the MicroPAD (Prefab Affordable Dwelling). The MicroPAD is designed to be installed quickly and economically on large and small sites, in a wide variety of building configurations.
The MicroPAD modules are built in a factory and then stacked like blocks to create multi-story, multi-unit buildings that are indistinguishable from conventional construction. Buildings constructed from MicroPAD modules meet all seismic and safety codes.
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These 160-foot apartments could be the solution to housing San Francisco’s homeless population of 7,000.
San Francisco might be a city of class, culture, and progression but its homeless population is through the roof. At any given moment, there are approximately 7,000 individuals living on the city’s streets, according to statistics gathered by volunteers in 2015.
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In San Francisco, approximately 7,000 people live on the street without a permanent home, and one man believes he has a solution. Patrick Kennedy and his team at Panoramic Interests developed MicroPAD, a tiny, prefabricated housing unit that can be used alone or stacked into 200-unit complexes to provide efficient shelter for those who currently have none.
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Micro Pad is a high-design, prefab 160-square-foot apartment. The company behind it hopes to put a building of them together so the city can help give shelter to some of its more than 7,000 homeless.
If you lie on a bed inside one of these new micro-apartments, your head is next to the kitchen counter, and if you sit up, you can reach out and touch the desk on the other side of the room. The entire apartment, at 8 feet by 20 feet, could squeeze into a long parking space.
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SAN FRANCISCO — California may be the new capital of American liberalism, but everybody who likes the sound of that ought to consider the fate of three recent San Francisco ballot initiatives.
The first, Proposition Q, aimed to eliminate homeless people’s unsightly tent camps by banning sidewalk tents and empowering the police to confiscate them with 24 hours notice so long as occupants were offered beds in shelters.
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San Francisco jealously guards its right to upzone new projects. But the catch is, in the majority of cases it’s not technically up to us.
Under a ruling in a 2013 court case with Napa County, developers in any California city automatically qualify for a 35 percent bonus in their number of units, provided that at least 11 percent of homes in the building are priced as affordable housing.
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On Thursday December 8th, the San Francisco Planning Commission approved the first market-rate housing project to apply the state density bonus law. The vote was 5-1. Commissioner Melgar was the dissenting vote and Commissioner Moore was absent. This marks a tremendous win for housing advocates who have pushed for this law’s implementation over many years.
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A project with 200 micro-units has been approved, the first time a San Francisco housing project has used the state’s density bonus program, which allows developments with affordable housing to rise 35 percent higher.
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Sarah Berkes was delighted, if also very surprised, to find that a place like the Webster Apartments on West 34th Street still existed in New York City. The stately rooming house for “career minded professional women” where she has lived for a little over a year is one of the few of its kind left in the city.
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When four young professionals share a one-bedroom, one-bath apartment, a strategy for the morning routine is a necessity.
Katherine Neal, who works in sales, and Annie Jackson, who works in public relations, take the first shifts in the bathroom. Ms. Neal gets in there at 6:45 a.m. and has 15 minutes before it’s Ms. Jackson’s turn.
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San Francisco’s new state senator pitches housing bill mere hours into his term
Every California city is required to build a certain amount of housing to meet the state’s overall housing goals.
And a lot of places just plain seem to ignore the mandate. Earlier this year, former Palo Alto Planning Commission Kate Downing opined that the Regional Housing Needs Assessments lack so much as a built-in slap on the wrist.
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A proponent of small living shows off his latest tiny apartment, and what his next space will be.
With 26,000 people per square mile, Manhattan is one of the most densely populated areas in the United States. Doing more with less space is a necessity of life and that often comes with compromises—no spare rooms, for instance, and a constant dearth of storage.
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It is no mystery that the Bay Area and San Francisco has a housing crisis. But the real challenges are more specific than just affordability needs and workforce housing demands. The real challenges are to find urban environments that can absorb and benefit from infill and redevelopment. In short, we need to place housing in walkable, mixed-use and transit rich places like SF if we are to structurally address our most significant social and environmental challenges.
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Holiday visitors to San Francisco who encounter people sleeping on the streets may be left to wonder: “Why aren’t city leaders doing something about this?” Actually, they are — and they have been laying the groundwork for some sustainable solutions. But the intensified effort in recent months has not been without its frustration and setbacks.
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In CCLR’s 20 years of working in brownfield redevelopment, we’ve found that land recycling means more than remediation or urban green space creation. Land is a finite resource, and the fight to make space for urban housing is a continuous battle.
From March 2015
California’s Home Prices and Rents Higher Than Just About Anywhere Else. Housing in California has long been more expensive than most of the rest of the country. Beginning in about 1970, however, the gap between California’s home prices and those in the rest country started to widen. Between 1970 and 1980, California home prices went from 30 percent above U.S. levels to more than 80 percent higher.
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Dearth of affordable homes pinches job market says consulting firm
The consulting firm Beacon Economics assessed the state of the Bay Area’s financial bearings on Monday. They conclude that the boom times are quieting to an echo, thanks in part to housing costs.
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So far, at least 36 people are known dead after a fire swept through the artist community in East Oakland known as the Ghost Ship. The grief and sense of shock in Oakland is palpable. For me, a Bay Area attorney and artist with friends at or near the Ghost Ship blaze this weekend, this terrible event hits close to home.
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SAN FRANCISCO (CNNMoney) – Small, stackable pods might be one solution to San Francisco’s homeless crisis.
At just 160 square feet, the micro-apartments are tiny, but for those who are homeless in the Bay Area, they could be life changing.
Almost 7,000 people are homeless in San Francisco.
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At least 36 died at a ‘Ghost Ship’ party but survivors are among those who say communal spaces should be cherished in a city where rents have gone sky-high
A devastating warehouse fire that killed at least 36 people has shone a harsh light on a housing crisis in Oakland and its consequences for artists and low-income residents.
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Developers in San Francisco have created a line of stackable pods as a potential solution to the city’s overwhelming homelessness crisis.
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Most S.F. housing for the homeless is a century old; even refurbished, severe health and safety issues can abound.
For many homeless people who land a spot within San Francisco’s network of 6,000 supportive housing rooms and apartments, being indoors means life gets better. No more nights shivering under blankets, getting beaten up in the street. On-site access to food, health care and counseling. Stability.
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Across California, local initiatives are generating funding to deal with homelessness, including a sales tax increase in San Francisco and a bond measure in Los Angeles.
The persistence of homelessness in California is a disgrace.
Thankfully, our state’s leaders are taking bold steps to address the problem. Gov. Jerry Brown recently approved a $2 billion bond that will pay for housing and services for those with mental illnesses on our streets.
This morning I came across the below graph in a Medium article by Eric Jaffe of Sidewalk Labs. It is taken from a research paper by Elisabeth Ruth Perlman called, Dense Enough To Be Brilliant: Patents, Urbanization, and Transportation in Nineteenth Century America.
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From Nov 10, 2016
Oakland’s first micro apartments are coming to the Nook on Valdez.
The first tenants should be moving into the Nook on Valdez—Oakland’s first micro dwelling—soon. Given the city’s housing crunch, it’s no surprise that micro-unit housing of buildings filled with tiny apartments of less then 300 square feet—about the size of a one-car garage—has arrived.
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Dublin City Council to place prefabricated units on Fishamble Street and in Coolock.
A vacant site in Dublin city centre, which was to be an owner-designed apartment block, is to be used for the city’s first modular apartment development for homeless families.
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Imagine having no place to live in one of the planet’s most expensive metropolitan areas. For many residents of San Francisco, this is a daily reality. Yet while labor and investment capital pours in, the region’s culture of technological “innovation” has failed to improve the livelihoods of our most vulnerable neighbors. Patrick Kennedy wants to change that.
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From June 22, 2016: San Francisco’s YIMBY movement is pushing the city to build its way out of the housing crisis.
San Francisco is one of the most expensive places to live in the country and has become the symbol of the nation’s housing crisis.
A booming jobs market and years of underdevelopment have led to skyrocketing real estate prices and rents in the region. In 2015, the Bay area added 64,000 jobs but built less than 5,000 housing units. The median home price is nowover the million dollar mark and an average one-bedroom apartment rents for more than $3,500 a month.
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AST WEEK, 461 Dean became the world’s tallest modular building. Designed by New York architecture firm SHoP, the Brooklyn residential tower consists of 363 pre-fab apartments that stack like Tetris blocks into a 32-story building.
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It’s sort of like staying inside a Swiss Army knife: In stylish new microhotels, architects deploy tech and minimalist design to fold a lot of amenities into small spaces. Consider the 150-square-foot rooms at the two Arlo hotels, which opened this fall in Manhattan.
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“…Small and inexpensive modular housing is one option… These ideas are all worth support. But they need to show results more quickly.
The civil disgrace of homelessness can’t be tolerated.”
San Francisco’s latest homeless head count shouldn’t surprise anyone who travels the streets, parks and sidewalks of the city. The number hasn’t budged over the past year, a dismal steady state of human misery.
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SEARCH FOR SOLUTIONS
More communities are focusing on providing their chronic homeless populations permanent, supportive residences. Experts say that’s the path to take to in order to put a roof over every citizen’s head.
Some are calling it the wave of the future when it comes to housing the homeless. Micropads are tiny pre-fab modules that can be stacked together into apartment buildings.
SAN FRANCISCO (KTVU) – Some are calling it the wave of the future when it comes to housing the homeless. Micropads are tiny pre-fab modules that can be stacked together into apartment buildings.
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Sometimes you have to see it to believe it. Planning Commissioners Kathryn Moore and Dennis Richards visited the MicroPAD on 9th and Mission Streets and came away “impressed.” At a recent public hearing, both commented on the design and quality of the unit and believe this is a viable approach to house San Francisco’s homeless population.
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A persistent shortage of construction workers across the U.S. is prompting some of the nation’s largest home builders to experiment with a model they once derided: factory production.
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A real estate developer wants to help end the street-living epidemic in San Francisco by converting shipping container-like modules into sleek new micro-apartments where the homeless can live.
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Local prefab developer, Panoramic Interests, revealed its CitySpaces MicroPAD on October 31 at 9th and Mission Streets in San Francisco. The furnished 160 square foot unit will be on display until November 15, marking the beginning of a tour to mobilize interest around the new product, which is designed for stacking into buildings geared for flexible living spaces that support homeless populations. With the Bay Area’s high building costs, Panoramic asserts that the off-site prefabrication assembly cuts construction costs by 40 percent, potentially expediting the creation of housing for those in need.
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Small Units Essential for Solving Homelessness
If you want to see how San Francisco can best reduce homelessness, go to 9th and Mission and tour the SF Micro-PAD. The brainchild of developer Patrick Kennedy, the Micro-Pad’s 160 square foot units could soon bring 1000 housing units to the city, with a third for the very poor.
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Several months ago, local developer Panoramic Interests introduced a creative solution to address San Francisco’s homelessness crisis. Their proposed MicroPAD is a very small housing unit that can be built quickly, affordably and at a scale that could make a real impact. For two weeks starting October 31, the public will have the opportunity to walk inside one of these homes and experience it themselves.
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A possible solution for San Francisco citizens without a place to call home
It’s a tiny moment of truth for developer Patrick Kennedy’s MicroPADs.
He touts his petite prefab apartments as an affordable solution to San Francisco’s homeless problem. But that only flies if the pads can impress both the city and public as a place where anyone might theoretically want to live.
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From Page 24
Construction unions used to be reliable supporters of development. Not anymore
Construction unions have traditionally been adbocates for new development, for an obvious reason: It keeps their members employed. That delicate alliance is now coming under threat.
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Nov 2016–Digital Version, pg. 94 http://www.modernluxury.com/san-francisco/digital-edition
Patrick Kennedy offers to give me a house. And I accept. He leads me to a far corner of his office suite on the ground floor of the shiny tower on Ninth and Mission that he completed in 2015 and that now serves largely as a high-rise student housing. And there sitting on a shelf is my house.
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Back in August we told you about developer Patrick Kennedy’s plan to build 200 tiny new homes in a DPW-owned parking lot in a matter of months.
Kennedy’s invention, the MicroPAD, is a modular studio apartment roughly the standard shipping container (with a bit more ceiling) that “snaps” together Lego-style with others to create a building supposedly in no time at all.
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City of Vancouver staff are considering fast-tracking permits for standardized, modular laneway homes as a way to help boost the city’s rental stock.
Such a move could speed up the development of backyard homes on the estimated 60,000 lots that can accommodate them in neighbourhoods across the city. While the entire city is zoned for laneway housing, just over 2,400 permits to build them have been issued.
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California will have to build about 3.5 million homes over the next eight years, more than triple its current pace of construction, simply to keep up with expected population growth and hold down housing costs to affordable levels. But how could the state actually do it?
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A temporary pavilion built on the roadway at Robson Square, where Robson Redux installations were previously located, showcases a prototype of the City of Vancouver’s first temporary modular housing project.
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Several months ago, local developer Panoramic Interests introduced a creative solution to address San Francisco’s homelessness crisis. Their proposed MicroPAD is a very small housing unit that can be built quickly, affordably and at a scale that could make a real impact. For two weeks starting October 31, the public will have the opportunity to walk inside one of these homes and experience it themselves.
What is the MicroPAD?
It stands for Prefabricated Affordable Dwelling.
Construction unions have traditionally been advocates for new development, for an obvious reason: It keeps their members employed.
That delicate alliance is now coming under threat. Angered by some developers’ attempts to use cheaper non-union labor, Bay Area construction unions have filed appeals challenging projects’ approvals and allied themselves with community groups who oppose the projects for different reasons.
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From Oct 3, 2016
Tents, wooden sheds and RVs do not provide the kind of stable and supportive housing in which an individual or family in homelessness can begin to deal with the issues in their lives.
LIKE most Seattleites, I am alternately frustrated, incredulous and dismayed by the number of homeless individuals I encounter every day while walking, driving or just living my life in Seattle.
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Off-the-peg homes could solve a shortage of houses and builder
A CAVERNOUS factory just outside Leeds may point to a shake-up of Britain’s construction industry. The building, which covers an area equivalent to seven football pitches, has just been kitted out by Legal and General Homes, a wing of the insurance and pensions giant. In the new year it will start producing pre-manufactured, or “modular”, houses.
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Developer Patrick Kennedy wants to build apartments for middle-class families near San Francisco’s Financial District, but he is struggling to win the city’s approval. The problem: in one spot the building’s courtyard is 5 feet too narrow.
Mr. Kennedy said his efforts constantly run up against such obstacles, which he said drive up the cost of construction and make it nearly impossible to build anything but luxury housing in one of the nation’s most expensive markets.
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Last week Richard Florida headlined an “Urban Lab” panel at the NYU Schack Institute of Real Estate. It was moderated by Sam Chandan, who is dean of the Shack Institute.
Here are 6 takeaways from the discussion, with a few of my own thoughts attached:
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It was a very different group of tent dwellers who set up camp Monday morning in front of City Hall.
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The seasoned micro-dweller challenges himself to downsize yet again.
In 2012, entrepreneur Graham Hill moved into a 420-square-foot SoHo studio that would act as his personal residence and a showcase for a movement. “I wanted to start a conversation about how doing more with less could improve our lives from an environmental, financial, and even emotional perspective,” he explains.
...MoreCities across America are facing a devastating housing affordability crisis. One obvious potential solution is micro-units. Adding density without affecting the skyline, they offer housing at a lower price point than is usually available in expensive areas.
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SAN JOSE — A newly signed law will allow San Jose to become the first California city to create tiny homes for the homeless by bypassing the state’s confining building codes.
City housing officials and advocates for the homeless call the new legislation a “game-changer” in the fight to solve one of the Silicon Valley’s most intractable problems.
