homesmillbrae.com

A clash over uniforms is keeping San Francisco police officers out of this year’s Pride parade.

The decision comes after a year and a half of negotiations between police and Pride organizers, in the wake of a tense confrontation between officers and demonstrators during the 2019 parade.

Parade organizers said they asked law enforcement, including sheriff deputies, not to wear their uniforms during the parade for people who feel traumatized or intimidated by police.

Officers fired back, comparing the prohibition on uniforms as a form of oppression and discrimination.

Read more from Rachel Swan.

From VCs to apartments

Could Silicon Valley’s infamous Sand Hill Road turn into affordable housing?

Locals say it’s unlikely the Menlo Park office buildings, some of the most valuable office real estate in the world, will turn into homes.

But city planners, tasked with the tough assignment to identify land for more than 2,900 housing units in the community, are considering building dwellings on the street currently home to venture capitalists and tech pioneers.

Part of that plan involves a strategy for fair housing, spreading homes throughout the city and in “high-resource” places, not just the neighborhoods where development has been concentrated so far.

Read more from J.K. Dineen.

• The Chronicle has a new tool to track home prices in every Bay Area city and ZIP code. What does yours look like?

• The Bid: Can you put a price on this 38-acre estate in Vacaville, the site of a former winery?

• If you want to own a piece of San Francisco history, the “Pink Painted Lady” is on the market for a cool $3.55 million.

What to eat

Menlo Park is about to get a modern Mexican restaurant helmed by a critically acclaimed Los Angeles chef. Mírame, which is known for dishes such as salmon-skin chicharron and cauliflower ceviche, will be the final restaurant to move into the city’s Springline development.

If the recent surge in COVID cases skeeves you out, fret not. Chronicle restaurant critic Soleil Ho has an updated list of the best restaurants that offer outdoor dining in the Bay Area. Among them are barbecue spreads at picnic tables, San Francisco Bay views with French fare and trendy izakayas with decked-out patios.

Around the Bay

• Virus infections: Some Bay Area COVID patients taking Paxlovid to treat their infections are reporting a relapse of symptoms and infection after treatment. Though concerning to patients, it’s not uncommon in infectious diseases, doctors said.

• Warriors win: Golden State cruised to a 109-100 victory against the Dallas Mavericks, putting them just a win away from the NBA Finals.

• Calm on the streets: Nonprofit Urban Alchemy hires formerly incarcerated people to address addiction, mental illness and homelessness on San Francisco’s streets. It’s faced both support and criticism in the neighborhood.

• Weather forecast:
Expect a warm-up as May comes to an end, with a possible red flag warning in store for parts of the Bay Area.

• From Justin Phillips: An Oakland vigil remembered the victims of a hateful dogma threatening to go mainstream. Also, listen: Phillips and Oakland community leader Cat Brooks explain the “replacement” conspiracy theory cited by the alleged shooter.

• Wildlife habitat: California is about to begin its biggest and most ambitious dam removal project yet.

• Housing and homelessness: Three years into Gov. Gavin Newsom’s tenure, housing production has remained slow. The holdup, Newsom argues, is “not in my backyard” politics.

• Backyard barn: A group of San Francisco parents shelled out thousands of dollars to rehabilitate a local elementary school’s chicken coop.

• Observe from afar: Wildlife experts want humans to keep a safe distance from seal pups and their mothers, which have recently come ashore on California beaches.

• Devil mountain:
See what Mount Diablo looked like through the decades in this dive into the archives.

Local story

A San Francisco artisan is the sole provider of Major League Baseball’s rosin bags.

For Dave Phillips and his shop, Pelican Bat Wax, it’s a “pretty big deal.” A day after the collective bargaining agreement was reached, the league tried to regulate the substances allowed on the field.

The 3,300 rosin bags sent to all 30 MLB teams aren’t the only products on the field. His other wares, including pine tar stick, have also been spotted in dugouts or on-deck circles.

Reporter John Shea writes about how a one-man-operation ended up with a big order.

Housing inventory in the Bay Area is finally up, but that hasn’t done anything to keep prices down. 

There are more houses for sale, but the combination of a rise in mortgage rates, and a tumbling stock market, makes the market still out of reach for most people.

“Less phone calls, I’m seeing less offers, less activities with open houses, definitely a cool down,” said Holly Barr, real estate agent with Compass.

She said a combination of still sky-high prices, combined with a rise in interest rates and inflation is leading would be buyers to hesitate, especially in tech-stock rich Silicon Valley.

“Interest rates are high, and my stocks, low … I can’t do that anymore,” said Barr.

