A recently listed house in San Francisco’s Duboce Triangle promises “the perfect backdrop for your new life” — one that “will redefine how you live.” The property in question is 160 Noe St.: a fully renovated 1907 Edwardian on a tree-lined slow street featuring three bedrooms, two bathrooms and 2,495 square feet full of Calacatta marble, designer lighting and custom woodwork. Listed for $2,995,000, the home has another standout characteristic..
The seller will consider Anthropic or OpenAI stock as payment.
That single line in an otherwise typical luxury listing may be the most succinct summary of what’s been going on in San Francisco for the past two years. It’s hard to believe that just a few years ago, the city’s obituary was being written in real time. Office vacancies soared. Retailers fled downtown. Then, of course, there was the doom loop… (more)
San Francisco may be proud of its role in making California the most expensive state in the union. Perfect for millionaires and whoever they need to augment their life of leisure that is not yet handled by AI and personal robots.
District 1 Supervisor Connie Chan, and running against Scott Wiener, author of the sone of the most aggressive upzoning bills, said: “I am interested in doing everything we can to unlock the housing that’s already in the pipeline.”
Amid rising construction and financing costs, the tax and fee incentives adopted in 2023 by San Francisco in an effort to spur housing construction weren’t enough to reverse the decline in The City’s residential building activity, according to a new report — but without those measures, it said, the slowdown likely would have been worse.
The analysis, conducted by the Board of Supervisors Budget and Legislative Analyst at the request of Supervisor Connie Chan, examined the effects of temporary reductions in inclusionary housing requirements approved in September 2023, along with incentives that included cuts in development-impact fees assessed on residential projects.
It concluded that while fee reductions and other policy actions might have provided financial relief for some projects in the pipeline, the changes were insufficient to offset or counteract broader macroeconomic conditions largely outside city control, including high building costs, interest rates, and the slow recovery of rents and condominium prices.
“We all want to build more housing, particularly housing that people can afford,” Chan said in discussing the report. “And so how do we do that in a way that is thoughtful?”… (more)
RELATED:
Supervisor wants city voters to grow Housing Trust Fund
We are seeing a slowdown in the building and sales of homes due to a lot of economic conditions that have nothing to do with housing density or upping or carrots or sticks. It is refreshing to hear a few of the candidates running for governor mention some of the obvious moves that may be easily made to preserve the affordable housing we have rather than tear it down during this slow down when many buildings are being put up for auctions as the overly optimistic owners are losing them to the lenders.. Some of comments on that subject may be heard on this recording of a Ezra Klein interview posted on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HETwu7Kfu8
What happened to the 2024 Prop A voter-approved $300 million affordable-housing bond money? What did the voters get out of it? Does passing another bond measure make sense?
How likely is Scott’s appetite for SF land going to help him win votes for his next big leap to Washington? How mad are the voters over the treatment they got from him in Sacramento?
For California’s local governments hoping to have some say over where and how large apartment buildings get packed near major transit stops, it’s crunch time.
Last fall, state lawmakers made it legal for developers to build mid-rises — some as tall as nine stories — in major metro neighborhoods near train, subway and certain dedicated bus stops.
But the final version of Senate Bill 79, which goes into effect on July 1, offered local governments plenty of wiggle room over the where, when and how of the new law.
With the summer deadline rapidly approaching, cities across the state are starting to wiggle…
The move took advantage of a set of escape clauses written into the state law: Transit-adjacent areas that already allow at least half of the housing required under SB 79 can hold off on changing the rules until a year after the next state-mandated planning period.
For Los Angeles and much of Southern California that’s 2030…(more)
Why is San Francisco rushing to do what other cities are putting off till 2030?
The map that adds heights and density where it was already added and plans were drawn up to stabilize the gentrified neighborhoods that were designed by the community to protect what needed protecting:
Added base height limits by Scott Wiener’s SB 79 in 2025. This will take away any hope Scott had of dividing and conquering the city. He has now touched every district in SF with his density bills and anti-CEQA actions. Base heights starting at 95′ going down to 85′ around the BART stations and trains and for some reason around General Hospital? 85′ on the piers? No exit plans or any emergency options will be left to anyone on the east or west side of San Francisco the way they are now configured on the west side.
