The Evolution of Protest: The Bay Area Has Been Shaped by Dissent, But No …

Thu, 13 Mar 2014 20:55:22 +0000

The first salvo in the great tech-bus wars was fired on a crisp Friday morning in December. News from the front was, of course, live-tweeted.

The correspondent in this case was Craig Frost, a Google employee whose charter bus ambled toward a busy intersection at Seventh and Adeline streets in Oakland around 8:30 a.m., only to be blocked by a man in a trucker hat, and a woman in sunglasses. They unfurled a banner. It read “Fuck Off Google.”

Frost tweeted the next sequence of events as other protesters gathered around the bus. Someone hurled a blunt object — either a rock or a sparkplug, Frost thought — and shattered one of the vehicle’s side windows. When protesters dispersed, they left behind stray paper fliers with a typed-out manifesto.

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“In case you’re wondering why this is happening, we’ll be extremely clear,” the piece began. “The people outside your Google bus serve you coffee, watch your kids, have sex with you for money, make you food, and are being driven out of their neighborhoods.”

The tech charter buses — big, sleek, equipped with Wi-Fi and upholstered seating — have come to signify the Bay Area’s nouveau riche, many of whom travel 30 or 40 miles each way to their jobs in Silicon Valley. By enabling that commute, the buses allow tech employees to live in San Francisco, Oakland, or Berkeley, where they raise the median income, ratchet up local real estate prices, and transform working-class neighborhoods into chi-chi retail corridors. In the process, they have displaced long-time residents and helped transform the urban environment through a concatenation of circumstances that no single Google employee could control.

“You are not innocent victims,” the flier went on. “Without you, the housing prices would not be rising, and we would not be facing eviction and foreclosure.”

Frost explained, in a series of tweets, that he’d moved to the Bay Area from Los Angeles to be closer to his in-laws, and that he drives a full hour to Oakland to catch the bus to Mountain View, for a job he started in January. “I can’t afford to live closer,” he tweeted, woefully, to the metro journalists who began following his feed for protest updates. “…When my lease is up I may try to move closer. It’s not about me you know. My wife has a job close to where we are now.”

Frost’s tweets — captured, screen-grabbed, and reprinted in numerous media blogs that day — portrayed a guy who’d stepped onto a battlefield, when he was just trying to get to work. He and his Google co-workers had become accomplices to all the land-grabbing, real estate speculation, and deepening income divisions that plague the Bay Area even as it’s been enriched by the tech boom. Their bus had become a totem in a tumultuous class war. And now, that war had become violent. Sort of.

It turned out that several atomized groups had staged bus blockades throughout San Francisco and Oakland that Friday. Protesters representing Eviction Free San Francisco obstructed an Apple shuttle at 24th and Valencia streets, waving cardboard “Evicted” signs in the shape of Google navigation points, and a banner with the slogan “Get Off the Bus; Join Us.” A different group blocked off a Google bus as it pulled into the MacArthur BART station, its front window bearing a tell-tale “Bus to MTV [Mountain View]” sign. Clad in North Face windbreakers and skinny jeans, the protesters looked nearly indistinguishable from their tech counterparts inside.

These protests don’t have quite the tectonic force of, say, the 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala. Unlike the civil rights movement, which aimed to repeal Jim Crow laws, or the gay rights movement, which aimed to abolish DOMA, the tech bus backlash doesn’t have a distinct endgame. Tech employees don’t have marching orders to displace ordinary residents; there isn’t a single, malevolent Silicon Valley bogeyman who is trying to strip San Francisco of its essential character.

Yet on one level at least, the bus protests have been massively successful. In two months, they’ve garnered national media attention, despite having lean production values and a small pool of organizers. They’ve used a repository of symbols to create a powerful visual tableau: that of the scrappy proletariat standing in front of big, insular tech. They’ve enabled San Franciscans to wield an old style of protest against a new, ascendant economy. They transmit a provocative message, even if the goal is illusory.

Any human can stand in the way of a bus, after all. But he can’t stop the engine of progress behind it.

