Construction Maison

San Francisco Supervisor Aaron Peskin has asked the city attorney to explore legislation to impose a vacancy tax on large property owners who leave residential and commercial buildings empty . During a supervisors meeting this month, Peskin said he continues to receive complaints about the impact of “ghost buildings” on neighborhoods. The problem is, nobody really knows how many vacant homes there are in the city and whether a vacancy tax would be legal or effective in freeing up much-needed housing. In an interview, Peskin cited a 28- unit apartment building at 1656 Powell St. that was vacated after a fire damaged some units in December 2013. It remains empty. The three-story building is in a prime North Beach location across from Washington Square Park . Four businesses on the building’s ground floor — a liquor store, a bar, a Thai restaurant and a seafood restaurant — are open, but the apartments above still have boarded-up windows and a littered lobby. Some work was done in the...

CLOSE Collier County will consider four public sites in East Naples and North Naples to encourage the development of affordable housing. Greg Stanley/Naples Daily News Credit: Andy Dean Photography via iStock (Photo: Andy Dean Photography via iStock) A developer wants to put up an apartment complex on Bayshore Drive and rent out nearly half of its units as affordable housing. The property, a vacant lot at the northeast corner of Bayshore and Thomasson drives, has been slated for affordable housing since 2005. But it has always been the county's plan for the East Naples site that the housing on it — either condominiums or single family homes — would be owned and not rented. In a 2005 agreement with the owners of the property, called the Cirrus Pointe Planned Unit Development , the county gave developers permission to build more units than is typically allowed in exchange for keeping 44 of those condos or homes affordable. More:  Four sites owned by Collier County could be us...

"); } if ($(imageDivId).length == 0) { $("#wrapper").after(contentText); } })(jQuery); BREMERTON, Wash. - Crystal Turner stood in the kitchen of her cramped apartment and stared at the cracks in the fake wood flooring beneath her feet. Surrounding her was the home she'd made for herself and her two sons in the past year, since they moved out of her Toyota Camry and into Admiral Manor, a low- rent apartment complex in west Bremerton . There was the single bedroom with two kids' beds on the floor. The living room she'd decorated with signs that said "Hope" and "Love." A dingy bathroom with a leaking toilet that had never been fixed. In this undated photo, Matthew Daigneault pushes his son Aden as he plays outside on the swings of his rental home in West Bremerton , Wash. (Larry Steagall/Kitsap Sun via AP) © 2017 Cox Media Group . Admiral Manor wasn 't the place Turner, a recovering addict, wanted to raise her boys. It was the place...