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The cost to build California’s ambitious but long delayed high-speed rail line has once again risen, with rail officials now estimating it could take up to $105 billion to finish the line from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
The project’s price tag has steadily risen since voters first approved nearly $10 billion in bond money for it in 2008, when the total cost was pegged at $40 billion.
— KOVR Sacramento
The additional need for money stems from necessary sound barrier upgrades and repositioning of the train away from the Central Valley’s Cesar E. Chavez National Monument, according to project officials. The state is confident it can raise the necessary funds from the new federal infrastructure... View full entry
The second most valuable company in the world, Amazon has been gobbling up space throughout the southeast corner of the city, taking advantage of zoning meant to preserve blue-collar jobs in a market in which housing and office space have typically generated higher revenues. — The San Francisco Chronicle
Amazon bought a 510,000-square-foot former sanitation motor pool parcel in the Showplace Square section of the city for $200 million in December of 2020. It has since proposed an expansion of the site’s footprint into an over 725,000-square-foot distribution hub for 400 workers that neighboring... View full entry
People living in San Francisco may be given the opportunity to vote on a proposal to tax vacant homes in the city. The proposal, filed with city officials this month, seeks to address a chronic shortage of housing in San Francisco by encouraging landlords to either rent or sell vacant units... View full entry
Within the architecture industry, there are individuals who work tirelessly to not only design impactful buildings but who aim to represent the people, places, and community that their work serves. Prescott Reavis was more than just a Black architect. He was an advocate, a mentor, and a formidable... View full entry
[...] Millennium Tower – a luxury condominium where star athletes and retired Google employees bought multimillion-dollar apartments before they realized it was sinking – is continuing to sink and tilt to the side by about 3in (7.5 cm) a year, according to the engineer responsible for fixing the troubled building. — The Guardian
At that rate, the building’s elevators and sewage systems would cease to function within a few years according to engineer Ron Hamburger’s report to the city’s municipal Board of Supervisors last week. He also told the 11-member body that the movement was inevitable, adding that, based on... View full entry
UCSF has released images of their proposed Helen Diller Medical Center, designed by Herzog & de Meuron in collaboration with HDR Architecture. The 15-story hospital will be constructed on UCSF’s Parnassus Heights campus, with 336 inpatient beds, diagnostic and treatment services, clinical... View full entry
Even as smaller projects are stuck in limbo due to market uncertainties and astronomical construction costs, the city’s colossal multi-phased projects like those at Treasure Island, Mission Rock, Pier 70 and Power Station will steam full speed ahead. Streets are being laid out, sidewalks poured, trees planted, streetlights installed and buildings are sprouting from the ground. — The San Francisco Chronicle
The city is currently in the process of transforming Treasure Island, the artificial holm named after the Robert Louis Stevenson novel and created for the 1939 World’s Fair, into an 8,000-unit residential neighborhood with below-market housing and retail amenities that is anticipated to host a... View full entry
The maddening hum of safety slats on the pedestrian handrails of the Golden Gate Bridge will finally be silenced under a recently released proposal by the Bridge District.
The fix — devised and tested by bridge engineers in consultation with aerodynamic and acoustic experts — calls for attaching U-shaped clips containing a thin rubber sleeve to all 12,000 vertical slats on the railings.
— The San Francisco Chronicle
The haunting acoustic hum is the direct result of a $12 million wind retrofit project authored by the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District. A few enterprising locals have made the most of the deafening din, although the majority of drivers in the Bay Area were vocally against it... View full entry
More and more, amid the pastels and the gold-leaf embellishments, you see a striking juxtaposition: 125-year-old houses painted in the tones of a cold war-era nuclear warhead or a dormant cinder cone. In neighborhoods like the Mission and the Haight, this phenomenon reads to some residents as an erasure of the Latino community or of the lingering counterculture. — The Guardian
Gentrification has authored a wholesale change to the city brought on by what New York’s outgoing mayor Bill de Blasio once referred to as a “crisis of desirability.” Like the Big Apple, many highly-paid workers have begun returning to their former spendy enclaves, bucking a trend that... View full entry
The cost of up to $1.7 million for building and installing the cabins, along with the dining and other facilities, will be paid for by the nonprofits DignityMoves and Tipping Point Community. The cabins will remain for 18 months, when the lease the city signed for using the parking lots as outdoor shelter spaces runs out. — The San Francisco Chronicle
The 64-square-foot cabins are produced by LifeMoves, a Silicon Valley-based company responsible for the installation of a similar development in nearby Mountain View in 2016. Neighboring Oakland has operated its own cabin site since 2017, albeit with mixed results for residents who have found... View full entry
New York City has surpassed San Francisco as the most expensive apartment rental market in the country. According to August rental data from Zumper, an apartment listing company, San Francisco has fallen behind New York in median one-bedroom rent, with New York at $2,810 and San Francisco at... View full entry
Work on the $100 million fix of the Millennium tower has halted as engineers scramble to figure out why the building has suddenly sunk an inch in a matter of weeks since construction began, NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit has learned. — NBC Bay Area
The “perimeter pile upgrade” project, paid for as part of a confidential settlement reached last year, is designed to reinforce the foundation of the 58-story, luxury Millennium Tower after it had been discovered in 2016 that the northwest corner of the structure had sunk 16 inches since its... View full entry
The single image published Dec. 8, 1922, resembles the industrial Carquinez Bridge, except at 20 times the scale. It’s the kind of bridge one designs when all they have to work with is Popsicle sticks and string. — The San Francisco Chronicle
An engineer turned newspaper editor named James Wilkins was the first to propose the bridge in a 1916 San Francisco Bulletin article. Joseph Strauss' early plans called for a cantilever-suspension hybrid but were later changed due to eight-figure cost concerns. Illustration of the... View full entry
You might've heard of the concept of a "bridge" in music. Well, guitarist Nate Mercereau is taking that term literally. In July, he released a new album in collaboration with San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge — yes, you read that right — titled Duets / Golden Gate Bridge, which features droning guitar improvisations over the eerie hum of the Bay Area landmark. — NPR
The Bay Area icon is known to have a humming effect resulting from a retrofit that added new slats to the bridge's handrails. Mercereau read about the effect in a San Francisco Chronicle article last year before recruiting an audio engineer and photographer to follow him into the... View full entry
As the world heats up and sea levels rise, communities in the U.S. could spend more than $400 billion on seawalls to try to hold the ocean back over the next couple of decades. But there’s a catch: Building a seawall in one area can often mean that flooding gets even worse in another neighborhood or city nearby. — Fast Company
A new paper from The Natural Capital Project at Stanford University that examines how seawalls might impact California's Bay Area was published this spring, adding to a slate of similar scholarship surrounding seawalls that have cropped up in recent years. Other efforts have seen a... View full entry
