Duke said Wednesday that Prologis’s offer is “insufficient” and “virtually unchanged from its prior proposals.”
Prologis owns 1 billion square feet of industrial real estate, leased to tenants including Amazon and FedEx. Duke owns around 160 million square feet, including properties in San Jose, Richmond and Hayward, according to its website.
“We are confident that the proposed combination will be a win-win for our respective shareholders,” Prologis CEO Hamid Moghadam said in a statement on Tuesday. “Prologis has a proven track record serving as a leader and innovator in our industry.
The industrial market has boomed during the pandemic, with customers gravitating to online shopping and companies seeking space closer to urban centers. Nationally, industrial space had a record low vacancy rate of 3.1% at the end of the first quarter, according to CBRE, a real estate brokerage.
Prologis has previously grown with acquisitions, buying Liberty Property Trust for $13 billion in 2020 and DCT Industrial Trust for $8.5 billion in 2018.
So in January, the 81-year-old finalized a deal to sell her Point Reyes Station home at a steep discount to the Community Land Trust of West Marin, better known as CLAM, which buys property off the high-priced private market and converts it into affordable homes. In Loeb’s case, it’s a deal that will allow her to live the rest of her life in the house with no monthly payment, then entrust CLAM to “pay it forward” to others in need of lower-cost housing.
“This is my community,” said Loeb, who has lived in West Marin for 46 years. “I want to do what I can.”
For many California families, passing down a home that’s mostly or completely paid off is the biggest opportunity in a generation to build wealth. Loeb said her children supported the plan to forgo some of those financial gains, and she saw it as a chance to settle her mind in her golden years while leaving something behind for others struggling to crack into an increasingly out-of-reach housing market.
After discovering that renting was “a nightmare” in the North Bay, Bobbi Loeb and her then-husband went in with a friend on a quirky two-acre lot with multiple small homes more than three decades ago. Loeb now lives on half the land in a small main house, with two one-bedroom rental units out front, after the friend sold her portion of the property and moved out of state.
Scott Strazzante/The Chronicle
The $550,000 sale of her 1-acre property — home to three one-bedroom bungalows ringed by mountains and cypress trees, which Zillow estimates could be worth more than $1 million — is the first success for a new Age-in-Place initiative at CLAM. It’s also an example of the increasingly sophisticated ways that Bay Area land trusts and community groups are trying to ease the housing crisis, from equity-oriented Oakland homeownership programs to wrestling entire apartment buildings back from Silicon Valley investors.
In Point Reyes, a Census-designated place that encompasses the downtown Point Reyes Station and has a population of 895, the average home is worth around $1.6 million, up 22% from just one year ago, according to a Zillow estimate. But similar to other Bay Area tourist hot spots, the average local household earns a disproportionately low $74,000 a year, census data shows, fueling high demand for scarce affordable housing.
“It’s impossible to keep up,” said Ruth Lopez, program manager for CLAM, which sees demand far beyond the 18 income-restricted rental units it currently manages. “We have 200 people on the wait list.”
As far as Loeb knows, the house that she lives in was originally built as a chicken coop about 150 years ago. Another owner stuccoed over the walls and made it a utilitarian homestead with low ceilings and overhead plumbing. Loeb and her then-husband bought the surrounding 2-acre property with a friend in the 1980s, then kept 1 acre and their house when the friend later sold and moved to New Mexico.
Today, the airy main house that Loeb’s contractor ex-husband renovated over 18 years has blond wood floors, ample skylights and walls full of art made by Loeb and her son. The lofted bedroom feels like a tree house with its vaulted wood ceiling and a balcony perched over the irises, apple trees and tomato plants growing below.
“We wanted the outside to be inside,” Loeb said. “That was the whole point of coming to California.”
House rich, cash poor
Even on the rural edge of Marin County, today’s California isn’t the 1960s dream that Loeb was chasing when she moved here from New York at age 20. In Point Reyes, where her son used to get chased home from school by ranchers’ kids for looking like “a hippie,” Loeb now avoids the throngs of tourists who pack the small downtown on weekends. She worries about former school colleagues and other workers being forced into long commutes.
For Lopez, whose three kids attended the Papermill Creek Children’s Corner where Loeb taught, rising housing costs also make it harder for housing nonprofits like CLAM to keep a foothold. That’s why, a few years ago, she and her colleagues started looking at places like Colorado for creative ideas to buy new properties with prices rising.
“The average age here is like 65,” Lopez said. “We thought there might be some seniors who are kind of house rich and cash poor, and that might be our best strategy to acquire properties and help seniors stay in their homes.”
It was spring 2021 when Loeb started seriously considering selling her home to CLAM. Under a deal known as a “retained life estate,” she plans to live in the home for the rest of her life with no mortgage, keep earning income from two small rentals on the property, then task CLAM with converting her home to affordable housing after her death.
