A spot in the city’s trendy South Beach neighborhood sold last week for $82,000, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on Thursday ( ).

The 8- by 12-foot parking space is in an enclosed garage in a condominium building near the San Francisco Giants’ ballpark. A Porsche SUV was parked in it on Thursday. The Chronicle said the unidentified buyer did not respond to interview requests.

While it may seem like a lot of money, real estate agents said parking could be a good investment in densely packed San Francisco, where vehicle spaces go for a premium. They can add as much as $100,000 to the purchase price of a property or be rented out at rates of $400 to $450 a month _ the going rate in South Beach.

“We had a very good response right out of the gate,” said Sean Sullivan with Climb Real Estate, which sold the spot. “It was only in the market two weeks.”

Sullivan said he sold a parking spot in the same building at the height of the last real estate boom for $95,000.

Overall, the city has seen real estate prices climb. Home prices in San Francisco grew by 22.2 percent in March compared with a year ago, second only to Phoenix among U.S. cities, according to The Standard Poor’s/Case-Shiller home price index released in May.

Home prices in the wider, nine-county San Francisco Bay area posted a 12th straight month of double-digit price increases last month, according to research firm DataQuick. DataQuick said Thursday that the median price for new and existing houses and condominiums reached $519,000 in May, up 30 percent from the same period last year.

Condos in the South Beach area are going for $1,000 a square foot, the Chronicle reported. At 96 square feet, the parking space was a relative bargain at $854 per square foot.

Sullivan said the building where the parking spot was sold was built before the city restricted spaces to one per unit. It is one of the few buildings that allows nonresidents to own a spot.

The owner has a deed and must pay property taxes and homeowner association dues.

The sale was all cash.

Article source: http://wnyt.com/article/stories/s3066080.shtml?cat=300

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS/AP) – It seems parking spots aren’t immune from the recent surge in San Francisco real estate prices.

A spot in the city’s trendy South Beach neighborhood sold last week for $82,000.

The 8- by 12-foot parking space is in an enclosed garage in a condominium building just a block from ATT Park. The unidentified buyer did not respond to interview requests, but a Porsche SUV was parked in the space on Thursday.

While it may seem like a lot of money, real estate agents said parking could be a good investment. It can add as much as $100,000 to the purchase price of a property, or be rented out at rates of $400 to $450 a month — the going rate in South Beach.

Sean Sullivan, who sold the space, said the spot has an ideal location with Instagram and other tech companies nearby.

“We had a very good response right out of the gate,” said Sullivan, an agent who works for Climb Real Estate. “It was only in the market two weeks.”

Sullivan said that he’s previously sold a space for even more. In fact, he sold a parking spot in the same exact building at the height of the last real estate boom for $95,000.

Overall, the city has seen real estate prices climb. Home prices in San Francisco grew by 22.2 percent in March compared with a year ago, second only to Phoenix among U.S. cities, according to the Standard Poor’s/Case-Shiller home price index released in May.

Home prices in the wider, nine-county Bay Area posted a 12th straight month of double-digit price increases last month, according to research firm DataQuick. DataQuick said Thursday that the median price for new and existing houses and condominiums reached $519,000 in May, up 30 percent from the same period last year.

Condos in the South Beach area are going for $1,000 a square foot. At 96 square feet, the parking space was a relative bargain at $854 per square foot.

Sullivan said the building where the parking spot was sold was built before the city restricted spaces to one per unit. It is one of the few buildings that allows non-residents to own a spot.

The new owner has a deed and will be required to pay property taxes and homeowner association dues on his little slice of South Beach.

The sale was all cash.

(Copyright 2013 by CBS San Francisco. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)

Article source: http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2013/06/13/parking-spot-sells-for-82k-in-san-francisco-building/

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Parking spots apparently aren’t immune from the recent surge in San Francisco real estate prices.

A spot in the city’s trendy South Beach neighborhood sold last week for $82,000, the

The 8- by 12-foot parking space is in an enclosed garage in a condominium building near the San Francisco Giants’ ballpark. A Porsche SUV was parked in it on Thursday. The Chronicle said the unidentified buyer did not respond to interview requests.

