Huell Howser Democrat
@TribTowerViews
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point access blocks. cost rentals. orinda is a policy failure. lawyer. union. price parking and roads.
Oakland
Joined April 2015
Don't wanna be here?
Send us removal request.
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As the decade progressed, San Francisco added 10 jobs for every 1 housing unit approved, putting tremendous pressure on Oakland.
Land values for this neighborhood, relatively close to Ashby and MacArthur BART, exploded. Renters were economically displaced.
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Japan Railways-themed “ramen station” coming to Oakland near Brooklyn Basin.
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Can someone show me where development has transformed this half of San Francisco in the past two decades?
No cities in America have been more transformed by luxury development over the past two decades than nyc and San Francisco, and those are also the places where rents have gone up the most, and it doesn’t even occur to these “yimbys” that that might disprove their whole thesis.
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The state rejected Berkeley’s housing plans. What happens next?
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"Shadows from tall buildings don't constitute violence."
Light violence at the threshold of acceptability by
@casperlaing
#OpenAccess
#ForensicArchitecture
#verticality
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When a five story building is proposed within 1/2 mile of BART in Berkeley
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One of the richest suburbs in California delayed overhead catenary electrification for Caltrain by two years using CEQA litigation — the petition was thrown out and then Atherton sued again using another legal basis.
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Another cool thing from Helsinki:
This 6 story, 22 unit public housing rental point block apartment from the City Housing Production Office & Heka.
Studios to 4 bedroom units, rooftop sauna, single stairwell and built with mass timber.
New paper on the city-wide effect of new housing supply in Helsinki. Impressively, researchers secured access to the Finnish total population register, and were able to prove that newly built homes enable "moving chains" and free up more affordable homes.
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Find something you love as much as S.F. Progs love pretending the Sunset is a low-income renter neighborhood that must be shielded from mixed-income apartments and fourplexes.
Eviction fetishists starting the new year off by wishing to evict more people into the streets. 99% of this housing was built over 40 years ago.
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The proud LA tradition of doing so little with so much
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"Fanciful"
I wonder what year California got rid of exclusionary zoning and allowed ADUs?
This is just as “fanciful” as communist revolution unless you can account for a theory of how stuff changes: “Abolishing exclusionary zoning and two-stair requirements would almost certainly facilitate more housing construction”
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People on here have negatively polarized themselves into questioning the efficacy of grade separations for rail crossings at 220 mph in-lieu of doing slightest amount of reading.
Why are they making the whole high speed rail elevated instead of laying the tracks on the ground?
Guys, I think I figured out why they’re blowing through the budget.
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“Wow [x city/neighborhood] is popping off tonight!”
East Oakland:
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Pretty good summation of YIMBY versus Anti YIMBY values here.
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The reason ppl debate “free transit” every 2 weeks is bc foundations & nonprofits that underwrite organizing don’t care about expanding or improving transit service to reduce GHGs or improve job/ed access.
They perceive transit as welfare instead of a service… QED free fares.
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If you've ever wondered why America has two building codes: Residential Code (1 and 2 family dwellings) and Building Code (Multifamily housing, and everything else), this is why.
@orangutanagram
Veiller:
"Do everything possible to encourage [SFH]... and penalize... [MFH] of any kind... If we require [MFH] to be fireproof... if we require stairs to be fireproofed... if we require fire escapes and... and allow [SFH]... to be built with no fire protection whatever."
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Thinking of the quote from nameless Biden admin officials expressing frustration that there are no visible under construction projects from Infrastructure Bill or IRA to tout in 2024.
Meanwhile Congressional Dems are working to ensure infrastructure is even slower/more expensive
This is, without exaggeration, the worst permitting reform idea I’ve ever heard.
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The histrionics you see here all downstream of the fact that the gondola would go over the headquarters of California Endowment, the foundation that funds dozens of nonprofits in LA county.
The leadership of CE is making opposition to it a priority for grant recipients.
A billionaire is trying to build a Gondola from Union Station to Dodgers Stadium. Because you know what Angelenos need? A heavy metal contraption flying just 40 feet above their homes 🚠 Don’t support the destruction of local wildlife and the disruption to local residents.
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"parking minimum" = 0 results
"building code" = 0 results
"land assembly" = 0 results
"discretionary approval" = 0 results
NYT wrote a whole article about 5/1s aesthetics and didn't bother to examine the underlying rules that produce them at all.
Around the country, people are fed up with the state of contemporary building.
Yes, we desperately need new housing. But we also need to build that housing well, in ways that people can appreciate and will last for generations.
What’s going on here?