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London’s latest micro flats meet the country’s minimum space requirements. Technically.
They’re built for one person. There’s only a shower, no bathtub allowed or they violate minimum size regulations. And if the concept works, its deep-pocketed New York backer may try to export the model.
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Creating supportive housing with a stackable, prefabricated building system is the most expedient and economical remedy to San Francisco’s homeless crisis. Yet the likelihood of getting these type of buildings built is in doubt. The reason: The city’s desire to house the homeless is often weaker than its willingness to deviate from standard building practices.
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The Obama administration is leaning on local governments to resist NIMBY rent-seeking and make it easier for the market to developers to come closer to meeting market demand for new housing. Politico reports:
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It is no secret that cities like San Francisco, New York and Washington, D.C., face challenges in the availability and cost of housing. But policymakers and economists have increasingly recognized both the role that certain inappropriate land use restrictions play in raising housing costs — not just in major cities but across the country — and the opportunity for modernizing these regulations to promote shared growth.
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Kositsky’s line may be the quintessential one in defining San Francisco’s radical and counter-productive politics. It isn’t enough that a project will provide hundreds of units for the homeless at half the cost; it also must solve various other societal issues unrelated to homelessness.
Anyone who has visited San Francisco, and stepped even a block off the beaten path, knows of its homeless problem. The city has an estimated 6,700 street people—the 2nd-highest per capita in the nation—and 1,500 of these are chronically homeless, often dwelling amid the drugs and violence of the Tenderloin district.
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What do you think about hundreds of new units of housing for the homeless built in just six months at no upfront cost to the city?
I think it is an idea worth exploring – but I need your help to break through the politics at City Hall.
Perhaps you saw the story in the Chronicle on Sunday. It outlined several plans to take a city property and use it to create modular micro homes dedicated to getting homeless people off the street. These units can be built in less time and at a lower cost than traditional housing.
From November 2008
Supportive housing is a type of affordable housing that provides on-site services to people who may need support to live independently. Residents may include formerly homeless individuals and families, people with HIV/AIDS or physical disabilities, young people aging out of foster care, ex-offenders, people with mental illness or individuals with a history of substance abuse.
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It’s not just difficult to get housing built in San Francisco. It’s even difficult to get homeless housing built in the city.
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San Francisco’s homelessness director wants them. A local developer is hot to build them, academics love them, and unions are open to the idea.
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“…Yet somehow I was unprepared for the scale and severity of homelessness in San Francisco.”
…Well-dressed tourists sharing the pavement with vaguely human forms inside cardboard boxes.
I’m confounded how to explain to my two children why wealthy society allows its most vulnerable citizens to languish on the streets.”
San Francisco — AFTER more than 27 years abroad, mostly as a foreign correspondent in Asia covering civil unrest and poverty, I wander the streets of this city, my new home, like an enchanted tourist.
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The U.S. population is projected to continue growing for decades to come, reaching 400 million circa 2050. Accommodating more people at current living standards will require many new homes, but how will cities deliver such housing? Must they continue expanding outward to provide enough housing, as they have done historically, or will densification within the existing footprint do the trick?
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If you watch cable television, you undoubtedly have seen a myriad of shows about tiny houses and small spaces. The tiny house movement is geared toward those who want to live a simple life without all the “stuff” accumulated in our consumer-driven society. But, can tiny houses and small spaces also be the solution to affordable living?
One San Francisco developer thinks it can by building “micro-unit” apartments.
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A proposed residential project in San Francisco’s South of Market wants to cut construction costs and pass along savings to tenants.
By building 200 “micro-units,” developer Panoramic Interests hopes to charge rents that are 30 percent below the city’s average, which was $3,590 per month for a one-bedroom in June, according to Zumper. The units would average 550 square feet.
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San Francisco housing activists and some city officials say a new state housing bill passed last week is a “developer giveaway.” But supporters say it will boost all of California’s affordable housing production, reflecting more tension between the city and Sacramento over housing policy.
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A tiny scrap of land might not catch your eye.
But to Japanese architect Yasuhiro Yamashita of Atelier Tekuto, there’s nothing more beautiful.
A veteran designer of kyosho jutaku — or micro homes — Yamashita has built more than 300 houses, each uniquely shaped and packed full of personality.
Solving the housing part of homelessness through the construction of modular, micro-housing is described in the above video by Patrick Kennedy, founder of Panoramic Interests. Filmed at Kennedy’s office, which itself is part of a micro-housing, multi-story complex that was profiled here, Kennedy talks about how to reduce costs through process improvement, modular construction and developing on under-utilized land. He points out that these lower costs do not have to sacrific quality and can actually enhance the overall end-product.
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From May 2014
The most admired companies of each age are often associated with a certain core competency. Ford popularized assembly line manufacturing in the 1910s. Toyota kicked off the lean revolution with its Toyota Production System in the postwar years. GE’s enthusiastic adoption of Six Sigma in the ’90s spread the mantra of quality. These capabilities are credited with helping tranSForm the respective industry of each company.
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Last week, Palo Alto planning commissioner Kate Vershov Downing stepped down, penning a now-famous letter to colleagues (posted on Medium) explaining that she was moving to Santa Cruz because she simply couldn’t afford Palo Alto anymore.
Downing, a 31-year-old lawyer who moved to Palo Alto from Sunnyvale five years ago (she’s originally from the East Coast by way of immigration from Russia), said she and her husband were tired of splitting a house with roommates to the tune of $6,500/month for their share. She also alleged that the city ignores the public’s demand for more housing.
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San Francisco’s single-room occupancy hotels house thousands of residents and provide a vital link in The City’s low-cost housing continuum — offering some stability to individuals and families that often have no other housing options.
San Francisco’s Department of Public Health last week released its report, “Improving the Health of Residents in SRO Hotels,” which included distressing statistics about the health risks associated with such buildings.
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Kate Downing was formerly a planning commissioner in the City of Palo Alto. She recently resigned from her position and, about about a day ago, she posted her resignation letter on Medium. It has since gone viral.
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PALO ALTO — You’re a well-paid professional. You work in tech. You’ve got it made.
On Wednesday, a planning commissioner here became the very public voice of the region’s frustrations over spiraling housing costs when she published her resignation letter to the city of Palo Alto.
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SAN FRANCISCO—California’s epic housing crisis is hurting more than lower- and middle-income working families struggling to find housing they can afford. It’s also threatening to derail landmark greenhouse gas reduction laws that for a decade have made California a global leader in the battle against climate change, according to a white paper released today by the Bay Area Council Economic Institute.
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Last week I was in the middle of packing and came across a well thumbed copy of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I don’t remember when I read the book, but it was way more than twenty years ago (and predates my professional involvement with cities). As a very belated tribute to the anniversary of her 100th birthday, I decided to dip back into that remarkable book. Here’s ten takeaways from the godmother of the American city.
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Imagine the smallest space in which you could possibly live. Now imagine something smaller.
Can you get by in just 160 square feet? The answer, as Berkeley based modular building developer Panoramic Interests will tell you, probably depends on what other options you have. And in the Bay Area, there aren’t too many.
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The city by the bay has the nation’s priciest real estate, and a battle is raging over whether tech wealth, population growth, or political will is to blame
All you need to know about San Francisco in 2016 was on display one recent Sunday at 83 McAllister Street, an office building turned into condominiums at the edge of the Tenderloin.
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The actress Linda Emond moved to New York in the mid-90s with few possessions and no idea where she wanted to drop anchor.
“My guess was that I would be doing theater, or that I’d want to be doing theater, so I wanted to be in Manhattan in a safe location where there was public transportation,” said Ms. Emond, 57,
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Encouraging developments that are car-free with micro-size dwelling units and use modular construction are three things that cities can do to make housing more affordable, according to Patrick Kennedy, founder of Panoramic Interests. With over 25 years developing projects Kennedy has experience in understanding the roadblocks to affordability.
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Yuba County created “tiny homes” for some of it’s homeless population. The county opened the doors on July 15, 2016. The house are a collaboration with the city and Habitat for Humanity.
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Supportive housing is just that: Housing plus support. Tenants have affordable apartments and easy access to whatever help they need to stay housed and healthy.
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Harrison Street in SoMa is the latest frontier for housing development in San Francisco. And it’s an unlikely location.
Home to five lanes of traffic zooming on and off the freeway, that part of Harrison Street has never offered a hospitable habitat for the investors and builders who have reshaped so much of South of Market.
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June 29th marked the beginning of the San Francisco Homeless Project, an effort where 70+ Bay Area media organizations are putting their attention on our city’s ongoing and tragic homeless situation. One of the biggest questions the project is posing is how do we as a city provide the housing necessary to effect real and lasting change for our chronically homeless citizens?
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How wealthy tourists have gentrified Jackson Hole, Wyoming, into a housing crisis
In March 2016, the family of 11-year-old Ventura Garcia Perez, otherwise known as “Vennie,” received an eviction letter. Born in Jackson, Wyoming, Vennie lives in the 56-unit Virginian Village Apartment complex with his parents, his four-year-old brother Dominic, and his dog Charlie. Throughout this summer, the owners of the Virginian are evictingseveral hundred tenants on a rolling timeline so the apartments can be remodeled and sold or rented at higher rates.
The presentations to the City Council at the workshop on housing on February 16 included a great deal of helpful data and many recommendations about how to achieve more housing to serve all income levels. In the Council discussion that followed, it was clear that all members agree there is a housing crisis that requires sustained effort and new approaches.
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Could San Francisco increase its stock of supportive housing by enough units to get all of the neediest homeless people off its streets in just two years?
Fixing San Francisco’s homelessness problem is possible.
It will require the addition of thousands of housing units for the hardest-core homeless people — the ones who wander the streets, screaming at the invisible, the ones who live in tents on sidewalks and shoot up in plain sight.
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Fifty years ago, the destitute figures who dotted America’s streets were called winos and hobos, and in San Francisco they mainly stuck to Third Street’s Skid Row.
Then, with the end of the Vietnam War, battle-shocked veterans began filling urban alleyways. The 1980s brought Reaganomics’ decimation of federal social and housing programs, and a cascade of the poor and mentally ill landed on the streets.
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One of my strange obsessions is watching TV shows about people building or buying tiny houses — generally 400 square feet or less.
These shows check back with the tiny-home owners shortly after they’ve moved in, when they are still infatuated with their adorable doll houses.
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Five years ago, I moved to San Francisco — right as the current startup boom kicked off.
Those five years saw a lot of change in the city, as tensions between longtime San Francisco residents and the tech industry hit a fever pitch.
It all traces its roots back to the San Francisco Bay Area’s housing crisis, where people are going to ridiculous lengths, including living in boats, vans, and cardboard boxes, just to make ends meet.
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Last week, the first tenants moved into the city’s first micro apartment development on East 27th Street. I did, too, for one night.
Tucked into a New York City Housing Authority site, on a spot between First and Second Avenues that was once a parking lot, and flanked by linden and honeylocust trees and a small plaza lined with park benches, the nine-story building, with 55 apartments between 260 and 360 square feet, is an elegant design by nArchitects, and built by Monadnock Development and the Lower East Side People’s Mutual Housing Association.
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Construction began last week of modular micro apartments designed to help solve student housing issues in Berlin, Germany.
The concept, developed by Arup, Berlinovo Immobilien and others, was created because of the high demand for affordable student housing in Berlin.
The first construction project on Storkower Straße in the district of Lichtenberg is part of a plan that aims to build a total of 2,500 apartments by 2020.
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I don’t know anything about Eric Fischer except that he’s a freaking hero.
Much like everyone else who has recently attempted to live in San Francisco, Fischer is very interested in housing costs. However, unlike every other such person, Fischer decided to contribute to this conversation by doubling the depth of modern historical data about them.
How often are you going to run into someone with whom you can do something creative or interesting?
Who was right, Jane Jacobs or Alfred Marshall and Michael Porter? The renowened urbanist, Jacobs argued for decades of the importance of density and diversity of economic actors in cities as a primary driver of innovation. Economists Marshall and Porter, on the other hand, have argued that clustering of similar industries in industrial parks and regions is the best way to stimulate innovation, job growth, and economic development.
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At LifeEdited, we love tiny houses! They are like architectural and existential reduction sauce. Every space and object that isn’t utterly essential, that isn’t something you absolutely need, is boiled away. They are great examples of how humans can live simpler, lower impact lives. Yet tiny houses have some big problems, ones that are often overlooked amidst the hype, and it’s not just their lack of legality.
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FROM 7-1-2014
Many tiny house designs fetishize smallness while missing what makes micro-housing so useful: density.
As much as we love gorgeous small-scale architecture, not all micro-housing is created equal. Over at City Lab, Kriston Capps argues that tiny houses plopped onto huge lots in the middle of nowhere miss the entire point of micro-housing: to provide more options for affordable housing, especially in crowded, expensive cities.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The U.S. has two big housing affordability problems. They’re related — and solving the first would go some way toward solving the second. But they’re not the same, and it’s important to understand that.
The first problem is that some coastal metropolitan areas in the U.S. are generating lots of good jobs but aren’t building enough housing to keep up with employment growth.
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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.
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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]
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40-square-foot “room” goes for $400 a month
Bay Area artist Peter Berkowitz couldn’t afford a place in San Francisco. His solution was “the pod,” a sleeper box that’s roughly eight feet long, five feet wide, and four feet tall. It’s made out of plywood and neatly installed in the corner of his roommate’s living room, a space he’s now paying $400 a month to rent. (Bertkowitz lists his total housing expenses as $508 a month, factoring in the $1,300 he spent building it.)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A modular building in the Bronx houses 62 people, some formerly homeless
When Bronx residents watched a 300-foot crane lower 90,000-pound blue- and red-accented modules onto a former used-car lot, the construction process reminded them of a familiar childhood toy.
So the locals dubbed it the Lego Building.
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For decades, San Francisco and other high-cost California cities have added fewer homes than needed to accommodate all the people who want to live in them. Adding fuel to the fire, San Francisco has added over 50,000 jobs in the last four years and is growing by approximately 10,000 new residents per year. With statistics like those, even the city’s current housing “boom” of approximately 3,500 units per year in 2014 and 2015 (compared to an average of 1,750 per year over the prior twenty) can’t go far in solving the crisis.
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People around the world who watch the Super Bowl on television Sunday will surely see plenty of beauty shots of San Francisco, but football fans who visit and venture beyond the city’s spruced-up core will find some views that aren’t so beautiful.
Scores of tents line Division Street under the freeway, just one of many camps across the city. Human feces and needles litter sidewalks. Deranged people scream and threaten pedestrians in broad daylight. One man believed to be homeless allegedly slashed a California Highway Patrol officer in the throat near an encampment last week.
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I thought Pocket’s Two Bedroom Competition would make a nice book-end to my earlier post “Making Apartments Work Harder: the 3rd Bedroom Challenge“.
We can learn a lot from London, and the innovative companies tackling the city’s housing affordability and supply challenges. For almost 3 years, I’ve been leading the design and development of mixed-use housing projects in the UK, and I’ve come to appreciate how deep and systemic the housing supply issue is here.
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San Francisco’s housing crisis is now legendary: the average rent for a 2 bedroom studio is $5000. To add housing stock fast, one developer has created the city’s first micro-apartment high rise (with units as small as 254 square feet).
Patrick Kennedy has been crusading for increased urban density for yeras, when I first met him in 2011, he was surprised there weren’t more people focused on the same goal. “San Francisco’s an interesting city: 42% of the population lives alone, much higher than any other American city, and yet there’s very little stuff that addresses the needs of a single person, especially something that can be affordable to a single person.”
