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 A quick history of how Asheville's "RAD" went from post-industrial grittiness to tourist haven. Joel Burgess/Citizen-Times The Stoneyard Apartments are proposed for 175 Lyman St. in the River Arts District . (Photo: Form & Function Architecture)   ASHEVILLE - Approval of a proposed $19 million River Arts District apartment complex has been delayed a second time after City Council concerns about high rent prices . The 133- unit Stoneyard Apartments were slated to be reviewed at Tuesday's council meeting, but Mayor Esther Manheimer asked that the public hearing be delayed to "a date uncertain." The council unanimously approved the change with no discussion. No one from the Saluda- based AltInvest development group spoke at the meeting. On Wednesday morning Sasha Vrtunksi , with the city's planning and urban design department , said the delay happened at the request of AltInvest. Chief developer David LaFave couldn 't be reached by text...

Jason LaVeris / FilmMagic / Getty Images I don’t remember when Joss Whedon went from being a garden-variety household name to being someone I refer to on a first-name basis. I quote Joss, I verb Joss, I adjective Joss . As a woman who was once a teenage girl who grew up with Buffy, I’ve internalized more than my fair share of lessons from Our Lady of Buffdom. For the better part of twenty years, I’ve known Joss Whedon as the creator of a feminist hero. For the better part of the same twenty years, Kai Cole knew Joss Whedon as her partner and husband. He was just Joss to her, too — far more intimately Joss than to any of his first-name-basis-ing fans. This weekend, Cole wrote about her divorce with Joss in a post on The Wrap . She writes about how, on their honeymoon in England in 1995, she encouraged him to turn his script for Buffy the Vampire Slayer — which had just been misinterpreted as a film — into a television show. Joss apparently hadn ’t wanted to work in television anym...

This week on Recode Media with Peter Kafka , writer Chuck Klosterman called into the studio to talk about his career in journalism and his new book, “Chuck Klosterman X.” (The X is a Roman numeral 10, as in this is his 10th book.) The two discuss trends in journalism, writing about the famous and whether football will disappear. You can read some of the highlights from the interview here, or listen to it in the audio player above. Below, we’ve also provided a lightly edited complete transcript of their conversation. If you like this, be sure to subscribe to Recode Media on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Peter Kafka: This is Recode Media with Peter Kafka. That’s me. I am part of the Vox Media Podcast Network . I’m here at the Vox Media podcast studio , sitting all by myself because ... This doesn’t happen very often. I think only once before ... our guest is not in studio with me. He’s in Portland. He’s Chuck Klosterman. Hey, Chuck....