San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee next week plans to appoint an earthquake retrofit czar, whose job is to make sure seismic safety plans from last year don’t languish on the shelf until the next big temblor strikes. City officials hope the new manager will fast-track a proposal to require owners of thousands of buildings to retrofit, and he will be tasked with figuring out a way to assist owners who cannot pay for repairs.
Category: Housing
Posted inCity Hall, Housing, Land use
San Francisco postpones vote on permitting tiny apartments
Apartment hunters in San Francisco will have to wait a little longer before they can get their very own “shoebox” abodes. On Tuesday, the Board of Supervisors voted to wait until Nov. 20 to consider an ordinance that would make the city’s smallest legal apartment size even smaller, by around 30 percent. It was the […]
Posted inCity Hall, Economy & Business, Housing, News, Technology
Plan to shrink minimum S.F. apartment size hits political snag
A developer-backed proposal to shrink the minimum living space of a San Francisco apartment to 150 square feet faces a delay of at least a month, while the supervisor who floated the plan scrambles to shore up support from wary colleagues. Supervisor Scott Wiener last week delayed a vote on the legislation until at least September. Supporters of the plan say they are scrambling to line up the necessary votes on the Board of Supervisors. Wiener’s proposal first appeared before the board in June. It would redefine “efficiency” apartments, reducing the minimum allowable living space to 150 square feet from the current 220 square feet, not including the kitchen, bathroom and closet.
Posted inCity Hall, Housing, Land use, News
City postpones vote to allow apartments with only 150 square feet of living space
The idea of allowing smaller apartments in San Francisco — as little as 150 square feet of living space for an “efficiency” — is still under consideration after the Board of Supervisors Tuesday pushed back a decision on whether to amend the city’s building code. Supervisor Wiener and developers are pushing the approval of what they call “affordable by design” apartments, intended for newly constructed high-rises. Activists are calling these tiny apartments “shoeboxes.”
Posted inCity Hall, Housing, Land use, News
Developers seek to legalize tiny apartments in San Francisco, citing soaring rents
Plan would shrink smallest living spaces by one-third, but opponents fear crowding
San Francisco of the near future could be a place where thousands of young high-tech workers pack into 12-by-12-foot boxes in high-rises, each equipped with a combination desk/kitchen table, a single bed and the overall feel of a compact cruise ship cabin. A developers’ group is pushing the idea that tiny apartments could be the answer to rising rental prices, and has convinced the Board of Supervisors to put the proposal up for a vote next Tuesday. The plan is to reduce the minimum living space in apartments from the current 220 square feet to just 150 — a little larger than a standard San Francisco parking space.
Posted inBay Area, Bay Area Smart Growth, Environment, Housing, Land use, Technology, Transportation
Rising gas prices exacerbated foreclosure crisis, researchers find
Spiking gas prices in recent years were likely a contributing factor to foreclosures in newly built outlying housing developments in the Bay Area, researchers say, suggesting that sprawl may be bad for the region’s economic stability. Two recent studies found links between gas prices and foreclosure rates across California and other parts of the nation. The highest concentrations of Bay Area foreclosures were in eastern Contra Costa and parts of Solano and Sonoma counties. The areas with the lowest foreclosure rates were in the urban corridors of Oakland, San Francisco and parts of San Mateo and Santa Clara counties — areas most accessible by public transit.
Posted inBay Area Smart Growth, Housing, Land use
Ever-changing population predictions frustrate Bay Area smart-growth planning
State and regional planning agencies have produced differing predictions of how many people will migrate to the Bay Area in coming decades. The disagreement is frustrating efforts to forge a consensus on how many hundreds of thousands of new homes to build across the region, and where. In May, the California Department of Finance took a fresh look at economic forecasts and officially backed away from its prediction that 9.5 million people would live in the Bay Area in 2040. The state now says it is likely to be closer to 8.4 million. But the Association of Bay Area Governments pegged the population for the same 2040 target date at a robust 9.3 million. The agency is charged with developing Plan Bay Area, an ambitious agenda to reshape the sprawling region by building 660,000 new homes in the urban image of walkable, transit-friendly San Francisco.
Posted inBay Area, Bay Area Smart Growth, Census, Education, Housing, Land use, News, Transportation
Map: Where we live now — 2010 household density and priority development areas
Part of the challenge facing regional planners, who wrote the 30-year Plan Bay Area, is that it is hard to predict future population growth. The current list of more than 200 potential priority development areas in the plan tracks established high-density zones closely, indicating that the Association of Bay Area Governments, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and other regional agencies want to fill in developments in areas that are already highly urbanized or near mass transit lines, instead of in undeveloped or underdeveloped suburban settings. This map helps readers of the Public Press’s summer edition special project, Growing Smarter: Planning for a Bay Area of 9 Million, understand these trends.
Posted inBay Area, Bay Area Smart Growth, Climate Change, Housing, Land use, Transportation
Cities resist regional plan to limit sprawl
A high-profile effort to focus new Bay Area housing into energy-efficient transit villages is seen as unworkable even as it makes its public debut this summer, say urban planners, because regional government lacks the authority to make cities build dense urban neighborhoods. The three-decade Plan Bay Area, unveiled in May, is the product of more than two years of research on the region’s demographics, economy, transportation and architecture. Proponents say “smart growth” could be the future of the Bay Area — if regional agencies had either the legal tools to enforce the grand vision or enough money to make it worthwhile for cities to participate.
Posted inHousing
Tenants raising rents on new roommates
Finding a place to live in the Mission can be daunting. Often, dozens of hopeful renters show up at open houses, and Craigslist ads elicit responses from hundreds of people. With demand comes desperation, and in addition to those who offer cooked meals or to slip in an additional $600 to secure a spot, some are willing to pay extra rent to a master tenant for a room — and some are willing to charge it.