The two sides agreed that, in exchange for the lower sale price, the land trust would also cover tax bills and major repairs. This spring, the whole property was tented and fumigated to get rid of pests, and a new roof was installed.
Loeb said her daughter, who lives nearby, was supportive of the decision, and her son, an artist living in Memphis, told her to “just do it.” The land trust also required family to sign off.
“We don’t want anyone coming back saying, ‘This is elder abuse,’” Lopez said.
‘My legacy’
A family portrait on the mantel of Bobbi Loeb’s home in Point Reyes. Loeb moved from New York to California 61 years ago, at age 20, after reading an article about teaching in Big Sur. She also lived in Berkeley and Bolinas before settling in the former ranching town.
Scott Strazzante/The Chronicle
The fine print of retained life estate deals like the one Loeb opted for vary, but they aren’t new. Other types of charities and community institutions — food banks, universities, churches — have long offered donors the option of passing on valuable properties this way. After a homeowner transfers the deed to a nonprofit for an agreed-upon price, effectively securing “future ownership,” Lopez said, the owner gets to keep living there while gaining the tax benefits of a charitable gift.
Homeowners seriously worried about losing their homes may look to such arrangements instead of risky loans or reverse mortgages, and the process is designed to avoid postmortem red tape like probate court. In exchange, the land trust or nonprofit gains a property that would otherwise be too expensive to buy.
Other Bay Area affordable housing groups, including the Sonoma Land Trust, also offer to help facilitate retained life estates. In nearby cities, housing nonprofits confronting their own forms of gentrification are experimenting with different approaches, several focused on extending homeownership and estate planning to non-white families who stand to disproportionately benefit because of pervasive racial wealth gaps.
The Oakland Community Land Trust acquires single-family homes — including one famously occupied by activist group Moms 4 Housing — to be sold at discounted rates or leased to own. In the working-class Peninsula enclave of North Fair Oaks, the nun who leads the Catholic nonprofit St. Francis Center has amassed a multimillion-dollar affordable housing portfolio by leveraging private donations to buy buildings back from real estate speculators.
Across the country, philanthropy consultants such as Chase Magnuson have seen rising demand to tap into would-be donor dollars locked in real estate, sometimes through wonky-sounding trusts or through traditional wills. The trick, he said, is making sure all sides are prepared to deal with potentially costly hurdles like maintenance, insurance and other financial or family turmoil.
“They need to have professional financial help,” said Magnuson, president of Houston’s Real Estate for Charities, “so that they don’t do something wonderful and then run out of money.”
In Point Reyes, CLAM agreed to pay Loeb $300,000 up front for the house, then two subsequent payments totaling $250,000. The discounted purchase was financed by a mix of private donations, county affordable housing dollars and funding from the Marin Community Foundation, county records show.
Lopez said CLAM, which has an annual budget of around $850,000 and owns several million dollars’ worth of property, is still evaluating long-term options for Loeb’s home. Whenever the day comes that she no longer lives there, the land trust may sell the bungalows and lease the land at an affordable rate, Lopez said, or rent them all out below market value.
That all sounds just fine to Loeb.
“I don’t see how this town can survive without affordable housing,” she said. “And I mean, that’s my legacy, right?”
Lauren Hepler (she/her) is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: lauren.hepler@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LAHepler
But the differences from the Bay Area compared with the state and U.S. averages are even more stark. As of February 2022, the median sale price per square foot for the U.S. was $218, compared with $501 for California. The median price for the San Francisco metro area was twice that of California’s and five times the median for the U.S. at $1,062 per square foot.
The geographical pattern in the Bay Area is clear: San Francisco and the South Bay command the highest prices, with costs going down as you move farther out to the east and north.
The median sale price per square foot in February for the U.S., California and the San Francisco metro, according to Redfin data.
Redfin
Sunnyvale topped the list with the most expensive square footage price of $1,113 in February 2022. That price was slightly below the city’s high of $1,142 during the previous decade, reached in May 2018, according to Redfin.
Many Silicon Valley neighborhoods have some of the most competitive real estate markets right now, with a high percentage of homes sold above listing, and low median days on the market. Experts point to the desirable suburbs that are centrally located in the Bay Area, and near good schools.
San Francisco came in second at $1,091 per square foot. The only other time during the past decade when prices were higher was in March 2020 at $1,117 per square foot. The San Francisco housing market has long been notoriously expensive — home prices have nearly doubled in a decade, and inventory is low, with not enough new housing being built due in part to the city’s strict zoning regulations and difficult approval process.
The median sale price per square foot in February for San Francisco, Oakland, Santa Clara and Vallejo, according to Redfin data.
Redfin
San Jose’s price per square foot was in the middle of the list at $876. Prices have increased relatively steadily over the past decade, with a sharp peak in April 2018 at $731 per square foot, followed by a big drop that ended in January 2019 at $619 per square foot.
In the East Bay, Concord has seen a much more gradual increase in price per square foot, reaching $531 in February 2022. By comparison, San Francisco hasn’t had a median sale price per square foot that low since March 2012.
