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

South of San Francisco, a whole town is being deformed by plate tectonics. [...]

This is Hollister, California, a town being broken in two slowly, relentlessly, and in real time by an effect known as “fault creep.” A surreal tide of deformation has appeared throughout the city.

As if its grid of streets and single-family homes was actually built on an ice floe, the entire west half of Hollister is moving north along the Calaveras Fault, leaving its eastern streets behind. — bldgblog.blogspot.com

Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf tossed out an idea that she admitted might sound a bit crazy: What if San Francisco housing developers could fulfill their affordable housing requirements by building some of that housing in Oakland? [...]

The idea is for San Francisco residents who qualify for below-market-rate housing to live in affordable units that would be built in Oakland. [...]

The foundation for the partnership is already being prepped in Oakland — sfgate.com

Everyone knows the supply of new homes in the Bay Area is falling far short of job and population growth, but the number of existing homes being put up for sale is also near record lows in many areas. [...]

“The move-up market is pretty much frozen,” said Matt Fuller, an agent with Zephyr. “Even if you can do great on the sale of your property, you are terrified to enter the market as a buyer.” [...]

Inventory is also shrinking because post-foreclosure sales have dried up. — sfchronicle.com

The Navigation Center is one of the most innovative homeless-help experiments being undertaken in the U.S. — meaning that when it opens the week of March 16 at an old high school at 16th and Mission streets, it will be watched not just by every homeless camper in the vicinity, but by aid agencies around the nation. [...]

The Navigation Center will be doing this as a pilot project for eight to 18 months, depending on its success. — SFGate

“This corridor of shame that I call Van Ness and Market is just a spectacular example of failed urban planning.” [...]

“In the built environment, as one writer puts it, all our warts and our glories are there,” says Paul Groth, an architectural historian at UC Berkeley. “You can tell how we’re treating our fellow humans in the built environment. It really is an autobiography.”

So, what does Groth think our current architecture says?

“Greed.” — KQED

“San Francisco is really focused on getting things right on the ground, creating a rich fabric,” said Gang... “You have your own ecosystem.” [...]

She’s at work here on a 40-story tower proposed at Folsom and Spear streets, one block in from the Embarcadero. The form would be simple, a lean rectangle, but the silhouette would be a ripple of angled bay windows, jagged and subtle at once.

“Some designers focus on the profile. We’re looking more at the elements, starting from the inside out,” — sfchronicle.com

The United States Olympic Committee seems ready to bid for the 2024 Summer Games. But the hard part is deciding which of the four finalists — Boston, Washington, Los Angeles and San Francisco — has the best chance of being chosen by the International Olympic Committee. The U.S.O.C. could make its selection as soon as this week, so we asked New York Times reporters in each city to describe the view from each place. — nytimes.com

The new design for One Van Ness, which will rise 37 stories at the intersection of Van Ness Avenue and Market Street, is the work of Snøhetta [...].

A journalist and illustrator, Susie Cagle tells me in an email that she covered San Francisco real estate in 2008, and the Snøhetta project reminds her of ambitious residential projects planned for Market Street that never happened. "I think it's a place where dense construction makes sense," she says. — citylab.com

The United States Olympic Committee board of directors unanimously approved a U.S. bid to host the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the USOC announced today. Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., remain under consideration, with the selection of a U.S. bid city to be made in early 2015. [...]

“All four cities have presented plans that are part of the long-term visions for their communities,” said USOC CEO Scott Blackmun. — teamusa.org

This would be the first U.S. tower for Snøhetta, founded in Norway but on the rise in the United States since being selected in 2004 to design the pavilion for the National Sept. 11 Memorial & Museum.

Snøhetta will replace an even better-known architect for the corner: Richard Meier, the Pritzker Prize-winning designer of the Getty Center in Los Angeles, whose firm has been working on a tower in the same location since 2008. —

The city’s board of supervisors voted to legalize and regulate short-term stays through a controversial piece of legislation that has been two years in the making [...]

The key changes include a limit on non-hosted rentals for up to 90 days per year. [...]

[The hosts will] also have to pay the city’s hotel taxes. They — not Airbnb — are responsible for certifying that they’re only hosting 90 days a year and for keeping records that prove this. — techcrunch.com

Welcome to prison, and a celebration of liberty. Ai Weiwei, the big man of Beijing, has spent years discovering pockets of freedom in the most straitened circumstances, resisting every effort by the Chinese government to shut him down.

This week he opens a major new exhibition in a place that makes that resistance literal: on Alcatraz [...]. The United States has the highest incarceration rate on the planet. But this prison is decommissioned, and Ai is using it to extraordinary effect. — theguardian.com