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San Francisco's privately owned streets: Do you live on one of them?

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http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-s-privately-owned-streets-Do-you-11746359.php By Mike Moffitt , SFGATE Published 4:37 am, Thursday, August 10, 2017 Photo: Matier & Ross, Courtesy Google Image 1 of / 11 Caption Close Image 1 of 11 Overhead view of Presidio Terrace , the private street that was sold in a tax auction to a San Jose couple even as homeowners were in the dark. Overhead view of Presidio Terrace , the private street that was sold in a tax auction to a San Jose couple even as homeowners were in the dark. Photo: Matier & Ross, Courtesy Google Image 2 of 11 This stretch of Zampa Lane fronting Geary Boulevard provides access to parking for several apartment complexes. This stretch of Zampa Lane fronting Geary Boulevard provides access to parking for several apartment complexes. Photo: Google Street View Image 3 of 11 Seal Cove Terrace , like many of the streets in developments springing up near old Candlestick Park , is private. Seal Cove T...

Charlotte affordable housing forum raises possible solutions

There’s a big demand for more affordable housing in Charlotte, where rents and home prices have shot up much faster than wages over the past few years. Many of the apartments being built now target more affluent renters, waitlists for housing vouchers are long and starter homes are snapped up almost immediately. So why aren’t developers building more affordable housing ? That was one of the main questions at a candidate education panel hosted by the Greater Charlotte Apartment Association on Friday, where about two dozen candidates for Charlotte City Council turned out to learn some of the basics on a complicated subject. “ Affordable housing is one of the topics you’ll talk about a lot,” Bryan Holladay, who supervises the group’s government affairs outreach , told the candidates. The subject is an alphabet soup of acronyms (like NOAH, or “ Naturally Occurring Affordable Housing ”) and overlapping terms and definitions. Sometimes when people say “ affordable housing ” they mean go...

NYC is screwing citizens by housing the homeless

Let’s face it: Nobody really knows what to do about the homeless crisis. The sheer numbers of 60,000 people in city shelters and nearly 4,000 more on the streets — many in the latter group psychotic, drug-addicted and violent — overwhelm the best-intended plans to help them. That said, there are better and worse ways to cope with the nightmare. It’s bad enough that the city now spends $2.3 billion a year on homeless services including $1.4 billion on shelter housing , twice what it spent just three years ago. But making things worse : City Hall is now paying landlords more money to put up the homeless than the property owners could make by renting apartments and hotel rooms to non-homeless people at ordinary market rates . Shouldn’t developers be incentivized to create actual affordable housing for permanent residents — not more shelters for transients with no links to a community? The hapless Department of Homeless Services has gone off the deep end at a site in The Bronx, whether ou...

Falling demand hits Sandton’s luxury apartments

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It was only four years ago that Africa’s richest square mile became the destination of choice for SA’s major financial firms , sparking the largest commercial property development boom of the decade. Corporates including Investec , Nedbank, RMB and the JSE were the early movers into Sandton during the 2000s, and several firms have since followed suit. Sasol, Webber Wentzel, Alexander Forbes, EY, and Bowman Gilfillan have anchored their main offices in Sandton in recent years while Discovery and Old Mutual Emerging Markets will soon pile into the area. Property developers believe the catalyst for Sandton was the advent of rapid rail system Gautrain in 2010, which unleashed billions of rands in office, retail and residential property developments . Over the last three years, developers launched high - rise luxury apartments , piggy-backing on the relocation of corporates into the area that would, in theory, create demand from buyers who desired to live closer to work. However, the s...

What Cities Can Learn From the Victorian Era

The Late Victorian period in the United States—roughly the last third of the 19th century—produced some of the most beautiful neighborhoods in the history of Western civilization . It also produced some of the most hopeless slums. In response to the crisis of industrial cities, the modern discipline of city planning emerged . The tools of this new profession helped clean up many unhealthy aspects of urban industry , but also stifled some of the best innovations of Late Victorian urbanism . By the 1920s, planners in the industrial world had established the legal authority to promulgate land-use regulations, and over the next generation, they succeeded at slowing the construction of slum housing and segregating noxious industries from incompatible activities, such as housing and office space. Through some of the same devices, however, planners curtailed some positive features of 19th- century urbanism , including the rich variety of free- form industrial development and the adaptiv...