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Good morning, Bay Area. It’s Monday, March 25. Here’s what you need to know to start your day.

California water worries

California farmers are caught in the middle of a tug-of-water between President Trump’s administration and the state over the reach of the federal Clean Water Act, writes reporter Kurtis Alexander.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is working to rein in the landmark law and halt what it sees as excessive oversight of small marshes, creeks and ponds. State regulators are seeking to maintain and expand watershed protections. They say too many waterways have been eaten up by human sprawl.

Whatever regulation emerges between the state and federal governments will affect potentially millions of acres, and the consequences for development, farming and infrastructure in California could be huge.

Report on the report

Voters can expect to hear President Trump repeat the “No collusion!” refrain until election day 2020.

His re-election campaign got a boost Sunday when Attorney General William Barr’s summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report proved Trump right on that count, says senior political writer Joe Garofoli.

Barr’s four-page letter said Mueller’s investigation “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” Mueller’s team drew no conclusions about whether Trump obstructed justice, Barr said.

Paving the way

The effort to open California’s parks to people with disabilities has raised important questions about the proper balance of nature and civilization in public parks. Should trails be paved? Can a path formed thousands of years ago violate a 29-year-old law?

“The idea of accessible parks really wasn’t in existence for a long time,” says Stuart Seaborn, managing director of litigation at Disability Rights Advocates, a Berkeley nonprofit that has played a central role in expanding accessibility nationwide.

More: Here are the five best parks in California for those who use wheelchairs or have other mobility impairments.

Finding harbor

An unusually large influx of gray whales into San Francisco Bay this year has thrilled boaters, beachgoers and tourists along Crissy Field, Angel Island and other shoreline locations, but the strange behavior and apparent poor condition of the magnificent sea creatures has marine biologists worried.

“It could be an early warning, or it could be a little blip,” one scientist said. “But I’m definitely on the alert. All the whale researchers should be paying attention and getting as much data as we can.”

Hidden haunts

Only one San Francisco guidebook includes a warning that the plaza at 50 Beale St. seems “geared toward office workers on their smoke break.” Or that there’s a public space inside Millennium Tower, but you wouldn’t know it because “their sign is small.”

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“The East Cut Open Space Inventory,” an image-rich tour of 40 spaces south of Mission Street and east of Second Street, may be written for the people who live on Rincon Hill and in the towers around the Transbay Transit Center. But its thoroughness spells out how private development can add breathing space to dense urban districts, writes urban design critic John King.

“These spaces can be difficult to find, or it’s difficult to know what’s public and what’s private,” said Jolene Jussif, an intern at the East Cut Community Benefit District, the organization that released the 82-page booklet.

Around the Bay

• Vacant juvenile halls: San Francisco Mayor London Breed created a panel of officials, criminal justice experts and advocates to examine the county’s juvenile justice system and make recommendations for potential reforms after a Chronicle report published online that documented a sharp drop in serious youth crimes across the state.

• Cause of death: San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi died from a mixture of cocaine and alcohol, which caused his already-damaged heart to stop, the city medical examiner has concluded.

• Turning up the heat: Democratic senators, including California’s Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris, filed a brief in support of the legal effort by Oakland and San Francisco to hold major oil companies responsible for harm caused by climate change.

• Urban Shield: Officials have scrapped Alameda County’s annual anti-terror training exercise praised by law enforcement agencies but panned by critics who said it militarized police forces.

• Stump speech: Presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders draws an enthusiastic crowd to Fort Mason in San Francisco.

• City lights: Literary lovers mark Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s 100th birthday.

Chronicle Food + Wine

The Fillmore’s Isla Vida is proof that there can be homegrown, personality-driven quick-service restaurants in this economy, says restaurant critic Soleil Ho.

Isla Vida’s older sibling, the 13-year-old Farmer Brown, closed its doors for good last year, citing the rising labor and real estate expenses associated with running a typical restaurant in San Francisco.

“Its story feels like a microcosm of how large-scale economic factors have prompted local restaurateurs to be lighter on their feet, shedding costly trappings like European-style table service in favor of models that look more like fast food,” Ho writes.