On the morning of Dec. 9 — almost two weeks before the bus blockade that ensnared Frost — a small, bespectacled, ginger-haired man emerged from somewhere behind a Google coach on Valencia Street, to badger a group of protesters.

“Look, I can pay my rent — can you pay your rent?” he demanded, waving an arm hysterically at a protest organizer named Erin McElroy. “Well then you know what?” he continued, “Why don’t you go to a city where you can afford it — you know? ‘Cause this is a city for the right people who can afford it. If you can’t afford it, it’s time for you to leave.”

Article source: http://www.sfweekly.com/2014-02-19/news/evolution-of-protest-google-tech-bus-apple/

Luxury housing market shows early signs of slowdown

Sun, 09 Mar 2014 08:41:16 +0000

First Republic Bank’s Prestige Home Index indicates luxury homes in San Francisco had a strong finish to 2013. But some suggest that California’s high-end housing market is starting to see a slowdown.

Mark Calvey
Senior Reporter- San Francisco Business Times

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The Bay Area’s luxury home market is signaling a slowdown ahead even as prices late last year were still showing year-over-year double-digit increases.

First Republic Bank’s Home Prestige Index released Monday found that luxury home prices in the Bay Area and other key California markets are near records amid tight supplies of homes selling for $1 million and often more.

But it’s the commentary from real estate agents that set off alarms for careful followers of the luxury housing market. The commentary follows recent economic reports pointing to a national housing slowdown, which some blame on the extremely cold weather. The National Association of Realtors said last week that January existing home sales fell more than 5 percent nationally, the worst showing in 18 months. But if bad weather is to blame, some ask why were sales down 7.3 percent in the warm and sunny West?

In discussing First Republic’s latest quarterly figures released Monday, real estate agents in California’s luxury housing market are using telltale language of trouble ahead, with such phrases as “supply is plentiful” and the “market is solid,” while others see “buyer resistance” and “expect the market to level off.”

That type of talk could put a further chill on the housing market and prompt more home owners to put their properties on the market before prices fall.

Real estate agents say that pricing and demand for the limited supply of homes on the market is approaching levels last seen just before the housing market began to crater in 2007.

Earlier this month, Christopher Stafford and Terry Wright, both of Paragon Real Estate Group in San Francisco, sent an email to clients alerting them to “shifts in the San Francisco real estate market.”

“It is far too early in the year to reach definitive conclusions regarding substantive changes in the market, but there are indications of a number of shifts,” the Paragon agents said. “From the hurly burly on the street, the word is that the quantity of offers coming in on new listings is declining. Where a new listing might have attracted 10 or 12 offers last spring, three or four are coming in now; where three or four offers would have arrived, the seller is getting one.”

For those who don’t fully appreciate what the decline in offers mean, the Paragon brokers put it bluntly, “The amount of competition deeply affects home-price increases.”

“And, according to Broker Metrics, for every two listings that accepted offers in December and January, another listing expired or was withdrawn without selling.”

The Paragon agents see plenty of potential buyers checking out online listings and open houses, but more of them are first-time buyers who are “proceeding more cautiously.” Plus that group doesn’t come in with the buying power of home equity built up over the years.

“Though the market remains hot by any reasonable standard, by some statistical measure it is cooling,” the Paragon agents advised clients. “This may reflect a transition or only a lull before the spring sales season begins.”

On Monday Stafford echoed a frequently heard lament in Bay Area real estate circles, “There is no inventory.”

“It seems some of the heat has been taken off the market,” Stafford told me, adding that he views any references to the market “cooling” as overstating the case.

Those hoping that the Bay Area’s luxury housing market gets a big lift this spring might be disappointed as the affluent experience what Marcum’s accountants call “tax shock” as their higher 2013 tax bills must be paid. This segment of the market is also greatly affected by stock market performance, given how much wealth is created in the Bay Area through stock options and initial public offerings. The IPO market also helps set prices paid by acquirers of private companies. The tie between stocks and luxury housing is so strong that one real estate agent, when asked for his outlook on the region’s luxury home market, said, “You’re asking me to predict what the stock market will do.”

The traditionally strong spring housing market may see even more inventory come to market if home owners decide that they’ll get better prices by selling sooner than later.

