Real estate signs in front of homes for sale March 23, 2010 in San Francisco. Justin Sullivan/Getty

One out of every 140 housing units in the Vallejo-Fairfield metro area is facing foreclosure, according to the latest numbers from RealtyTrac’s U.S. Foreclosure Market Report for July 2011, making the North Bay region the fourth most-impacted in the country.  This is a 33 percent jump for the region since last month.

Statewide, the foreclosure activity rate is one out of every 239 housing units, marking a 4 percent increase for California since last month, but a 16 percent decrease compared with July 2010.

Nationally, the rate of foreclosure has decreased 4 percent since June and 35 percent since last year.

But RealtyTrac’s Daren Blomquist told KQED intern Nick Fountain that the decrease in foreclosure activity is not necessarily as good as it seems.

“We have to say that there’s no marked improvement in the economy or the jobs market or the housing market that is causing this improvement in the foreclosure picture,” he said.

Blomquist said the national decline, which has been going on for 10 months, is primarily due to a slow down in processing of foreclosures as a result of of the “havoc” created last October when lenders “got into hot water using slopping paperwork and documentation.”

“So, at this point, the decline is more of a short-term fix,” he said.

Locally, San Francisco County showed a 39 percent increase in foreclosure activity since June, which Blomquist attributed to a jump in bank repossessions. Similarly, activity this month in Contra Costa County increased 17 percent and Alameda County 15 percent.

But several regions outside the Bay Area are faring far worse. While the San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont metro area ranks 28th nationally in foreclosure rates and Vallejo-Fairfield ranks fourth, the Stockton area ranks second. There, foreclosure activity increased 57 percent from June to July, to a rate of one in every 124 homes.

Check out the chart below, created by Fountain and online producer Lisa Pickoff-White, to see how some California counties fare in the new report.

For more on the Bay Area housing market, listen to Wednesday’s Forum program.

Article source: http://blogs.kqed.org/newsfix/2011/08/11/new-foreclosure-numbers-vallejo-fairfield-fourth-highest-in-the-nation/

San Francisco’s effort to transform an abandoned rail yard on its eastern shore in Mission Bay into an urban center is poised for a serious boost from plans by Salesforce.com Inc. to build a sprawling corporate campus in the area.

Urban-planning experts say the arrival of Salesforce will provide a vital stimulus for a once-neglected part of the city. But the bold design for the campus is just beginning a monthslong approval process, and Chief Executive Marc Benioff is leaving open the possibility that the company could simply pick a different location for its new headquarters. Some civic groups and architects, meanwhile, lament that the corporate-driven development isn’t creating the same neighborhood feel as other sections of the city.

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Salesforce.com

A rendering of the proposed Salesforce.com campus shows plans for a Jumbotron screen overlooking a plaza.

The Mission Bay redevelopment zone was established in 1998, anchored by a new campus of the University of California, San Francisco. City officials, who envisioned Mission Bay as a center for health care and medical research, say 35 biotech firms now are based in the area and take up more than one million square feet of office space. Salesforce.com, a business software maker now based in the city’s Financial District and South of Market Street, is proposing eight buildings containing roughly two million square feet. Mission Bay also is designed to include 6,000 housing units, half of which have been built so far.

Mission Bay “is the most important thing for San Francisco’s economy in the past 30 years, if not longer,” said Michael Teitz, an emeritus professor of city and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley. “The city was headed in a direction that was basically tourism, and some software development during the dot-com boom, but it didn’t have what I’d regard as a solid, modern sector in the economy—and I think Mission Bay does that.”

Yet critics say the large buildings and plazas planned for the Salesforce campus won’t improve what they perceive as an unwelcoming atmosphere in Mission Bay.

“Unfortunately, that part of the city is still a bit of a wasteland, and the project doesn’t do much to change that,” said Eric Corey Freed, the founder of organicARCHITECT in San Francisco. Mission Bay, he said, offered the chance to build a new and vibrant neighborhood. Instead, he said, the area is “a place that feels cold, out of scale and out of touch with humanity.”

Mission Bay is a public-private partnership. Private firm FOCIL-MB LLC uses a developer partner to build the infrastructure, and is reimbursed as the redevelopment agency issues bonds backed by increases in property-tax revenue and fees within the redevelopment zone. The agency has issued $320 million in bonds for Mission Bay, while the area’s infrastructure is ultimately expected to cost about $700 million, said Kelley Kahn, the project manager for the redevelopment area. She added that the project is in year 13 of a 25-year buildout.

Only three of the area’s more than 70 lots have yet to be sold by FOCIL-MB, Ms. Kahn said. Much of the land still unoccupied is expected to be filled by Salesforce.com, which purchased 14 acres for $278 million, and an adjacent UCSF hospital complex expected to open in 2014. Salesforce.com didn’t receive any tax breaks for the campus.

Renderings of the Salesforce.com campus, released earlier this month, feature a flashy design. A public square is anchored by a hot-pink Jumbotron video screen.

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Brian L. Frank for The Wall Street Journal

A portion of the area in Mission Bay where the Salesforce.com headquarters would be built.

“That was my idea,” Mr. Benioff, the Salesforce.com CEO, said of the screen. “Putting something like that there can add a lot of energy.” The Jumbotron could be used for things such as employee presentations and public entertainment, he said.

Salesforce.com is hoping for design-review approval from the city by September. “If we can’t get the approvals we could also end up somewhere else,” Mr. Benioff said.

The redevelopment agency’s Ms. Kahn said that while she didn’t anticipate problems with the design review, the pink Jumbotron might face additional environmental scrutiny. Overall, Ms. Kahn said, “we’re generally, based on what we’ve seen, pleased.”

Mr. Benioff argued that a dramatic influx of color in Mission Bay would liven an area that until now has had an “office park” feel.

Mr. Benioff said he first became intrigued by the Mission Bay property when visiting the site of the UCSF children’s hospital he is helping fund with a $100 million gift.

Mission Bay has been the focus of disputes over how to best develop it dating to the 1980s. While the area is physically close to downtown, its location on the opposite side of Mission Creek and Interstate 280 can make it feel remote.

The project’s housing also has generated complaints. A lawsuit originally filed in 2006 by occupants of the Beacon, a nearly 600-unit condo development, alleges flawed construction and insufficient disclosures about soil contamination beneath the building. An attorney representing the real-estate company that sold the condos says buyers were informed of the soil issues prior to the sales, and that the contamination doesn’t pose a danger to residents. The case has been moved to arbitration, said Patrick Catalano, an attorney representing the plaintiffs.

Salesforce.com, which has about 2,750 employees in the Bay Area, expects to house between 8,000 and 9,000 at the new headquarters, designed by Mexico City-based architects Legorreta + Legorreta. The company said it doesn’t yet have an estimate for the construction cost or move-in date.

Write to John Letzing at john.letzing@dowjones.com

Article source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304070104576397610335534024.html