While it may seem like a lot of money, real estate agents said parking could be a good investment in densely packed San Francisco, where vehicle spaces go for a premium. They can add as much as $100,000 to the purchase price of a property or be rented out at rates of $400 to $450 a month – the going rate in South Beach.

“We had a very good response right out of the gate,” said Sean Sullivan with Climb Real Estate, which sold the spot. “It was only in the market two weeks.”

Sullivan said he sold a parking spot in the same building at the height of the last real estate boom for $95,000.

Overall, the city has seen real estate prices climb. Home prices in San Francisco grew by 22.2 percent in March compared with a year ago, second only to Phoenix among U.S. cities, according to The Standard Poor’s/Case-Shiller home price index released in May.

Home prices in the wider, nine-county San Francisco Bay area posted a 12th straight month of double-digit price increases last month, according to research firm DataQuick. DataQuick said Thursday that the median price for new and existing houses and condominiums reached $519,000 in May, up 30 percent from the same period last year.

Condos in the South Beach area are going for $1,000 a square foot, the Chronicle reported. At 96 square feet, the parking space was a relative bargain at $854 per square foot.

Sullivan said the building where the parking spot was sold was built before the city restricted spaces to one per unit. It is one of the few buildings that allows nonresidents to own a spot.

The owner has a deed and must pay property taxes and homeowner association dues.

The sale was all cash.

Copyright Associated Press

Article source: http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/San-Francisco-Parking-Spot-Sells-for-82000-211467521.html

Music

By Jonathan Curiel | Feb 24, 2013

Near the corner of Broadway and Columbus, in the heart of San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, a storefront beckons passers-by with signage that suggests good times for all. “Jazz at Pearl’s,” blares the awning at 256 Columbus Avenue, where an outside wall has the same big lettering. Below the lettering, though, are stickers with graffiti, and a bigger sign that tells the bitter truth: “For Lease.” If there’s a poetic symbol of the up-and-down state of jazz in San Francisco, it’s 256 Columbus Avenue.

When Jazz at Pearl’s was going strong, as it was a decade ago, jazz aficionados crowded into the space to hear the likes of singer Madeline Eastman and percussionist extraordinaire Pete Escovedo. Those days, anyone walking by 256 Columbus Avenue could hear and see the music, too, because the Jazz at Pearl’s stage was right by the window. It was San Francisco at its best — a public spectacle of an art form that has always had deep roots here.

These days, San Francisco’s jazz scene is centered in Hayes Valley, at 205 Franklin Street, where SFJAZZ has its new $63 million super structure — a 35,000-square-foot Shangri-La that opened last month and has everything from a 700-seat concert hall to state-of-the-art café run by Charles Phan (of Slanted Door fame).

Photo by Jonathan Curiel.

The contrast between the gleaming SFJAZZ Center and the graffitied former home of Jazz at Pearl’s is emblematic of the state of jazz in San Francisco. Because of the changing economy — fueled by booming housing prices, booming rents, and booming tech money — San Francisco is becoming a city of economic haves and have-nots. Running a jazz club can be highly expensive. A city that, in its jazz heyday, was festooned with small jazz clubs is down to a handful of clubs facing an uncertain future.

“Small jazz clubs cannot survive in this day and age,” says Pascal Bokar Thiam, a prominent jazz guitarist and academic who co-owns Savanna Jazz, a Mission District jazz club that opened in 2003. “San Francisco used to be a Mecca for jazz. But the art form doesn’t necessarily die because small jazz clubs cannot survive. In the context of San Francisco, what SFJAZZ is doing is important because it puts front and center the reality that America has an art form of its own. And that art form expresses the highest standards of aesthetics that humanity has been able to make. By cultivating this, SFJAZZ is doing something extremely important to the general health of jazz.”

But jazz elders are now debating whether there’s a substantial audience for jazz in San Francisco beyond the confines of SFJAZZ’s programming. Sonny Buxton, a deejay at Bay Area radio jazz station KCSM who was the musical director of Jazz at Pearl’s before its 2003 closing, says an increase in college jazz programs around the country has helped produce a new generation of jazz-goers steeped in the music’s history.

“There’s a new, upcoming jazz audience that’s young and vibrant,” Buxton says. “They’re into jazz and world music and a lot of different things. One thing today that wasn’t in existence when I was coming up is that virtually every college and university in the country today has a jazz program. That means a lot of young people are being exposed to it.”

