By James Brasuell : Planeten – excerpt

The density-enabling mechanisms of the California law Senate Bill 10 are too much for San Diego’s citizen planners.

The San Diego Planning Commission—the citizen advisory group on planning in one of the YIMBYest cities in California—won’t go so far as to eliminate single-family zoningthroughout the city.

“San Diego’s Planning Commission unanimously voted against a key part of Mayor Todd Gloria’s housing plan Thursday that would have eliminated single-family zoning in much of the city,” reports Phillip Molnar.

That key part was the Senate Bill 10, a voluntary statewide bill that “[allows] a single-family home to be torn down and replaced with a new structure of up to three stories with up to 10 units in much of the city,” according to Molnar…(more)

By Alec Regimbal : sfgate – excerpt

Assembly Bill 37 would allow Calif. lawmakers to start using unlimited campaign funds to hire bodyguards or install security systems.

On April 21 of last year, a convoy of roughly 20 truckers gathered outside the Oakland home of state Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, with the express purpose of intimidating the Democratic lawmaker. They crowded the streets in front of her house, honking and demanding through bullhorns that Wicks, who was home at the time, come outside. After police arrived, the convoy departed…

Those events and others like them are the inspiration behind an unusual bill that’s currently working its way through the California Legislature: Assembly Bill 37, which would remove the cap on how much campaign funds state and local lawmakers — as well as those who are running for such offices — can put towards security, and would for the first time allow candidates to use political donations to hire bodyguards…

One might ask why these public servants need protection from their constituents. What are they doing to anger the public they are supposed to support?

Community Vision CA – from LinkedIn

Did you catch our partner Oakland Community Land Trust in The New York Times? We are thrilled to see them featured in this story about the history, power and significance of Community Land Trusts (CLTs).

CLTs are critical vehicles for advancing #CommunityOwnership of community assets. Over the years, we’ve continued to deepen our partnership with CLTs, including through initiatives like our California Community-Owned Real Estate (CalCORE) program.

CalCORE works to address the capital and capacity barriers that many community-based developers face. By bringing together cohorts of small and emergent developers, with a focus on Black, Indigenous and people of color-led CLTs and CDCs, CalCORE provides community-based real estate entities with opportunities for network building, cohort training, one-on-one advising and project support, as well as access to pre-development and project capital.

We are honored to have partnered with Oakland Community Land Trust in a variety of ways over the past several years, including as a participant in our first CalCORE cohort.

Read the full NYT story: https://lnkd.in/gbNAsnsJ

By Wendell Cox : newgeography – excerpt

Driven, at least in part, by the huge increase in the potential for remote work, US residents moved in large numbers to states with lower urban densities in the two years and three months (27 months) between the 2020 Census (April 1) and the 2022 Census Bureau population estimates. The date of the Census was also nearly the same as the start of the Covid pandemic, during which working from home increased substantially.

During these 27 months, an annualized average of 1,111,000 residents moved across state lines in the United States. This is an increase of 64% relative to the annual average net domestic migration of 679,000 between states during the previous decade. 2010s. The average urban density in the United States was 2,544 per square mile in 2020, according to the Census.

Moving to States with Lower Urban Population Densities…(more)

Kalima for Our Neighborhood Voices

Link to KCBS

Kalimah KCBS 740 Bay Area Aug 2 2023.m4a

By Adam Brinklow : thefrisc – excerpt

The city’s pro-housing officials call BS on the building, which doesn’t meet basic requirements. So why are YIMBYs gung-ho for it?

If the thought of a 50-story tower looming over the San Francisco Zoo and Ocean Beach like a fairy-tale giant stresses you out, the Planning Department has good news: It says the high-rise at 2700 Sloat Blvd., as proposed, is not going to happen, and was probably never something to take seriously in the first place.