On Monday, First Republic’s closely watched survey of luxury home values clocked in strong gains from a year ago, but more modest gains from the third quarter, especially when looking at the third quarter’s gain over the second quarter of 2013.

In the Bay Area, luxury home values in last year’s fourth quarter rose 12.4 percent from the fourth quarter of 2012 and 1.8 percent from the third quarter of 2013. That was just below the third quarter’s gain of 1.9 percent from the second quarter of 2013.

In Los Angeles, the fourth quarter’s luxury home values rose 13.7 percent from from a year ago and 1.3 percent from the third quarter. The quarter-over-quarter gain was down sharply from a 6.7 percent gain seen in the third quarter from the second quarter.

In San Diego, luxury home values rose 16.6 percent year-over-year and 1.3 percent from the third quarter of 2013. Again, that represented dramatic slowdown in price gains from the third quarter’s 6 percent increase from the second quarter.

San Francisco-based First Republic Bank produces the quarterly Prestige Home Index with Core-Logic Case-Shiller, a provider of automated property valuation services to the financial services industry. First Republic has tracked luxury homes since the bank’s founding in 1985.

The fourth quarter figures and analysis may provide a snapshot of rising luxury home values as the market was turning down.

“Luxury home prices again posted double-digit gains on a year-over-year basis,” said Katherine August-deWilde, president and chief operating officer of First Republic Bank. (NYSE: FRC) “Market conditions in California’s luxury communities continue to be very strong. Limited inventory, robust demand and low interest rates are driving prices higher.”

In Marin County, higher-priced homes saw gains.

“Going into the end of the year, homes $4 million and above finally picked up,” said Pat Montag of Sotheby’s International Realty in Mill Valley. “Prices are getting close to the peak of the market in 2007. We have very little inventory and that’s constraining the market.”

San Francisco also participated in the strong housing market last year.

“Prices continue to rise because there is so little inventory and so much demand,” said Mary Lou Castellanos of Sotheby’s International in San Francisco. “There are a lot of people who want to buy. The homes that do come to market generate multiple offers and offers over the asking.”

And new tech wealth is spurring luxury home buying on the Peninsula.

“From Palo Alto to Atherton, we are seeing offers 20 percent to 40 percent over the asking price,” said Pat Kalish of Alain Pinel Real Estate in Palo Alto. “It’s tech money as well as foreign buyers. From all indications, prices will keep increasing because the inventory is so low. If you’re a homeowner, this is one of the best times ever to sell.”

Hope springs eternal among those selling real estate.

Southern California also enjoyed a strong market as the stock market clocked in with one of its best years ever in 2013.

“The demand is incredible. It is much stronger than it was in 2006 at the height of the market. Homes that were selling at $10 million in 2005 and 2006 are now $20 million and $25 million. It’s astounding,” said David Mossler of Tele Properties in Beverly Hills.

Further south in Orange County Ron Miller of HOM Sotheby’s in Newport Beach told First Republic Bank that homes at $4 million are selling above year-earlier comps.

“The attractive properties are generating multiple offers,” Miller said. “I see some buyer resistance now and expect the market to level off.”

Even further south in the San Diego area, more signs of a cooling market are evident.

“We’re seeing multiple offers and offers over the asking for properly priced homes up to $3 million,” said Linda Sansone of Willis Allen in Rancho Santa Fe. “From $3 million to $5 million, the market is solid, prices are appreciating and supply is tight. For homes $5 million and above, there is plenty of supply, and prices are rising modestly.”

Sue De Legge of Sue De Legge Associates, also in Rancho Santa Fe, said home-price appreciation was driving the market.

“Rising prices are motivating more sellers to list their homes,” she said. “We expect more inventory to be brought to market in coming months.”

And as a reminder for those who missed Econ 101, rising supply is likely to put downward pressure on prices. One thing is certain: this spring’s home-selling season will be well worth watching.

Mark Calvey covers banking and finance for the San Francisco Business Times.