The restaurant’s chef-owner, Jay Foster, now focuses his energy on his outlets at SFO and smaller, quick-service operations such as Little Skillet in SoMa and Isla Vida in the Fillmore.

Bay Briefing is written by Taylor Kate Brown and sent to readers’ email in-boxes on weekday mornings. Sign up for the newsletter here, and contact Brown at taylor.brown@sfchronicle.com

Article source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Briefing-Farmers-caught-up-in-13713246.php

Article source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Bay-Area-political-events-Heather-Booth-Bernie-13709192.php

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WOODSIDE — With seven homes, three pools and sweeping foothill vistas over 74 acres in one of the most expensive towns in the world, Green Gables has been the Fleishhacker family’s summer oasis for five generations.

But like all things Silicon Valley, disruption is coming.

The sprawling estate built a century ago by San Francisco industrialist Mortimer Fleishhacker is on the market, pitched to be the most expensive private home sale ever in the Bay Area. Although a listing price has only been whispered — perhaps $140 million, maybe more — brokers expect the rare, historic property to fetch more than the previous record, a nearby mansion that sold for $117.5 million.

“The size alone and the location are just unparalleled,” said listing agent Michael Dreyfus. The estate is a short commute to Stanford and the venture capital firms on Sand Hill Road, and 30 miles to San Francisco.

Green Gables is perhaps one of the last grand Peninsula properties of its size to hit the market. Many of the large, 19th- and 20th-century estates in Woodside and nearby communities have either been sold to developers and divided up into affluent suburban neighborhoods, or preserved as public parks and attractions.

The Fleishhacker family has managed to keep the property as a summer retreat for five generations with a combination of smart management and a relatively small number of heirs, said Marc Fleishhacker, great-grandson of the family patriarch.The addition of newer homes on the property has also helped keep family harmony, he said.

Ownership of the property is shared by 10 family members, and the next generation includes 18 descendants. “Trying to manage a shared asset when you get to that ownership,” Fleishhacker said, “is onerous.”

But it wasn’t as difficult when patriarch Mortimer Fleishhacker started the project in 1909. Fleishhacker, a banker and founder of the Great Western Power Company, wanted a cottage and grounds to escape the chill and fog of San Francisco summers. He had his chauffeur pull over in Woodside one day, noting the fog line lifting over a vineyard.

Fleishhacker bought nine properties stretching over 74 acres. He hired noted architect Charles Sumner Greene, known for his Arts and Crafts bungalows and estate homes, to design and build an English country home. Instead of a traditional thatched roof, builders steamed and bent redwood shingles to create an undulating roofline. An enormous, freeform pool is a few steps from the house.

The main house offers a large patio and lawn for entertaining. On a lower terrace, a dramatic three-foot-deep Roman pool stretches the length of a football field and is lined with arches made of locally quarried stone. Many of the features, inside and out, were designed and hand-made in the Arts and Crafts style specifically for Green Gables.

Marc Fleishhacker spent his childhood summers on the estate. He re-enacted Roman sea battles with his cousins in the reflecting pool, learned to drive on the private roads and escorted debutantes at the local cotillions. “We would create tons of havoc,” he said.

The estate is tucked near Woodside’s town center but hardly stands out, locals say. In a town of heavy privets, iron gates and security suites, Green Gables has few impediments to its front door but speed bumps. It lacks even a gate.

“I’m sure people who live in Woodside, even some of the more recent families, don’t even know it exists,” said Barbara Wood, a local historian and journalist. “Most people know it as open space.”

That open space attracts deer, coyotes, wild turkeys, pheasants and migrating birds. There’s no hemmed in fences and few natural predators, making it an ideal enclave for wildlife. “It’s just a magical, wonderful piece of property,” Wood said.

The property hosted several family weddings, and now caters to corporate retreats. The family books a few events to help pay the upkeep on the property.

But the family members are spread across the country, and managing and preserving the estate has become more challenging.

“People used to go to Woodside because it was a nice, sunny place,” Fleishhacker said. But the influx of vast wealth — venture capitalists and tech founders brokering power deals at the local diner, Buck’s — has shifted the culture. “It’s changed.”