When news of the proposed tower — more than 500 feet high, more than 700 units within — broke a few months ago, reactions on social media and in public hearings were as zealous as they were predictable…

“This project is a distraction. It defies logic,” the department’s director Rich Hillis tells The Frisc…

[Update 7/27/23: The Board of Appeals Wednesday night rejected Hickey’s bid. At the hearing, planners argued the law is written to avoid big, bulky development in zoning like this, and that smaller separate buildings are better urban design policy. The height wasn’t a factor for planners, although many commenters were preoccupied with it. Hickey did not say if he plans to continue his quest through other channels.]…(more)

By Jennifer L. Hernandez, Marne S. Sussmab, Norman Carlin, Brian C. Buinger : hklaw – excerpt

State Legislature Weakens Many of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Original Proposals

• Holland & Knight recently wrote a practical guide describing the proposed reforms to the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and other content in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s “May Revise” budget trailer bills.
• Gov. Newsom’s Proposed package included 11 bills. As finally enacted, the content was consolidated into five bills: Senate Bill (SB) 145, SB 146, SB 147, SB 149 and SB 150, including some provisions that have been watered down from the original versions.
• This Holland & Knight alert summarizes practical changes to CEQA and infrastructure permitting in the final content of the bills as enacted.

As stated in Holland & Knight’s recent alert detailing Gov. Gavin Newsom’s package of 11 bills to amend the venerable California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), meaningful reforms to CEQA have eluded all past governors in the state. (See “A Practical Guide to Gov. Newsom’s May 2023 Budget-Revised CEQA Trailer Bills,” May 23, 2023.)

For the past five decades, CEQA has been finely tuned to protect the status quo even in the face of California’s urgent housing and infrastructure needs. CEQA lawsuits (and lawsuit threats) are the go-to tool for “NIMBYs” (not in my backyard organizations) and anyone with the resources to file a lawsuit who wants to leverage a project approved by elected and appointed officials to further their own special interests. For example, as reported in Part 3 of the “In the Name of the Environment” series authored by Holland & Knight attorneys, examining all CEQA lawsuits filed from 2019 to 2021,1 local and regional land use plans to allow more than 1 million new homes were targeted by CEQA lawsuits…(more)

RELATED:

Opinion: The California Environmental Quality Act is not the problem it’s made out to be

SB 149, Caballero. California Environmental Quality Act: administrative and judicial procedures: record of proceedings: judicial streamlining.
The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) requires a lead agency, as defined, to prepare, or cause to be prepared, and certify the completion of an environmental impact report (EIR) on a project that it proposes to carry out or approve that may have a significant effect on the environment or to adopt a negative declaration if it finds that the project will not have that effect…(more)

By Emily Hoeven : sfchronicle – excerpt

California Democrats haven’t had to worry about being relevant in a long, long time.

A Republican hasn’t won statewide office in California since 2006, and Democrats control a supermajority of seats in the state Legislature. So dominant are Democrats that, if they were to face a serious threat, it wouldn’t be from the withered California Republican Party. It would be from Democrats themselves, whose votes this week on high-profile criminal justice and housing bills sent a glaring signal that some members are increasingly willing to sacrifice everyday Californians on the altar of ideology.

Perhaps the most egregious example came Tuesday, when Democrats in the Assembly Public Safety Committee killed a bill that would have classified human trafficking of minors as a “serious” felony, adding it to the list of crimes under California’s three strikes law that results in longer sentences for repeat offenders.

The committee chairperson, Assembly Member Reggie Jones-Sawyer of Los Angeles, noted that human trafficking can already result in lengthy sentences and can be classified as a “serious” crime under certain conditions, such as if great bodily injury was inflicted on the victim.

This reasoning — child trafficking should only be considered “serious” if the victim endures additional horrifying circumstances on top of being trafficked — illuminates how far some Democrats are willing to go to uphold ideological principles that, when carried to their logical extreme, are no longer morally defensible.

Understandably determined to avoid repeating California’s failed history of mass incarceration, many Democrats are now wary of increasing penalties for any crime, even the most egregious. This has resulted in stances that are almost impossible to justify…(more)

By Thomas Soper AIA

Downtown view from the former Carnelian Room in the Bank of America Building

There are too many variables in architecture and urban planning to offer a “one size fits all” statement on re-purposing Office buildings downtown, but certainly, converting vacant downtown space is a watershed topic. Today, we have politicians and a public who want quick answers but have simplistic opinions on the subject and it becomes counter-productive to opine to convince politicians to do the right thing. It’s a little like how the YIMBY’s have succeeded (temporarily) with their simplistic views in convincing City hall to do the wrong things.

We have to ask the right questions. My advice is for the City to do the right thing which is to convert as much of the vacant office space downtown as soon as possible in a systematic and rational way, using the best practices of independent professions who know-how. That’s the bottom line because this crisis involves multiple emergencies, one of which we have never faced before and the sum total is an existential threat. That has to be the first and foremost objective to spearhead a consensus to address the pernicious urban decay that has taken hold downtown. Few want to be there. The exodus is real. The loss of tax base is real. The list goes on.