Article source: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2014/02/home-prices-san-francisco-real-estate.html?page=all

SF Techie Explains Why the World Should Revolve Around Bay Area Techies

Tue, 24 Sep 2013 20:03:53 +0000

Flickr/:rayWhat would we do without you?Last week technology reporter Farhad Manjoo wrote an impassioned defense of the city’s tech sector for SF Magazine. By chance our own tech-savvy correspondent, SF Techie, had written a very similar article, often using the very same words. We’re proud to present it now, in support of his well thought out case.

By SF Techie

I recently met a 23 year-old who’s launching a startup while living out of his car. As a young tech entrepreneur, on or off his meds, he represents San Francisco’s future, and he’s not alone. Hundreds of thousands of equally qualified people are all moving to the Bay Area.

They’re coming here to innovate. And is there anything more innovative, in this day and age, than being a twenty-something with an idea for a startup?

They have to come here. One of the great promises of the Internet, after all, is liberation from the petty constraints of geography. But in practice, that’s absurd — if you want to be anyone in tech, you have to be in the Bay Area. Which means that, this one time, the Internet didn’t actually live up to its promise to change something. But that’s the only time that happened, or ever will happen. That and ending racism. And raising the living standard of the middle class. It turns out the internet has failed to do any of that.

But that’s it. We should be confident that every other promise made about the Internet by tech-funded economists, tech-funded journalists, and tech-entrepreneurs, will come true. Why? Because: Technology. Disruption. New Economy. 2.0.

You can’t argue with that.

No other region is better positioned to take advantage of the new tech forces shaping the world than the Bay Area, except perhaps the Virtual Bay Area being constructed by Google. It’s where the Singularity will live, if it can afford an apartment. (Our best engineers are still testing whether the Singularity can create a real estate market it can’t buy into.)

Nowhere else besides the Bay Area has anything close to the density of funders, product managers, engineers, journalists, strategists, and data miners that you find here living out of their cars. And if someday those cars drive themselves, then we’ll have finally revolutionized homelessness, too.

All those brilliant and ambitious engineers and scientists working together with government support can only do good things, the way they once did in Motor City or Tuskegee. These were extraordinarily productive times for technology and innovation, and no one got hurt.

Which means there’s only one thing standing in the way of the Bay Area becoming a permanent capital of the next global economy: democracy. If the small minded, myopic, and reflexively antagonistic people who live here decide they don’t want to reinvent their neighborhoods for the good of the technology industry, and use their votes to prevail, then we may have to take their votes away, like we have so many minority-owned homes. Real estate, after all, is a meritocracy.

But don’t be pessimistic! As a tech journalist in constant contact with industry executives, founders, investors, and engineers, I’ve been struck lately by how giddy the techies have become — how often they seem to pause in slack-jawed awe at their industry’s potential to reshape our lives over the next decade. To be sure, many of these people are professional smoke blowers. And yet I believe them. That’s called “Journalism.” Or, at least, “Pando Daily.” And it’s never been wrong.

Study the roots of our new tech economy, and you’ll find that it differs in important ways from the Internet bubble of the ’90s. That blip was fed by the promise of future billions that we were certain to realize from the web economy. Today’s tech industry, on the other hand, is fed by the promise of future billions from the mobile economy.

It’s a completely different economy. And unlike the web, which never caught on, people actually use mobile devices.

The vast infrastructure created by personalized big data collection incorporated across biometric mobile platforms in no way cross-synergizes empty buzzwords the way the 90s tech boom did.

So what San Francisco really needs is more tech workers. Just as only technology can solve the many, many, problems created by technology, so only more tech employees can solve the many, many problems created by tech employees.

The fact that we deny causing them only proves how much better we’ll be at solving them than you.

Why should we assume that the thousands of new aspiring tech workers pouring into the Bay Area will decimate the arts, cultural diversity, tolerance, and neighborhoods of San Francisco, just because that’s what happened last time? Technology is about innovation. If the industry destroys your city the same way twice, it hasn’t done it right. We’ve obviously learned from our mistakes, the same way Wall Street has.

If you want to see the benefits that the tech sector brings to San Francisco, look no farther than Airbnb, which refuses to pay hotel taxes, and the ride sharing site Uber, which won’t adequately insure its drivers or accept the non-discrimination clause taxis do. They boldly show that the tech industry doesn’t respect your laws or your regulations, which is how you know they’ll be great neighbors.