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LA: engage consultants to study issue, lead interagency meetings & NPIC listening sessions, and travel to 3 countries to design and deliver four (4) units of infra. 3+ years
Emeryville: ID issue, use in-house staff, select off-shelf design and deliver 50 units of infra. 9 months
At press event for new
@LADOTofficial
@cd1losangeles
bus stop shade/light structure “la sombrita” at 3rd & Union
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Single stair reform bill AB 835 (
@alex_lee
) passes on a 39-0 unanimous Senate vote after
@Scott_Wiener
presented the bill on the Senate floor.
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Rode an e-cargo bike for the first time.
Give people an universal ebike subsidy, imho.
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The present system in California where 90% of new multifamily housing is rental and 98% of new single family housing is ownership is absolutely poisonous to urban infill housing politics.
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Conversely the Los Angeles City Council has tried to ban mass timber and mandate steel/concrete buildings ahead of the 2028 Olympics.
Europe’s largest timber development, in Paris
It helps that in France all new public buildings must be made at least 50% from wood. And any building in Paris over 8 storeys built for the 2024 Olympics must be made entirely of timber.
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Carbon tax, land value tax to pay for for UBI and high quality public housing.
What a king
South Korean politician Lee Jae-myung, who once said he aspired to be a ‘successful Bernie Sanders,’ is leading the field to replace Moon Jae-in as president after rising to prominence with an aggressive pandemic response and a populist economic agenda
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I’m just a simple country lawyer, but this is not the same as a North American 5/1.
Many people hate 5-over-1 buildings, but the problem is only skin-deep. This Parisian building is the same size, but with calmer skin that’s beautiful & durable. Calm massing saves $$$. Skin 5-over-1s like this and be a hero.
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Imagine a world where American consumer auto debt goes down because of mode shift to ebikes, transit and walking.
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The new NIMBY Left line against 4plexes is that demolition increases emissions.
What produces more GHGs:
1) tearing down a poorly insulated & wired 80 year old house in Berkeley *once*?
2) three households living in Antioch, Vallejo or Texas and driving 40+ miles every day?
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Nearly all LA County senators declined to support allowing mixed-income apartments near transit.
Instead LA County will build thousands of homes here:
If approved by a judge the Tejon Ranch development "will join the massive Newhall Ranch project in northern Los Angeles County as the most environmentally friendly suburban developments ever planned in California."
Between the two, plans for 40k new homes
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Kinda weird how Dean Preston’s chief of staff working for rich NIMBYs to block low-income housing in Livermore, an affluent suburb, was just swept under a rug… ngl.
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It’s been exactly one year since someone called this mixed-income apartment on a single family lot near transit in a high resource neighborhood “eco apartheid.”
Checking in on a housing twitter celebrity, the eco apartheid apartments. It looks good!
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AB122, the bill legalizing Idaho stops for bike riders in California, passes the Senate 31-5.
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We're now two years into Builders Remedy realm in California and every BR application is in high-resource suburb or urban neighborhood.
And yet we still have people claiming that development capital prefers to build in low-resource neighborhoods rather than high-resource ones.
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@aceckhouse
@mateosfo
Unfortunately for critical geographers upzoning works in practice but not in theory.
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Tomorrow would be a fine time for Dianne Feinstein to announce her retirement.
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The majesty of CEQA is that the existing scrap metal recycling plant on the right that emits noxious chemicals and regularly catches fire was able to drag out and sue under the environmental review process to block a mixed-use development proposal on the left.
Air quality advisory issued as fire burns at Schnitzer Steel in Oakland. Smoke spreading as far as Dublin. See my video and our latest update.
#oakland
#fire
#schnitzersteel
@OakTribNews
@EastBayTimes
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Bizarre to me that anyone on the left--especially current grad students--would go out of their way to defend affluent homeowner Phil Bokavoy's lawsuit to choke off UC Berkeley's enrollment.
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Decentralization has failed for 130 years to create new economic centers of gravity, reduce environmental impacts or produce housing + transport affordability at scale.
It's an ideology of Inner Suburb professionals seeking, not to make "great places", but to protect the fief.
Rather than building hi-density housing in the place “where people want to live”, maybe we need to increase the *number of places* that people would want to live.
The missing word in the debate is “decentralisation” — moderately sized communities built around industry&
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Paying my respects to the best new building in Oakland.
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2012: Supe Scott Wiener passes legislation to allow new micro units or SROs
2014: Dorms at 1321 Mission are approved under new law over protest from Elberling-funded nonprofits
2015: 1321 Mission opens as dorms serving CCA
2022: 1321 Mission acquired by SF as supportive housing
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Of course that’s your contention. You’re a first-year policy associate at a California Community Foundation-funded nonprofit. You just finished reading California Environmental Justice Alliance's blog post and are convinced that CEQA abuse is the "Big Lie"...