The reason I say pernicious is that I lived and first practiced in downtown Detroit during which it almost recovered in the mid 70’s. I witnessed first hand this scale of crisis. While the social causes of Detroit’s urban decay are different, Detroit’s coup de grace is becoming San Francisco’s fatal mistake: lack of leadership, factionalism, bureaucracy and absence of knowledge. We were forced to tear up our roots, endure the set-back and landed in SF.

On the brighter side, Gensler SF has done some recent investigations into converting office buildings into residential apartments. They would be a good local source for a more rational and hopefully a comprehensive perspective. It is also important to note that NYC is way ahead of SF in these proposals because it has both less factionalism and something call rent stabilization, not control. NYC is not a provincial town.

Let me illustrate why room height is off target for convincing others: I did two new office high rises in SF in the mid 80’s. For these two buildings the floor to floor height was 12′-6″. Take away 3 feet for structure and office HVAC leaves a ceiling of about 9’-6”. But this rule of thumb would be different if the building’s structural system was concrete. At the same time, I don’t view ceiling height as the most challenging in terms of conversion. But I caution you because there are many criteria that need to all be satisfied. Each building has to be quickly evaluated by a team of experts.

Ceiling heights are in general malleable in office buildings because apartment HVAC systems are smaller and are often put on the outside walls for fresh air make up. Back to minimum ceiling height, the code says that closets, kitchen and bathrooms can be as low as 7′-0″ and they don’t require natural light. This means these rooms must occupy space farther away from facades where natural light can enter.

I think that the BMR ceilings, other than closets, kitchens and bathrooms, in the “habitable” rooms are generally adequate up to 9′-0″ for residential use. But ceiling height is also a function of the plan dimensions of the room: the bigger the room, the higher the ceiling usually wants to be.

There are other more critical criteria that are more difficult to overcome:

1. Natural light and ventilation minimum requirements are written in the Code. There is a formula for minimum window sizes for all rooms other than closets, kitchens, and bathrooms.
2. Commercial building footprint typically occupy the entire parcel. Many office buildings are built right up to the interior lot lines facing other buildings with only one façade facing the street which must deliver all the natural light required by code.This is a worst case scenario but makes conversion into housing more challenging.
3. Structural column bay size and office building floor depth (horizontal) are deeper than apartment depth for natural light reasons. There are a number of ways that this can be mitigated, such as carving out large light wells but, that involves “orthopedic, pulmonary, and cosmetic surgery”.

So you are probably thinking, conversion might be too costly. Not necessarily so. The unit cost might be higher ($/sf) but less area is affected with conversion. The proper comparison is this: the total cost of conversion will likely be less than the total cost of whole scale demolition and stating all over again with new construction. (always compare “apples to apples”). When you think about it, renovation doesn’t require a new foundation, it doesn’t require too many new columns and maybe a new skin. Demolition is relatively less expensive by unit cost. These conversions would be a different paradigm, more like the medical analogy above.

Finally, why do this new kind of “surgery” on the office buildings to solve our multiple crisis today?

1. It’s not so new. Many Architects are well versed in these techniques. Politicians are not. Case in point: City Hall is base-isolated and I have never heard a politician mention it after the dedication ceremony.
2. It’s very likely cheaper to renovate when compared to tearing down and building back up.
3. These conversions can be designed to be reversible when the balance of office space comes back (or not)
4. We must shift rapidly to Type 4 construction where possible and design by code allowing for performance criteria and alternate means provisions. We have these skills readily available.
5. Here’s the big environmental argument. Concrete is by far the most deleterious material to Global warming. Steel is second. Renovation greatly minimizes this.

We might survive the BMR housing crisis by building with reckless abandon new units, but we will most certainly lose the existential crisis by using new construction. Renovation is the priority for all forms of construction for at least the next 10 years if not longer.

Thomas Soper AIA

Architect

P 1.415.902.9457

F 1.415.566.0465

RELATED:

PODCASTS / MULTIMEDIA

Bloomberg’s Odd Lots Podcast: What It Really Takes to Convert an Office Building Into Apartments

[7-6-23] // Joe Weisenthal & Tracy Alloway speak with Joey Chilelli, who has been involved with conversion projects for a decade. They discuss the challenges involved in actually pulling off these complex projects. (46 min.)

See also companion story.