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Gentrification fuels growth in once-depressed districts, adding to pressure on shelters
SAN FRANCISCO—The technology boom has rapidly gentrified some neighborhoods here, pushing wealthy buyers and renters into once-gritty areas and generating friction over the city’s entrenched homeless population. Now, tension is mounting as the Bay Area prepares to host Super Bowl 50 next month, bringing an estimated one million football fans to parts of the city where the unsheltered often congregate and sleep.
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There is something compelling and exciting about cities that makes many of us love (and some of us dread) them. They are full of bright attractions, intriguing strangers and endless, unimaginable possibilities. Yet despite a great migration towards city living in the modern era, we haven’t quite got cities figured out. Some parts of them are full of delightful surprises, and others are dreadfully boring; or worse, dangerous. One of the most instrumental people in understanding how urban areas work was a woman who spent her life explaining just how complex and vital cities really are.
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The Martin Prosperity Institute here in Toronto recently published a new report that looks at worldwide venture capital investment by city. The report is called Rise of the Global Startup City.
The data is from 2012, because that’s what was available from Thomson Reuters, so keep in mind that there might be some variation in the rankings if we were to look at more recent data. Some of the cities sit fairly close.
Nonetheless, here are a few of the broader takeaways (from the report page):
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Tech companies and workers are vilified while longtime homeowners who fight high-density growth continue to profit from rising rents and property values.
A recent This American Life episode, “Poetry of Propaganda,” describes a San Francisco after-school program’s production of an original musical starring young children. “I don’t know what I expected,” said the writer Jon Mooallem, whose daughter played a tiny part, “but it wasn’t this. Act One opened on a sinister tech-executive meeting with a corrupt mayor and San Francisco’s board of supervisors.”
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NEW YORK (AP) — The apartments in a new Manhattan building boast little balconies, tall ceilings, dishwashers and storage space. All in 360 square feet or less.
It’s micro-living in the nation’s biggest city, and New Yorkers could be seeing more of it. Planning officials are proposing to end a limit on how small apartments can be, opening the door for more “micro-apartments” that advocates see as affordable adaptations to a growing population of single people. Critics fear a turn back toward the city’s tenement past and question whether less space will really mean less expensive.
Here in San Francisco, passions run high. But sometimes it’s hard to match the mood of anger and fear to the scale of the real effects on residents or to match the proposed solutions to the real issues, which makes me think that there are subtexts and currents below the surface.
When I served on the San Francisco Planning Commission, I was often puzzled by the angry, passionate objection to minor changes. Often, I realized, it had little to do with the item before us, which was sometimes just the trigger for people’s fears or other emotions.
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It’s like Yoda once said: “Size matters not.”
Put aside for the moment the size of the units in Carmel Place, a new multifamily housing development that just went up in New York City. Here are a few numbers that matter more than the square footage: Carmel Place is a nine-story development that includes 55 units. Of those, 33 units are designated market-rate; eight of the 22 units slotted for affordable housing are reserved for very-low-income renters.
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The pronounced swing back towards urban living, and the renewed fervor for downtown development, has only made our cities more dense, making the search for cheap housing that much more challenging. While mayors across the U.S. have called for more affordable housing (in New York, both Bloomberg and De Blasio have said it was imperative the city offer more low-rent options), many developers have decided the solution to density and affordability is downsizing and designing smaller units.
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Berkeley’s zoning board approved two largely car-free buildings Thursday set to add 92 new residential units to the city’s housing stock.
Both of the projects — 70 units on Telegraph Avenue and 22 units on Shattuck Avenue — were proposed by Patrick Kennedy’s Berkeley-based Panoramic Interests.
The Telegraph project, dubbed The Nexus, is set to take the place of a 1-story office building where the nationally recognized Center for Independent Living got its start.
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Utah has housed nearly all of its chronically homeless people — those who have a disabling condition, and who have been homeless for more than a year, or four times in the past three years. These days, there are fewer than 200.
But chronic homelessness is just a small part of a major problem.
An additional 14,000 people in Utah experienced homelessness this year. As in many places around the country, housing prices are rising, forcing people onto the street and into shelters.
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There’s been a lot of recent hype about New York City’s Carmel Place (aka “My Micro”). Rightfully so. It is the city’s first purpose built micro-apartment building after all. But if you have ever lived in or visited a typical NYC apartment, you know New Yorkers are no strangers to micro living.
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When LifeEdited began several years ago, the micro housing conversation was happening but primarily in small pockets–the odd tiny house in northern California, Gary Chang’s tranSForming Hong Kong apartment and so. But in the last few years, spurred by things like the adAPT NYC competition and, we like to think, our own efforts, the micro-housing movement has grown considerably and become far more mainstream.
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Nearly three years after winning a competition to design a residential building with units smaller than 400 square feet, Carmel Place is on the verge of completion.
Located in Manhattan’s Kips Bay neighborhood, the building is the first micro-apartment development in New York City. Its 55 units range between 265 and 360 square feet, and market-rate units cost between $2,650 and $3,150 a month.
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If you watch enough zoning hearings, the testimony begins to sound pretty repetitive. That novel argument you’re making? The Council members have heard it a million times before. Here are 9 of the things we hear most often at zoning hearings, illustrated by cats.
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A growing number of Bay Area multifamily developments are cutting back on parking spaces. It’s already being done in some Bay Area cities and elsewhere, such as Washington DC, as transit-oriented development, car-sharing and more walkable communities gain in popularity. We caught up with Panoramic Interests’ Patrick Kennedy to talk about the hot trend.
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The 30,000-pound boxes being delivered by a fleet of flatbed trucks to the Bayview don’t look like much. But if you ask Mayor Ed Lee, they just might be a solution to the city’s housing crisis.
On Thursday morning, Lee stood next to a construction trailer at 5830 Third St., talking to developer Rick Holliday and contractor Larry Pace about the 136-unit apartment complex going up there, the biggest modular housing development ever erected in San Francisco.
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We just got our hands on some exclusive renderings of a brand-new micro-unit project landing in SoMa—which is why we are also super excited to host our Bay Area Multifamily Heatin’ Up event Oct. 15 at Hotel Kabuki, starting at 7:30am.
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Tiny living: It’s the future in more and more cities where space is at a premium and residents are willing to pay for a prime location. These eight micro unit developments are great examples of where the market’s heading.
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Last week, twenty-five SF Housing Action Coalition (SFHAC) members walked through the City’s newest micro-units at The Panoramic during a tour led by the project’s developer, Patrick Kennedy of Panoramic Interests. The building at the corner of 9th and Mission Streets includes 160 micro-homes, with studios as compact as 274 square feet and three-bedroom suits around 630 square feet. With all of the units fully leased to the California College of the Arts (CCA) and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, we’ll soon see these efficient homes put to the test.
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Change hits cities in all sorts of ways, from blunt skyline changes to brash coats of paint. This stylized upgrade of a nondescript post-1906 corner building appeared in late May, commissioned by the bar inside that features such cocktails as Birds of Babylon. Exuberant yet dense, it’s a head-turning contrast both to the tawdrier aspects of this stretch of Mission Street and such transition signals as the 11-story box opening next door that will house several hundred college students.
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With his venture Cocoon9, Christopher Burch — the man behind the now-shuttered clothing brand C. Wonder and the former husband of the fashion designer Tory Burch — hopes to prove that small, prefabricated spaces can be luxurious and perfect for the Hamptons.
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The city’s devastating affordability crisis has an unlikely villain—its famed progressive politics.
I moved to San Francisco for its radical politics. Lots of people did, for generations. Maybe it was like moving to Los Angeles if you wanted to be a movie star: If you wanted to be part of the grand project of reconstructing the American Left in the petri dish of a single city, San Francisco beckoned.
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After hours of public comment and discussion Thursday, Berkeley’s Zoning Adjustments Board unanimously approved an environmental impact report for a proposed six-story building on Telegraph Avenue.
The mixed-used project is planned to be built at 2539 Telegraph Ave. at a location that formerly housed the Center for Independent Living, or CIL, an organization that provides disability services to residents of the city and surrounding areas.
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It’s been more than two years since nARCHITECTS’ My Micro NY apartment design won the adAPT NYC competition and now the micro-dwellings have begun to rise. The project, a collaboration between the DUMBO-based architecture firm and Monadnock Development, was selected as the winner of the 2013 call to develop innovative housing models for the city’s growing population of smaller households, and consists of 65 prefabricated modules
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Micro-Living: Supplying an affordable yet distinctive micro-living product, which trades private space for public amenities and infrastructure
According to the United Nations 2014 report ‘World Urbanization Prospects’, by 2050, the global population expected to live in cities will rise to 6.33 billion, or 66 per cent of the
world’s total forecast population of 9.6 billion.
Half the world today lives in cities — and, according to the United Nations, nearly 70 percent of the world will live in cities by 2050. At a recent National Association of City Transportation Officials conference in San Francisco, former Massachusetts Secretary of Transportation Richard Davey even went as far as to label this the “Century of the City.” Data shows that younger generations are leading this urban migration.
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WHEN most people picture their dream home it’s hard to go past the six bedroom McMansion with seven bathrooms, home cinema and an acre of benchspace in the kitchen.
While it’s easy to get caught up in the cycle of wanting that bigger place, with the spare bedroom, bigger yard, study or airy dining area, an increasing number of people are waking up to the fact that instead of enjoying the extra space, having more room often means you just buy more stuff to fill it up.
And this clutter is not making people happier.
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Architect Michael Chen has one of the most impressive portfolios of small apartment projects in the United States, if not the world. “Although we [MCKA, Chen’s firm] work at a broad range of scales, we are fascinated by the design of small spaces because they demand inventiveness,” Chen wrote to us in an email. “We love taking on a complicated and difficult problem with the intent of creating solutions that are thoughtful, beautiful and deceptively simple.” His latest project, dubbed the “5 to 1 Apartment,” is a beautiful representation of his love of tranSForming the complex to simple. It is also, to my mind, his finest work to date.
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Patrick Kennedy of Panoramic Interests is best known for developing teensy but livable micro-units. However, his newest proposal in San Francisco isn’t technically for his signature micro-studios, but instead for very small one-bedrooms and two-bedrooms whose diminutive size is meant to make them affordable by design—and thus cheaper than the average SoMa apartment. Panoramic just submitted a Preliminary Project Assessment (PPA) to SF Planning for a new building at SoMa’s 333 12th Street.
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When new billion-dollar companies known as “unicorns” lap up equity funding, they’re usually on the hunt for big chunks of office space.
So it’s no surprise that San Francisco’s email-slaying startup Slack – which reportedly got a fresh $2 billion valuation Monday – is in the market for a sizeable 50,000 to 75,000 square feet of space, market watchers say.
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Californians already know how expensive housing is in our state. But a new report from the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office makes it clear that as a state, this ever-growing bill is one we simply can’t afford to keep paying.
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While tiny houses, micro-apartments and even tranSForming furniture may seem like recent phenomenon, the truth is quite the contrary: it’s big homes, excess space and stuff that are the new thing. People have been living in dense areas, in tight quarters with little stuff for eons. Nowhere is this more evident than in Manhattan. As strange as it sounds, there were over 600,000 more Manhattanites in 1910 than there were in 2013, 2.3M and 1.6M respectively. A recent piece in Curbed gives an account of the island’s various schemes to pack more people onto its 34 square miles.
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The last time that we checked in on the under-construction micro-units at the Panoramic, the 11-story building taking shape in SoMa, they were just starting to come together. In December, as you may recall, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music leased the building’s top five floors. The California College of Arts had already taken out the bottom six, meaning that all of the building’s 160 units will go to students. Panoramic developer Patrick Kennedy, who doesn’t usually like to hear micro-apartments compared to dorm rooms, has ended up seeing both of his micro-unit projects in San Francisco—38 Harriet as well as the Panoramic—become student housing.
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CHATTANOOGA, Tenn.—A push to live in smaller spaces is reaching the nation’s smaller cities.
When Kelly Lunt moved here from the San Francisco area in November, she rented a 550-square-foot one-bedroom apartment in the heart of this city’s downtown. She pays $900 a month with all utilities and Wi-Fi included.
The 29-year-old, who is a project manager for a nonprofit that helps tech businesses, is even considering downsizing—to a $685-a-month, 375-square-foot studio in the same building.
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New York, San Francisco, Vancouver and, to a lesser extent, Seattle, DC, Boston and LA are logical places for micro-housing. These cities are very or fairly dense, they have high property values in many spots and have infrastructures that support micro-housing–i.e. decent public transportation systems, strong economies, walkable neighborhoods, etc (yes, LA might be a stretch).
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What does it take to be able to live in a minuscule apartment? A penchant for throwing things away helps, as do friends with carpentry skills and a healthy dose of patience. Friendless and lacking diligence? Never fear. There are plenty of small space hacks that money can buy to make your adorable 100-square-foot house box in Cobble Hill a home. Come, learn the secrets to living in a microdwelling.
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New Yorkers have always scrambled for space. They’ve crammed into cellars, rookeries, and wooden shacks; hung rows of hammocks in seven-cent lodging houses; and huddled under low attic roofs. Now, with micro-apartments rising on East 27th Street, it seems like people are as desperate as ever for a foothold.
Like many apartments in the city, the new units may be derided as closet-sized. Starting at 250 square feet, the studios are indeed smaller than the zoning code usually allows.
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As we are all well aware, housing is the Bay Area’s burning topic of the day. The housing shortage is reported by local and national news, and you can’t walk down the street or ride on BART without overhearing multiple people discussing how the housing crisis is affecting them. How the Bay Area will house everyone is a serious question. SFHAC, in conjunction with SPUR and AIA San Francisco, assembled this panel to consider if and how group housing can play a part.
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Every morning, the first thing Katherine Qiu had to do was turn her bed back into a couch. It was May of 2009, and Qiu, then a 25-year-old graduate student in MIT’s real estate development program, was living in a prototype micro-unit designed by the Berkeley-based developer Patrick Kennedy.
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Micro-Apartments, Tiny Homes Prefabricated in Brooklyn
For most single New Yorkers, the tyranny of living in a small space, or worse, a shared space, is all too familiar.
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The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones VentureSource are tracking venture-backed private companies valued at $1 billion or more. See how the club has expanded since the project began in January 2014 and select companies to learn more about each.
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In 2010 I moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco and thought I had to bring my car with me.
LA, as anyone who’s ever heard anyone say anything about LA knows, is a car city. If you’re going anywhere, you’re going in your car.
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Connect Homes’ cofounder argues for a new approach to modular home building.
I’m an architect, and for many reasons—quality, availability, efficiency, sustainability and aesthetics—I think residential architecture should be produced more like the industrial design typically found on Core77. Most important, if houses were designed, manufactured and distributed more like products, good design would be far more affordable and many more people could build their dream home.
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Groceries, sushi, pizza, wine, tacos, Blue Bottle, and anything else you could want.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Twitter building has arrived on the culinary scene. Right on schedule, The Market, the first of the many dining projects scheduled for the massive former SF Furniture Mart at 10th and Market, has made its debut, offering a dizzying array of groceries, takeout food, and other deliciousness in a project that its owners, Bruce Slesinger & Tom Collom (Small Foods), Chris Foley, and Richard Hoff (Oakville Grocery, Napa Farms Market) are dubbing Northern California’s answer to Eataly.
Seana O’Shaughnessy has lived in the Bay Area for 19 years — nearly half her life. Yet in the next few months,O’Shaughnessy, 41, and her husband will pack up and leave Redwood City for Chico in time for her daughter to start kindergarten in the fall. It breaks her heart, but O’Shaughnessy believes she has no choice.
