On Oct 14, 2024, at 4:26 PM, zrants <zrants@gmail.com> wrote:
By James Salazar : sfexaminer – excerpt
The Port of San Francisco and Fisherman’s Wharf business owners agree parts of the area need maintenance and repair. That’s where the agreement ends.
The Port Commission voted Tuesday to endorse the term sheet for a $550 million revitalization of Pier 45 and a parking lot currently operated by SP+ Parking, beginning progress on an effort that would construct a seafood market, food hall, and events center and performing arts space that port officials say will revitalize the wharf’s surrounding area.
But local fishermen contend the area’s many vacant storefronts and lack of industrial facilities are matters that can be handled in the immediate future, and more quickly restoring economic activity than the Pier 45 project.
Sarah Bates, a member of the San Francisco Crab Boat Owners Association, told The Examiner that she and her group members have “deep concerns” about Pier 45’s proposed redevelopment. She said portions of the proposal could displace longtime waterfront tenants. A group known as Revitalized Fisherman’s Wharf LLC, which includes former Boudin Bakery owner Lou Giraudo and Mission Bay Development Group’s Seth Hamalian, initially sent the proposal unsolicited to the port in February 2023.
The Triangle Parking Lot, owned by SP+ Parking, would house a beverage garden and outdoor plaza, a visitor center, a public open space and short-term vacation rentals. Of the project’s preliminary estimated cost of $548 million, $185.9 million would go toward infrastructure investments along the pier. Officials also plan on seismically retrofitting the seawall. Construction of the project’s first phase isn’t expected to begin until 2028 at the earliest.
Bates said additions like the beer garden could be located anywhere in The City, rather than carving out space along the wharf.
“As working fishing families, we can’t simply relocate for the sake of an amusement park,” Bates said. “Fisherman’s Wharf should be for fishing.”…
Are we looking at another issue for voters to weigh in on? A new mayor may think otherwise. Let’s ask the candidates where they stand on this one shall w
e?
The Port of San Francisco and Fisherman’s Wharf business owners agree parts of the area need maintenance and repair. That’s where the agreement ends.
The Port Commission voted Tuesday to endorse the term sheet for a $550 million revitalization of Pier 45 and a parking lot currently operated by SP+ Parking, beginning progress on an effort that would construct a seafood market, food hall, and events center and performing arts space that port officials say will revitalize the wharf’s surrounding area.
But local fishermen contend the area’s many vacant storefronts and lack of industrial facilities are matters that can be handled in the immediate future, and more quickly restoring economic activity than the Pier 45 project.
Sarah Bates, a member of the San Francisco Crab Boat Owners Association, told The Examiner that she and her group members have “deep concerns” about Pier 45’s proposed redevelopment. She said portions of the proposal could displace longtime waterfront tenants. A group known as Revitalized Fisherman’s Wharf LLC, which includes former Boudin Bakery owner Lou Giraudo and Mission Bay Development Group’s Seth Hamalian, initially sent the proposal unsolicited to the port in February 2023.
The Triangle Parking Lot, owned by SP+ Parking, would house a beverage garden and outdoor plaza, a visitor center, a public open space and short-term vacation rentals. Of the project’s preliminary estimated cost of $548 million, $185.9 million would go toward infrastructure investments along the pier. Officials also plan on seismically retrofitting the seawall. Construction of the project’s first phase isn’t expected to begin until 2028 at the earliest.
Bates said additions like the beer garden could be located anywhere in The City, rather than carving out space along the wharf.
“As working fishing families, we can’t simply relocate for the sake of an amusement park,” Bates said. “Fisherman’s Wharf should be for fishing.”…
Are we looking at another issue for voters to weigh in on? A new mayor may think otherwise. Let’s ask the candidates where they stand on this one shall w
e?
Via nextdoor: “Saratoga, Calif. (AP) — A California vineyard owner is suing Santa Clara County after officials fined him for allowing his longtime employee to live in an RV on his property for years.
Michael Ballard, whose family owns Savannah-Chanelle Vineyards in a town south of San Francisco, alleges he was fined a total of more than $120,000 after the county said he violated local zoning laws that ban anyone from living in an RV on public or private property, according to the The Mercury News.
Marcelino Martinez, manager of the vineyard, which is around 2.6 million square feet (243,000 square meters), said his family lost their lease on a trailer they were living in years ago and had limited options for affordable housing in the area. The Ballard family agreed to allow them to live in an RV at the vineyards. Martinez, his wife and children have lived there for free since, 2013, according to The Mercury News.
“I couldn’t make a family homeless for arbitrary reasons,” Ballard told the newspaper. “The human impact exceeded any damage or nuisance that their continued living in the trailer was going to create.”
