homesmillbrae.com

In nearby San Jose, rent decreased nearly as sharply — from $3,118 to $2,892, or -7.2%, over the same time period. The two cities’ average rent declines were especially sharp compared to the national average rent change, which actually showed a small increase – .5% – compared with last January.

Other data have shown a possible rebound for rents in San Francisco and San Jose: A Zumper report found rent in both cities increased slightly between December and January. But the report noted that it was still too early to tell whether these increases were part of a new upward trend — and the Zillow report does not reflect any such trend.

Other real estate websites such as Zillow and Apartment List have reported higher annual declines over 20% using different methodologies.

“Rents in many expensive, coastal metros are currently much lower than a year ago,” the Zillow report noted, citing the “lost shine of urban life” as the pandemic has left many restaurants, bars and other city attractions shuttered.

Some less pricey cities, on the other hand, saw the opposite effect: Sacramento’s rental prices increased by a full 7.6% during the pandemic, a change that could be partially explained by an influx of San Franciscans and other Bay Area residents.

Meanwhile, home sales prices told an entirely different story: both San Francisco and San Jose saw increases to their average prices based on Zillow data.

San Francisco’s home value index increased by 5.3%, from $1.12 million to $1.18 million. San Jose’s home index, meanwhile, shot up 14.2% from $1.15 million to 1.31 million, a sharper increase than the national average of 9.1%.

Coupled with flatlining or declining rent in expensive regions, soaring home prices in the Bay Area and elsewhere reflect the unequal effects of the pandemic, according to the Zillow report. Job losses and economic effects of the pandemic have been concentrated among renters, who tend to be less economically stable than people who can afford to buy homes.

“The divergence in trends between the for-sale and rental markets underscores just how unusual, and unequal, the recession triggered by the pandemic really is,” the Zillow report said.

Susie Neilson is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: susan.neilson@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @susieneilson

From devastation came opportunity, particularly for one young man named Jack Thornburg. Then just 21, he began to plan out a new neighborhood filled with fairy-tale charm and secret corners.

To find it today, you need to know what you’re looking for. Normandy Village is tucked away on an ordinary street, just off the intersection of Hearst and Spruce. A few steps up Spruce and you’re transported to another world. The collection of a few dozen apartments, homes and condos comprise perhaps the best example of the storybook architectural style, which had a brief, magical moment in California in the 1920s. The look is more fantasy than reality, an imagined dream of a French-English village straight out of “Beauty and the Beast.”

No one is quite sure who conceived of Normandy Village’s unusual style, but at some point Thornburg joined forces with Oakland architect W.R. Yelland.

There are a few different stories about Yelland’s creative process. The most common is that he served in France during World War I, coming home full of ideas about thatched roofs and curvy outdoor staircases. Although he enlisted for the Great War, there’s no hard proof he was indeed deployed to France. Another tale says Yelland toured Normandy during his honeymoon, but that’s decidedly revisionist romantic history; he didn’t marry until 1930.

The most likely source of his French fascination is another trip. In 1920, the Oakland Tribune announced the then-Oakland High drawing teacher was leaving for a European holiday. Immigration records show Yelland returning from Marseilles a few months later.

Full of inspiration, Yelland set to work designing some of the East Bay’s most fantastical creations. Among the first was the Tupper Reed Building on Shattuck, which opened in 1925. It’s still there today, looking ready to topple over at any moment.

Next, he collaborated with Thornburg on their charming little neighborhood. They initially planned for it to be a true European village, complete with retail and grocery stores. But ultimately the city’s zoning rules prohibited this, and the pair instead began opening up homes starting in 1926.

A glowing May 1927 story in the Tribune explained the excitement around Normandy Village. “Large windows are the rule, and the charm of the strange building is enhanced by carved heads, or grotesque gargoyles, hanging above,” it read. Frescoes of fairy-tale roosters called chanticleers, still cheery today, were done by Yelland himself. Inside, the homes were decidedly modern, though, with electric ranges and top-of-the-line plumbing. “Only in the conveniences can an accusation of conventionalism be made,” the Tribune said.