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The Urban Land Institute Multifamily Housing Councils were awarded a ULI
Foundation research grant in fall 2013 to evaluate from multiple perspectives
the market performance and market acceptance of micro and small units.
As real estate values skyrocket, young professionals who want to live in the heart of big cities on a budget are increasingly drawn to micro apartments that provide them with a minimum of private space as an alternative to sharing. Living small is nothing new. The poor have always endured cramped quarters—from primitive huts to tenements or trailers—and the homeless are grateful for a modest room in an SRO. Le Corbusier and his wife spent many summers in their 12-foot-square cabin in Roquebrune.
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With the construction of Panoramic Interest’s 11-story building rising on the southwest corner of Mission and 9th Streets nearing completion, a building which includes a total of 160 market-rate units, of which 120 are “micro-units” as small as 274 square feet in size, it’s time to unveil the public art which will adorn the south façade of the building as rendered above.
From Ken Kalman, the San Francisco-based sculptor who holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and has been commissioned for the installation:
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Thirty-three architectural firms entered a competition initiated by Mayor Bloomberg for 300-square-foot apartments in New York, and it’s likely that his successor will push even harder to foster innovative housing solutions. In San Francisco, the city authorities are part of the problem. In 2012, they revised their minimum space requirements to permit apartments as small as 220 square feet, but cautiously capped their number at 375. Panoramic Interests, a Berkeley-based developer, has already demonstrated their viability.
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Why do people pay so much to live in San Francisco?” a writer for San Francisco Magazine recently asked me. My answer: Because it’s worth it. San Francisco is one of the most innovative and creative places on the planet.
But the very forces that are making San Francisco boom are also dividing it. While techies and knowledge workers make enough extra in salary and income to afford it, the city’s working and middle classes fall further behind, accelerating a dual migration in which the affluent are pouring into the city while longtime residents and lower-paid workers are being pushed out.
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To celebrate the topping off of its 12th floor, the gang behind the Panoramic project threw a party Friday afternoon. We zipped up to the roof with Panoramic Interests’ Patrick Kennedy, the developer behind the micro-housing project delivering at the corner of 9th and Mission next June. The project will contain 120 microstudios and 40 microsuites, or two and three-bedroom apartments.
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For those who can afford to live in San Francisco, it can be a gloriously dense network of professional opportunities, friends and artisanal edibles and goods. For those who are on the outside, it seems ridiculously unattainable – an image not helped by extreme rental listings (case in point: For the privilege of crashing in a Nob Hill living room, the renter was expected to pay a monthly rent of $900 as well as contribute hours of Web programming).
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Jourdan Lawlor bought her tiny apartment on West 12th Street, in a quaintformer dormitory for Hudson River dockworkers, in 2011—three weeks before she met Tobin Ludwig. The director of sales development at The Daily Meal, she was tired of renting and decided to buy, scouring the city for a downtown apartment under $300,000 before settling on this prewar option, a high-ceilinged ground-floor studio that clocks in at a diminutive 242 square feet. That includes closets, cabinets, and a 29-square-foot storage nook above the bathroom door.
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A major migration is under way, with technology companies large and small setting up shop in San Francisco and bypassing the historic heart of the tech industry.
SAN FRANCISCO — From the sixth-floor boardroom where Zendesk holds its most important meetings, CEO Mikkel Svane has a unique view of San Francisco. It’s not the iconic snapshot of the city — no Golden Gate Bridge or Transamerica Pyramid.
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As a New Yorker, burdened as I am with our stereotypical New York-centricity, it kinda pains me to admit that Seattle is America’s micro-apartment capital. Seattle’s micro-apartment’s might lack the flash of NYC’s adAPT pilot program or the innovation behind Panoramic Interests‘ San Francisco develops.
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Most cities would die for the problems San Francisco is having. But with so many techies flooding the city, the cost of renting or buying a place to live is soaring.
SAN FRANCISCO — Two years and 18 bids after they first tried to find a place to live in San Francisco, Julia Knittel and her fiance Rasheq Zarif finally nabbed an apartment.
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Real estate developer Patrick Kennedy prefers minimalism and efficiency. When he ends a phone conversation, he says, “Thanks, goodbye,” then hangs up. HIs email subject lines contain actual message-no need to waste time opening the email. And his hobby? Ultra-lightweight backpacking, where you strip down to the absolute minimum of what you carry.
As a developer and proponent of urban microapartments with his Berkeley-based company, Panoramic Interests, Kennedy is well aware that his hobby is a bit of a busman’s holiday version of his job.
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Prefab technology is revolutionizing the way we build our homes, one stackable Lego-like module at a time. Australian construction company Hickory Group recently completed one such example with the One9, a nine-story apartment tower that was installed in just five days. Built from 36 prefab modules, the One9 project also includes numerous environmentally sustainable features such as a gray water recycling system and solar hot water panels.
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Over the past five years, 1,400 new housing units have opened on Mission Street between Fifth Street and South Van Ness Avenue, including 800 studio apartments that landlord Angelo Sangiacomo built between Seventh and Eighth streets.
And there are a lot more coming.
On Mission between Eighth Street and around 10th Street, contractors are pouring floors on three mid-rise residential towers, construction that will bring an additional 500 units to the corridor by the end of 2015.
At 1400 Mission St., Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corp. is building 190 affordable family units. Across the street, at 1415 Mission St., Martin Building Co. is working on 126 apartments, while a block to the east at 1321 Mission St., Berkeley developer Patrick Kennedy is well under way on 160 micro-studios and “micro-suites,” half of which will provide housing for students from the California College of the Arts.
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A while ago we checked out San Francisco’s SMARTSPACE Harriet (i.e. the first smartest space in San Francisco), a four story, 23-unit building made up of prefab micro-apartments. SMARTSPACE Harriet was and is significant as it, along with Vancouver’s Micro Lofts, was one of the first true micro-apartment buildings in the modern sense of the term. The vigorously designed 295 sq ft apartments employed numerous tranSForming elements that made them perform like much larger spaces. The inclusion of things like a building car-share, communal spaces and solar hot water made them all the sweeter. Now (well, for a while actually) SMARTSPACE developer Panoramic Interests is building on its initial project. “The Panoramic” is a 160 unit, 11-story building going up in San Francisco’s SoMa District and it represents a lot of big ideas in small building and living.
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Micro housing developer Patrick Kennedy is on a roll (and not just because of his treadmill desk, below). His latest project in Berkeley, Calif. proves thetiny living arrangement is here to stay in the US.
San Francisco is the trendsetter, with Patrick’s firm (Berkeley-based Panoramic Interests) delivering the country’s first prefab micro housing project in SoMa last year: 23 units less than 300 SF each, gobbled up in a flash.
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Millennials are the social generation, both online and in-person. As the founders of the social media movement, they’re never more than a few clicks away from friends and family. And offline, they prefer to live in dense, diverse urban villages where social interaction is just outside their front doors.
Breaking from previous generations’ ideals, this group’s “American Dream” is transitioning from the white picket fence in the suburbs to the historic brownstone stoop in the heart of the city. And their dreams have the power to affect cities and towns across the U.S. According to Nielsen’s recent Millennials – Breaking the Myths report, those aged 18-36 are 77 million strong, or 24 percent of the population—the same as Baby Boomers (between 49-67 years old). As Millennials continue to come of age and control an increasing share of the economy, understanding how their diversity and values play into their lifestyle and purchasing preferences will be essential to appeal to this generation of consumers.
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In a previous blog, we introduced the micro-apartment trend and discussed whether it was the “real thing” or the latest fad in city living. The micro-apartments, or micro-units, as they’re sometimes called, average around 500 square feet or less and are geared toward young, single folks in urban locales.
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The Santa Clara Valley was some of the most valuable agricultural land in the entire world, but it was paved over to create today’s Silicon Valley. This was simply the result of bad planning and layers of leadership failure — nobody thinks farms literally needed to be destroyed to create the technology industry’s success.
Today, the tech industry is apparently on track to destroy one of the world’s most valuable cultural treasures, San Francisco, by pushing out the diverse people who have helped create it. At least that’s the story you’ve read in hundreds of articles lately.
It doesn’t have to be this way. But everyone who lives in the Bay Area today needs to accept responsibility for making changes where they live so that everyone who wants to be here, can.
The alternative — inaction and self-absorption — very well could create the cynical elite paradise and middle-class dystopia that many fear. I’ve spent time looking into the city’s historical housing and development policies. With the protests escalating again, I am pretty tired of seeing the city’s young and disenfranchised fight each other amid an extreme housing shortage created by 30 to 40 years of NIMBYism (or “Not-In-My-Backyard-ism”) from the old wealth of the city and down from the peninsula suburbs.
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It’s boom time in San Francisco, and it seems as though there’s more construction happening now than ever before. All over town, construction crews are busy building homes, hospitals and office towers to accommodate an impressive influx of new residents and businesses. Last Summer, Curbed mapped forty of San Francisco’s most prominent development projects. Since then, ground has been broken on a slew of hotly-anticipated towers, while construction has wrapped up on some staples from the old list. As such, it’s high time for a map update. See a project that deserves to be on the list, but hasn’t been featured? Drop us a line, or let us know in the comments. Here now, without further ado, an updated map of SF’s forty most notable active development sites.
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Hard hats and construction trucks may become a familiar sight to Berkeley residents within the next few years as Downtown Berkeley experiences a surge in housing developments.
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N.B.: The August 15, 2001 edition of the Berkeley Daily Planet included a letter to the editor describing the Gaia Building as “…a monstrous, Stalinist-style monument to civic corruption.”
PCK
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Even a cursory review of today’s real estate market reveals that there’s a lack of choice for certain households in the American West. If you’re on the market for an apartment without parking, or would like to build a “granny flat” for an aging parent, or desire to live in a tiny apartment in a hip neighborhood, you’re probably out of luck. Unfortunately, today’s building codes and land use regulations frequently prevent these types of moderately-priced housing options from being developed. In the “new normal” American economy, with limited resources at every level of government, the affordability crisis will only deepen if we don’t change regulations that prohibit sensible development.
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Builder Patrick Kennedy had landed a big construction loan for small pads in Central SoMa.
With half of the 11-story, 160-unit rental building at 1321 Mission St pre-leased to the California College of the Arts,Jones Lang LaSalle capital markets team has lined up a $50 million construction loan on the deal.
Washington Capital provided the first mortgage with TDA Capital Management providing the mezzanine financing. Managing Director John Manning and Senior Vice President Alex Witt led the JLL team on the transaction.
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The incredible, escalating prices for apartments in San Francisco, the South Bay and East Bay edged down or flattened in the final three months of 2013 – but don’t get too excited.
The slight slump is a typical seasonal slowdown. After a year of rocket-like gains, asking rents remain sky-high compared with just a year ago.
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My city, San Francisco, is in the midst of an affordability crisis. People here are angry and afraid. The skyrocketing cost of housing comes up in seemingly every conversation and dominates local news and local politics.
The recent piece on San Francisco’s housing crisis I wrote for The Atlantic Cities seemed to hit a nerve. But it was mostly devoted to describing how the city got to be a place with the highest housing costs in the country. Now, I want to turn to what we can actually do about it.
We face a complex problem. It has roots in income inequality, a national issue, as well as regional anti-growth attitudes that extend well beyond the city boundaries. But at the city level, there are a surprising number of things we can definitely do.
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We’ve talked a lot about the merits of the SRO (single room occupancy). Throughout the 20th Century, the once-common, small and spartan apartments provided affordable urban dwellings for people looking for basic living accommodations. Unfortunately, in the latter part of the century, they became synonymous with drugs and graft. As neighborhoods gentrified, the unseemly SROs were excised from most cityscapes. Their demise left a gap in urban dwelling typology: i.e. the affordable crash pad. A nearly complete project in New York City is bringing back the SRO, albeit from decidedly 21st century perspective.
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160 micro-units are officially under construction in Mid-Market now that the single-story furniture store at the corner of 9th and Mission streets has been cleared away. Dubbed Smartspace Mission, the building will strategically maneuver the 160 units into an 11-floor frame that will also include nearly 3,400 sq. ft. of ground floor retail and parking for 240 bicycles. A rooftop garden will satiSFy the open space requirements and a snazzy lobby is planned. The building will be constructed to energy-efficient standards using all Energy Star appliances, sustainable building materials, storm-water management systems, and low-flow plumbing fixtures. The building is expected ready for occupancy late next year.
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SAN FRANCISCO — The tech sector is, increasingly, embracing the language of urban planning — town hall, public square, civic hackathons, community engagement. So why are tech companies such bad urbanists?
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Build Inc. is teaming up with EmbassySF to create the next frontier in co-living in the South of Market.
While the city characterizes the proposed 1532 Harrison St. as a “group home,” the project is more of a dense, urban iteration on the communes of the 1960s and 1970s, but with institutional backing and professional management.
The property would be broken up into 28 “houses” with common kitchens, dining areas, living rooms, and outside space. The 235 private spaces — suites — would range from 327 square feet to 409 square feet. These would have bathrooms, sinks, two-burner stoves, and private balconies. The three buildings would be joined by a series of sky bridges and would be separated by two 25-foot mid-block alleys. The project could have up to 470 individual beds.
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GLANCING at his phone a few years ago, Marty Castleberg noticed that he had dialled 911 more than almost any other number. Little wonder; he lived in San Francisco’s crime-ridden mid-Market area. His apartment block, a former office complex, had accepted tenants since the tech boom of the late 1990s. It did not meet the city’s strict residential codes (not enough windows), but Mr Castleberg could live in the city centre for a pittance.
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The proliferation of new apartment complexes in San Francisco is proving to be a bonanza for corporate housing groups that help fast-growing tech firms find temporary digs for a wide variety of new hires, consultants and interns.
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On a smug November Monday—crisp, sunny, 68 degrees in San Francisco—I went kayaking. The bay shimmered as my paddle split the water, and I felt lucky, light, even a little artistic. Such athletic transcendence had nothing to do with me, though. It was my ride: a prototype origami kayak. Yup, origami. It isn’t just for paper swans any more.
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While it was originally reported that Build Inc. was planning to build around 120 rental units on the half-acre SoMa parking lot which fronts 12th, Norfolk and Harrison Streets, plans for the construction of three six-story buildings with 235 group housing suites and up to 470 individual beds, common living areas and shared kitchens have been drafted for the 1532 Harrison Street site.
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Unless an appeal is filed within the next few hours, the permit to demolish the one-story building on the southwest corner of Mission and Ninth will be issued, clearing the way for San Francisco’s first micro-unit building to rise and be ready for occupancy in 2015.
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The year is winding down, so it’s time to take stock of where America is heading.
Last year’s inaugural U.S. 20 list featured things like the end of retail, the revival of manufacturing and the shale revolution.
Believe it or not, it wasn’t difficult at all to come up with 20 brand new trends this year that will dominate headlines over the next decade.
It’s not that all of last year’s forces have already dissipated.
But new movements have already sprung up.
The 2013 list includes two new geographic centers of the American economy, evolving patterns of relationships, robots, and the changing energy landscape.
Check it out.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/business-insider-us-20-2013-2013-11?op=1#ixzz2p5lvmgIt
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Here is a brilliant piece of data viz to show how public transit reduces congestion. I sort of can’t stop staring at it.
If you do succeed in dragging your eyes away, read more about America’s evolving car habits at The Atlantic Cities and check out Jordan Weissmann on the decline of driving in the U.S. over the last few years.
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Kayla Smith, 35, has been out of college for years, but she’s returned to dorm-style living in an apartment the size of a one-car garage in a brand-new building in San Francisco’s Tenderloin.
Urban planners and San Francisco leaders say smaller units help tackle the city’s housing shortage and rising rental costs.