Uber, it should be pointed out, is also greening the city by discouraging people from using public transit or bicycles. And you haven’t even thanked them.

So San Franciscans have to find new ways to accommodate the tech industry. The tech industry would be glad to find new ways to accommodate San Franciscans, too, but it’s busy innovating. That’s much more important than anything you’re doing. Trust us. We’re innovators. It says so in our mission statements.

These newcomers are not barbarians at our gates — these are people whose values largely mirror those of the city dwellers they are ruthlessly pushing out. They’re just like you, only whiter and able to live here. There’s absolutely no rational reason to expect you won’t enjoy knowing they’re living in what used to be your apartment.

What cities in the Bay Area need to do is to develop policies that better support young entrepreneurs: more Single Room Occupancy units, for example, that can be given to tech workers instead of actual homeless people. We’re not asking for a government handout, we just want the government to support the development of our industry through massive tax breaks and civic realignment without getting anything in return.

Which you have to do because, if you don’t, we won’t locate here. Except that we have to locate here, because if you want to be anyone in tech you have to be in the Bay Area. Which … hmmmm ….

Ah screw it, just give us the tax breaks and your houses, and let the trans-humans figure out why. They’ll be smarter than both of us put together, which is how we know they’ll agree with me.

The Bay Area has finally found a source of economic prosperity that will keep on going no matter who it hurts. Let’s not ruin that by worrying about unintended consequences. There’s no historical evidence to support such fears. When has a new industry ever had unintended consequences?

It’s never happened. I checked my Twitter feed.

People who are worried about how a boom industry that refuses to play by the rules of democratically elected local governments might lead to unintended consequences for their communities just don’t understand how the world works. They’re naïve, which is why the people who decided to come to the bay area and live out of their cars while pursuing a startup will crush them.

What I’m saying is: we will destroy you. But don’t worry about it. We’re just like you.

Benjamin Wachs is a Literary Chameleon

Article source: http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2013/09/sf_techie_explains_why_the_wor.php

East Bay median home price growth crushes San Francisco

Tue, 24 Sep 2013 01:58:31 +0000

This three-bedroom home at 330 Gravatt Dr. in Berkeley is on the market for $1.15 million.

Blanca Torres
Reporter- San Francisco Business Times

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Homes in East Bay cities are seeing dramatic price gains far greater than homes in San Francisco, according to ZipRealty, an online real estate brokerage.

Oakland’s median home price ballooned 76 percent to $432,000 in August compared with $245,500 in August of 2012. In Hayward, home prices jumped 55 percent to $387,000 in August 2013 compared with $250,000 last year.

Meanwhile, San Francisco’s median went up by 20 percent to $880,000, up from $735,000.

“Oakland and other communities in the East Bay were impacted more severely by the foreclosure crisis, which took a toll on East Bay real estate values while also setting these areas up for the dramatic recovery in prices we are now witnessing,” said Lanny Baker, president and CEO of Emeryville-based ZipRealty.

Prices are up by 36 percent across the nine-country Bay Area with a median of $585,000, so cities like Oakland and Hayward represent a deal in the region.

Nonetheless, prices can vary significantly from ZIP code to ZIP code in the same city. For example, Berkeley, where the median home price jumped by 21 percent during the past year to $737,500, has three ZIP codes where the median is above San Francisco’s median: $955,000 in 94707, $901,000 in 94708 and $1.22 million in 94705, which includes neighborhoods such as Claremont, the Claremont Hills, Elmwood and Panoramic Hill.

In Oakland, the 94610 ZIP code has the highest median home price of $743,000 and encompasses neighborhoods like Grand Lake, Adams Point, Lakeshore, Crocker Highlands and Trestle Glen.

In San Francisco, some of the fastest appreciating neighborhoods include North Beach and Telegraph Hill in the 94133 ZIP code where prices grew by 82 percent during the past year as well as the Marina, Cow Hollow and Pacific Heights in the 94123 ZIP code where prices rose by 68 percent in the past year.