Normandy Village quickly became a hot commodity — which is still true now. Berkeleyans jockey for position when rare listings come up, and some even rent there in the hopes a permanent vacancy will someday materialize.

The one drawback? Curious, photo-taking tourists, who arrive from around the world to see the anachronistic slice of medieval life right next to the UC Berkeley campus.

The final footnote to Berkeley’s prettiest neighborhood is the unusual life of Jack Thornburg.

After finishing the project, he left real estate. He got his pilot’s license in the late 1920s (although some stories claim he was a World War I flying ace, this seems highly unlikely), and in the 1930s joined the nascent airline TWA as one of its very first pilots. During World War II, he became a famed commander for flying rescue missions to Iwo Jima and Okinawa. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

In civilian life, he enjoyed teaching young pilots, including 21-year-old Barry Goldwater. In his memoir “With No Apologies,” Goldwater wrote, “I decided to learn to fly. My instructor, Jack Thornburg, had a Great Lakes biplane with an inverted four-cylinder air-cooled engine.

“It was the only time I ever kept a secret from [my mother].”

Have you passed by any weird remnants of the past in the Bay Area you want to know more about?  Or any modern day oddities that just don’t make sense? Please send any ideas for future Obscure SF stories to katie.dowd@sfgate.com or andrew.chamings@sfgate.com

— There’s something strange about this gas station on Van Ness

— The secrets behind the sad little windmill on Telegraph Ave

— The chilling sign that watches over Chinatown

Was this progressive city San Francisco? Of course not. When it comes to housing, San Francisco isn’t progressive at all.

This truly progressive city was Sacramento — a city that’s preparing for an influx of residents and businesses by, get this, building more housing. So people of all socioeconomic backgrounds can live there. Shocking, I know.

“Sacramento is a rapidly changing city, and we’re shedding our old image as just a government town,” Mayor Darrell Steinberg told me. “We are diversifying our economy where we’re attracting a lot of tech and life sciences and innovation and broadening our economic base.

“But it is not enough to just grow a modern economy,” he continued. “That growth needs to be coupled with an absolute commitment to inclusion. People should not only have the ability to play in Land Park, which is the crown jewel in our regional parks system, they should have the opportunity to live there as well.”

What if San Francisco mayors and supervisors had adopted that vision 20 years ago during the first dot-com boom? Or 10 years ago as we emerged from the Great Recession and saw an influx of tech companies and a huge spike in housing prices and rents? What if they’d called for our thriving economy to not leave anybody behind and demanded that people of all income levels be able to live near Golden Gate Park?

While some parts of San Francisco saw high-end residential towers built and a smattering of affordable housing was added, the city didn’t come close to adding enough units for low- and middle-income earners. And large swaths of the city, mostly on the west side, have remained frozen in time. An artist, teacher, waiter, custodian or nonprofit worker new to the city and lacking a trust fund or high-earning spouse has no chance of buying a home in the city. And little chance of affording rent. Living near Golden Gate Park? Not likely.

So if those people work in San Francisco, they often endure long car commutes, which is bad for the environment and one’s health and sanity. Progressive? Not at all.

Of all the land in San Francisco where homes are allowed to be built, 74% of it is slated for single-family homes, according to Matt Regan, senior vice president of public policy for the Bay Area Council, a business advocacy organization.

“It’s a suburb masquerading as a city, really,” Regan said. “There’s no difference between the west side of San Francisco and most of suburban San Mateo.”

“Socially, yes, San Francisco is the most progressive city in the country, but when it comes to land use and planning, it is absolutely one of the most conservative. We give divine rights to homeowners and existing residents at the expense of renters and future residents,” he continued. “It’s progressives against progress.”

For decades, some San Francisco progressives have argued that for some reason, the laws of supply and demand don’t apply to San Francisco’s housing market. But the pandemic — and the drop in rents here — proves that they do.

And Sacramento’s progress isn’t even the stuff of NIMBY nightmares. That city isn’t plopping high-rises in the middle of residential neighborhoods. It’s merely allowing up to four units to be built on one lot while ensuring size and design fit in with neighborhood character. Current height limitations would remain.

