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Allison Arieff is the editorial director of SPUR, an urban planning advocacy non-profit based in San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland. Known in full as San Francisco Planning and Urban Research, SPUR is primarily focused on improving urban planning efforts and policy in the San Francisco Bay... View full entry
Through the program, property owners will pay a small assessment that will go toward maintaining and improving parks, plazas, gardens, sidewalks and more. It’s modeled after the Community Benefit District (CBD) program, but geared toward greening a residential area, as opposed to promoting commercial shopping districts, like more conventional CBDs. [...]
“This provides a way for us to not only maintain them [the public spaces], but provide capital improvements over time.”
— NextCity
Targeted specifically in the Dogpatch and Northwest Potrero Hill neighborhoods of San Francisco, the impetus for the Green Benefit District plan began years ago, as development rates were quickly beginning to outpace public green spaces in the area. The GBD program would provide a continual source... View full entry
Comedy troupe Cultivated Wit takes a humorous jab at megaprojects, outlandish crowdsourcing, and how much San Franciscans loathe Burning Man in a cheeky mock campaign that would support the construction of a 300-mile wall around the Bay Area to keep Burners out, forever. And all at a reasonable... View full entry
Laundromats have recently been closing down in San Francisco, which prompted a Google employee to tweet in response "cost of disruption: washio and others have removed need for laundromat on every block." Who needs laundromats when there's an app for that? Well, people who can't afford to spend... View full entry
Luke Iseman, 31, leases a 17,000-square-foot warehouse in Oakland in which he has built 11 micro residences out of cargo containers, Bloomberg reports. He charges $1,000 per months for each of the makeshift homes, which aren’t legal, strictly speaking. [...]
“We have an opportunity here to create a new model for urban development that’s more sustainable, more affordable and more enjoyable.”
— businessinsider.com
More news on shipping containers and the Bay Area's residential market:The Emergence of Container UrbanismForget Big-Box Stores. How About A Big-Box House?Airbnb rentals cut deep into San Francisco housing stock, report saysNo room for affordable housing in SF? Build it in OaklandLooking to buy a... View full entry
[Apple Inc.] reached an agreement to rent about 76,000 square feet of office space in the South of Market neighborhood’s 235 Second St. [...]
the area has some of the highest monthly asking rents in the city at about $66 a square foot. [...]
Apple and Facebook have been notable holdouts as Silicon Valley giants like Google and Linkedin gradually expanded their footprints in San Francisco.
— bizjournals.com
More news from Apple and San Francisco:Apple invites visitors to gaze at its 'spaceship' from new observation deckDrone footage shows the latest construction status of the Foster-designed Apple campusCan't find office space in San Francisco? Try the mall.Uber HQ headed to San Francisco's... View full entry
Simply look up into the sky at a single cloud, on average that white pouf holds 8 million gallons of water — enough to sustain 100,000 people for a day. Yet the water we harvest has become so scarce, its cost is greater than the devices invented to catch and deliver it. [...]
How might we imagine new ways to collect water? How do we get it off my socks and into my coffee cup?
Fog catchers – contraptions that gather the moisture in our atmosphere for drinking water – have been used by humans and animals alike to survive in some of the driest places on earth. In Chile's Atacama desert, fog catchers have been in use for over half a century, and even are used to... View full entry
The trend toward living in less square footage isn't just about battling rent hikes: in Orange County, the able-bodied and financially resourceful are choosing to habitate (and sometimes co-habitate) in so-called micro or mini-apartments. Although the definition varies, anything below 500 square... View full entry
These are strange days in San Francisco, where the clamor to build needed housing — especially at affordable levels — is matched only by the self-righteous vigor with which actual proposals for that housing tend to be opposed...But if we want a well-planned city with distinctive new buildings for all its citizens, projects like this show that good design and good policy can go hand in hand. — San Francisco Chronicle
Developer Tishman Speyer's nearly one-year-old proposal for a 400-foot-tall residential tower, which Jeanne Gang designed, at 160 Folsom St. is suddenly facing opposition from local groups. With former mayor Art Agnos at the forefront of the opposition, the groups argue that the building promotes... View full entry
This relatively low-tech method is among a battery of tests that materials scientists are using to determine why several anchor rods securing the newest portion of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, the region’s busiest, failed their earthquake inspections. The first alarms sounded in 2013, when seismic tests found 32 faulty rods. They’d been sitting in a large pool of water, corroding. — wired.com
Previously:Bolts along Bay Bridge bike path failAfter $6.4 Billion, San Francisco Bridge Remains a MessTime-Lapse of San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge Construction View full entry
For a fledgling startup, finding an office in San Francisco can be a real nightmare. Rents are now climbing past $60 a square foot, second only to Manhattan in the US [...].
This means young startups have to get creative if they insist on staying within the city. And Westfield, one of the world’s largest mall operators, has a solution for them: Bespoke, a 37,000-square-foot coworking and event space within its shopping center in downtown San Francisco.
— qz.com
The heart of the campus, designed by SHoP Architects and interior designer Studio O+A, is a multistory “commons” — a glassed-in network of circulation and gathering spaces fronting Third Street. [...]
Uber said that the design of the Mission Bay office would mark a departure from the open office plans that have become so trendy in recent years. Instead, the Uber workstations will be arranged in a series of work areas, each with access to shared support and collaborative work zones.
— sfgate.com
Between 925 and 1,960 units citywide have been removed from the housing market by hosts renting out entire units on Airbnb for more than 58 days, the [San Francisco Budget & Legislative Analyst's] report estimates. [...]
The report draws a comparison between the number of evictions in neighborhoods with the most hosts, though notes there is no way to draw a direct connection. In the Mission, for example, there were 315 hosts last year and 323 evictions.
— m.sfexaminer.com
New York and London remain the world’s most global cities, as they are the only cities to rank in the top 10 of both the Global Cities Index and the Global Cities Outlook according to the A.T. Kearney Global Cities 2015 [...]. San Francisco leads the Global Cities Outlook due to its strength in innovation. Other cities ranking at the top of the Global Cities Outlook include London (#2), Boston (#3), New York (#4), and Zurich (#5). — atkearney.com
For lovers of city rankings:Melbourne named world’s most liveable city for fourth consecutive yearForbes Releases Baffling "Coolest Cities" ListFor skeptics: The Top 6 Reasons to Be Wary of City Rankings, Ranked View full entry
When the Presidio Trust announced last year that it was rejecting George Lucas’ bid to build a museum at Crissy Field, its leaders didn’t reveal that three days earlier they had been prepared to grant the “Star Wars” creator the land he sought. [...]
if he agreed to change the look of his desired museum, a mock-classical temple that at one point had four ceremonial domes. [...]
Five months later, Lucas was bound for Chicago.
— sfgate.com