A number of factors influence how much an area’s median home price goes up such as number of homes available. Cities such as Oakland, Berkeley, Hayward and San Francisco had less home inventory in 2013 than the year before.

Blanca Torres covers East Bay real estate for the San Francisco Business Times.

Article source: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/real-estate/2013/09/east-bay-home-prices-san-francisco.html

Top 10 best-selling Bay Area cities with the best schools

Wed, 18 Sep 2013 01:28:55 +0000

#1. This three-bedroom home in Piedmont is offered at $2.75 million. Piedmont has a School Score of 9.5 and a median home price of $1.2 million.

Blanca Torres
Reporter- San Francisco Business Times

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For homebuyers looking for a great public school district, the East Bay is the top area to buy a home in the Bay Area. Emeryville-based ZipRealty, an online brokerage, compiled a list of the top selling cities in the Bay Area with the highest ranking public schools — eight were in the East Bay.

Click on the slideshow to see the top 10 .

“Home values and school scores are always going to be linked,” said ZipRealty President and CEO Lanny Baker. “In order to give our users the most complete picture of a home’s value, we provide a School Score, which is calculated based on test-score data as well as student/teacher ratios, for every home listing on ZipRealty.com.”

The scores range from zero to 10 with 10 being the highest.

The No. 1 city with the highest school score is Piedmont, a small rich enclave completely surrounded by Oakland where the schools scored a 9.5 and the median price dropped 27 percent to $1.2 million in August of 2013 from $1.53 during the same month last year.

The only non-East Bay cities on the list were Palo Alto and Benicia.

Overall, median home prices in the Bay Area rose 36 percent during the past year to $585,000.

Nationwide, the Bay Area real estate market ranked second after Sacramento for having the best public schools. The Bay Area is followed by Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Orlando.

Blanca Torres covers East Bay real estate for the San Francisco Business Times.

Article source: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2013/09/bay-area-real-estate-top-school-district.html

How green can you go? PAE Engineers challenges Bay Area developers

Sun, 15 Sep 2013 01:14:56 +0000

PAE Engineers designed the building systems for the six-story Bullitt Foundation building Seattle that is one of the five “living buildings” PAE has worked on.

Blanca Torres
Reporter- San Francisco Business Times

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PAE Consulting Engineers Inc. wants to work on the first “living” building in San Francisco. They just need a developer or architect to hire them.

The Portland-based engineering firm opened its San Francisco office less than three years ago to bring its expertise in sustainable buildings to the market.

PAE specializes in sustainability practices such as zero net energy, where a building generates more energy that it uses, and living buildings, which are structures that capture and generate their own water supply and are not connected to a municipal sewer system.

The Bay Area is home a few zero net energy buildings like one in San Leandro, a industrial building retrofitted to house an electrical union training center, and the Exploratorium, which opened earlier this year in San Francisco.

But there are no living buildings in the Bay Area.

“We want to find people interested in this challenge,” said John Paul Peterson, senior associate with PAE’s San Francisco office. “Let’s make this happen here. We know the science can work.”

PAE has worked on five living buildings including one in downtown Seattle, a six-story office building for the Bullitt Foundation, that opened earlier this year. The firm designed a system that composts all the waste from toilets (people still flush, in case you were wondering) and has a its won rainwater reclamation system.

The building takes advantage of natural lighting, which is more challenging in Seattle than in San Francisco, uses geothermal radiant heating and cooling, and encourages occupants to take the stairs instead of elevators as much as possible.

Blanca Torres covers East Bay real estate for the San Francisco Business Times.

Article source: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/real-estate/2013/09/pae-engineers-zero-net-energy-buildings.html

Bay Area home values up 28 percent, luxury home prices leap 11 percent

Thu, 12 Sep 2013 01:03:36 +0000

This home at 3800 Washington St. in the Presidio Heights neighborhood of San Francisco is on the market for $21 million. It has eight bedrooms, seven bathrooms and 17,895 square feet. Prices for homes above $1 million grew by 11 percent during the past year.

Blanca Torres
Reporter- San Francisco Business Times

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The Bay Area’s housing market continues heating up, but for how long?