The real estate giant Re/Max Bay Area says economic conditions have quickly clouded the Bay Area housing picture.

Local

“We’re definitely seeing a little bit of a change,” said Tim Yee, president of Re/Max Gold Bay Area. “It’s not as robust as it was last year.”

With prices up 12% from this time last year, Re/Max says local sales are down 17%, largely because only the very well-heeled can afford to buy what’s out there.

“The interest rates, the inflation, I think it affects the lower end of the market much more than the middle ends or higher ends of the market,” said Barr.

While predicting real estate prices is a fool’s game, people said prices are likely to stay steady for at least a while, unless we see a continued selloff among local tech stocks.

Article source: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/making-it-in-the-bay/more-supply-met-with-less-demand-in-bay-area-housing-market/2896036/

What can I do to prevent this in the future?

If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware.

If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices.

Article source: https://therealdeal.com/sanfrancisco/2022/05/03/double-whammy-of-rising-interest-rates-prices-hits-bay-area-compass/

Approved overwhelmingly by voters during a housing bubble in 1978 when assessments were skyrocketing, Prop. 13 caps property taxes to 1% of a home’s assessed value at the time of purchase, and limits annual increases to 2%. Properties are reassessed for tax purposes only when they change hands.

Prop. 13 continues to enjoy support among California voters. A 2018 Public Policy Institute of California survey found that 40 years after its approval, 57% of Californians felt the initiative was mostly a good thing for the state, with support particularly strong among older residents (66% age 55-plus), Republicans (71%) and homeowners (65%). A sweeping 2020 measure that would have removed its tax protection for commercial property, Prop. 15, was defeated at the polls.

While acknowledging he’s not an expert in tax policy, Levin said the recent red-hot housing market clearly illustrates the uneven effects of Prop. 13: “Every time housing prices go up, it further benefits people who own homes, and further hurts people who don’t own homes,” he said. “I have a lot of friends trying to start families who are priced out of the housing market. If they were to buy a house now, they would be paying much higher tax rates than everyone.”

So just how have the differences in Prop. 13 tax savings played out across different parts of the Bay Area?

Cities in six Bay Area counties are covered by Levin’s website: Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Mateo, San Francisco and Santa Clara. Using county tax records from 2019 and 2020 and estimated average home values from popular real estate listings websites from November 2020, Levin calculated average Prop. 13 tax disparity, or what he calls “subsidy,” by taking the difference between homes’ current market value and their assessed value and applying the local tax rate to that savings. The “subsidy” is the additional amount the average homeowner would have paid if the tax were based on the home’s current value.

The data shows disparities are greater in wealthier areas where the average market value of homes and median household incomes are higher. Looking at the top 25 largest cities by population in the Bay Area, the highest average disparities are in Silicon Valley locales in the Peninsula and South Bay: Mountain View with $13,900, Sunnyvale at $13,520, Redwood City with $10,422 and Santa Clara at $10,074. San Francisco follows in fifth place with an average subsidy of $9,984.

At the bottom of the list with the lowest disparities are three cities in Contra Costa County in the East Bay: Pittsburg, with an average subsidy of $2,184 per year, Antioch at $2,597 and Richmond at $2,605.

The correlation between home values and Prop. 13 tax savings is particularly clear when looking at the Bay Area cities with the highest disparities. Atherton, which has consistently been ranked the most expensive ZIP code for housing in the country, has the highest average “subsidy” per year of a little over $35,000. Los Altos Hills has the second highest at about $29,000, and Palo Alto comes in third with almost $25,000.

On the other end of the spectrum are three places in eastern Contra Costa County: Discovery Bay has the lowest annual “subsidy” at about $1,380, followed by Oakley with nearly $1,670 and Brentwood at $1,740.

The data illustrates the discrepancy noted by Carolina Reid, a professor of affordable housing and urban policy at UC Berkeley and faculty research adviser for the Terner Center for Housing Innovation: Prop. 13 disproportionately benefits wealthier, older, non-Hispanic white homeowners and people who have owned their homes longer, she said.

“Overall, it’s regressive and contributes to the racial wealth gap, and can make it harder for new households to enter homeownership,” she wrote in an email.

On the flip side, Reid added that Prop. 13 “protects older homeowners from big increases in property taxes,” especially if housing prices increase.

“For seniors, and especially low-income seniors on fixed incomes, pegging increases in property taxes to house values without some kind of cap or other relief program could impact their ability to stay in their homes,” she said.

However, Susan Shelley, a spokesperson for the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association – which is named for the mastermind of Prop. 13 and works to protect it – argues that the data from the Tax Fairness Project can be made to “look anyway you want.”