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There were a number of suggestions from readers, via both the blog comments and Twitter, on how we could build cheaper multifamily housing. Here are a few ideas with my thoughts.
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San Francisco rentals were a different world when Chuck Post became a leasing agent – just four years ago.
“In 2009 we were actually discounting rents, offering things like a free month’s rent when you moved in, perhaps throwing in free parking,” he said.
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San Francisco has the reputation as the most bulletproof apartment market in the country, but a torrent of new construction promises to test its armor, as does reinvigorated condominium building.
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Amidst its turmoil, the City of Seattle has drafted a proposal for establishing citywide micro-apartment (aka “micro-unit” and “micro-housing”) regulations. The good news is that “DPD [Dept. of Planning and Development] has found that micro-housing provides an important lower-cost housing option that is appealing to many renters, and we recommend that it continue to be allowed to meet this demand.”
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German industrial designer Dieter Rams is a legend, and for good reason, thanks to his rational, less-is-more philosophy on design. Here, take a look at everything Rams from products to interviews to exhibitions.
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Young people shunning the suburbs in favor of the hustle and bustle of city life are leading the charge in the “reurbanization of America,” real estate mogul Sam Zell told CNBC on Tuesday.
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The Berkeley Chamber of Commerce in cooperation with the Berkeley Start Up Cluster and the Skydeck accelerator are hosting the first Berkeley Visionary Awards on September 30th from 5-7:30 at the penthouse Skydeck at 2150 Shattuck Ave.
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GENERAL INFORMATION
Applicant Gmail address:
Applicant Twitter Handle:
Number of Twitter Followers:
What is your current residence?
Why are you leaving current residence?
_Parents kicked me out.
_Amicable parting from parents (it was just time).
As more people across the country are living alone, the costs of rent and real estate are soaring in many urban areas. Cities like New York and Vancouver are trying to get the most out of available apartment space by creating “micro” apartments. Many of these apartments are smaller than what was previously allowed under the law.
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For developers in San Francisco, “it’s the best of times, and it’s the worst of times,” says Panoramic Interests CEO Patrick Kennedy.
If you’ve just put a building on the currently under-supplied market, it’s a really good time. But if you’re in the earlier stages of a project, everything is getting expensive.
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Amsterdam student Rose Mandungu stands in front of a colorful apartment complex constructed of a rather unusual material—discarded shipping containers. The crowded Dutch city has been meeting a pressing need for student and other low-income housing by using ubiquitous steel shipping containers. After years at sea, the containers were rusted and dented but ready for reuse to house people instead of products.
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Single people are taking over U.S. cities. The numbers are so staggering that it’s hard to understand why housing policy has been so slow to react. In New York City, a third of all households are single people living alone. San Francisco beats New York at 38 percent, and Washington, D.C., Seattle and Denver top the charts for larger cities, with over 40 percent of their homes occupied by a lone resident. But even in smaller cities like Atlanta, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, single people make up close to half of their households.
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A decade ago, billionaire entrepreneurs Peter Thiel and Elon Musk decided to take booming start-up PayPal public from a small coffee shop along Palo Alto’s University Avenue. The street, the epicenter of Silicon Valley high tech, also helped incubate such now-established giants as Facebook and Google. But today, Thiel has seemingly left the Valley behind.
The venture capital funds he runs are based 30 miles north, in a San Francisco building with views of the Golden Gate Bridge. A number of highly publicized start-ups like Twitter, Square, and Pinterest are also located in the heart of urban San Francisco. As Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey tweeted last February from his new headquarters in San Francisco’s Mid-Market neighborhood, “I love the idea of an urban corporate campus with all the energy and variety that provides.”
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When Gil Blattner hired a housekeeper for his elegant apartment with 12-foot ceilings, tall windows and marble fireplace mantle, the woman looked at the living room and asked, “Where’s the rest of it?”
There was no more. She’d seen all 250 square feet of his cocoon, located on a tony, tree-lined street in Chelsea near restaurants, art galleries and bookstores. His monthly rent: $2,500.
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U.S. CITIES MAY EMBRACE NEW YORK’S TINY, LESS-PRICEY APARTMENTS
Construction will start soon on an experimental New York housing complex in Manhattan with 55 “micro-sized” apartments, from 250 to 370 square feet each. The prefabricated units, which will rent for $914 to $1,873 per month, aim to help alleviate the city’s shortage of less-pricey studios and one-bedroom apartments. As more urban dwellers live alone, other U.S. cities are considering similar solutions.
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Whatever you want to call people living alone — some go with solos, others singletons — the fact is there’s a lot more of them than there used to be. In 1950, solos accounted for about 9 percent of all U.S. households; today that figure is roughly 28 percent. As sociologist Eric Klinenberg points out in his 2012 book Going Solo, one in seven American adults now lives alone, and the trend toward solitary living is truly global:
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Whether it’s a closet-esque studio or the short-straw bedroom in an apartment, San Franciscans have evolved to forgo sofas and square footage for some of the “coziest” living spaces in the country. I talked to the inhabitants of seven spaces registering toward the “speck of dust” end of the size spectrum to learn about the good and the bad of micro living.
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San Francisco recently saw the opening of the first prefabricated micro housing project in the US! Developed by Panoramic Interests, SmartSpace SoMA is a complex of sub-300 sq ft apartments designed by Lowney Architecture and fabricated by local prefab builder ZETA. The urban infill lot is close to transit and stores and provides 23 studio apartments with full kitchens and fold-out beds. The project is currently aiming for LEED Platinum certification and has secure bike parking along with an on-site City CarShare lot.
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The Berkeley, California-based developer Patrick Kennedy does not like to hear his apartments compared to dorm rooms. “That’s a bad word in our office,” he told Architizer. Kennedy, who owns Panoramic Interests, had just wrapped up a tour of SmartSpace SoMa, a new micro-living development in San Francisco’s trendy tech corridor, South of Market. The urban research nonprofit SPUR had organized the tour, giving a few dozen architects, builders, and micro-enthusiasts the chance to size up the project’s 295-square-foot units—which, in an inconvenient twist of fate, are slated for student housing. Come fall, California College of the Arts will lease the building while Panoramic looks for a buyer.
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Winning Projects to Be Announced at 2013 Fall Meeting in Chicago
For more information, contact: Robert Krueger at 202/624-7086
WASHINGTON (June 26, 2013) — The Urban Land Institute (ULI) has selected twenty-seven developments as finalists in the 35th annual ULI Global Awards for Excellence competition, widely recognized as the land use industry’s most prestigious recognition program. The competition — which honors real estate projects that achieve a high standard of excellence in design, construction, economics, planning and management — is the centerpiece of ULI’s efforts to identify and promote best practices in all types of real estate development. From this elite group, the jury will select a smaller group of winners that will be announced in November during the ULI Fall Meeting in Chicago.
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Winning Projects to Be Announced at 2013 Fall Meeting in Chicago
WASHINGTON, June 26, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — The Urban Land Institute (ULI) has selected twenty-seven developments as finalists in the 35(th) annual ULI Global Awards for Excellence competition, widely recognized as the land use industry’s most prestigious recognition program. The competition — which honors real estate projects that achieve a high standard of excellence in design, construction, economics, planning and management — is the centerpiece of ULI’s efforts to identify and promote best practices in all types of real estate development. From this elite group, the jury will select a smaller group of winners that will be announced in November during the ULI Fall Meeting in Chicago.
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In the US, high density cities like New York, San Francisco and Boston are the likely candidates for micro-apartment booms. Their steep property values, limited land and solid public transportation infrastructures make them ideal for small housing. But other large cities are increasingly entertaining compact living as a solution for growing their housing capacity in a cost effective and environmentally responsible manner. Two exhibitions that just opened in Los Angeles, a city that has become synonymous with car-fueled sprawl, are looking at how that city might include micro-apartments in its future.
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When it comes to living space, how minimalist would you go? Boston is one of many cities poised to join the micro-apartment bandwagon: the city has authorized 190 “innovation units” in the Seaport District, as small as 350 square feet, with access to common work and living spaces. But some want to see even more, smaller homes. A Globe editorial last weekend urged the city to lift its restrictions on micro-apartments, building up tiny units in neighborhoods like Forest Hills and Longwood — as a way to appeal to young workers, ease market pressures, and open up larger apartments to middle-class families.
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Typically ranging between 180 and 300 square-feet, these tiny apartments are becoming increasingly popular among the young-and-single set and even some retirees, seeking affordable places to live in the nation’s costliest cities.
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As they have for decades, Americans are moving toward cities and jobs. And now more than ever, they are willing to settle for less square footage in return for a carless commute, convenient access to shopping and entertainment destinations, and that hard-to-define quality called “place.” Fewer want to own their own home, and many more are looking for affordable options.
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A Maryland business executive who recently retired from Under Armour clothing company has shelled out approximately $9.5 million for 1028 Market St., a former billiards parlor that could be redeveloped with about 150 housing units, according to market sources.
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THE MICRO-UNIT TREND (see “Living Large in Tiny Apartments,” from the May-June 2013 issue) may have originated in cramped cities like Tokyo and Paris, but it is now starting to develop in the United States.
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At LifeEdited, we frequently use the expression “less, but better.” To us, it means that living an edited life is more about refinement than elimination. Have what you need, but love what you have. And as clever as we think we are, we weren’t so clever as to coin “less, but better”–that distinction goes to Dieter Rams. Even if you don’t know Rams by name, you know his work. The German industrial designer has become synonymous with economical and elegant design.
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With dense urban centers and housing that was built hundreds of years ago, Europeans have long known how to make their tiny spaces feel triumphant. But this apartment in the Montparnasse neighborhood of Paris is an above-and-beyond exemplar of hyper-efficient, micro-urban living.
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If you live in San Francisco, chances are you already feel like you’re living in a closet. But soon the city’s smallest living spaces will likely be tiny enough to fit in a compact one-car garage.
San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors tentatively approved Tuesday a trial run of 220-square-foot “micro-apartments” — carefully designed compact living spaces that have become all the rage in urban development. Pending ratification and mayoral approval next month, the plan beats, in smallness,Vancouver’s 226-square-foot “micro-lofts,” and make the 275-square-foot units under trial in New York look like airplane hangars.
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SoMa Studios, a building of 23 micro-units in San Francisco, is hitting the for sale market.
Now that the building is built and fully-leased by the California College of the Arts to use for dorms, developer Patrick Kennedy of Panoramic Interests is ready to sell with an asking price of $7.4 million or about $321,500 per unit.
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SEATTLE, June 2 (Reuters) – Aaron McConnell doesn’t mind sharing a kitchen with seven neighbors. He’s fine in living quarters with just enough room for a twin bed, a corner desk and little else. Closets? Forget about it – he stores his clothing and other possessions on shelves and hooks.
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In Luke Clark Tyler’s last New York City apartment, his shoes had some unusual companions in the closet. The shoes sat, in neat pairs, on a rack, directly below his dishes and right next to the microwave. A few inches away, a hip-high refrigerator lived beneath his desk. And the apartment was so narrow that Mr. Tyler could sit on a sofa pushed against one wall with his feet propped up on the opposite wall.
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Depending on how you count, Graham Hill’s micro-apartment, in SoHo, has either six rooms or one. The other night, a dozen people gathered in them/it for a dinner party. “This is the first time I’ve had apartment envy for a place even smaller than my own,” one of them whispered.
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A historic $5 billion explosion of rental housing is about to dramatically reshape San Francisco’s skyline, neighborhoods and politics.
Ending last decade’s flirtation with high-end condo towers, the city is rattling and humming with the biggest burst of apartment construction witnessed since Joe Alioto was mayor in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Nearly 8,000 new apartments, mostly in mid-rise and high-rise buildings, will come on line between now and 2015 — 3,498 in 2015 alone. It’s more new rental housing than was built in the last 15 years combined, according to real estate research firm Polaris Pacific.
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Central Market Street is not changing by the day, it’s changing by the hour.
After a week out of town traveling with my family, I cycled down Market Street Monday morning. Of course I expected some of the progress I saw: AvalonBay had added a couple of floors at 55 Ninth St., Crescent Heights had snapped on more of the glass skin at 1401 Market and poured a few more floors on the tower as well. But other developments were more startling.
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SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS) – Crews are putting the finishing touches on some San Francisco micro-apartments, spaces under 300 square feet, meant to be a more affordable option for those looking to live in the city.
Just off Mission Street at 38 Harriet sits a sleek new building with 23 units, “smart spaces” that are small, but comfortable
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In Seattle, they call them “apodments,” a neologism that could have come straight from Douglas Coupland’s 1995 novel, Microserfs. Certainly that’s the target market. Some of these apodment buildings are even in suburban Redmond, convenient to Microsoft headquarters, with units that measure a mere 140 square feet. Kitchens are communal, like laundry rooms. The rent is about $800 a month, including Wi-Fi. Similarly, in some of Seattle’s most desirable residential neighborhoods, such as Capitol Hill, skinny towers full of tiny dwellings have popped up in recent years, encouraged by a loophole in the zoning law that allows as many as eight unrelated people to share a kitchen. Eight living spaces with one kitchen count as a single unit, allowing developers to add density without applying for a variance.
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Nine buildings have been singled out as representing the best new design work in Berkeley for 2010-2012. Berkeley Design Advocates, a volunteer group of architects and urban planners, selected three UC Berkeley buildings, a restaurant, a senior home, two retail spaces — one newly built, one restored — a wine store, and the renovation of a branch library from a list of 15 submissions, and handed out the award certificates at a ceremony on Thursday, March 28. (See the 2013 Awards Brochure for full details.)
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Micro-apartments. Twitter-apts. Mini-flats. There are many descriptive names one could come up with for the small apartments that we will soon be seeing more of in San Francisco. But judging from the opposition, you would think they were named like the media names disastrous East Coast storms: Apartmogeddon, Frankenapt, Apocalyptment.
Scary thoughts aside, in November 2012 the Board of Supervisors passed legislation by Supervisor Scott Weiner — the anti-Peskin —that approved the construction of a limited number of micro-apartments. The units, as small as 220-square-feet of total space, are expected to rent for around $1,500 per month, about a quarter less than the average apartment in the City.
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Some time ago we saw a video with Patrick Kennedy from the development company Panoramic Interests show us around their SmartSpace 166 sq ft prototype micro-apartment. We gave reports as their building at 38 Harriet St in San Francisco’s trendy SoMa district went up; it would feature 23-apartments, each measuring 295 sq ft. The building was going to be pretty exciting, incorporating many of the prototype’s interior features like tranSForming furniture and high quality finishes as well as an in-house car-share, solar-thermal hot water, rain water collection, LEED Platinum certification, common spaces and much more. These guys were doing it right.
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To cater to a growing population of young workers, San Francisco is now allowing construction of apartments as small as 220 square feet, putting it at the forefront of a micro housing debate ricocheting across the country. Officials in fast-growing cities from New York, to Boston, to Seattle are exploring development of these smaller units to satiSFy rising demand for urban housing and provide relief from skyrocketing prices.
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“How-small-can-you-go?” has dominated the buzz on the new SmartSpace apartments at 38 Harriet Street in San Francisco. They’re each 295 square feet. Hey, that’s downright spacious compared to recent microhousing in Vancouver, to say nothing of Tokyo.
Two key features have tended to get lost in the buzz: the building is LEED Platinum (applied for), and it consists of 16 truck-sized modules that were built elsewhere and assembled here in the space of four days. They were built by Zeta Communities, an industry leader in green modular construction. You can watch the four days zoom by in stop action on Zeta’s website.