But in July 2019, the county began fining the Ballards $1,000 daily for the RV, then lowered the penalty to $250 a day, the vineyard owner said.
The county disputed that it fined Ballard $120,000 and said he refused to agree to deadlines to reduce the violations, according to the newspaper. Officials have made multiple offers to drastically cut fines if he removes the RV, they said.
The county was imposing “excessive fines” and violating the U.S. Constitution with its actions against Ballard, his attorney Paul Avelar told The Mercury News.
Ballard doesn’t agree with the county spending so much time penalizing him when it is facing greater issues.
“Just drive anywhere in the county, there are mobile homes parked all over the place. There are encampments everywhere you go,” he told the newspaper. “The problem is obvious and overt, yet they’re choosing to prosecute us in probably the least intrusive example of this, where we are letting someone live on private property in a private location and we’re not bothering anyone.””
By Keith Menconi : sfexaminer – excerpt (Includes audio)
Want to solve California’s affordability crisis? The popular answer these days is to allow developers to build more homes. Supporters say it’s an intuitive solution that follows the basic logic of supply and demand laid out in Economics 101.
But as San Francisco city officials move forward with a controversial plan to allow much denser housing development across large swaths of The City, some residents who oppose that effort are embracing a heterodox housing researcher who argues that the mainstream housing consensus is simply wrong.
On a Saturday afternoon last month, a crowd of about 200 massed inside Noe Valley Ministry to hear the housing homily delivered by Patrick Condon, a professor of urban design at The University of British Columbia. Condon had come all the way from Vancouver to offer up a warning: “You’re in for a big disappointment.”
A former city planner, Condon has become a prominent voice in Vancouver’s own housing debate. He told the gathered crowd he has seen firsthand how increasing density doesn’t solve the problem of housing unaffordability. Despite a massive development boom in recent decades that has made Vancouver one of the densest cities in North America, housing prices there are among the highest on the continent.
“Unfortunately, it will take 30 years for you to realize that you were wrong,” he said...(more)
The Harris platform calls for huge government spending on affordable housing—along with strict market regulation.
The real estate industry-dominated press is busy claiming that Vice President Kamala Harris has fully embraced the industry’s front group (aka Yimbys) position and that that position has swept the entire Democratic Party (for example, see The Atlantic). The argument goes that since Harris has laid out a housing position and since that position makes the common-sense claim that we need to build more affordablehousing, it is a Yimby position.
But when we look at the details of the Harris (actually Biden) position on housing, it differs in fundamental ways from the classic Yimby position, at least as practiced in the Yimbys adopted hometown, San Francisco—and is most different from the policies of the Yimby’s San Francisco favorite, London Breed.
In fact, the Harris program, as outlined on her web page and press releases, far more resembles the program of her kindergarten schoolmate Sup. Aaron Peskin than the “build housing at all income levels” mantra of Breed…
The details of the Harris (Biden) program can be found here ( Harris Walz Housing Plan), here (Harris market controls ) and here (Lower Housing Costs). These are the most detailed housing proposals made by a national party since Harry Truman’s proposals in the 1948 election. They commit some $40 billion in new federal funding for affordable housing development—in stark contrast to the Obama Administration, which simply failed to appropriate new federal funding after the housing crash in 2008, choosing to bail out banks and Wall Street instead, allowing the banks to foreclose on tens of thousands of homeowners…(more)
We just posted a series of clips from a meeting with President Peskin that cover his ideas about housing, finance and governance that are on the November ballot:
No easy way to return Canada’s residential real estate markets to ‘normal’
It’s a puzzle. Whatever its answer, its consequences are likely to foment an upheaval in Canada that the coming defeat of Justin Trudeau’s Liberals and the election of a Conservative government should not be expected to forestall.
The puzzle, by the reckoning of urban planner, landscape architect, author and University of British Columbia professor Patrick Condon, can be put this way.
Many, if not most, Canadians under the age of 35 are unlikely to ever own a place of their own. Canadians earn a bit better than $57,000 annually, on average. But you need more than three times that income to afford the mortgage on a typical Toronto condo.
Average house prices in Canada have gone from $435,000 to $794,000 since Trudeau’s Liberals were elected in 2015, and average rents have risen from $966 to $2,187.
Here’s the puzzle, according to Condon: “For leaders across the entire political spectrum to have landed on a response to this critical problem that is essentially the same, and is entirely wrong, is unprecedented. It’s a very unique circumstance, when you think about it.”
