Category Archives: Housing

Housing

How Long It Really Takes to Get a Building Permit in San Francisco — and Why

By Adam Brinklow : thefrisc – excerpt

Whether you’re swapping windows or putting up new homes, SF’s red tape is notorious. Those in charge say relief is finally coming.

It’s a simple project,” says John McDowell, a permit expediter who helps would-be builders untangle San Francisco’s legendary red tape. His current clients, who own an early 20th-century, mixed-use building on Market Street, want to replace wood windows with more durable materials that he swears will look “exactly the same.”

McDowell says SF’s planning commissioners, who must approve the swap, won’t be able to tell the difference, let alone someone walking by on the street. The windows “are on the second floor, even,” he adds. He wouldn’t disclose the specific address…

Plenty of people with experience developing in San Francisco — be they architects, engineers, developers, permitting experts, and property owners large and small — have a horror story to share, perhaps more than one…

Mayor London Breed, some supervisors, and the Planning Commission are pushing for reform — and surprise, so are the very city bodies whose practices are under the microscope. In interviews and recent public meetings, staffers at both the Planning Department and Department of Building Inspection say they’re eager to speed up the way things work…(more)

Housing, Politics

San Jose Says Its ‘Tiny Homes’ Are Reducing Homelessness. More Are on the Way

By Calmatters :sfstandard – excerpt

It was the bathrooms that convinced Darlene Pizarro to accept an offer of shelter at a lot of “tiny homes” in San Jose last month…

“Tiny home” describes a specific type of housing more permanent than a tent or disaster shelter, but less than a single-family home, townhouse, apartment or something else thought of as permanent housing. The structures—smaller than 400 square feet, often lacking either a kitchen or private bathroom—have become increasingly common in California’s response to homelessness over the past five years, though opinions are split on how much to rely on them in years to come.

Pizarro’s unit boasts all the fixings of what homeless advocates say are best practices for temporary housing: Individualized case management allowing residents to stay as long as they need to get permanent housing

  • Laundry and kitchen facilities
  • The privacy of individual rooms that lock, with personal bathrooms
  • Other elements that emphasize residents’ dignity, like dog runs and weekly community events

Tiny homes are sometimes called modular homes or, in the case of San Jose, “emergency interim housing.” The city is all in, operating more than 600 such beds across six sites and building more. Mayor Matt Mahan credits them with a recent 10% decline in the city’s unsheltered population and notes that of the 1,500 people the city has sheltered in its tiny home sites, 48% moved to permanent housing. That’s compared to an average rate of 34% across Santa Clara County’s shelters over the past three years…

RELATED: Building Tiny Homes a Gigantic Task in Broken San Francisco…

A sense of privacy

Also making the sites attractive are a host of modular housing companies springing up to offer tiny homes that are more livable.

Compared to flimsier and less fireproof prior models that evoked disaster zones, many tiny homes now include double-pane windows that can open, individual thermostats and doorbells. In San Jose, one site where the city broke ground this year will include some tiny homes that have private kitchenettes.

Though not all cities use them, many companies build modular units with en suite bathrooms, which residents say provide significantly more privacy and dignity…(more)

Housing, Politics

Newsom signed 60 housing bills in 2023

Newsom signed 60 housing bills in 2023

Download the pdf or read the article in the Chronicle: https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/newsom-california-housing-bills-18442548.php

Unfortunately, the real elephant in the room in SF is not the lack of housing projects being entitled. The problem is that they are not being built thanks to the the DBI holding back on processing buildings and then one must run the gauntlet of the inspections department, but, have been heavily mired in corruption and are years behind schedule, unless you are a big corporate developer.

 

Housing

California exodus: Charts show huge shift in which U.S. states most people are moving to

By Christian Leonard : sfchronicle – excerpt
Texas remained the most common destination for former Californians, followed by Arizona.

California lost a net of 340,000 people to other states from 2021 to 2022, with a growing number of residents leaving for Florida and Arizona.

The outflow from California to other states was lower than it was from 2020 to 2021, when about 410,000 more people left California than arrived, according to new migration data from the U.S. Census Bureau. But it was still far higher than in the years before the pandemic, when the annual net loss was fewer than 200,000.

The Census Bureau’s estimates for the calendar years, which don’t include international migration, are based on responses to its American Community Survey. The 2022 survey asked respondents whether they lived at a different place than they did a year ago, and if so, where they lived previously.

The emigration from California contributed to a slight dip in the state’s population from 2021 to 2022, from about 39,143,000 to 39,029,000…(more)

Looks like the state finance department has more accurate calculations that HCD.

CEQA, deregulated housing bills, Housing, Politics

These 12 secret power players are shaping the Bay Area housing market

By Susie Neilson, Emma Stiefel, J.K. Dineen and Lauren Hepler : sfchronicle – excerpt (includes audio track)

Last year, The Chronicle obtained data on almost every property in the Bay Area — about 2.3 million unique records. We were hoping the data would be a treasure trove of information about real estate ownership in the region, allowing us to easily identify who owns what, and thus pinpoint the most powerful corporate owners of rental housing.

Quickly, we learned it wasn’t so simple. California doesn’t have hard-and-fast rules on how property owners identify themselves; large corporations, hedge funds and even wealthy families often purchase multiple homes through shell companies or trusts, shielding their names from ownership records. It’s only by carefully tracing networks of ownership that one can start to grasp how much property an entity actually has.