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The new $34-million Eleve Lofts & Skydeck is big on ideas and luxury, yet compact and efficient. When opened next month, the 170,000-sq-ft mixed-use project will feature one of the country’s largest active roof and six levels of unique “micro-apartments” targeted at the emerging 20 to 34-yr-old Generation Y crowd of young professionals.
The massive roof deck includes all the project’s open space, from barbeques to a full dog park.
The project uses wood framing 65 ft above the podium, which is the maximum allowable height for bearing wood shear wall construction.
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Imagine waking in a 15-by-15-foot apartment that still manages to have everything you need. The bed collapses into the wall, and a breakfast table extends down from the back of the bed once it’s tucked away. Instead of closets, look overhead to nooks suspended from the ceiling. Company coming? Get out the stools that stack like nesting dolls in an ottoman.
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I LIVE in a 420-square-foot studio. I sleep in a bed that folds down from the wall. I have six dress shirts. I have 10 shallow bowls that I use for salads and main dishes. When people come over for dinner, I pull out my extendable dining room table. I don’t have a single CD or DVD and I have 10 percent of the books I once did.
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Space is at a premium in many big cities, driving up rents, so micro apartments are seen as one possible answer. CBS News’ John Blackstone reports from San Francisco, where a change in the law is allowing construction of the nation’s tiniest new apartments.
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It’s little buildings’ time to shine in the Mid-Market corridor.
Now that technology giants like Twitter, Square, Yammer, and Dolby have pounced on every large block of space on Market Street between Fifth Street and Van Ness, tenants and investors are turning attention to some smaller, long-forgotten gems.
At 1019 Market St. San Francisco-based Cannae Partners and financial partner Westport Capital Partners LLC are repositioning the Eastern Outfitting Co. building, a 75,000-square-foot structure with Corinthian columns and a five-story bay window. The investors bought the building for $9.5 million, about $125 a square foot. Contractor Howard Wright is in the …
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We thought a 325-square-foot apartment was tiny, but San Francisco has shrunk the size of a studio even further — to a ridiculously minuscule 160 square feet. Patrick Kennedy of the development firm Panoramic Interests designed a life-size model of the smallest-size studio apartment that’s legally allowed in California — and yes, it really is only 160 square feet. But according to Kennedy, that’s really all you need: Decked out in custom, modular, multipurpose furniture, the “micro-apartment” offers the functionalities of a regular one-bedroom.
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The Romans used to celebrate victory by building triumphal arches through which troops would march, blowing trumpets. California‘s new technology lords are not quite so flamboyant but there is no denying the sleekness of the citadels springing up across San Francisco.
Twitter and Yammer have led the way by moving into Market Square, a downtown art deco landmark where employees enjoy gourmet food, yoga studios, arcades and rooftop gardens.
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The so-called micro-pad is now a buzz phrase and a cultural touchstone, thanks to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. But when single-room living was being sketched out in the floor plans of Manhattan’s first apartment buildings, particularly during the boom years of the 1920s, it was called the studio apartment.
Designed for the eager young women and men on a budget who were flocking to the city, the romantic label was intended to evoke the glamour and Bohemianism of the artist’s preferred mode of living. Studio was a “magic word,” as Anatole Broyard once wrote about his own dive apartment on Prince Street in the 1940s.
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With all the hoopla around the adAPT NYC competition and other micro-apartments around the country, it’s clear there’s a demand for smart, small apartments. In fact, people write us daily asking if we have apartments available to rent or buy.
While LifeEdited is working with development teams to get you your micro-apartments with the greatest haste (be sure to sign up for our list), many of the developments are years away. This leaves the question: What do I do now if I want a micro-apartment?
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Boston Properties Inc. is so bullish on the future of San Francisco that it is investing more than twice as much capital in the city’s office market as it is in the rest of the country combined.
“It is a thick market with a tremendous labor pool coupled with barriers to entry,” said Raymond A. Ritchey, national director of acquisitions and development for the real estate investment trust. “We are betting long.
“Virtually all of our major new investments are coming to San Francisco,” he said.
The Boston-based company has owned the iconic Embarcadero Center since 1998, is redeveloping 680 Folsom St., which is leased to Macys.com and Riverbed Technology, and is building the 1.4 million square foot Transbay Tower with the Hines company. “We are designing it to appeal not only to technology tenants but also to be equally attractive to law firms at the top. A building that size, you have to expand your base to a large pool of prospective tenants,” he said.
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Daniel Marienthal, 23, lives in a Twin Peaks mansion with 11 other men, where privacy is so scarce that for a few months he lived in a canvas tepee he had built.
Josh Furnas, 23, has taken up residence in a converted closet, near the living room, in a Bayview apartment that he shares with an Ecuadoran family of seven.
Dan Stifler, 24, wakes up – under two faucets – in a Mission District laundry room.
This is the reality of pop-up housing in San Francisco, where young entrepreneurs, drawn to the promise of startup riches yet finding few affordable housing options, are inventing homes of their own – often in violation of zoning codes.
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In response to skyrocketing rents in New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed a challenge to the city’s best architects: to design a space no bigger than 350 square feet into a comfortable and affordable micro-apartment. NBC’s Stephanie Gosk reports.
By Ben Popken, TODAY contributor
New Yorkers are famous for their teeny apartments, but a new trend in dwelling seeks to tranSForm those tiny spaces into big assets. They’re called “micro apartments,” and they make a few hundred square feet feel like over a thousand.
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About a decade ago, right out of college, I visited my friend John in Manhattan. We ordered pizza that night, and the following morning I tried to heat up the leftovers. But I couldn’t get the oven to work. How do you turn the oven on, I asked John, who had been living in his one-bedroom apartment for about six months. “I don’t know,” he replied. “I’ve never tried to use it.”
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There’s loads of housing proposed for SoMa, and 1321 Mission Street is set to throw a bit more into the mix, courtesy of tiny apartment master Patrick Kennedy. The proposed Smartspace Mission project, which demos a one-story furniture store, will construct an 11-story-over-basement, 120-foot building with up to 160 units, 120 of which would be designated as efficiency dwelling-units with reduced square footage. The unit floorplans look pretty familiar, but we guess if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Currently a minimum of 80 units will be for student housing units, but the project sponsor has the flexibility to change the rest to student housing up until the first Certificate of Occupancy.
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The apartment of New York City’s future, as the city imagines it, has all the amenities of modern life: wheelchair-accessible bathroom, a full kitchen, space for entertaining and access to a gym, communal lounge, front and back porches and a rooftop garden — all in 250 to 370 square feet.
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This 420-square-foot studio has a moveable wall that hides a guest bedroom. (Photo: By Matthew Williams for Life …People who live in big cities are used to small spaces — and to longing for larger ones . One green-minded entrepreneur may have found the perfect solution: He renovated a 420-square-foot studio in New York City to function like a 1,100-square apartment.
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Squeaky wheels tend to get the grease. But sometimes it’s more instructive to look at wheels that are spinning smoothly on their own, and how they got that way without all the dramatics.
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I moved to San Francisco 9 months ago from the East Coast bastion of Boston. Despite having experience living in a major US city, I found quite a few surprises coming here. Some have been great, while others not so much.
If you’re planning the move here, I hope this will help you know better what to expect. And if you already live in SF, this should give you a laugh or two and hopefully inspire you to leave a comment with anything I missed. Consider this the guide I wish someone had given me when I moved here.
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If the Bay Area economy were considered a stock, analysts would definitely rate it a “strong buy” for 2013.
“You folks will continue to outperform the U.S. economy and all of California,” predicts Wells Fargo’s chief economist, John Silvia.
Of course, prognosticators can be wrong. Many had predicted the state’s unemployment rate, for example, would continue in double digits through 2013. In fact, unemployment dipped below 10 percent last month for the first time in four years and continued to fall even further in the Bay Area. And job growth numbers were led by industries such as transportation, construction and leisure and hospitality, rather than high tech, which has almost single-handedly powered the local economy.
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Background: Kennedy spent 20 years developing apartments and condominiums in Berkeley, eventually selling a 500-unit rental housing portfolio to Equity Residential for $146 million. Kennedy bought his first San Francisco property in 2009 and developed the 23-unit 38 Harriet St. His company is now entitling 1321 Mission St., 180 units of efficiently designed studios and suites. He expects to break ground in spring 2013.
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In 2010, we met Graham Hill- the founder of treehugger.com and a serial entrepreneur. He had just bought two tiny apartments in a century-old tenement building in Soho and he had plans to turn them into laboratories, and showcases, for tiny living. He’d spent most of the past year living in tiny spaces- “a tiny trailer, a tent, and then a boat” and he was convinced others would love it as much if small spaces could be designed right.
He wanted a tiny space that didn’t sacrifice function, but instead that would expand to provide a wish list including dinner parties for 12, accommodations for 2 overnight guests, a home office and a home theater with digital projector. Not wanting to limit himself to local architects, he crowdsourced the design as a competition and received 300 entries from all over the world. Two Romanian architecture students won with their design “One Size Fits All”.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Scroll to bottom of page and click link for video dated December 6, 2012.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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After being married for about a year, Carrie and Shane Caverly gave themselves the ultimate couple’s test. With her background in sustainable design and his in building green homes, the couple worked together to plan and build their own 200-square-foot tiny home on a flatbed trailer. And although it was challenging at times, the collaborative process was truly a bonding experience.
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This week the Board of Supervisors of San Francisco will consider amending the city’s building code to let micro-apartments become even more micro. At present, dwelling units must be a minimum of 220 square feet of living space plus bathroom, kitchen, and closet — roughly 290 square feet in all. The amendment [PDF] would reduce that minimum to 150 square feet of livable space, for a total area of 220. If you could trade stock in real estate terms, now would be the time to buy cozy.
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WHETHER it’s Frank Gehry at New York by Gehry, Christian de Portzamparc at One57 or Robert A. M. Stern at 15 Central Park West, showcasing a “starchitect” is part of the arms race that is luxury condo development in Manhattan these days.
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As of late, it seems the only things hotter than our home sales market is our rental market—and of course our San Francisco Giants! Who would have thought a year ago that the Giants would be facing the Detroit Tigers in the World Series? Or that rents would be up by as much as 15 percent year-over-year in San Francisco.
But are they?
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In the middle of this piece on the tranSFer of development rights (a useful approach, in which a developer pays farmers not to develop their farms into subdivisions, and is given a height bonus in return by local government, allowing him or her to build a taller building), there sits this strange quote:
...More“Of course, TDR is not without its critics. Many green-minded people will celebrate density until it arrives in the form of a high-rise condo next door. But this hesitation is about more than just NIMBYism: Anna Nissen, a design professional in Seattle who takes a critical eye to TDR, points out that upscale development — like Olive 8, for example — drives up property values and hastens gentrification. ‘The poor, the working class, and their employment have been bounced out of central cities that unaccountably are making matters worse by designating dizzying amounts of increased density,’ she writes in an email. ‘TDR rides aimlessly on top of all that.’”
Roll out of bed and you are already in the kitchen.
Here’s a rental notice that might surprise even the most jaded of San Francisco apartment hunters: “Studio, 300 sq. ft., $1,500 a month.” Yes, that’s $18,000 a year for a home the size of two parking spaces. But such pint-sized digs are scheduled to hit the market in SoMa this month, thanks to Patrick Kennedy, developer of SMARTSPACE. (Kennedy won’t confirm any prices, but sources have reported anywhere from $1,300 to $1,600.)
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The real estate blog Curbed recently published a post entitled “Ten Hilarious Quotes About Living in ‘Micro-Dwellings‘”. The post is a collection of quotes from various publications that cites the way micro-dweller’s rationalize their small digs. There were quotes like “We don’t do closets” or “On Saturdays, if we both get work calls, one of us has to take theirs into the bathroom.”
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Developer Patrick Kennedy is about to complete SmartSpace 2.0, a building comprised of 300-square-foot studio apartments built with prefab technology developed by his Berkeley-based company, Panoramic Interests. And, if the Board of supervisors passes legislation allowing it, he’s set to build SmartSpace 3.0, a micro apartment development that would have 287-square-foot units, the smallest ever in San Francisco and among the smallest in America. Can this be a good idea?
Kennedy says yes.
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Last week, On the Block’s Jenny Pisillo asked if it isn’t cheaper these days to buy in the Bay Area than rent. Today, we revisit the topic. More proof that the rental market in SF is crazy? Trulia’s Rent Monitor report offers plenty.
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Noticiero Univision. Las camas están escondidas en sofás y las mesas se convierten en camas. El apartamento cabe dentro de la cuarta parte de una cancha de baloncesto.
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“My apartment is so small…I have to go out in the hall to change my mind!” It’s no joke — a newly built apartment building in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood boasts pre-fab mini-units of 300 square feet.
But why stop there? SF’s Board of Supervisors is voting today on whether to allow apartments of just 220 square feet – that’s including bathroom, kitchen and closet. Why the shrinking spaces? A tech boom has led to a housing crunch and a run on rentals by new hires, desperate for city living on a budget.
Listen to the broadcast here.
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Cities such as New York and San Francisco are developing living spaces that are 200 to 300 square feet for residents willing to pare down to the bare essentials.
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The Board of Supervisors is proposing apartments as small as 220 square feet.
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SAN FRANCISCO —
San Francsico is tapping into the latest global trend with a proposal for tiny ‘micro-unit’ apartments, and supervisors are considering changing city building code to allow for even smaller dwellings.
23 of the pre-fabricated micro-units could go up on Harriet Street in the South of Market District. Each is a compact 300 square feet in size.
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If you’ve already been storing your extra shoes in your oven because your studio apartment is too small to live in, just take this into consideration.
In San Francisco, the minimum size for a residence is already a pint-sized 290-square-feet. But on Tuesday, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors will be proposing changes to the city’s building code to allow for “shoe box homes,” literally.
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The tiny apartments are touted as “affordable by design.”
New York City has launched a pilot project to test them out. Boston is doing it too. But here in San Francisco, where a growing number of residents are being priced out of the housing market by a revived tech economy, city leaders are considering the smallest micro-units of all.
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IN July, when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced his competitionto create a building of residential “micro-units” in Manhattan, each ranging from 275 to 300 square feet, the plan ignited the imagination of countless architects and developers.
It also gave many New Yorkers a joltingly fresh perspective. For those who already consider themselves space-starved, quarters that are even more cramped seemed inconceivable. Yet to others, an apartment of that size sounded crazy-huge.
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Hari and Karl Berzins decided to build a tiny home for their family in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains to free themselves of the financial burden of owning a large home.
They knew that moving two children, a dog and a cat into a 168-square foot space would be a challenge, though it would also eliminate the need for a mortgage and cut their utility costs.
But they didn’t expect it to completely change their lives, Hari Berzins said.
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The SoMa Studios, a 23-unit apartment building in San Francisco’s trendy South of Market district, is believed to be the first modular-built urban infill apartment complex in the nation. The stylish four-story LEED Platinum building was deposited, module by module, on a 3,700-square-foot lot between a parking garage and an apartment complex, after being trucked over the Bay Bridge from a Sacramento factory.
Watch how “Prefab in SoMa Stacks Up in 4 days!” here.
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Scott Elyanow makes his tiny space work with ‘purges’ and clever storage. A New York pilot program signals growing interest in shrinking housing.
Scott Elyanow had clung to the red, long-sleeved sweatshirt with the words “Marblehead High School” for 20 years. It had softened with age, like the memory of the long-ago love who had given it to him.
But Elyanow was nearing 40, and what he had gained in years and wisdom he hadn’t gained in living space — his apartment measures 275 square feet, including the bathroom, kitchen and an entryway with overhead clearance of 5 feet, 7 inches. So he took a picture of the sweatshirt for a keepsake, then tossed the worn piece of clothing into a “purge” pile, a system Elyanow has adopted during his seven years living in a so-called micro-studio apartment in New York City.