The decrease of San Francisco jazz clubs in the past 20 years may be due more to real-estate economics than a leveling-off of jazz audiences. Jazz at Pearl’s shut down in 2003 when the building’s owner declined to give the club more than a five-year lease. (A new Jazz at Pearl’s opened in the same location but closed its doors in 2008 over similar lease issues.) Savanna Jazz faced foreclosure when a bank refused to negotiate new terms. Facing a possible bankruptcy, Yoshi’s San Francisco is trying to redo the terms of loans it received from the now-defunct San Francisco Redevelopment Agency.

Will audiences support these venues at their most vulnerable economic times? Thiam says the audience for jazz is limited because jazz and music education have disappeared at the grade school, middle school, and high school levels. San Francisco’s jazz scene, he says, reflects a nationwide trend: among younger audiences, jazz is losing out to hip-hop, rap, pop, and other music. Young black students have even told Thiam that they consider jazz a “white music” that has little relevance to their lives.

“Jazz is not profitable, primarily because there is no audience for it — it’s an art form that isn’t taught in schools,” says Thiam, whose club is located on Mission Street between 25th and 26th Streets. “Schools teach Mozart and Beethoven, but Mozart and Beethoven are the products and the geniuses of Europe. In America, we have our geniuses that created an art form that’s performed all over the planet. Singapore has a jazz festival. Turkey has a jazz festival. Denmark has a jazz festival. And these geniuses are called King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and so forth. Because our student population as early as elementary school is not knowledgeable about people who created an art form that lifted this nation to the status of a cultural superpower, we have this vacuum. There is no energy for young people to go to jazz clubs — not because they don’t like jazz; it’s simply because they don’t know anything about jazz. This is an area where culture has impacted business. And as a result, business by dwindling impacts the culture.”

The Danish government, Thiam says, gives financial support to the country’s jazz clubs — upwards of $125,000 a year to each club, “so they can operate a higher-standard learning environment.” While the U.S. government may not have a similar approach, moneyed institutions like SFJAZZ should consider supporting small jazz clubs, which are incubators of upcoming jazz musicians and singers, says Thiam and Franzo King, the saxophone-playing Archbishop at Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church on Fillmore Street. The San Francisco church, which some jazz fans consider a de facto jazz club, was evicted from its longtime home on Divisadero Street in 2000 because of a massive rent increase.

King views the opening of SFJAZZ’s new center with decidedly mixed feelings, saying its new location in a gentrified neighborhood anchors San Francisco’s jazz scene away from the African-American community that historically supported jazz in the city. Popular jazz in San Francisco, King worries, may become an art form performed in a symphony-like environment where audiences are snazzily dressed and discouraged from being vocal during performances. “SFJAZZ moved out of the community where it was born,” King says.

After opening its doors last month, SFJAZZ has had a series of sold-out performances, and is well on its way to raising all necessary funding. So far, donors have contributed $54.9 million, with nine donors giving $1 million or more. One anonymous contribution totaled $25 million. “The SFJAZZ Center believes that rising water raises all ships,” says SFJAZZ spokesperson Marshall Lamm. “We hope the Center can generate more exposure for the genre that will then increase the interest in jazz so more people go out to experience live music in every venue.”

Thiam is taking a wait-and-see approach. In the meantime, Savanna Jazz is negotiating new loan terms with its bank, says Thiam, who is hopeful the jazz club, with its nightly jazz and its prominent display of jazz memorabilia, will be around for the foreseeable future. “We’ll be here,” Thiam says in his office on a recent Saturday night, “as long as the spirit of Louis Armstrong says we’re going to be here.”

As Thiam spoke, the Montreal-based jazz singer Jeri Brown and her trio of top-flight musicians performed another song for an enthusiastic audience of 30. That number may seem small, but even famous jazz clubs like the Village Vanguard in New York get crowds that are similar in number. The night I visited Savanna Jazz, one audience member moved her hands to the rhythm of Brown’s beats, as if the woman were on stage with Brown and her trio. The woman seemed to be in a trance, and her seat was practically shaking with feeling. Nearby, other audience members were also riveted, even if they were less demonstrative.