The responses to the “housing crisis” from the Liberals, the Conservatives and the New Democrats differ in their polemics and their particulars, but they all land on the same square: Do nothing to undermine the market value of residential real estate, pour everything into boosting supply, and hey presto, housing becomes more affordable.
The housing crisis might be fixed if the government gets out of the way.
In my opinion governments killed the free market when they stepped into the role of planning our futures for us by trying to control the market. Things did not go according to their predictions, but they refuse to accept responsibility for the economy they created and forced on us. Not everyone supported their theories and now there is upheaval around the world because people don’t trust governments to fix what they broke.
We have heard a lot about the problems cities are facing with speculation and rising costs of living that is killing the middle class. Patrick Condon seems to have put his finger on what many are calling out as the major culprit. Every city in the world is doing the same thing. There are no variables left for comparison. No room to experiment with other ways of operating a city. We are caught in a mire of our own making that is turning into an AI nightmare. Government has removed too many options for the market to experiment with different methods for driving down costs by eleviating options.
None of the markets under similar legal constraints have succeeded in bringing down the costs of real estate so far. Perhaps it is time for some new options. If California wants to be the leader they claim to be, perhaps starting to remove the state overloads from the picture to allow new options would be the first step in discovering a more balanced approach. Voters have at least one state bill that could shift the state control mechanism. In voters in California remove the state rent control to allow more flexibility among cities, we might start to see a shift in how people determine where they live and for how long. The bottleneck may be open if some cities choose more control and others choose less. We need variable options to see what works.
Next we might try to remove some other state controls that have created a frozen market, such as the density demands that are plaguing cities world wide and not creating any so far perceived improvements in the market. Once the controls are deregulated, one might start to see some improvement in some areas while others may lag behind. At least there will be more choices and more options and that alone should create a less stale market. – Mari Eliza
Planner and professor says massive increase in density and new housing didn’t bring costs down; in fact, costs are way up
Patrick Condon was once what they now call a Yimby. A landscape architect, urban planner, and professor at the University of British Columbia, he worked with hundreds of others to build a sustainable, affordable city in Vancouver, BC.
For years, Vancouver was a case study for city planning. The San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association used to take local officials on tours of the Canadian city, talking about the “slender towers” and grand amenities that they said come with orderly but aggressive growth.
In fact, Condon told me, Vancouver has allowed and seen built more new housing compared to its population than any other city in North America. And it was all what’s known as “infill housing,” not suburban sprawl.
So, if the Yimby doctrine is right, and removing “obstacles” to growth and adding more infill housing results in prices coming down, Vancouver “ought to be the most affordable city in North America,” Condon said.
Except it’s not; it’s the most expensive. He has 30 years of solid data: The Yimby approach didn’t work. It backfired… (more)
If Balaji Srinivasan is any guide, then the Silicon Valley plutocrats are definitely not OK.
To fully grasp the current situation in San Francisco, where venture capitalists are trying to take control of City Hall, you must listen to Balaji Srinivasan. Before you do, steel yourself for what’s to come: A normal person could easily mistake his rambling train wrecks of thought for a crackpot’s ravings, but influential Silicon Valley billionaires regard him as a genius.
“Balaji has the highest rate of output per minute of good new ideas of anybody I’ve ever met,” wrote Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the V.C. firm Andreessen-Horowitz, in a blurb for Balaji’s 2022 book, The Network State: How to Start a New Country. The book outlines a plan for tech plutocrats to exit democracy and establish new sovereign territories. I mentioned Balaji’s ideas in two previous stories about Network State–related efforts in California—a proposed tech colony called California Forever and the tech-funded campaign to capture San Francisco’s government.
Balaji, a 43-year-old Long Island native who goes by his first name, has a solid Valley pedigree: He earned multiple degrees from Stanford University, founded multiple startups, became a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz and then served as chief technology officer at Coinbase. He is also the leader of a cultish and increasingly strident neo-reactionary tech political movement that sees American democracy as an enemy. In 2013, a New York Times story headlined “Silicon Valley Roused by Secession Call” described a speech in which he “told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations’: outdated and obsolescent.”
“The [speech below] won roars from the audience at Y Combinator, a leading start-up incubator,” reported the Times. Balaji paints a bleak picture of a dystopian future in a U.S. in chaos and decline, but his prophecies sometimes fall short. Last year, he lost $1 million in a public bet after wrongly predicting a massive surge in the price of Bitcoin.