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As wealth disparities in the United States have reached Dickensian proportions, housing disparities have followed. Condo developers are creating increasingly lavish apartments for the super-rich, while those with modest budgets find themselves priced out of city centers.
That’s an issue not only for housing advocates, who lament the human toll of housing stratification, but also for mayors who believe their cities’ futures depend on attracting “young creatives.” One solution is to encourage the building of micro-units, apartments of about 300 square feet or less.
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Pinterest’s recent move from Palo Alto to San Francisco has sparked chatter in the high-tech world: Is the Bay Area’s innovative center of gravity shifting away from suburban Silicon Valley to urban San Francisco?
The answer is a qualified yes. The tech migration is not just a phenomenon of San Francisco – it’s happening in New York’s downtown Silicon Alley and East London’s once rundown and raw Silicon Roundabout. This emerging model of “urban tech” just seems to fit downtown San Francisco especially well.
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Patrick Kennedy of small apartment fameis back at it, with a new 23-unit prefab apartment project. The new Soma Studios at 38 Harriet street is designed by Trachtenberg Architects with Taeko Takagi, with construction only taking a mind-bending 90 days. ZETA and Panoramic Interests are building the four-story, car-free project to reach LEED Platinum, with green features like solar hot water heating and a dedicated City-CarShare pod. The tiny units will all be rentals, and will feature energy efficient fixtures and appliances and built-in furniture.
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Patrick Kennedy”s prefab micro-apartments units are stacking up beautifully at 38 Harriet St. in San Francisco.
Workers from Pankow Construction are on the third floor of the four-story, 24-apartment building, the units of which were fabricated at Zeta Communities’ factory in Sacramento. Stacking of the units started Tuesday.
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It’s a small world we live in. Urban dwellers in San Francisco may soon find that adage a reality as one Bay Area-based developer wants to take minimalistic living to a whole new level.
Patrick Kennedy, a veteran Bay Area developer, wants to help alleviate the city’s housing challenge, by building what he calls “smart spaces” – energy- and design-efficient micro-apartments in San Francisco, complete with a bathroom, built-in kitchenette and enough space for a couch that folds out into a bed.
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First it was New York City with its micro-apartments, and now San Francisco is jumping on board with the idea of smaller apartment sizes. This consideration comes as a response to increased rental prices, a need for more single living spaces, and a serious housing shortage.
The current minimum apartment size is 290 square feet, and the proposal in negotiation will lower that to 150 square feet plus a kitchen, bathroom, and closet – making it 220 square feet in total.
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Small is coming to SoMa — apartments, that is. East Bay student housing developer Patrick Kennedy is close to installing his first San Francisco project, which will feature units measuring a compact 300 square feet. The project’s 23 units are currently moving along the assembly line at Zeta Communities’ factory in Sacramento and will be ready for occupancy in October.
“This kind of living is appealing to people who like living in cities and all the stimuli and attractions that are available,” said Kennedy, who heads the development firm Panoramic Investments. “Our residents will make a trade-off of proximity and convenience for space.”
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In a crowded city like San Francisco, size matters. That’s why developer Patrick Kennedy of Panoramic Interests is building bite-size apartments in S.F.’s South of Market district.
Kennedy plans to unveil a 23-unit apartment building at 38 Harriet St. in October.
The units were designed and built in collaboration with Zeta Communities, a San Francisco-based maker of prefabricated buildings. Each 300-square-foot apartment is currently under construction at Zeta’s factory in Sacramento.
The builder will ship the units via trucks to San Francisco, where they will be assembled like building blocks
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Coming soon to San Francisco’s hot South of Market area: A “tech savvy” residential community, containing 463 rental apartments, a shared gourmet kitchen, work space areas, plus restaurants, cafes and perhaps even a hipster barbershop like they have in New York.
“We’re creating a space that mirrors the sensibilities of the community,” said Eric Tao, managing principal of San Francisco’s Avant Housing, developer of the two-building project covering 587,000 square feet at Folsom and Fifth streets.
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Your front-page story on “tiny living spaces” was like a ray of hope. The charity-lottery system of providing affordable housing isn’t filling the gap in our housing stock.
We can balance income and housing needs by allowing developers to produce market-rate affordable dwellings. This is a very good way to promote diversity and social stability in the city, and hopefully in our state.
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San Francisco’s lopsided housing market – sky-high rents and an invasion of young workers – has experts thinking: Why not drop the minimum size of new apartments to the equivalent of a one-car garage?
It’s an idea worth exploring and encouraging, but the results will hinge on the appeal and convenience of the finished product. Financing, the job market and even housing politics could all play a role in a helping or hurting a promising idea.
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Small is the new big.
When Supervisor Scott Wiener proposed legislation that would allow for new construction of rental units with as little as 150 square feet of living space, there were hoots of derision.
That’s no more than a parking space, critics said.
Well that’s just silly. It is at least two parking spaces.
But the concept isn’t so far-fetched. In 2008, an innovative condo building called Cubix opened on Harrison Street, and although the hoots were just as loud – and it experienced some rocky financial times – it is now fully occupied with tenants who say they are neither dissatiSFied nor claustrophobic.
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Are itty-bitty apartments the next wave for urban dwellers in San Francisco?
The city is considering shrinking the minimum size of rental units, prompted by a demographic shift toward one-person households along with rising rents and an acute housing shortage.
“This seems like a logical, necessary response to housing in an extremely high-cost market like San Francisco,” said Tim Colen, executive director of the San Francisco Housing Action Coalition, a largely developer-backed nonprofit that is “solidly behind” cutting the size of the smallest allowable apartment by about a third.
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San Francisco supervisors will consider a plan that would allow developers to create so-called “micro apartments.”
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This afternoon, ever-tinier legal living spaces are up for a vote at the Board of Supervisors meeting. A modification to the building codesponsored by Supervisor Wiener (flying solo) would reduce the legal square footage for new construction rental units to 220 square feet, measured to the inside perimeter of the outer walls, and include a full bath, a closet, and a kitchen with at least 30 inches of counter space. No mention of a dishwasher or in-unit laundry, and presumably you get to live/sleep/eat/work/sex in whatever’s left- which the new code would define as a minimum 150 square feet of the 220– about the size of a parking space.
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Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Deputy Mayor for Economic Development Robert K. Steel and Department of Housing Preservation and Development Commissioner Mathew M. Wambua today launched the adAPT NYC Competition, a pilot program to develop a new housing model for the City’s growing small-household population. adAPT NYC seeks to create additional choices within New York City’s housing market to accommodate the city’s changing demographics.
Currently New York City has 1.8 million one- and two-person households, but only one million studios and one-bedrooms. The design competition involves a Request for Proposals for a rental building composed primarily, or completely, of micro-units – apartments smaller than what is allowed under current regulations. New York City’s housing codes have not kept up with its changing population, and currently do not allow an entire building of micro-units. Under this pilot program, Mayor Bloomberg will waive certain zoning regulations at a City-owned site at 335 East 27th Street in the Kips Bay neighborhood of Manhattan to test the market for this new housing model.
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To protect rent-controlled units, San Francisco may ban converting apartments for student-only uses and create incentives for developers of student dwellings.
SAN FRANCISCO — Lower Nob Hill, a once stately neighborhood whose shifting fortunes have proved a draw over the years for prostitutes and petty crooks, is buzzing with new activity.
The Academy of Art University has snatched up nine apartment buildings and former hotels in the enclave, converting them into dorms for students who pack the neighborhood’s cafes and linger on the sidewalks to smoke and skateboard.
Private landlords have gotten in on the action, renting to students who, city officials say, pay as much as 20% more for their lodgings than permanent residents do.
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NEW YORK (AP) — Maybe it’s the urban dwelling of the future: studio apartments measuring no more than 300 square feet.
New York City planners believe the tiny units could be the answer to a growing population of singles and two-person households. And in a nation that’s becoming increasingly populous and increasingly urbanized – and where people more frequently are creating a family of one – such downsizing may not stop here.
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It’s no secret that housing is expensive in San Francisco. Only 11 percent of San Franciscans can afford to purchase the average-priced home. Rents, always high, are even higher these days. It seems like we are perpetually at risk of pricing out our young people, working people, seniors, families and our middle class generally. To address this crisis, we need to think broadly and creatively and make our housing policies more flexible.
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From 2001 to 2005, a team of social scientists studied 32 middle-class families in Los Angeles, a project documenting every wiggle of life at home. The study was generated by the U.C.L.A. Center on the Everyday Lives of Families to understand how people handled what anthropologists call material culture — what we call stuff. These were dual-earner households in a range of ethnic groups, neighborhoods, incomes and occupations, with at least two children between the ages of 7 and 12 — in other words, households smack in the weeds of family life.
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Prices Soar as Well-Paid Tech Workers Stream Into City After a Long Exodus
SAN FRANCISCO—The latest technology boom is helping to stem a decade long exodus of residents from San Francisco, but the influx of well-paid workers is driving up already-high housing costs and straining public resources.
The promise and perils of the boom are evident in the experience of Genevieve Sheehan and her husband, who are relocating from the Boston area for her new job at social-games maker Zynga Inc. They have endured a grinding hunt for a home.
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Dolby Laboratories says it will move its headquarters to the Mid-Market neighborhood, continuing the tranSFormation of a neighborhood that is becoming a new technology hub.
The audio technology provider said Tuesday that it plans to purchase the building at 1275 Market St. from DivcoWest. The purchase price is $110 million.
The building, which sits a few hundred feet from the new Twitter headquarters near Ninth and Market streets, was formerly occupied by the State Compensation Insurance Fund. DivcoWest and TMG Partnersacquired the 354,000-square-foot building from the fund in October for $44 million, according to the San Francisco BusinessTimes.
Representatives said the new sale price reflects a retrofitting of the building that is under way.
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Twitter moved into its grand new headquarters in Market Square this month, and other tech companies like Yammer and One King’s Lane are right behind it. Their arrivals herald a turnaround for some of the most deteriorated stretches of Market Street — but others still languish.
The catalyst for much of the new investment in the area was Twitter’s decision to move to Market Square and the city’s creation of a payroll tax exemption to lure other tech tenants as well. Since April 2011, when Shorenstein Properties finalized the 215,000-square-foot lease with Twitter, investors have spent more than $500 million in the neighborhood.
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Congratulations! You’ve taken the plunge and decided to move to San Francisco for your own startup or to join one of the hundreds (thousands?) here. Making the decision to move may have been difficult, but nothing compared to all the hassles and headaches of moving to this city.
Having just gone through this and spent a significant amount of time asking friends for advice on making the move, I’d like to share the best advice I received and what I learned myself. For reference, most people take months to find a place to live and move in. With the tips below, I found an apartment and moved in within 2 weeks of landing in SF.
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Like a preacher in an urban-revival tent, Richard Florida roused the gathering at last week’s 20th Congress for the New Urbanism in West Palm Beach, Florida. The event took place on the 10th anniversary of publication of The Rise of the Creative Class, the book that made him a star among city admirers.
“Isn’t it interesting that the world has come to us?” he asked the gathering of 1,100 urbanists. “Something has changed to make this part of the great challenges of our time. … I thought I was out in the wilderness, but it’s happening everywhere.”
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It may be that the house of the future is an apartment — at 420 square feet, a very small apartment — in a century-old tenement building on Sullivan Street. Shiny and white, it has movable walls that allow it to morph from one room into six, as well as expandable furniture and filtered, or “country,” air, as the owner, Graham Hill, put it recently while showing off the apartment’s convertible tricks like a modern-day Bernadette Castro, dressed neatly in a black merino wool polo shirt, black pants and black Vans.
This laboratory, as Mr. Hill calls it, for small-space, sustainable and — it must be stressed — high-end living is the first tangible product from his fledgling company, LifeEdited.
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Michael Austin and Emily Morrison aren’t highly paid tech workers. He’s an actor with a day job as an administrative assistant; she’s an arts teacher at CalShakes. Newly engaged, they’ve been seeking an apartment in San Francisco to move into together.
“We started combing Craigslist, and when we filtered by the neighborhoods we want and our maximum price of $2,000 for a two-bedroom, there is almost nothing,” Austin said. “It was just shocking to me.”
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Americans are getting used to the idea of renting the good life, from cars to couture to homes. Daniel Gross explores our shift from a nation of owners to an economy permanently on the move—and how it will lead to the next boom.
“The Great Gatsby,” the pre-eminent American novel of financial ambition, overextension and downfall, offers a revealing vignette about the great American obsession: real estate. The narrator, Nick Carraway, can’t afford to buy in the rarefied Long Island world inhabited by Gatsby, and by Tom and Daisy Buchanan. But he can afford to rent. “When a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town, it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington, and I went out to the country alone,” he notes. “I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a month.”
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The human imagination is a bewildering process. How the brain comes up with great ideas is mysteriously complex.
Jonah Lehrer’s ambitious new book, Imagine: How Creativity Works, takes a fascinating dive into the world of creativity and how it all works, not to mention devoting a chapter entirely to cities.
Lehrer recently took some time to chat with Atlantic Cities and expand on his ideas concerning the nexus of creativity and cities.
You title your chapter on cities “Urban Friction”and you go on to talk about the pioneering work of Geoffrey West, Luis Bettencourt, and their colleagues at the Santa Fe Institute on “urban metabolism.” How is it that cities come to stimulate and enhance our creativity abilities?
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Here’s one way San Francisco’s current tech boom differs from the dot-com era: This one is creating many more jobs.
The city will have 28 percent more technology positions by the end of this year than it had at its 2000 peak, according to a new analysis of state employment data by real estate consultant Jones Lang LaSalle. Technology is San Francisco’s fastest-growing sector, and now occupies more office space in the city than any other industry.
The city will have 44,305 tech jobs by the end of the year, up from 36,921 last year and 34,442 in 2000, according to the analysis. The estimates are based on data from the California Employment Development Department, Moody’s Economy.com and Jones Lang LaSalle.
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As reliably as autumn brings Orion to the night sky, spring each year sends a curious constellation to the multiplex: a minor cluster of romantic comedies and the couples who traipse through them, searching for love. These tend not to be people who have normal problems. She is poised, wildly succesSFul in an ulcer-making job, lonely. He is sensitive, creative, equipped with a mysteriously vast apartment, unattached. For all these resources, nothing can allay their solitude. He tries to cook. She collects old LPs. He seeks love in the arms of chatty narcissists. She pulls all-nighters in her office. Eventually, her best friend, who may also be her divorced mother, tells her that something needs to change: she’s squandering her golden years; she’ll end up forlorn and alone. Across town, his stout buddy, who is married to someone named Debbee, rhapsodizes about the pleasures of cohabitation. None of this is helpful.
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Car culture and the romance of the open road are losing their allure among young Americans, according to a report released Thursday by a public interest group.
Teens and young adults drive substantially fewer miles per year than their predecessors did, and many don’t even bother to get a driver’s license. They increasingly rely on their feet, their bikes or mass transit, according to the “Transportation and the New Generation” report.
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In the 1950s, the five-story brick Asheville Hotel in Asheville, North Carolina, started to fall into decline, presaging what would happen to most of the city’s downtown over the next couple of decades. A department store moved into the ground floor while everything above it sat empty. Then the building got one of those ugly metal facades that’s designed to distract from the fact that all the windows are boarded up.
Twenty years later, the local real-estate developer Public Interest Projects set its sights on the building for a mixed-use retail and residential property. Local bankers and businessmen said they were foolish.
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Here are the top and bottom markets by rent growth during 4Q2011 across Apartment, Office and Retail sectors based on data for our 82 primary metros (80 for Retail). Reis tracks 200 markets across the nation including 2,100 submarkets.
