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...

Affordable housing activists are calling out Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto , saying he hasn't done enough to help low- income residents evicted from East Liberty's Penn Plaza Apartments . But Peduto responded, saying his administration has gone "overboard" to help relocate the displaced residents. "To say that the city didn't do enough is an insult," Peduto said.  "Even when we did [find new housing], they said no, and now they're holding protests saying we didn't do enough." In the summer of 2015, approximately 200 residents of the Penn Plaza Apartments were served 90- day eviction notices by developers LG Realty Advisors . This was a shock to the mostly low-income residents, who found out their homes would be razed to support an upscale Whole Foods grocery store , a plan that has since been cancelled. Although the city stepped in to give residents more time to move, activist groups like Homes for All and the Penn Plaza Support ...

The same day it voted to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee from a park — a move that white supremacists descended on the city to protest — the City Council did something that got much less publicity. It unanimously approved a $ 4 million spending plan to address racial disparities . Over the next five years, about $2.5 million is to be used to redevelop public housing ; $250,000 will go to expanding a park in a black neighborhood; and $20,000 a year will pay for G.E.D. classes for public housing residents . Photo K. Ian Grandison, a University of Virginia professor, with a map of what the rapidly gentrifying city looked like in the 1920s. Credit Matt Eich for The New York Times Activists call it reparations for the destruction of Vinegar Hill and other black neighborhoods here. “I’m hoping that other elected officials and policy makers from across the country can see it’s not enough to just move a damn statue,” said Wes Bellamy, the vice mayor, who proposed the plan. “I think symbol...

Take a walk east from the gold-plated cupola of San Francisco City Hall and the landscape transforms into the Tenderloin, a patchwork of residential hotels, small delis and social service clinics that cater to the poor. It winds into the city’s main tourist corridor , and, farther along, a glossy cluster of condominium towers where upper- story penthouses cost millions . These symbols of extreme poverty and prosperity are wedged together in District Six, which serves both as a portal for visitors and a cauldron where San Francisco ’s most pressing political issues simmer . For 20 years, District Six voters have reliably concluded that the solutions to those issues come from the progressive viewpoint. And while it’s more than a year until the next election for supervisor, the contest is already shaping up as a test of whether that is still true. From the Tenderloin to the Mission Bay waterfront , District Six has seen a rush of development over the past two decades, and residents are ...

"It's the same old story. First the builder picks the property, then he gets the Planning Commission to designate it, then the people get bulldozed out of their homes." - Jane Jacobs Under Title I of the Federal Housing Act of 1949, federal funds became available to cities for demolition or rehabilitation of blighted areas, and throughout the 1950s, Robert Moses' Slum Clearance Committee lived up to its name, razing entire New York neighborhoods in the name of urban renewal. In 1960, the city's Housing and Redevelopment Board took over those duties, promising to displace residents less brusquely than had been Moses' way. But the city Planning Commission continued to support the basic tenets of urban renewal, believing that New Yorkers would ultimately be much happier in modern, less crowded housing with lots of open spaces. Jane Jacobs, a 45-year-old editor at Architectural Forum, had another opinion: Urban planners , she believed, were des...

The lack of affordable housing and the city's overburdened shelters led to a range of possible ways to combat the problem—but it was inspiration from the houseless community themselves ("houseless" is a preferred term within the community) that led to the start of an innovative solution.  In the spring of 2016, a group called the Village Coalition—made up of advocates, activists, and houseless individuals—joined forces with several student fellows and faculty Sergio Palleroni and Todd Ferry from the Center for Public Interest Design (CPID), a research and action center within the Portland State University 's School of Architecture. Working together, they created the POD Initiative (Partners On Dwelling) to address  houselessness in the city. They observed that the houseless community had been establishing their own informal "villages" around the city. As a result, the group reached out to the greater architecture community , asking them to apply their...