It’s part of Sacramento’s 2040 General Plan, and if it’s fully adopted, homeowners could start adding units in about two years. It’s similar to action taken in Portland, Ore., and Minneapolis.

Under state law, most California homeowners including those in San Francisco can add up to two in-law units to their properties, but Regan said allowing fourplexes would professionalize the endeavor and add far more housing.

State Sen. Scott Wiener, who has tried and failed to dramatically alter California’s laws to get more housing built, said San Francisco’s policies “ensure that housing stays super expensive and perpetuates segregation.” He called Sacramento’s plan “fantastic.”

Assemblyman David Chiu called it “a bold move” that could work in San Francisco.

“I appreciate that people are attached to the status quo, but fourplexes are an incremental change that could go a long way in addressing our housing and homelessness crisis,” he said.

Mayor London Breed also supports adopting Sacramento’s plan. “She’s all for policies that make it easier to build housing throughout our entire city,” said Jeff Cretan, her spokesman.

So will San Francisco ever follow Sacramento’s smart path? Unlikely. Pinning the 11 supervisors down on this question was like trying to capture fog.

Supervisor Connie Chan, whose Richmond district includes a lot of single-family homes, said the city has enough market-rate housing, though nearly all economists and housing experts disagree. She supports only development that’s 100% affordable and pointed to teacher housing, but only one such complex is under development after more than 15 years of talking about the idea.

Supervisor Gordon Mar, whose Sunset district also includes a lot of single-family housing, texted that he grew up in Sacramento and “a modest density increase to single-family zoning is certainly worth considering.” He did not respond to requests for a phone interview for more clarification about whether he’d support fourplexes.

Supervisor Myrna Melgar, whose West of Twin Peaks district likewise includes a lot of single-family homes, is among the most straightforward supervisors. She said she likes the Sacramento plan, but doesn’t think it would have the votes here. She said she’d support it if the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency restores the bus and streetcar lines in her district that have been slashed during the pandemic.

“We can’t talk about more density until we have a working transportation system,” she said.

Supervisors Catherine Stefani and Ahsha Safaí — representing the Marina and Excelsior, respectively — also have single-family homes in their districts, but did not return requests for comment. Neither did Supervisor Dean Preston, who represents the Haight and seems to be one of the supervisors most opposed to building market-rate housing.

Supervisor Matt Haney doesn’t have single-family homes in his district — the Tenderloin and South of Market — but supports Sacramento’s plan and said, “it makes sense to allow apartments anywhere.”

Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, who represents the Castro and Noe Valley, said following Sacramento’s lead is “the right thing to do.” He added that his constituents tend to oppose giant homes built for one wealthy family, but would support them if they were for three or four families.

Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who represents North Beach and Chinatown, said he supports “density equity,” but didn’t go into specifics about Sacramento’s plan.

Supervisor Hillary Ronen, who represents the Mission, said she supports requiring all new homes built in the city to include at least two units.

“It’s all about balance. San Francisco is beautiful and desirable because of the years we’ve fought to preserve the character of our now world-famous neighborhoods,” she said. “But we are not a museum, and we definitely need housing that San Franciscans can afford.”

Supervisor Shamann Walton was the only supervisor to flat-out oppose adopting Sacramento’s plan.

“Policies like this would speed up the gentrification in areas like Bayview,” he said. “Of course I want affordability and opportunities to provide increased housing, but this policy is bad for San Francisco.”

Housing advocates argue the opposite is true — that gentrification has been worse in San Francisco than elsewhere in part because it’s built so little housing while creating so many jobs. The city’s current policies contribute to high housing costs, which drives people out to places like, yes, Sacramento. That city has seen rents rise because of an influx of Bay Area residents.

“Sacramento doesn’t feel like it has the luxury to throw its head into the sand about the housing crisis,” said Louis Mirante, legislative director for California Yimby, a pro-housing group. “Your Board of Supervisors is seemingly unable to consider the impact their policies have on other people. When it comes to land use, San Francisco could learn a lot of lessons from Sacramento.”