After three years of labor and argument, San Francisco passed the Family Zoning Plan in December. It lifted 50-year-old restrictions on building heights and densities across many neighborhoods, including the Sunset, Richmond, and Marina Districts.
But the plan avoids many other neighborhoods considered “priority equity” areas where residents are more likely to be low-income renters than in other neighborhoods. The Tenderloin is one of the city’s lowest-income, for example, and Chinatown, the Mission, and the Bayview are home to minority populations that at various times in SF history have been subject to restrictive racist policies and redevelopment.
But the city’s decision not to loosen building restrictions in these neighborhoods doesn’t mean they’re off-limits. Thanks to a new law from SF’s own state Sen. Scott Wiener, whose earlier work also led to the Family Zoning Plan, select parts of south and east neighborhoods, including the Bayview, Mission, and Excelsior, must be unlocked as well.
The law, SB 79, also calls for changes to parcels in Potrero Hill, along Guerrero and Valencia Streets, and in other areas that are not designated for equity protection.
SB 79 requires California cities to make housing easier to build near major transit lines. In many cases, this new round of zoning only means small-bore changes, such as making room for a single new home near St. Mary’s Playground in the Outer Mission. But some parcels will be zoned for more, such as 20-plus units next to the former Candlestick Park site or at the corner of Cesar Chavez and Guerrero Streets. In all, planning documents call them “modest zoning changes.”…
The new rules will then make their way to the Board of Supervisors, which must approve them by July 1.
If SF doesn’t meet that deadline or tries to modify the rules, SB 79 could trigger more dramatic upzoning across much more of the city. “Even if they are against this type of legislation, supervisors don’t really have a choice,” says Zach Weisenburger, policy analyst at SF-based Young Community Developers… (more)
2019 cranes were everywhere. There are very few today.
If you were herein 2019 you may remember a lot of tall cranes in the air all over the city. Dozens of office towers were being built due to the belief that they would be needed for the next tech wave. It hit San Francisco with a bang but fizzled out when AI came to town and started laying off tech workers. Vast amounts of square footage built to meet the “imagined demand” sit idle. The only game in town now is buying and selling over priced real estate. And the Mayor wants to cut that revenue under the familiar guise of incentive to grow the down town again. Isn’t this a familiar tune?
So much for politicians’ predictions, and response to reality when their dreams and aspirations do not go as planned. Instead of changing their strategy when reality pokes holes in their theories, they go charging full steam ahead and digging ever bigger holes in their budgets. When their funds run out they go screaming to the voters demanding more money and higher taxes to fulfill their flawed schemes.
Now SF Planning claims we need more density to provide for more housing, even though people are losing their jobs to AI and leaving the city at a very fast pace. Realtors report that the new wealthy buyers only want single family housing and many prefer to live and work in mansions. They are shying away from office downtown offices and condos. Aaron Peskin was right when he said, most people want the housing that developers want to demolish, not what the developers want to build.
Housing is much like transportation. Everyone in our friendly city wants other people to live in crowded quarters and take the bus.
Many cities are demanding a pause in the enforcement deadlines so they can figure out what they are supposed to do with all the complicated contradictory bills that their state legislators cannot explain. Senator Wiener has considered holding off on the deadline, so why is San Francisco in such a rush to upzone more now?
Wiener may have gone too far if he wants non-YIMBY votes to get him to Washington. Going after the coast, farmers, and continuing to boost his trickle down theory in spite of the facts, may prove to be his undoing.