Home values in the Bay Area rose by 27.8 percent during the past year to an average of $628,200 in July, according to Zillow, a real estate information site. Zillow calculates home value appreciation for all homes, not just homes that have sold or are on the market.

Click on the image for a slideshow of Bay Area homes that are on the market or have risen significantly in value.

San Francisco ranked third nationwide for home value appreciation after Sacramento with 33.1 percent growth to $274,600 and Las Vegas with 30.8 percent growth to $151,600.

Nationwide, home values crept up by 6 percent during the past year to an average $161,600 — about 25 percent of San Francisco’s average (kind of makes you want to move doesn’t it?).

“The U.S. housing market recovery has proven it is on very sound footing,” said Zillow Chief Economist Dr. Stan Humphries. “We have entered a new phase in the recovery when we can begin to turn away from ugly recent history and turn toward what the housing market of the future will look like and how it will act.”

The housing market has improved significantly, but I’m not sure the Bay Area’s performance will continue to rise at the rapid pace we’ve seen in the past couple of years.

Also, the market here is increasingly shifting toward the high-end and away from first-time and entry-level buyers.

First Republic Bank reported today that luxury home prices in the Bay Area jumped 10.9 percent during the second quarter of this year compared with 2012 to an average of $2.9 million — the highest since the fourth quarter of 2008 and approaching the all-time highs of 2007.

Blanca Torres covers East Bay real estate for the San Francisco Business Times.

Article source: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/real-estate/2013/08/bay-area-home-values-up-28-percent.html

Amazon leasing surges in Bay Area

Thu, 05 Sep 2013 06:47:45 +0000

Jeff Bezos

J.K. Dineen
Reporter- San Francisco Business Times

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Amazon.com Inc. is pushing ahead with a San Francisco expansion that will grow its footprint in the city to nearly 150,000 square feet.

In August, the Seattle-based online retailer signed a 65,000-square-foot lease at 475 Sansome St. The deal surprised downtown real estate observers because Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) had previously leased 20,000 square feet in the Sansome St. building but had planned to sublease the space when it took 83,000 square feet at 188 Spear St. Instead, not only did Amazon decide to keep its space at 475 Sansome St., it tripled its commitment there.

Amazon has about 80 jobs open in San Francisco, more than half of which are for its Amazon Music division, according to the group’s website. The ads are looking for engineers and designers to “help us build the world’s best online music player.”

The deals come as Amazon, led by Jeff Bezos, is also making big moves in Silicon Valley. In 2012, the group agreed to a lease of close to 600,000 square feet at Jay Paul Co.’s Moffett Towers complex to house its Lab 126 subsidiary, previously located in Cupertino. The lab is where the Kindle and the Amazon smartphone are developed.

“Amazon is on a space tear in the Bay Area,” said Research Director Colin Yasukochi of CBRE. “If you add up what they did down in the valley and what they are doing here, they have added a lot of space in the Bay Area. Of course, if you compare it to what they are doing in Seattle, it’s a drop in the bucket.”

In downtown Seattle, Amazon is developing a 3.3-million-square-foot high-rise campus on three blocks; construction is underway on the first block.

The Sansome St. deal was the second large new lease in the month of August, slightly smaller than Cisco’s 67,000-square-foot lease at 500 Terry Francois.

J.K. Dineen covers real estate for the San Francisco Business Times.

Article source: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2013/09/amazon-goes-on-bay-area-growth-spurt.html

Home prices slowing elsewhere, still spiking in Bay Area

Sun, 01 Sep 2013 12:28:29 +0000

The Golden Gate Bridge is seen in the view from a 15,000-square-foot custom built home on Belvedere Island in Marin County, California, U.S., in Dec. 2012. The builder couldn’t find a buyer for the brand-new waterfront mansion he listed in January for $45 million. He hoped one will turn up at an auction, where the starting bid was $25 million. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

Blanca Torres
Reporter- San Francisco Business Times

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Home prices across the country show signs of stabilizing — except in the Bay Area where we continued to see big price spikes. Why do we always have to play the role of outlier?

Signs of stabilization depend on increases in median home price, numbers of new listings and the average number of days for-sale homes stay on the market.