James Corless is the executive director of the Sacramento Area Council of Governments, which includes 28 local governments from Davis to Lake Tahoe and the delta to Yuba City, and he’s a big fan of Sacramento’s move.

“We want to be a region that’s one of the most creative, thoughtful and forward-thinking regions in California, and this is the type of policy that does just that,” he said. “We have to open ourselves up to be more flexible and invite developers and affordable housing providers in so we can build the city of tomorrow.”

He didn’t say this directly, but there was one implication: San Francisco is the city of yesterday.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight appears Sundays and Tuesdays. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf Instagram: @heatherknightsf

Here are the most recent median single-family home prices for each Bay Area county at the end of the year:

  Alameda: $1.06 million

  Contra Costa: $763,000

  Marin: $1.46 million

  Napa: $842,000

  San Francisco: $1.58 million

  San Mateo: $1.7 million

  Santa Clara: $1.375 million

  Solano: $510,000

  Sonoma: $720,000

Article source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Here-s-what-home-prices-look-like-right-now-for-15906551.php

It’s simple, really. As part of the sixth RHNA cycle, the HCD gave a housing allocation to the MTC, which worked with the HMC to create a growth blueprint for ABAG — and the newly-strengthened HAA means said housing could actually get built.

Sorry… Did we lose you there?

For all the non-housing wonks in the audience, here’s a translation: the cities and counties of the Bay Area must change their zoning laws to allow for the construction of 441,000 new homes between 2023 and 2031. A Thursday night vote by the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) made that result all but certain, although there will be some continued debate about where in the Bay Area all of those homes should go. 

The Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA), a recurring, bone-dry planning process, has quietly become the front line of the Bay Area’s housing wars. Its hyper-bureaucratic nature and its long time horizons, make it more difficult to understand than high-profile housing production efforts like Senator Scott Wiener’s SB 50, or the more modest housing production package that failed in the legislature last year. But over time, the RHNA process could be just as transformative as SB 50, thanks to a law Wiener shepherded through the legislature in 2018 with little fanfare. Far from being the “Sisyphus of housing legislation,” as he was recently described in CityLab, Wiener and his allies in the YIMBY movement are starting to look more like Zeus, raining policy lightning bolts on expensive coastal cities from their perch in the state capitol.

RHNA Grows Teeth

RHNA (pronounced ree-na), also known as the Housing Element, is the main lever the state government has to push cities to build enough housing to keep up with job and population growth. In eight-year cycles, the department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) allocates a certain number of homes to each major metropolitan area in California, organized into four affordability levels: very low income, low income, moderate income, and above moderate income. 

Each metropolitan area has their own planning organization — in the nine-county Bay Area, it’s the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) working with planners from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) — that distributes the state’s housing allocation among the cities and counties in the region. 

But this cycle was different, thanks to SB 828, the 2018 law Senator Wiener masterminded. The law beefs up the methodology used to determine each region’s housing allocation, accounting for previous under-production of housing, as well as areas where home prices are rising faster than wages, among other considerations. The result is that the upcoming cycle’s RHNA allocations are multiple times greater than the current cycle, which spans 2014-2022. The Southern California Association of Governments’ (SCAG) housing allocation more than tripled from about 400 thousand to about 1.3 million. ABAG’s allocation merely doubled, from 187,990 homes to 441,176. 

Of the Bay Area’s allocation, 26 percent of new homes must be for very low income households, 15 percent for low income, 17 percent for moderate income, and 42 percent for above moderate income. 

Plan Adopted

Since that allocation came down from the state in June, planners at the MTC have been working on distributing those planned new homes among cities and counties. In October, planners added an “equity adjustment” to the methodology intended to combat racial and economic segregation, combined with their existing mandate to plan for housing near jobs and transit. 

On Thursday, that plan was “adopted” by the ABAG board, which is led by Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin, and includes elected officials from around the region, including San Francisco Supervisors Rafael Mandelman and Gordon Mar, by a vote of 29 to 1, with 3 abstentions. Before it is officially certified, the plan will be reviewed by the state, and individual cities will be allowed to appeal their allocations. 