Still, his appetite for autocracy is bottomless. Last October, Balaji hosted the first-ever Network State Conference. Garry Tan—the current Y Combinator CEO who’s attempting to spearhead a political takeover of San Francisco—participated in an interview with Balaji and cast the effort as part of the Network State movement. Tan, who made headlines in January after tweeting “die slow motherfuckers” at local progressive politicians, frames his campaign as an experiment in “moderate” politics. But in a podcast interview one month before the conference, Balaji laid out a more disturbing and extreme vision…
“Mission Local besmirches the city with unbalanced coverage that only emboldens Preston, Peskin, Chan,” he wrote in November, name-checking three of the elected officials upon whom he would later wish a “slow death.”…
Amid his drunken tweet scandal, Tan paused such attacks. He hired a public relations consultant, apologized, and ceased sending out caustic tweets—temporarily. Then, on March 29, the Times published a favorable profile of him. Written by former Chronicle columnist Heather Knight, it characterized him as a “middle-of-the-road” Democrat agitating for “common sense” ideas. Tan came across as contrite and humble, a civic-minded centimillionaire who let his passion for political change get the best of him. “Mr. Tan has tried to learn from his online mess—or says he has,” wrote Knight. “In person, he speaks kindly and calmly and smiles often, frequently bowing to people while making a prayer gesture with his hands.”
Progressives groaned at what they saw as a conspicuous whitewashing of Tan’s behavior. Tan proudly shared the piece on social media. He has nevertheless returned to his old antics. “SF legacy media is dishonest and lies to you,” he wrote to his 428,000 followers on April 1.…
In the aftermath of Tan’s death threat tweets, both the Chronicle and the Standard hesitated for at least a day before publishing full stories. For a moment, it seemed unclear whether they would cover it at all. Yet despite the local media’s generally fair approach and the puffy Times glow-up, Tan continues to rage against the press. Nothing less than absolute control and fealty seems acceptable to the Network State types.
“Do not hire PR,” tweeted Balaji on April 4, days after Tan’s P.R.-wrangled Times profile. “They want to ‘train’ you to talk to journos. But journos hate you! So this is an obsolete model. Instead, just hire influencers. Build your own channel. And go direct.”
These guys are serving up a new brand of Kool-Aide to their followers. Just how far they will go remains to be seen. How far some of our less friendly politicians will bend. To their will is another big question. If they intend to dominate, they will have to curb their obvious appetite for power and revenge long enough to slip into the mire and mingle unseen among the political influencers. This is not very likely to happen soon in the Bay Area. They are too obvious to hide here. They may have better luck elsewhere.
The Democratic nominee has made “ending America’s housing shortage” a key pillar of her campaign. That pledge is light on details but heavy on vibes.
Amid a worsening housing and homelessness crisis, the defining political fight in San Francisco for more than a decade has been between pro-development YIMBYs and slow-growth NIMBYs.
Now, with a Bay Area politician as a major party nominee, Kamala Harris may become the first YIMBY president of the United States.
Tucked inside her newly unveiled economic agenda last week was a proclamation that housing activists never thought they’d hear from a presidential candidate.
“There’s a serious housing shortage,” Harris said to an enthusiastic audience of supporters in Raleigh, N.C. “In many places, it is too difficult to build, and it’s driving prices up.”
She followed the statement with a pledge that wouldn’t feel out of place at a YIMBY rally.
“We will take down barriers and cut down red tape, including at the state and local levels,” she said. “And by the end of my first term, we will end America’s housing shortage by building 3 million new homes and rentals that are affordable for the middle class.” …(more)
Houston faces choices confronting many US cities. Billions of federal dollars available for them to upgrade rail and bike transit, but some are balking.
“Houston – This epicenter of the oil and gas industry was ready to shed its reputation of being a car-centric city. Bicycle infrastructure projects were underway and the city had secured federal funding to expand public transit. Voters in Harris County, home to Houston, had approved billions of dollars to improve public transportation.
But after Mayor John Whitmire took office in January, everything changed. The city’s chief transportation planner left, bike infrastructure projects were stalled, and the region’s transit authority — largely appointed by the mayor — delayed parts of a $7.5 billion public transit expansion.
Advocates for transit and “safer streets” in Houston say they now suffer from whiplash, and fear the city is turning the clock back on transportation alternatives. It comes at a critical time for many U.S. cities that want to be part of the climate solution and make a meaningful shift away from reliance on the automobile. Whether America can make this shift could depend on the outcome of city-by-city battles.”… (more)behind a paywall
Houston is at the epicenter of the rising tides and frequently floods. The mayor knows how important a hasty retreat out of some areas is and the best way to evacuate is by private vehicle. People can take care of themselves when they have that option. The mayor may have witnessed streams of people driving away during one of their many disasters and figured that there is no way the public transit systems can handle this. People need their cars.
You must be logged in to post a comment.