On that night, jazz was alive and well at a small club in San Francisco — just like it was in the old days when John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and other big names would visit San Francisco and perform in venues that were not much bigger than a studio apartment. Jazz spots like Savanna Jazz helped forge the cultural environment that led to SFJAZZ in the first place. A venue like Savanna Jazz is the only place to see an artist like Jeri Brown, who’s highly considered in jazz circles (and a new favorite of mine) but not yet so popular she could sell out SFJAZZ’s concert hall.

“Small jazz venues are the incubators of local talent,” says Thiam. “In order for this art form to survive, small jazz clubs have to be able to survive. It’s very important for big entities like SFJAZZ and Lincoln Center in New York to realize that there has to be a partnership with small jazz venues. If that becomes a commitment — if the big outfits that have the financial endowment hold hands with small jazz venues — then only then will the tide lift all boats.”

For more information on the programming at SFJAZZ, visit sfjazz.org.

Resources

• SFJAZZ

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Article source: http://www.kqed.org/arts/music/index.jsp?id=116887

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, Jan 27, 2012 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) –
230 Ritch Street, an architect’s dream home in the South Beach
neighborhood, is now on the market and represented by Zephyr Real
Estate. Designed by Santos Prescott and Associates under the
direction of Adele Naude Santos, FAIA, it is a splendid amalgam of
beauty and utility.

The home features four spacious bedrooms and three full bathrooms in
approximately 2,640 square feet of living space. The master suite
encompasses a full floor complete with a soaring 22-foot ceiling and
a private roof deck. The gourmet eat-in kitchen is appointed with
luxury appliances including a Thermador range with barbecue grill, a
Sub-zero refrigerator and Hansgrohe faucets. At the center of the
home, the double-height living space looks out onto a tropical
courtyard of palm trees that rise three stories high.

A highly-refined proportion and geometry create a home that is filled
with sunlight and space and perfectly blends the outside with the
interior. The structure, built in the 1930s, was originally a
warehouse. At its conversion in 1998, every effort was made to retain
the original sense of space and to utilize the original elements,
such as the large timber beams. “Luxurious materials and finishes
have been added throughout so that the home is a modern
interpretation of the original,” explains Ms. Santos in her
architect’s statement.

Additional features include a mezzanine overlooking the living space,
a private street entrance, private garage parking with internal
access, edge-grain birchwood floors, Miele washer and dryer, Siedle
video intercom and BASWAphon acoustical plaster for sound absorption.
An expansive wall of textured gunite concrete flanks the home’s main
entrance and central staircase.

The home is listed with Seth Skolnick, a Zephyr Top Producer in 2009,
2010 and 2011. In 2004 he founded 46 Degree Properties, devoted
exclusively to the sale of luxury properties of architectural
importance. He is a member in good standing with the San Francisco,
the California and the National Association of REALTORS(R) as well as
Zephyr’s Premiere Property Group. He can be reached at
seth@zephyrsf.com or at 455.695.7707.

About Zephyr Real Estate
Founded in 1978, Zephyr Real Estate is San
Francisco’s largest independent real estate firm with $1 billion in
annual gross sales in 2011 and a current roster of more than 200
full-time agents. In 2010, Zephyr launched its new website, which has
earned three web design awards, including the prestigious WebAward
for Outstanding Website from the Web Marketing Association. Zephyr
Real Estate is a member of the international relocation network,
Leading Real Estate Companies of the World; the luxury real estate
network, Who’s Who in Luxury Real Estate; and the local luxury
marketing association, the Luxury Marketing Council of San Francisco.
Zephyr has six strategically located offices in San Francisco, a
business center in Marin County, and serves a large customer base
throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. For more information, visit

www.zephyrsf.com .

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        Contact:
        Melody Brown
        Zephyr Real Estate
        San Francisco, CA
        415.729.3555
        Email Contact

SOURCE: Zephyr Real Estate

http://www2.marketwire.com/mw/emailprcntct?id=B3A8EBA85AB1B2D0

Copyright 2012 Marketwire, Inc., All rights reserved.

Article source: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/zephyr-real-estate-lists-230-ritch-street-property-2012-01-27