Construction Maison

The California legislature is responding to spiking Bay Area rents by moving bills that would force cities to loosen restrictive land use rules that have impoverished renters and created massive profits for apartment owners. Year-over- year apartment rents at the end of March 2016 were falling hard in the Bay Area, with annual percentage decreases of 15% in Redwood City, 13% in Santa Clara, 8% in Palo Alto, and 5% in Oakland. But prices stabilized after the election of President Donald Trump ignited a new technology stock price boom , and have recently begun to take off and spike to new all-time-highs over the last 12 months. But the most recent Zumber survey found that Bay Area one- bedroom apartment rents rose by 2 percent in July. San Francisco  has the most expensive rent in the state at $3,450, followed by Mountain View at $3,060, and Redwood City at $2,970. The least expensive area rents were Vallejo at $1,270, followed by Napa at $1,540, and Santa Rosa at $1,550. The fear...

A month after publicly denouncing a health care bill that the president was desperate to pass, Senator Dean Heller sat uncomfortably alongside President Donald Trump in front of rolling cameras. Holding the floor, Trump did not disappoint, addressing the awkwardness head on with a veil of humor so thin it stood no chance of obscuring anyone's view of the true threat at its heart. “Look, he wants to remain a senator doesn ’t he?” Trump said with a smirk. Heller rocked his head back and initially burst into a laugh. But, with a subtle yet significant hand on his arm, Trump let him know that the warning was not to be taken lightly. Keep up with this story and more by subscribing now “And I think the people of your state, which I know very well, I think the people are going to appreciate what you hopefully will do,” the Republican president added . [embedded content] And with that, the uneasiness of being a Republican in the era of the most unpredictable and self- serving president ...

In January 2015, a massive fire in Edgewater, N.J., demonstrated that buildings with sprinkler systems are not always protected against fire. The blaze destroyed 240 residential apartments and displaced 500 people from the Edgewater Avalon apartment building . The fire began when a maintenance worker’s plumbing torch accidentally ignited wooden wall studs , and flames quickly spread throughout the structure. Fifteen minutes passed before workers called the fire department . In that time, the fire spread throughout combustible void spaces (between walls and floors) and soon engulfed the building. Emergency personnel from 35 different cities and towns ultimately responded to the incident. Thankfully, there were no fatalities. Immediately after the blaze, people asked why the fire was so devastating. The building had sprinklers, after all. Shouldn’t the sprinkler system have extinguished the fire? To make matters worse , this building had already burned down 15 years prior during i...

Transgender North Dallas resident hopes to win the SD 8 seat Pam Curry DAVID TAFFET | Senior Staff Writer taffet@dallasvoice.com Pam Curry is one of two Democratic candidates running for the Texas Senate District 8 seat that includes Frisco, McKinney, Sachse, Plano and Richardson, as well as a small chunk of Dallas north of Forest Lane at Central Expressway. The seat is currently held by Van Taylor, a Republican who served for one term. He’s giving up the seat to make a run for Congress. Texas Sen. Don Huffines represents SD 16 , just to the south. His twin brother, Phillip Huffines , is running for the Republican nomination in SD 8. Curry has an opponent from Collin County in the Democratic primary, so just winning the primary makes this an uphill fight. “I know from the get-go, I live on the Dallas side,” she said. “It’s a long shot.” Healthcare is Curry’s primary issue. “Healthcare was crappy before the ACA, remained crappy, and unless we do something about it, it’s going to remai...

“They’re tired of politics as usual,” Sal Albanese, the best chance the Never de Blasio movement has of electing a new mayor, said last night during the first televised debate of the Democratic primary. “It’s always tough to run as a reformer, but I think this time is different.” This time is probably not different. Albanese, a former five- term city councilmember from Brooklyn who is challenging Mayor Bill de Blasio , jabbed and scraped and lashed out at his bête noire during the debate, drawing his share of applause from a sympathetic Upper West Side audience . For watchers of the political scene, there wasn’t much to learn: De Blasio, in Albanese’s eyes, is corrupt; he’s in the pocket of big developers; he’s allowed the city to degenerate into some kind of carnival of woe, but for rich people. De Blasio, who despite his height advantage over Albanese often struggles to be the bigger man, rebutted plenty. His testy side was showing. A progressive Democrat, the first to govern this ...

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...