As development and a new Bay Area ethos has crept in, the family is ready to sell, Fleishhacker said. The decision did not come quickly or lightly. “It’s a sense of nostalgia and a sense of relief,” he said.

The property is larger and offers more privacy than other estates in the region, making it difficult to place an exact price on it, Dreyfus said. The pool of potential buyers — billionaires and big companies looking for a private retreat — is tiny.

Two other Peninsula homes have brought nine-digit sales prices. A $117.5 million, 9-acre estate in Woodside was purchased by SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son in 2012, and, a year earlier, Russian-Israeli venture capitalist Yuri Milner paid $100 million for a luxury property in Los Altos Hills.

A new buyer will gain more than a grand private retreat. The property is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and preserved under a conservation easement with The Garden Conservancy. It’s also in a town known for standing up against famous residents like Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison.

“It’s a million dollar view,” said Thalia Lubin, local architect and member of the Woodside History Committee. “Or a $140 million view.”

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Article source: https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/02/25/century-old-bay-area-family-estate-could-fetch-record-price/

San Francisco has the highest rent in the nation, beating New York by more than $800 for a one-bedroom rental, according to the rental app Zumper.

Every year rent has steadily increased and does not appear to be dropping any time soon. The median price of a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco is $3,690 while New York is $2,870, according to Zumper.

“We are trying to reflect the open market so we can give a better picture of what [people] will be paying if [people] moved out tomorrow,” Zumper marketing manager Crystal Chen said.

Zumper collects rent data from their platform with other third-party listings on the online real estate portal MLS.com, according to Chen. The data excludes new construction projects and listings that are no longer available.

Zumper looked at rental data during winter, which is a slow season for renting. With a high demand for housing in the Bay Area, rent will only become higher, according to Chen.

“The price of condos has gone down, but the rents have only gone up,” said Bay Area real estate agent Paul Hwang. Hwang has been a real estate agent in the Bay Area since 2001.

Since the Bay Area is known as a hub for the tech industry, more and more start-up companies have moved into the area. These companies bring more jobs to the region, which increases the demand for housing and affects the cost of rent, according to Hwang.

Students are particularly vulnerable to the exorbitant cost of rent in the Bay Area.  

Anthropology major Janelle Scarritt, 25, is working on her second semester at SF State and her rent for a shared apartment at University Park North is $1,601. She receives some financial aid, but still works up to 60 hours between two jobs and still has to use her credit card to be able to afford rent and live in the area.

Going to school full-time while working is not “survivable” in the long term, according to Scarritt.

Scarritt lived in Long Beach and was paying $1,300 for an apartment a few blocks away from the beach. When she moved to San Francisco to attend SF State, she was shocked by how expensive the rent was.

Article source: https://goldengatexpress.org/2019/03/21/san-francisco-rent-is-highest-in-the-country/

The day started with an intense tropical storm consuming San Francisco, but by evening the clouds had parted just in time for a group of grinning and excited venture capitalists, techies, and real estate agents to gather atop a downtown highrise that overlooks the city all the way to across the Bay to Oakland.

Everyone was there to discuss all the money to be made off the newest class of overnight millionaires that Silicon Valley is about to birth.

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2019 is slated to produce an extraordinarily long list of multi-billion-dollar IPOs from San Francisco Bay Area heavyweights like Lyft, Uber, Palantir, Pinterest, Airbnb, Slack, Postmates, and Instacart. The result will be a massive and sudden injection of liquid cash into a region already infamous for both the nation’s priciest real estate as well as a vast and growing wealth gap between rich and poor neighbors.

On stage at Monday’s event, a three-hour catered affair titled “Tech IPOs effect on Bay Area Real Estate” held in DocuSign headquarters, Deniz Kahramaner, a big data real estate agent at the tech real estate firm Compass, laid out a series of shocking numbers about what to expect as San Francisco’s rich prepare to get so much richer. He estimated $250 billion in total valuation of the local companies expected to IPO this year, based on private investment, which dwarves anything seen in half a decade.

“Are we going to see a one bedroom condo worth less than $1 million in five years?” Kahramaner rhetorically asked the room. “Probably not.”