So here’s what the latest, not quite final, RHNA maps look like:

San Francisco needs to plan for a 22 percent increase in households, or 82 thousand more units, between 2023 and 2031. That’s up from an allocation of about 29 thousand homes during the 2014-22 cycle. 

Other Bay Area cities slated to see significant household growth include Emeryville, Millbrae, Colma, Brisbane, Mountain View, Santa Clara, and Milpitas. However, the most dramatic changes could come in smaller, wealthier bedroom communities on the leafy fringes of major cities, many of them in Marin and Contra Costa counties. These communities were used to getting paltry RHNA allocations. Marin’s allocation of 14,285 is 21 times higher than the previous RHNA cycle. 

Not only were many wealthy, politically powerful suburbs able to get away with minuscule housing goals from the state (last cycle, Beverly Hills’ allocation was 46, this time around it’s over 3,000), cities frequently refused to provide permits for homes the state said they were required to produce. No longer.

In September, the state released a memo outlining the effect of several recent laws including Wiener’s SB 35 and East Bay’s Sen. Nancy Skinner’s SB 167, that strengthen the decades old Housing Accountability Act (HAA). These laws will make it much harder for city governments to reject housing projects that comply with zoning — zoning that must be changed to allow for the amount of housing set forth in each jurisdiction’s RHNA allocation. Legal watchdog groups like CaRLa and YIMBY Law have emerged to make sure that cities follow these laws. Governor Newsom’s most recent budget proposal includes $4.3 million for a Housing Accountability Unit to do much the same thing.

All that is to say that even though there is no guarantee that all 441,000 homes in this RHNA allocation will get built — they probably won’t — there are measures in place to ensure every city does its best to try. 

Affordability 

While RHNA receives little media attention, these changes have not been without controversy among those in the know. 

Many leaders and planners in suburbs that have seen virtually no new housing construction in decades are not thrilled about what lies ahead. In practice, abiding by RHNA will require cities to make zoning changes similar to those proposed by state laws like Wiener’s SB 50. Except this way, local officials, not Wiener, will be poised to take the heat from change-averse residents.

This is the case in San Francisco, too. Short of allowing a couple dozen Salesforce-tower sized apartment buildings, it’s hard to imagine how the city can meet its RHNA goals without upzoning single family areas. If the hoopla following Heather Knight’s latest Chronicle column on this exact issue is any indication, that will be a politically fraught process.

At the Thursday meeting, many voiced concern that these housing goals would be impossible to achieve in the allotted time frame. Mayor Pat Eklund of Novato, the sole ABAG board member to vote no, brought up a controversial study by the Embarcadero Institute that questions the RHNA methodology and suggests the state is asking the Bay Area to produce far more homes than it needs. Many urban planning academics dispute the Embarcadero Institute’s data. 

There are also concerns about the impacts that so much housing development could have on low income communities of color, especially in the Bay Area’s big cities. During public comment, Peter Papadopoulos with the Mission Economic Development Agency said, “This proposal will flood S.F. and other urban core communities with additional market rate housing burden, on top of preexisting harms already endured… This proposal currently doesn’t go past tinkering around the edges of equity and it will have grave harmful impacts if left unchanged.” (The Supervisors have the power to determine where new housing in the city is allowed to be built, whether in gentrifying or wealthy areas.)

San Francisco has historically met its RHNA goals for above moderate income housing production, while falling short in the other categories, especially moderate income, since there are more subsidies available for building low-income housing. However, the city’s RHNA goals in all income categories for the forthcoming cycle are now much higher. 

Fernando Martí of the Council of Community Housing Organizations, another group that has historically been skeptical of increased market rate development in San Francisco, struck a different tone. “It is not perfect,” Martí said of the RHNA housing allocations with the equity adjustment, but “this is a baseline to begin to support racial and social equity across the region.”

This piece has been updated to correct an inaccurate transcription of Peter Papadopoulos’ comment at the ABAG meeting, and an inaccurate description of how much greater the new RHNA allocations are compared to current allocations.

Article source: https://www.sfweekly.com/news/bay-area-takes-step-toward-major-housing-growth/