So we redoubled our efforts. During the past year, The Chronicle analyzed these property records, which were collected from county assessors’ offices, plus nearly 7 million unique business records. We used machine learning methods to parse the data and called on dozens of experts and additional data sources. This work yielded a list of 12 of the Bay Area’s largest, most influential ownership networks. We believe this is an unprecedented effort to uncover rental ownership and management networks across all nine counties in the region: Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano and Sonoma…

We still aren’t sure we’ve captured all of the Bay Area’s largest owners, but we’re confident this list of 12 includes some of the region’s major power players in residential real estate, housing tens of thousands of families in nearly 7,000 assessor-defined properties from San Jose to Santa Rosa…

Even if the owner of your property isn’t on our list, you can learn more about who owns it by using our map of nearly 2.3 million Bay Area properties here. You may read more about our methodology here.

Read why transparency matters…

Navigate to our content

One company operates thousands of San Francisco apartments. Just don’t call them a landlord

This map reveals who owns every property in the S.F. Bay Area…

Invitation Homes
Michael Marr
Greystar
Woodmont / Tad Taube
Equity Residential
John Vidovich
Neill Sullivan / REO Homes
Essex
UDR, Inc.
Tricon Residential
AvalonBay
Ardenbrook / Ardenwood…(more)

RELATED:

This map reveals who owns every property in the S.F. Bay Area

By Emma Stiefel and Susie Neilson: sfchronicle – excerpt

This tool will help you investigate your landlord or anyone else’s

To our knowledge, there has never been a centralized database where someone could see who owns any property in the nine-county Bay Area region, making it difficult to investigate connections between the powerful forces that shape the housing market for all. So The Chronicle built one.

Type in your full address, or any Bay Area address, to see who officially owns nearly any building. The map contains data on almost 2.3 million properties registered across the Bay Area’s nine counties, which The Chronicle obtained in summer 2021…(more)

Housing, Politics

State-Mandated Housing Coming to Your Town | Christine Epperly

Video

California Insider New : youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nW0nseaI70

Siyamak sits down with Christine Epperly, a licensed civil engineer and building designer with over 30 years in business. She discovered a state-run plan called the “15 Minute city”, that is changing the landscape of California.

“What’s happening in California is we’re building these high-density communities in the middle of the towns and suburbs. I looked at them and they’re basically all the same. It’s brutalism.”

Housing, Politics, Uncategorized

Secret in-flight recording sparks rage over wildfire insurance ‘bailout’

By Sophia Bollag, Joe Garofoli : sfchronicle – excerpt

SACRAMENTO — A conversation with a lobbyist secretly recorded on an airplane is shedding light on discussions of possible wildfire insurance legislation that consumer advocates are worried will be pushed through the Legislature in the final two weeks of the session.

“We are trying to jam a bill in the last three weeks,” longtime insurance industry lobbyist Michael Gunning says on the recording, which was taken on a Southwest flight from Los Angeles to Sacramento. He went on to explain that major insurance companies, including Farmers, State Farm and Allstate, have been reducing their footprint in the state…

The conversation goes to the heart of a question roiling Sacramento in the last days that bills can be written before the end of the legislative session: What can state lawmakers do to stave off concerns of an insurance crisis in California — a state that boasts the strongest insurance protections for consumers in the country?…

Consumer Watchdog has long been a thorn in the side of the insurance industry, and its founder was the chief backer of Proposition 103, the 1988 voter-approved ballot measure that created California’s strict rules governing insurance policies in the state. That measure also created the office of the insurance commissioner.

Gunning, a registered lobbyist with the firm Lighthouse Public Affairs, did not return a call seeking comment for this story. A colleague from his firm followed up with an emailed statement, characterizing the recording as an example of Gunning’s work to address California’s housing crisis.

“Let’s not do a bailout at the end of session with no public scrutiny,” she said. “It never ends well for consumers when lawmakers push through a bailout at the end of session.”…(more)

This news broke on national broadcast news so the secret is out.

Most bills are created by lobbyists who go to great lengths to hide the details from the public until the bills are passed. People have been complaining about backroom deals for years, but, the information has fallen on deaf ears.

All of a sudden the media is acting surprised. We shall see how far they go with it. Will they only despair of insurance company scams or will they admit how widespread the practice is? How many bills are passed without public knowledge or participation?

Isn’t this how we got SB35 and SB2011 that are now being blamed for such monstrosities as 2700 Sloat and a little known project going up on a greenway next to Sunset Blvd.? Is this how they will confiscate the parks and golf courses and waterfront sites that are not tied down to a trust of some kind? In San Francisco our public parks are being leased to private enterprises for a pittance . Not much is of limits when the developers get greedy and the state reps are hooked on their largesse.

Housing, Planning, Politics, Transportation

Can Bay Area Political Leaders Solve Climate Change?

By Marc Joffe : cato – excerpt

Passing laws, adopting regulations, and spending money to fight climate change are popular activities for both elected and unelected officials in the San Francisco Bay Area. But since they only govern 2.3 percent of the U.S. population, their ability to turn the tide on greenhouse gas emissions is limited. Instead, their costly and coercive policies drive up the area’s cost of living and help drive out residents.

In a previous post I described some of the high cost, low ridership Bay Area transit projects that raise local sales taxes while replacing only a handful of car trips. Since I last wrote, we have learned that San Francisco’s new $2,000,000,000 Central Subway is afflicted by serious water intrusion issues, making the travel experience less appealing for the roughly 1,000 passengers that use the Chinatown station each day.

More recently, local lawmakers have declared war on natural gas, an energy source that used to be popular with some environmentalists because it burns more cleanly than other fossil fuels. But now the intention is to fully embrace electricity even though California is unwilling to add nuclear generating capacity and lacks the enormous number of solar panels and windmills needed to fully power the state…(more)