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When Bravo reality television star and Sotheby’s real estate agent Roh Habibi took the stage, he thought out loud about whether his newly IPO-rich clients should spend $9 million on a single San Francisco property or buy three $3 million properties spread out around Northern California.

A few miles away, Oakland High School teacher Matt Fields lives in a two bedroom apartment with three people. Even sharing a bedroom with a friend, Fields still pays around $1,000 monthly in rent in order to live in the community where he teaches.

The City of Oakland is three days into a public school teacher strike centered around the difficulty of living in the Bay Area on a non-tech salary.

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Combined with student loans and the learning curve any second-year teacher faces, Fields says his $47,000 salary and glacial pace of raises makes the grueling first few years of teaching even more taxing. The result is an extraordinarily high teacher turnover rate in every corner of Oakland.

If union demands for higher teacher salary and better school conditions are met, Fields says, the best case scenario is that he may be able to rent his own bedroom inside a shared apartment.

“It’s not an option to fail,” Fields told Gizmodo in a conversation about the strike. “We’re in a situation right now where I, as a college educated, second-year teacher, cannot even afford to have my own bedroom in the place where I teach, and that needs to change.”

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“I have been reconciled for some time to the fact that my own income is not enough to support my family in Oakland,” Lara Trale, an English teacher at Oakland High School, said on Monday to Gizmodo by phone. “Students and families are being priced out too. I’ve seen the same thing to happen to colleagues. They’re excited, motivated, and driven but feel like they can’t make a lifelong living in a place where they have to share a room.”

The imminent slate of tech IPOs promises to push real estate prices higher in what is already the costliest market in the country, according to multiple studies as well as the real estate agents in the room at DocuSign.

That is “super beneficial,” Habibi told a rapt crowd of real estate brokers on Monday, for the tech industry rich who will be readily buying and the real estate agents who will be aggressively selling. For people stuck on the outside looking in, the view is turning dark.

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Back inside DocuSign headquarters, it’s bright as hell. A group of real estate agents couldn’t help themselves from uttering “wow” out loud with every new big dollar figure on center stage: 211 techie buyers projected to purchase property above $10 million, thousands expected to buy above $1 million, and San Francisco’s real estate dominated by buyers—51.1 percent of whom come from the software industry—who are about to have a whole lot more money in their pocket.

Laughs and maybe a little jealousy hit when the conversation turned to Nema, a luxury housing company known for building and buying property within walking distance to tech giant headquarters in downtown San Francisco and then selling at absurd prices to engineers who readily pay whatever it takes to avoid public transportation. Here’s a $6,303 per month studio from Nema near Uber’s headquarters, in case you happen to be nearby and about to come into a windfall of cash.

As you might expect from a crowd like this, California’s income inequality gap and housing crisis—problems deemed a “code red” by Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom—never came up during Monday night’s beautifully catered event.

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Instead, the panel’s last question probed Habibi about the flashiest pads he’d sold recently to clients rich enough to buy huge amounts of land in the heart of Silicon Valley. A panel consisting of a real estate agents, tech CEO, and venture capitalist was congratulated as a “very well balanced” conversation about the impact of new tech IPOs. The teachers like Fields and Trale, up since 6:30 am that morning to strike despite flash flood warnings, went unrepresented and unmentioned.

“I wish I had a clever, optimistic answer,” Anthemos Georgiades, CEO at the real estate startup Zumper, said. “But the next two to three years, if you look at the liquidity about to come to market with these IPOs, and then you look at how few buildings coming to market that would actually bring inventory. It’s basic supply and demand. It makes no sense to think anything will get cheaper.”

For someone who doesn’t make what a Facebook employee does—the company has a median annual salary of $240,000— the prospects of living in and around Silicon Valley and the entire San Francisco Bay Area is now more uncertain, even for the students who were born, raised, and recently began their public education there.

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“It’s a crisis,” Newsom said last year when he was running for governor. “We can’t live on intentions. At the end of the day, if you want to move the mouse, you’ve got to move the cheese. The middle class of the state is leaving in droves. This is a Code Red in California.”

Article source: https://gizmodo.com/upcoming-tech-ipos-will-mint-hundreds-of-overnight-mill-1832889859