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A Bay Area developer brings compact living to a whole new level. His “Smart Spaces” are single furnished apartments that are 160 square feet. Elizabeth Cook reports.
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In a top-secret location in Berkeley, Patrick Kennedy is showing a reporter around a tiny living space — so compact in fact that, at 160 sq ft, it is the smallest apartment one is legally allowed to build.
“It is how small you can go without causing psychological problems,” jokes Kennedy, who, through his company, Panoramic Interests, is responsible for developing swathes of Berkeley. His projects include the Gaia Building on Allston Way, the Berkeleyan Apartments on Oxford Street, and the Touriel Building on University.
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Housing developer, Patrick Kennedy, is a small space lover and is aiming to develop the smallest apartment allowed by California code. At around 160-square-feet not a single inch goes unused and everything is multi-purpose. He’s given his residential response to the Smart Car a spin — watch the video below to find out what works great, and what just cramps his style.
Kennedy lived in a 78-square-foot Airstream for a period of time, and was inspired to build small homes. He built the tiny apartment prototype, SMARTSPACE 1.0, in a Berkeley warehouse and had an MIT student live in, and test the home. It’s actually very impressive the amount of research that went into the design, and how efficient they’ve been with the space. After the trial period they’ve honed in on the sucesSFul details, as well as tweaks that they plan to make for the next version.
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The intersection of 10th and Market streets isn’t much to look at now: an abundance of asphalt, construction workers in a hole and on a roof, a sandwich board touting the virtues of bacon.
Stop by in a few years. I’ll wager that what you see is San Francisco’s newest hot spot.
Some clues are obvious on the landscape. Others aren’t yet apparent. And if the details are site-specific, the alchemy at work shows what cities everywhere need to thrive – a diversity of economies and scales that are flexible enough to allow for tranSFormations large and small.
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From Graham Hill’s LifeEdited project to tranSFormer apartments with moving walls, TreeHugger has featured many a dwelling from the less-is-more school of design. What stands out in these examples is the use of smart design, creativity and order to deliver the same function and even atmosphere that would previously have been delivered by simply throwing more square footage into a home. Just as fossil fuels are the enemy of creativity, it seems that over-sized homes are the enemy of smart design.
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Patrick Kennedy is a housing developer who likes to build small. His vision is to build the housing equivalent of the Smart Car. His SMARTSPACEs will be small- just a couple hundred square feet- and prefabricated. Kennedy envisions this type of development as “a larger and hipper version of LEGO blocks”.
Building prefab allows him to construct faster and more efficiently (avoiding a lot of construction waste) and everything down to the lighting and type of furniture has been studied carefully so that space is maximized in the tiny units.
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How denser, more urban workplaces will strengthen the Bay Area’s economic competitiveness.
High unemployment rates and slow employment growth continue to threaten our economy. Once-succesSFul sectors are in decline. Even the workplace is in transition. New technologies and ways of working have disrupted everything from the speed of a typical product cycle to the amount of real estate a company needs.
But as our economy changes, the emerging story is also a positive one.
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Despite San Francisco’s long-entrenched Transit First policy, nearly 2 in 3 trips in the city are made by car. Transportation officials want to get the number to 1 in 2 trips before the decade is over.
That would mean more people would need to get around by riding Muni, biking and walking – options that produce less congestion and air pollution.
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More tranSFormation is coming to San Francisco’s South of Market district, this time in the form of a university campus. University of the Pacific just closed a $47 million deal to buy the former Wells Fargo building at 155 Fifth St. and turn it into a spanking new location for its Arthur A. Dugoni School of Dentistry.
The seven-story, 395,000-square-foot building, across the street from The Chronicle, is to be completely renovated, both inside and out, to make way for the dental school’s classrooms, labs, research space, patient care and future university programs.The top two floors of the building will be leased separately as office space.
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Bay Area roads are some of the most congested in the country, according to a new study from the Texas Transportation Institute.
The study, which ranks specific traffic corridors based on overall congestion, unpredictable congestion and “reliable unreliability,” says a half-dozen highways in the Bay Area are gridlocked, logjammed, bumper-t0-bumper, packed like sardines … well, you get the idea.
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Every year around this time the editorial staff at the San Francisco Business Times begins soliciting nominations for our annual Real Estate Deals of the Year (which publishes in March the following year).
But as we look across the cityscape of what was completed in 2011, we are coming to a startling conclusion: Not one market rate housing project of more than 30 units opened this year.
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For new renters, or people looking to move to a new rental, we have not such great news. None of which should come as a surprise. According to the San Francisco Business Times, the rental vacancy rate in town is at 3.2% and rents are up 9%.
Despite reports that California is losing population, the nine Bay Area counties are expected to add 30/35K new residents this year.
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Swinerton Builders has received the green light to start work on a long-stalled 749-unit apartment complex at 10th and Market streets in San Francisco.
The $200 million project, being developed by Miami-based Crescent Heights , is a central piece of the city’s plan to bring new activity and investment into the Mid-Market neighborhood. The development, originally for-sale condos, was shelved before the recession started in 2008; it was redesigned as apartments last year.
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In San Francisco proper the vacancy rate is an ever lower 3.2 percent, and demand has pushed rents up 9 percent in the past year to an average of $2,568 per month. San Mateo County also has a 3.2 percent vacancy and rents have climbed 11 percent to an average of $1,934.
Yet just 1,400 new Bay Area rental housing units came online in 2010, about half of the rental housing production the area saw between 2005 and 2009, according to Cassidy Turley.
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Transportation consultant Jeffrey Tumlin figures that you’ve got to be colorful when you’re talking about the intractable problems of urban parking infrastructure. As such, he describes what he does this way: “Our business operates like a methadone clinic to get cities off their parking addictions,” he says. “And each addict goes through a different route.”
Tumlin, a principle with transportation planning consultancy Nelson/Nygaard in San Francisco, has worked with cities on the East and West Coast to build more transit-oriented development and fewer parking garage behemoths.
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Forty technology companies are looking for close to 2 million square feet of office space in San Francisco, most of it South of Market, according to a report by real estate firm Colliers International.
That, as was pointed out in the course of yet another tech office opening attended by Mayor Ed Lee on Thursday, is the “equivalent of nearly four Transamerica Pyramids.” Add that to the 1.6 million square feet of net new office space leased so far this year in the city – the highest number in the past four years, according to Colliers.
The mayor was on hand to welcome one of the more recent newcomers to the area, a social-gaming company called Idle Games, which designs games for Facebook, one of which is called “Idle Worship,” “the world’s first polytheistic god game with exploding bunnies.”
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Los Angeles-based Laurus Corp. is the latest investor to reach for a piece of the promising Mid-Market renaissance, paying $27 million for the current PUC headquarters building at 1145-1155 Market St.
The $193 million-a-square-foot investment comes at a time when private capital is flocking to the Mid-Market neighborhood. Earlier this year, Shorenstein Properties paid $110 million for 1355 Market St.
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If the four decades of sluggish revitalization progress in The City’s mid-Market Street neighborhood are any indication, it will take more than street murals to fix the heart of San Francisco.
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“HELL is other people,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre. He nonetheless spent much of his life in Paris, the better to interact with other French intellectuals. Cities have long been incubators and transmitters of ideas, and, correspondingly, engines of economic growth.
That has never made the crowds less annoying. Maybe that’s why people try to tame the city by chaining it down and limiting who can build what where along its quieter streets. We lobby leaders to fight development, aiming to protect old buildings and precious views, limit crime and traffic, and maintain high-quality schools. But what makes a city a city and a not-city a not-city is the fact that a city is dense and a not-city isn’t. The idea of it may chill a homeowner’s heart, but the wealth supported by urban density is what gives urban homes their great value in the first place.
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To rejuvenate urban centers, look to teachers and entrepreneurs.
Detroit once had 1.85 million inhabitants. Now it has fewer than 740,000. cleveland and St. Louis, too, are half the size they were in 1950.
When so many cities are booming, why are some trapped in decline?
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Most of humanity now lives in a metropolis. That simple fact helps to fuel our continued success as a species.
Crime, congestion and pollution mar all cities, from Los Angeles to Mumbai. But another force trumps the drawbacks of urban living: cities bring opportunities for wealth and for creative inspiration that can result only from face-to-face contact with others.
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Mid-Market’s geographic boundaries seem to be miraculously expanding.
After decades of false starts and unfulfilled promises, the hard-luck neighborhood is finally on the cusp of true revitalization. And becoming fashionable.
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Developer Patrick Kennedy has bought the former Guitar Center building at Mission and Ninth streets in San Francisco and plans to build a 200-unit student housing facility that could serve the California College of the Arts and other institutions.
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Aneglected segment of San Francisco housing is getting some attention.
In November, the San Francisco Planning Commission approved legislation that would allow residential projects for students to be an exemption from affordable housing requirements, thus increasing the financial incentive to consider building or renovating student housing.
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Builders hungry for new residential projects may soon have a fresh opportunity to chase in San Francisco: student housing. The Planning Commission recently approved legislation that would exempt student residential projects from costly affordable housing requirements, opening up new development possibilities.
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More than two decades ago, Patrick Kennedy wanted to develop housing in San Francisco. He’s finally getting there.
Kennedy spent the time in between pioneering private student housing development in Berkeley. But his Panoramic Interests now has two, 22-unit “micro-projects” planned, one in San Francisco and one in Berkeley, using pre-fabricated units from Zeta Communities that he says will change how in-fill development is done in the Bay Area.
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Since its first condominium projects emerged in the late 1980s, perhaps no neighborhood in San Francisco has seen such a dramatic tranSFormation as the South of Market (SoMa) district. In a span of roughly two decades, it went from being the part of town where you’d fear being alone after dark to being one of the most in-demand locales in the Bay Area.
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The green building movement is targeting a goal once thought virtually unattainable: zero net energy use.
While the trend is nascent, dozens of “net zero” and “near net zero” developments — projects designed to use only about as much power from the public grid as they can save or produce on their own — have sprung up across the U.S. over the past five years.
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Berkeley infill developer Patrick Kennedy expects to be looking at a highly energy-efficient, four-story apartment building just three to four months after he gets approval for the project.
If so, it would be the fastest turnaround in the 15 years Kennedy has been in the business.
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The same economic downturn that wreaked havoc on home manufacturers appears to be creating opportunities for Zeta Communities, a hopeful purveyor of ultra-efficient multifamily housing.
To date, the company has built just one 1,540-square-foot demonstration home in Oakland to support its thesis that high-efficiency can also be affordable.
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For a nine-year-old who loves pirates and science fiction, Jonah Finger thinks of his family’s apartment as make-believe come true. His parents, Michael Finger and Joanne Kennedy, completed the renovation of their 640-square-foot walk-up in Manhattan’s East Village in May of 2008, just a week before the birth of Jonah’s baby sister, Esther. And while changing houses and getting a new sibling can be a turbulent transition for a kid, moving into the new place provided a thrilling amount of entertainment for Jonah. He has secret compartments under the floor to fill with toys and his own Murphy bed hiding in the wall behind his dad’s desk. For Finger and Kennedy, these features are critical space-savers that allow them to live peacefully in the postage stamp–size apartment, but the inventive design is also a reminder that livability isn’t just about organization and tidiness; it’s about the joy of interacting with a space.
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What are the real, personal financial benefits of going car-free?The friendly folks at the U.S. Dept. of Housing & Urban Development (HUD) have provided a collective body of research, Regulatory Barriers Clearinghouse (RBC), the goal being to help build more affordable, pedestrian-oriented residences, especially in preparation for what they’ve been instructed will be an innovation-minded administration.
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Patrick Kennedy (MSRED’85) is a real estate developer in Berkeley, California, a place whose citizens were once described by the Wall Street Journal as ‘…torn between a desire to overthrow the US government and a quest for the perfect croissant’.
Upon moving to Berkeley in 1988, Kennedy found an ailing downtown with empty storefronts, panhandlers and no new rental housing by a private developer since World War II. He set out to ‘decriminalize housing development’ and began what was initially a single-handed effort to develop mixed-use infill housing in Central Berkeley.
In a city with the third-highest median income in the country, about 30,000 San Franciscans – 4 percent of the city’s population – live in abysmal conditions in more than 500 single-room-occupancy hotels.
The hotels that fare worst are privately owned, which most are. There, residents pay $600 to $1,000 a month for an 8-by-10-foot room in buildings where the smell of human waste infuses the hallways from overflowing toilets; floors gather puddles from leaky pipes and ceilings; carpets go unchanged for decades; and rooms are infested with bedbugs, cockroaches and mice. Residents share dormitory-style toilets and showers, typically one or two per floor, and there are no cooking facilities.
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Builder creates apartments, backers, critics
Man who transformed skyline is conscientious hero to some, opportunistic villain to others
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Developer conquers labyrinthine politics to bring Berkeley badly needed housing.
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A decade ago, no rental housing had been built in downtown Berkeley for 50 years, and city leaders and preservationists weren’t rolling out the welcome mat to private developers.
That’s when Patrick Kennedy came to town to make his mark. Since then, his firm has completed 11 buildings worth about $100 million, including seven apartment buildings, three of which just opened.
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The Fine Arts Cinema is officially dead, and Patrick Kennedy, the owner of the massive apartment and commercial complex rising on its former site, doesn’t hold out much hope for a new theater on the site—spelling the end of repertory cinema in the city t hat first raised it to an art form.
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In which a powerful commission packed with zealous foes of development has local builders downright hamstrung
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“People wonder why there’s no new housing in Berkeley,” Kennedy said after the committee voted not to give the building landmark status. “Even the experts said the building has no intrinsic merit, but NIMBY (not in my back yard) obstructionist types tried to stop it.”
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Berkeley developer accepts community opposition to his dense, mixed-use projects to create the Greenwich Village of the West
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As a teenager in sub-urban Danville, Patrick Kennedy would cut down signs advertising sprawling new tract home developments on former ranch land in the rolling hills of the East Bay.
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Berkeley’s most successful real estate developer says he has the answer for Berkeley’s traffic, parking and housing problems.
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Patrick Kennedy, Berkeley’s most controversial builder, is kicking off the new year with a bang.
Of the seven proposed buildings to be heard during Thursday night’s meeting of the Design Review Committee, four are projects proposed by Kennedy’s firm–Panoramic Interests–and all are ambitious.
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In their drive to develop densely on the fringes of urban cores, planners and builders usually ignore detached single-family houses. Instead, suburban developers are delighted to be able to develop at a density of 15 to 18 units per acre.
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Patrick Kennedy’s latest project at 2700 San Pablo has been temporarily stalled, but don’t bet against its final approval.
It took Howie Muir 25 hours to put together a homemade styrofoam model of his West Berkeley neighborhood, complete with handpainted buildings, which may explain why he angrily yanked it away from Patrick Kennedy when the developer started playing with the pieces.
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Stackable hydraulic car lifts can be used in urban infill projects to satisfy both smart growth advocates, because of their space-saving features, as well as developers who are attracted by definable economic benefits.
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Would six-story ‘Parisian-style’ buildings solve Berkeley’s housing crisis?
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My mother used to tell me that there were two kinds of people in the world..:…. those who do and those who don’t. Patrick is clearly, and wonderfully for the City of Berkeley, one of those who do.
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A builder who faced problems dealing with the Berkeley buildings bureaucracy has a condominium project on the market at last, the first new private-market residential building in the city’s downtown in several decades.
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Patrick Kennedy is on a campaign to “decriminalize development in Berkeley.”
He may be succeeding
Street-corner Painter, Cited For Lack of Business License, Will Have a Day In Court Next Month
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