The lack of affordable housing is a complex problem. And every complex problem, as the saying goes, has an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. In this instance, free market fundamentalism has long provided one such answer — the notion that invisible economic forces will solve affordable housing crises, if we only step aside, wait patiently, and let them work their magic. It has, of course, never worked out that way; but free-market apologists have always found a way to blame the world for its failure to conform to mechanistic economic models. This has kept their totalizing theories roaming the earth like zombies, providing intellectual cover for their policy application, and forever eluding the grave where bad ideas go to rot. And in recent years, these zombies have gotten a makeover and started to pop up in unexpected places.
The Bay Area is a land hospitable to technoutopianism and invigorated by the perennial search for hacks and technological fixes for life and its vicissitudes. It should then come as no surprise that it was here that the current iteration of the YIMBY movement came to be. Folks dismayed by the region’s high housing costs looked around and rediscovered a simple technical solution: deregulation. In their account, land use controls had inhibited housing construction and constrained supply, leading to higher housing prices. This intuitive connection was made by reference to single-family-home districts and to a history of exclusionary zoning practices— a move that gave the movement’s deregulatory platform the semblance of a progressive plea. Thus framed, YIMBYism gained traction and was promulgated across the country in the name of social equity by useful zealots and self-interested cynics, willfully or blissfully unencumbered by the weight of historical counter-evidence, the contingencies of context, or the nuances and limitations of contemporary housing research. Before long, the old wine of deregulation started showing up in YIMBY bottles at the table of housing policy debate and, increasingly, it was the only drink on the menu…
Several assumptions undergird the deregulationist push to override local land use controls and to undermine, in the name of housing affordability, the influence of communities in the development of their neighborhoods:
Lack of affordable housing stems from a lack of overall housing supply;
An increase in overall housing supply will make housing affordable to those in need; and
The relaxation of land use regulation provides an effective means to stimulate the new construction…
The political appeal of peddling deregulation—a straightforward policy solution that just happens to redound to the benefit of the real estate sector—has been plain to see (as it ever has). We hope that the new administration will part ways with its predecessor and take the less expedient path of tackling the affordability crisis as it exists in the real world and not as real estate interests and its YIMBY mouthpieces would like it to.
California peach farmers are expected to take a multimillion-dollar financial hit and lose vast quantities of crops after Del Monte Foods plans to permanently close two state plants.
Del Monte-owned plants in Modesto and Hughson will permanently close and leave hundreds of workers unemployed by April 7, according to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification that was filed earlier and obtained by SFGATE. Hundreds of employees will lose their jobs, including 571 general laborers at the Modesto plant alone.
But the California farmers who grow fruit for the factory are also taking a financial blow. Farmers in the Central Valley, as well as Yuba and Sutter counties, face a $550 million revenue loss from 20-year contracts to grow peaches with Del Monte, according to the Sacramento Bee. Many farmers haven’t made substantial profits from the orchards that Del Monte asked them to plant just a few years ago. Now, about 75,000 tons of peaches will likely go to waste, lcoathe outlet added.
“Two-thirds of the growers are going to be, basically, just left out to dry,” Sarb Johl, a farmer in Yuba County, told the Sacramento Bee… (more)
If you failed to notice the negative effects of re-zoning all of California yet, this may catch your attention. Food shortages may be coming as farmers leave their farms. If re-zoning farmland and raising taxes on farmers to get them to leave their farms for AI power production and housing concerns you, please make that an important conversation to have with your state and federal representatives and the candidates who are running to replace them. NOW IS THE TIME TO ACT !
By J.K. Dineen : sfchronicle – excerpt (includes audio track)
A rendered aerial view of the proposed development that would stand 23 stories tall, or more than twice the city’s height limit, on San Francisco’s Embarcadero.
In 2014 San Francisco voters delivered a strong message at the ballot box: No tall buildings on the waterfront without our approval.
The “no wall on the waterfront” Proposition B referendum, which came on the heels of voters’ rejection of a contentious housing project at 8 Washington St., required developments on Port of San Francisco property to get the voters’ approval if they exceed existing height limits. It won with 59% of the vote.