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31 days until all Bay Area cities and counties have to adopt substantially compliant housing elements or risk losing funding and expose themselves to Builder’s Remedy projects (20% low income or 100% mod income = no local zoning/height/development standards).
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Builders Remedy application in Palo Alto:
- 45 condos (20% low income)
- 5 stories
- 85 underground parking spaces
- using SB 330 streamlining
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Delaying the repair of a crumbling bridge over the Pacific because the proposed new railings would the undermine the aesthetics of decay prioritized by Instagram users.
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Kinda interesting to compare the rhetoric used by Copenhagen’s Social Democratic mayor to support a land reclamation project that will house 35k people to the rhetoric around urban growth in the American center-left.
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I wonder if Anti-YIMBYs can spot the year ADUs were legalized by-right across California in this chart.
In that vein, one must ask why lighter YIMBY proposals like ADU allowances haven’t netted many new units. Or why so few are selling their homes at what looks like a market peak. Perhaps the raw Econ framing of individuals as rational profit-maximizers and nothing more is wrong…
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City of Berkeley suing the University of California to stop undergraduate and graduate student housing from replacing a parking lot.
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Kudos to the American Planning Association for updating their priors and coming out in support of AB1401, which eliminates parking minimums near transit.
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San Francisco media, with little new development moving forward in the city, is focusing its moral panic about the aesthetics of tall buildings Eastwards.
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Here’s Calvin Welch admitting the slow growth movement of San Francisco in the 70s/80s was driven by middle class perceptions of on-street parking scarcity — not anti-displacement or social justice concerns.
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Broadway Valdez Triangle, Oakland - 2004 and 2021
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I don’t think rich suburbs in California should be allowed to delay electrification of regional rail lines serving >50k daily riders based on environmental/aesthetic claims as pretext for NIMBYism.
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@decadimitry
Never tire of affluent, coddled San Franciscans coming up with more reasons why they shouldn’t build housing for all the jobs they added and just shift the demand to West and East Oakland
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Seems pretty clear that a significant driving force of American urban policing is the maintenance and promotion of property values.
What’s less clear is why left analyses so often leave homeowners/flippers out of this analysis—while fixating on new development.
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The non-hierarchy and flexibility of Japan's national zoning code is well-known among urbanists, in part due to the chart below.
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Reading the 2021 International Building Code updates like
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Normalize referring to it as “on-street vehicle storage” in planning documents.
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Glad to see a new public restroom at Astro Park.
I am concerned, however, that Oakland Parks, Rec and Youth Development did not adequately consult all stakeholders and may have spent less than $1.7 million on it.
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San Francisco’s tens of thousands of low and moderate wage in-commuter service workers are not “theoretical.”
Consigning these people to three hour commutes to shield some of the most affluent neighborhoods in the US from growth is a moral and climate catastrophe.
Do you ever think about how YIMBY is like effective altruism? There seems to be a lot of overlap.
EA centers theoretical people yet to be born and YIMBY centers theoretical residents who have yet to move to a neighborhood.
Seems anti-democatic in a way.
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@erikmbaker
Sorry I’ve watched Sierra Club members kill bus/bike lanes and affordable housing near transit in Berkeley using the California Environmental Quality Act too many times to believe all environmental claims are sincere.
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Will this example, and others in Minneapolis, Auckland et al., convince supply skeptics (of the "developers will never build enough to result in lower rents" variety) to reevaluate their priors?
After a decade of building 8,000 apartments in Oakland, market rate 1-bedroom units are now affordable to low income people, as defined by HUD.
Today the SF Chronicle reported:
- Oakland has largest rent decline (-7.2%) among top 100 US cities.
- Median one-bedroom rent in
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“After 111 years, we just thought July 1968 was a good time to incorporate.”
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Allowing California transit to die because MFAs and nonprofit lifers can’t distinguish between left-liberals and fascists.
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@kscottz
Tens of thousands of people commute into San Francisco each day to perform low and moderate wage service work due to the 50 year regional housing shortage.
These people are not “theoretical”; they’re cleaning toilets, caring for kids/elderly and keeping systems running.
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It’s that time of year when middle class people try to spin their gripes about air travel during the holidays into a populist cause.
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@sam_d_1995
Driving 3.5 hours for dinner but refusing to spend 10 minutes looking for paid on-street or off-street parking.
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NOPA has been a million dollar SFH neighborhood for over 20 years and has been full of tech/finance management and expensive restaurants & bars for the last 15 years.
In what sense is it “blue-collar”?
Q: I'm a 30-year resident. Why do you want to build these buildings? This is traditionally a blue-collar neighborhood and you can only build a certain number of units here. It's easier to build more housing elsewhere.
Troy says, “It's kind of what we do.”
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Berkeley 1973: We’re gonna downzone the entire city, enact historic preservation controls and create a *truly* affordable community.