In the Bay Area, our inventory of new listings increased by only 3 percent to 8,006 homes in July 2013 compared with the same month last year, while our median home price soared by 40 percent to $610,000 in July, up from $436,000 the prior year, according to Emeryville-based ZipRealty.

At the same time, nationally, inventory levels grew by an average of 12 percent and median home prices beefed up by 15.8 percent — a lot more moderate than our 40 percent hike.

Van Davis, ZipRealty’s president of brokerage operations, called the growth in the U.S. real estate market, “one of moderation with underlying strength.”

“The increase in listings coupled with moderating price growth and sales volumes provide significant evidence that the real estate market is beginning to become more balanced,” Davis said.

More inventory on the market keeps prices from ballooning, but clearly that isn’t happening in the Bay Area.

In fact, our total inventory of available homes dropped by 21 percent to 8,275 in July 2013, compared with 10,466 in July 2012.

Places where new listings are climbing at impressive rates include Denver with 34 percent growth, Portland, Ore. with 24 percent, Orange County with 22 percent and Seattle and San Diego both with 21 percent.

“Several metros on the West Coast, which have had the greatest supply imbalances, are now seeing the biggest increases in listings,” Davis said. Did you notice San Francisco is a glaring omission on that list?

Blanca Torres covers East Bay real estate for the San Francisco Business Times.

Article source: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/real-estate/2013/08/housing-market-stabilizing-everywhere.html

Top Bay Area cities where you can buy a home and go car-free

Fri, 16 Aug 2013 17:23:26 +0000

This one-bedroom home in Berkeley at 1196 Cornell Ave. is on the market for $400,000.

Blanca Torres
Reporter- San Francisco Business Times

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For all the talk in recent years about more Bay Area residents steering toward a “car-free” lifestyle, it sure is hard to find a place to live that is affordable and pedestrian-friendly once you leave San Francisco’s city limits.

Emeryville-based ZipRealty Inc. ranked the most walkable cities with the most affordable homes near San Francisco and came up with a whopping four cities: Emeryville, downtown San Jose, Albany and Berkeley.

ZipRealty used data from WalkScore.com, which ranks locations with walkability scores of 0 to 100, to come up with its list.

“One of the allures of living in San Francisco is the city’s beautiful and convenient walkability, and that appeal is well-reflected in its lofty real estate prices,” said CEO and President Lanny Baker. “According to our partner Walk Score, San Francisco is the second-most walkable large city in the United States, behind New York City. In the local study we conducted, the most walkable and affordable communities were quite surprising alternatives to the high average price in San Francisco, which currently exceed $1 million.”

Here is a breakdown of the four cities with median home price and Walk Score:

Emeryville: $388,888 / 80.
Downtown San Jose: $508,450 / 74.
Albany: $622,500 / 86.
Berkeley: $786,256 / 95.

This list points out some interesting dynamics about Bay Area real estate. It appears living in a city where you can get around without a car will cost you a premium. San Francisco by nature is a dense, walkable city with amenities around the corner in most neighborhoods. In contrast, cities around San Francisco developed with the more suburban model of separating residential and commercial areas, making residents dependent on cars.

Emeryville is a compact, 1 square-mile sized city that has undergone a major transformation during the past few decades from an industrial wasteland to a city with thriving commercial and retail districts. Most of the housing there is either apartments or condos, as is the case with most of the homes for sale that fit ZipRealty’s criteria for affordable and walkable.

Having alternatives to driving is not just better for the environment and buyer’s pocketbooks, but has other benefits, said Josh Herst, CEO of Walk Score.

“The trend in urban areas is moving toward less dependency on cars and a greater commitment to live more sustainably,” Herst said. “People in walkable neighborhoods weigh six to 10 pounds less than those who don’t. Walk Score has also done extensive research showing that walkable places make people happier and healthier. Finally, short commutes reduce stress levels and give people more free time to be involved in their communities.”

Blanca Torres covers East Bay real estate for the San Francisco Business Times.

Article source: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/real-estate/2013/08/top-bay-area-cities-where-you-can-buy.html?page=all

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