But now, a dozen years later, in a political landscape dominated by YIMBY-backed laws aimed at forcing cities to build more housing, a proposed apartment complex on the Embarcadero is emerging as a test case of whether the powerful state “density bonus” legislation preempts the local voter-approved regulations…
Strada Investment Group is proposing to build 619 units at 555 Beale St., a port-owned parking lot about four blocks north of Oracle Park that in recent years has been used as a homeless navigation center. While the majority of the complex would adhere to the parcel’s 110-foot height limit, a tower on the northern part of the site would stand 23 stories, more than twice the current limit…
But the idea that SB330 gives developers carte blanche to ignore the will of the voters is not sitting well with the San Francisco Waterfront Alliance, a small group of nearby condo owners who argue that Strada should either go to the ballot to win approval for the project or redesign it to be consistent with existing zoning...
In February, Scott Emblidge, the group’s attorney, wrote a letter to City Attorney David Chiu and Port General Counsel Michelle Sexton arguing that the city should “respect the will of the voters.”
“When San Francisco’s voters enact local legislation, they are entitled to have the City Attorney respect and defend that legislation,” he said. “If a developer wants to erect a height-limit-busting tower on waterfront property, the developer can do so if, and only if, the developer asks the voters for permission.”
In a response, Chiu said his office “will continue to defend the legality of ordinances approved by the voters or the Board of Supervisors.”
“When the State Legislature adopts statutes that purport to preempt local ordinances, we provide confidential advice to city policymakers about the implications of those statutes,” Chiu wrote. “We identify legally defensible options to address the conflicts between state and local law.” … (more)
One day before the anniversary of the 2025 Los Angeles firestorms, Wiener will re-introduce legislation making it easier for developers to profit off victims’ losses and trauma. Photo by Christopher LeGras. I
start this post with some reflection. This Wednesday marks the one year anniversary of the January 2025 wildfires that devastated swaths of the city and county of Los Angeles. As the world well knows, the communities of Pacific Palisades and Altadena were almost completely wiped off the map. The fires destroyed 18,189 structures including homes, local businesses, community centers, places of worship, schools and others. At least 31 people died as a direct result of the fires, to which researchers attribute an additional 409 excess deaths. Nearly a quarter of a million people were evacuated, and some 100,000 remain displaced to this day.
During two hellish weeks, Angelenos were glued to their TVs and to the Watch Duty app, which provided invaluable real time alerts of the fires’ progress, the ignition of new fires, evacuation orders and warnings and other critical information. Dozens of times a day the app’s distinctive whooshing tone sounded and millions of people picked up their phones to get the latest alert. That tone is etched into our collective memory.
For two hellish weeks, Angelenos were glued to the Watch Duty app.
We were also glued to our phones themselves, sending and receiving thousands of texts and making hundreds of phone calls to affected loved ones, friends and colleagues. Countless Angelenos from unaffected areas rose to the moment by volunteering or donating. Those who could — journalists, city and county staff, off duty first responders — shuttled residents back to the remains of their homes to sift through the rubble for whatever precious possessions that might have survived. Residents in neighborhoods bordering the burn zones formed watches to deter looters. A number of victims remained on their properties, camping out, protecting their neighborhoods and proving the essentialness of the Second Amendment. Unlikely bonds and friendships were forged in the flames and the aftermath…
You’ll be hard pressed, one year on, to find an Angeleno who doesn’t have direct memories of the fires, through personal experience, the experiences of family and friends, or both. Those 100,000 displaced people just celebrated their first holidays in new homes they never expected to occupy. Many will never be able to return.
Like the burn zones themselves, the psychological wounds will take years to heal. And while they ultimately will, the scar tissue will never look quite like the pre-fire physical and emotional landscapes. While a majority of Angelenos weren’t directly affected, their lives were changed, too. Their perceptions of the city they live in changed, from Santa Monica to Sunland-Tujunga, Malibu to Monrovia.