Berkeley 2020:
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@MitchellMTsai
@ezraklein
>easy statute to comply with
Yeah so easy to comply with this hat this 1300 page document that took four years to prepare is insufficient because an IP lawyer who bought a house next to frat row is mad that students live next to Cal
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California YIMBYs just passed a bill upzoning >100k lots on commercial streets across the state to 4-8 stories and are forcing cities into regional planning compliance with lawsuits and the builders remedy.
I think they’re doing fine.
Lack of progress in YIMBY policy in California has an awful lot to do with the fact that people associated with them will call people fascists at the drop of a hat or say insane shit like "confiscate all the guns even if it means civil war"
Good luck winning GOP voters with that
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Rad and Tern both announced new utility ebike models today with lower list prices, while new car prices continue to escalate.
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This is a London Breed-appointee to the Planning Commission having a meltdown about shadows and mid-block open space for a 10 unit, 40’ tall townhome project in affluent Nob Hill — close to jobs and transit.
Diamond: more objections. Calling it "family housing" is laughable; it's not really designed for small children or older people. She's also skeptical of the fire safety claims. "This is a really unusual project" and wants it to come back for review if
@SFFDPIO
demands changes
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San Francisco has approved 13 jobs for every 1 housing unit approved, forcing Oakland to house the former’s growing workforce.
Gordon’s opposition to mixed-income housing in the affluent Sunset District drives displacement in Oakland.
We’re actually set to exceed our market rate housing needs, while falling 18,000 units short of our need for truly affordable housing over the next six years. This is the kind of data we should use to make land use and planning decisions.
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The Left-NIMBYs, the ones that work hand-in-glove with Livable California, are so mad about this image lol
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“Endless growth”
And finally local residents are right to be concerned whether the local ecology can be sustained with this endless growth. Leaving aside earthquakes we are in midst of unprecendeted drought and fire-risk
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Guy that wants social housing for California, but doesn’t want to build any new units.
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Very good Op-Ed on single stair from
@alfred_twu
in the Chron.
OPINION: "Through single stair codes for mid-rise apartment buildings, we can have housing that is cheaper, safer and better," writes Alfred Twu, an architect, artist and housing advocate.
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Here's my plan to buy off 90% of people that insist a Link21 2nd tube should be BART gauge:
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Reject double-loaded corridors
Embrace single stair multifamily
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AOC asking candidates to support allowing duplexes in single family zoned neighborhoods is "more right-wing than SB50" is the pure, uncut stuff.
@TribTowerViews
AOC's questionnaire was actually more right-wing than SB50 because it didn't mention sensitive communities
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Increasingly encountering sentiment from LA nonprofit and leftists opposing TOC because "developers only include on-site low-income units because of density bonuses."
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@gusselsprouts
Just got back from the grad school communist rally. Amazing turnout. Thousands of people holding hands and chanting “Better things aren’t possible”
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Value engineering to save $200m on $20bn rail tunnels that precludes proven tech based on the assumption that two speculative technologies will mature and scale.
@calelectricrail
Del Mar realignment by SanDag has assumed value-engineered TBM to reduce diameter saving $200M. How? b/c "overhead electrification of the trains is not planned for the corridor and .. should assume use of battery- or hydrogen-operated trains in the future.
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400 apartments
150k sqf office space
23k sqf retail
164 room hotel
2400 parking spaces
someone who is good at transit oriented development please help me plan this. my transit village is dying.
Transit villages are a great idea on paper, but how about real life? I visit the Bay Area's newest -- a mixed bag that, more than anything else, shows how difficult it is to whip up community from scratch
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San Franciscans that oppose building sprawl in Solano County should also be vocally supporting infill housing on the Westside.
OPINION: A new city with 75,000 people would destroy one of California’s most important assets — the beautiful and underappreciated Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.
Column by Carl Nolte:
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.
@BuffyWicks
is right.
Every time San Francisco arbitrarily denies a zoning-compliant project, it places more pressure on lower-income and more diverse Oakland to house the former’s ever growing white collar workforce.
For some California lawmakers, the derailed San Francisco housing project is a stark example of why state intervention to address the housing crisis is not only necessary, but should escalate.
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Opinions on Sepulveda Transit Corridor:
- UCLA students who support heavy rail
- A planner adamant about how bad the monorail option is
- A retiree and avid cyclist who likes monorail because motorists can see it from 405
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Coastal California cities: sorry our lots are too small and awkwardly shaped for apartment development.
Southside Berkeley:
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Imagine believing property developers are responsible for the fact that Piedmont, California (70% white, 1% Black; median home price $2.7m), which is completely surrounded by Oakland, has built one (1) multifamily housing project in last 100 years, rather than homeowner-voters.
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