Increasing property taxes hurts every homeowner, she said.

“If you raise property taxes on people to the point where they are forced to sell their property, we think that’s wrong,” she said, adding that it would particularly affect homeowners in lower income communities.

“(Prop. 13) inherently benefits all homeowners: the longer you own a home, the more you benefit,” she said. “It favors stability in neighborhoods, and not gentrification.”

Shelley pointed to a calculator created by her nonprofit lobbying and policy organization that shows what the average property tax would be without Prop. 13. Using Discovery Bay as an example, she said under Prop. 13 the property tax bill for an average home there is $6,030, but without it, it would more than triple to $19,000.

Another primary argument brought up while discussing Prop. 13 is funding public school education. Before Prop. 13 was approved, property taxes were a major source of income for public schools. Now, income taxes are the main source of revenue for California schools, with property taxes accounting for 28%.

Prop. 13 has also had ripple effects compounding California’s housing crunch, Reid said — for example, creating a significant shortfall in local city budgets for things like infrastructure investments.

“To make up for budgetary shortfalls, cities impose development fees on new construction,” Reid said. “These fees drive up the costs of new housing, exacerbating the affordability crisis.”

In addition, cities have given commercial development preference over housing, because they add more revenue than housing through sales taxes, she said.

Factors driving the trend include higher interest rates and prices increasingly out of reach for buyers, the report said.

“California’s housing market is moderating from the 12-year-high levels experienced in 2021, as higher mortgage interest rates and soaring home prices are starting to have an adverse impact on housing demand,” Jordan Levine, vice president and chief economist of the California Association of Realtors, said in the group’s April 2022 Sales and Price Report.

The realtors association found that the April statewide sales pace, measured by the number of homes sold, was down 1.9% from March and down 8.5% from last year — the biggest year-over-year decline in the last four months, the report said. Bay Area sales in April slowed even more than the state average, dropping 18.1% since one year ago, according to the report. Only the Central Coast saw a larger year-over-year decline, at 21.3%.

“With April pending home sales recording the worst drop in two years, the affordability challenges that buyers have been encountering are materializing in recent sales trends, and further declines in housing demand could continue in the second half of the year,” Levine added.

At the same time, however, the report found that prices are higher than ever, owing to mix of factors, including low housing inventory overall, inflation and an increasing share of high-end homes being sold on the market — a trend that is expected to continue in the coming months.

The realtors association found that California’s median home price in April broke March’s record, hitting $884,890 — 8.7% over last April. While that year-over-year increase was the smallest since June 2020, it still set a new peak price for the state.

The shifts in sales activity and pricing are subtle, reflecting a changing, but not crashing, housing market, realtors said.

“While many real estate pundits predict an imminent crash in the Bay Area real estate market, it appears they might be a bit premature in their dire forecasts,” Tim Yee, president of real estate firm RE/MAX Gold Bay Area, said in a report. But, he added, “rising interest rates, unchecked inflation and consumer confidence are all contributing to a leveling of the Bay Area markets, especially noticeable in the last two weeks of April and the first week of May.”

With inflation high and the stock market down, “the housing market is beginning to slow preliminary, but not universal reactions,” real estate firm Compass noted in its report, pointing to slowing sales activity as well as realtor accounts of less-crowded open houses and fewer offers on new listings.

But the firm added that, absent an economic disaster like the 2008 crash, cooling trends tend to be gradual — “more of a slow leak in an over-pressurized tire than a blowout at high-speed.”

“Even the hottest markets eventually cool. This does not necessarily imply a large ‘bubble and crash,’” the report said. “Over the past four decades, a cooling shift has typically meant a gradual decline in sales activity, then either a leveling off in appreciation or price declines of 5% to 10%.”

Compass also noted a slight “atypical” decline in the number of listings accepting offers and going into contract for the month of April after they had increased sharply every month since December 2021.

The local and state trends mirror nationwide housing market trends, according to the National Association of Realtors, which reported that sales activity was down year-over-year all over the country.

Though things may be slowing, the reports show that the market is still very competitive, and housing affordability issues are likely to persist throughout the state.

“As rates remain on the rise, the sense of urgency to buy is keeping the market highly competitive, especially since housing inventory continues to stay well below pre-pandemic levels,” California Realtors Association president and Bay Area real estate broker Otto Catrina noted in the group’s report.

“While we will likely see more listings come on to the market as we move further into the home-buying season, the housing shortage issue will likely persist throughout the rest of the year in major metropolitan areas, such as the Bay Area and the Southern California region,” Catrina added.