The median sale price per square foot in February for Concord, Fremont and Sunnyvale, according to Redfin data.
Redfin
Santa Rosa was second lowest on the list at $455 per square foot, and Vallejo had the lowest price per square foot at $371.
Kellie Hwang is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kellie.hwang@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @KellieHwang
It’s difficult to answer how many people are experiencing homelessness in San Francisco on any given day.
Though volunteers fan out across the city annually to try and count, the range varies wildly. The latest best estimates oscillate between 8,000 and 19,000 people living outside of stable housing.
Despite the discrepancy in numbers, a Chronicle analysis of several sources of data and interviews with homelessness experts make clear that the problem is only getting worse.
Henri Louvigny receives his Pfizer booster from resisted nurse Katya Betz in October as his daughter, Monique Louvigny, holds her dog, Olive, at the Solano County Fairgrounds in Vallejo.
Lea Suzuki / The Chronicle 2021
• Millions of people are still suffering the effects of long COVID. Ranging from neurological symptoms to chronic fatigue to cardiac problems, they’re baffling researchers who are trying to alleviate their suffering. What’s causing the holdup in treating these long-term symptoms?
• COVID cases are again rising in the Bay Area, spurred by a subvariant of the omicron strain. San Francisco has the second-highest rate of infection in California, and experts fear it could get worse with people no longer wearing masks.
• More than a year after COVID vaccines became available for most of the United States, the majority of the country has received at least one shot immunizing them from most severe coronavirus infections. But there are still a lot of remaining questions, such as when kids under 5 will become eligible for shots and when waning immunity will prompt others to get another shot. Here’s what the timeline looks like going forward.
Delicate bird’s nest pastries and pastel soft serve swirled atop fish-shaped cones are all the rage in the East Bay this spring.
Notable restaurant openings in the East Bay in April also include Hotbird, a hot chicken shop that moved back to Oakland from San Francisco, and Dissident Spirits, a Richmond craft distillery with a new tasting room. The Chronicle’s must-try new restaurant guide has you covered for eateries blooming outside of the East Bay.
Up north, aperitifs are making a comeback in the form of a French-inspired tasting room. L’Apero les Trois in Winters (Yolo County) is probably the first aperitif-focused showroom in California, offering inexpensive flights paired with small plates.
Around the Bay
The focus of San Francisco’s crime problem will shift to Mayor London Breed if voters recall the district attorney.
Scott Strazzante/The Chronicle 2019
• From Joe Garofoli: If D.A. Chesa Boudin is recalled, Mayor London Breed will be solely responsible for San Francisco’s crime concerns. Also: The Chronicle has compiled a comprehensive Voter Guide to the key races that California and Bay Area residents will decide on in June.
• Filling the gaps: A new San Francisco program wants to assign case managers to people struggling with addiction and mental illness before they fall through the cracks of a patchwork health care system.
• Disconnect: Despite pushing for more electric vehicles, California’s public charging stations are in sorry shape, users say. A new survey found that nearly a quarter of the Bay Area’s electric vehicle chargers are unreliable or inoperable.
• “Inhumane”: California has awarded Oakland nearly $5 million to address a sprawling homeless encampment crisis. But local leaders say it’s not enough to solve the problem.
• From the vault: What did San Francisco’s first women’s college look like? We dive into the archives for photos of the Catholic nun-run higher education institution.
• Clean streets: An economic recovery program from the Latino Cultural District wants to revitalize San Francisco’s Mission District, which has suffered during the pandemic.
• Big loss: A fire in Oakland’s Fruitvale district ripped through several apartments and businesses, destroying the home of an artist who had been living in her gallery.
• “This is America”: Warriors forward Draymond Green was the target of a racist slur from a Memphis meteorologist over the weekend, which coach Steve Kerr called “not surprising.”
• Snow in May: A light dusting of snow fell over the Sierra over the weekend, accompanying unseasonably low temperatures across Northern California.
Areas of interest
479 Ferne Ave. in Palo Alto hit the market for $4 million, but sold for more.
DeLeon Realty
Although there isn’t quite an exodus from the Bay Area, prospective home buyers are thinking seriously about leaving the region.
New Redfin data shows that nearly 1 in 4 Bay Area users of the real estate site is looking at other metropolitan areas in California when browsing for homes. Sacramento and Los Angeles top the list of cities they’re looking in, but Seattle, Austin, Texas, and Portland, Ore., are also catching would-be buyers’ eyes.
High home prices and mortgage interest rates haven’t driven everyone away. A Palo Alto home hit the market at $4 million. Its eventual sale price went even higher. Can you guess how much it eventually sold for?
Bay Briefing is written by Gwendolyn Wu (she/her) and sent to readers’ email inboxes on weekday mornings. Sign up for the newsletter here, and contact the writer at gwendolyn.wu@sfchronicle.com.
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