Faith shaken
Their perceptions of their city and county governments changed, too. In some cases, they changed for the better. CD 11 Councilwoman Traci Park secured her place in L.A. history as she fought tirelessly, relentlessly, for her devastated district and traumatized constituents. Out in the valley, while CD 7 Councilwoman Monica Rodriguez’s district was spared severe destruction, she nevertheless became an outspoken voice demanding accountability from city agencies…(more)
Set for launch in 2026, this new approach empowers lawmakers, staff and the public, underscores the Speaker’s ongoing commitment to listening to Californians, and refines solutions for greater impact
SACRAMENTO — On Thursday, Speaker Robert Rivas announced a first-of-its-kind legislative oversight tool that empowers Assembly members to assess, review and improve implementation of enacted laws that they’ve authored or championed — aiming for elevated community engagement, better outcomes, and lasting benefits for Californians.
Set to launch in January, this new approach underscores the Speaker’s ongoing commitment to strong accountability and transparency in government.
What Speaker Robert Rivas Says – “Passing laws is only the first step. The real test is ensuring they work. Gone are the days when laws can be signed and forgotten. The Outcomes Review tool empowers Assembly members to evaluate real-world outcomes, engage directly with residents, and refine our solutions for greater impact. It’s a forward-looking approach to oversight that every 21st century Legislature should adopt.”
‘Outcomes Reviews’ Continue Assembly Commitment to Oversight – Under Speaker Rivas’ leadership, the Assembly has consistently prioritized impact, oversight and accountability.
From the formation of new committees that make sure taxpayer dollars are implemented effectively and efficiently to special affordability-focused hearings on energy prices and the top cost drivers for working families, the Assembly has prioritized robust oversight of state spending and new legislation with real impact — especially in lowering the cost of living in California.
In 2025, Speaker Rivas also lowered the number of bills legislators can introduce from 50 to 35, so that every leader in the Assembly has the greatest possible bandwidth to focus on making sure California’s laws uplift prosperity.
Now in 2026, the Speaker is empowering members to emphasize collaborative review of enacted legislation by introducing an “Outcomes Review” oversight tool, which government policy author Jennifer Pahlka described as a “bold” and “intentional, structured process for evaluating whether the laws lawmakers pass actually do what they’re supposed to do” on her Eating Policy Substack.
With this work, Members will undergo three key steps, including:
Announce laws to evaluate and review as part of an Outcomes Review, in coordination with policy committees, and identify partners for collaboration at the start of the legislative session
Work with policy staff and stakeholders to host Outcomes Review-related committee hearings and community meetings starting in the spring, empowering Californians directly impacted by enacted laws to have a strong voice in this public process
At the end of the legislative year, highlight Outcomes Review findings, actions and solutions that will improve implementation of laws
Speaker Rivas Invites Members to Utilize ‘Outcomes Review’ Oversight Tool – The Speaker’s office is working with Members and inviting lawmakers to participate in the new “Outcomes Review” legislative tool. In January, a first cohort of Assembly members will be announced. So far, the following lawmakers are already scheduled to begin Outcomes Review work at the start of 2026:
Assembly Majority Leader Cecilia Aguiar-Curry will continue her work on health care access for California families by reviewing implementation of Assembly Bill 744, which was enacted into law in 2019 and delivers telehealth solutions that improve care for all residents
Assembly Bill 2011 by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, also known as the Middle Class Housing Act. It was enacted in 2022 to make it easier to build affordable and mixed-income housing projects in cities and metro areas where shops or offices are already allowed. Assembly member Wicks will review the enacted law to make sure it is having a meaningful impact.
Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin enacted Assembly Bill 488 in 2021 to make sure charitable donations have their intended impact. She will look closely at how this law is being implemented and the experience of victims of the Los Angeles firestorms.
Assembly Bill 457 by Assemblymember Esmeralda Soria was enacted in 2025 with the goal of building more affordable farmworker housing within 15 miles of farm or grazing land in the Central Valley. The Assembly member will take a close look at outcomes and review whether the law is resulting in more homes for California’s farmworkers.
What Assembly Members are Saying About Outcomes Reviews…(more)
