citymaus

“In nearly every major US city, apartments are banned in at least 70% of residential areas. San Jose prohibits apartments in 94% of its residential areas. The most a developer can build in these zones is a detached single-family home.

Beyond apartment bans, a host of other zoning regulations limit housing supply. Rules such as height limits, minimum setbacks, and floor-area ratios curtail the development potential of most residential areas. In San Luis Obispo, the “High-Density Residential” zone—the most liberal residential district in the city—limits buildings to a 35-foot height and mandates large lawns. Where apartments can be built at all, these specifications mean the complexes won’t host many units.

Apartments aren’t the only type of housing snarled by zoning. In cities, many zoning codes ban single-room occupancies (SROs)—better known as boarding or rooming houses—in which residents rent a furnished private bedroom with a shared kitchen and bathroom. Where they’re allowed, SROs serve as a housing safety net, providing exceptionally affordable accommodations to low-income singles. In the postwar period, however, many cities—including New York—modified their zoning to ban them.

For every zoning rule prohibiting new housing, a half-dozen rules inflate the prices of the housing that actually gets built.

Consider minimum lot sizes, which require developers to set aside a certain amount of land for each home. These rules are common in single-family zoning districts, where lot size is a key driver of costs. Although they serve a health-and-safety function in rural areas—where, for example, sewer hookups may be unavailable—these rules serve no such purpose in most cities and suburbs. Ample research has shown that minimum lot sizes are a major culprit for rising housing costs. 

“Minimum parking requirements do similar damage in cities. These mandate that for each new unit of housing, a developer must also build some number of off-street parking spaces. While developers have both the incentive and local knowledge to determine how much parking a project requires—too few spaces and the units won’t sell; too many spaces and the developers waste money—minimum parking requirements supersede their judgment with often-arbitrary standards.

“The most powerful voices in local housing debates are those of incumbent homeowners. If they see zoning regulations as a means to inflate their biggest investment—the value of their home—the prospects for reform are slim. Even when local policy makers manage to change codes, they will face continual opposition. Their victories are unlikely to last.”

read more: atlantic, 21.06.2022.  arbitrary lines, by m nolan gray. 

“The War Era: 1940 to 1950

Prior to World War 2, Berkeley was a fairly affluent city of professionals who worked in Oakland and San Francisco. In 1940, the Black population of Berkeley numbered around 5,280. Here’s the earliest Census neighborhood map of Berkeley taken in the year 1940. The federal government-sponsored Homeowners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) alerted lenders and home buyers if non-whites were moving into a neighborhood by highlighting the borders of diversifying areas in red on maps, a practice later known as redlining. These redlining maps referred to the Black enclaves in the Bay Area as “slums under infiltration” but distinguished South Berkeley, nicknaming it “Negro Piedmont” and described it as where the Bay Area’s Black professionals lived.

But Black newcomers faced endless hostilities in the housing market, which was heavily sponsored by the federal government. The FHA was subsidizing white people into homeownership while refusing to lend to prospective Black homeowners or in their neighborhoods, viewing their presence as a threat to federally-backed mortgages. Thus Black people often paid more expensive mortgages at higher interest rates than their white counterparts for the same house.

2135 ward st., south berkeley. flickr/mateox

“The White Flight Era: 1950 to 1960

White flight in the 1950s reversed much of the white in-migration that occurred in the 1940s in the flatlands. The attempt to stop Black residents from moving into Central Berkeley that McGee-Spaulding neighbors had started in the early 1940s failed, and 1,000 white residents left the area while 500 Black and 400 people of color moved in.

The red line containing Black residents to southwest Berkeley unofficially dissolved and Black residents poured into West Berkeley, Central Berkeley and gradually into the Northwest neighborhoods right up to the Albany border. Census 1960 data reveals the newly-permitted areas for Black residents became everything west of Sacramento Street in North Berkeley and everything west of Shattuck Avenue in South Berkeley, having moved east from Grove Street (now MLK Jr Way).

In contrast to the previous decades, home construction did not follow the Black population. New construction was almost exclusively private single-family homes in the Berkeley Hills and a few dingbat apartments in the white neighborhoods of eastern South Berkeley, Bateman and the west side of Elmwood.

But the primary culprit for the lack of Black residents in new development was discrimination. Landlords in new apartments did not rent to Black tenants if the housing was located outside of Black areas. As the local NAACP president said to East Bay business leaders: “And where in the non-ghetto areas can a Negro buy a house less than 20 years old in metropolitan Oakland?” Black residents were confined to new housing only in the redlined areas, or were charged higher rents in older housing than white tenants as a racial surcharge by landlords in white areas. “I don’t rent to Negroes or beatniks,” one Berkeley landlord told the San Francisco Chronicle.

2807 shattuck ave., south berkeley. flickr/mateox

“The Radical Era: 1960 to 1970

In 1969, white youths conducted a now forgotten third People’s Park-styled occupation of a vacant lot in South Berkeley, intending to turn it into a youth hostel and garden called “People’s Pad.” Though the Black Panthers tried to be open minded with the hippies, Black residents and community boards angrily feuded with them during negotiations and eventually forced them to give up, causing the demise of the short lived People’s Pad. 

Black South Berkeleyans were recorded saying that they didn’t want another “Haight-Ashbury” in their neighborhood. But one prominent neighborhood activist, Mable Howard, recognized the larger demographic significance occurring in South Berkeley: “You white kids are in a sense returning to the ghetto to atone for the sins of your parents. When we blacks moved in, years ago, your white folks moved out. Now you're coming back, and some of us blacks are wanting to play the same game your parents played."

The Black population continued to increase, but growth slowed down to 5,571 new residents. With de jure discrimination by race in housing struck down in California by Byron Rumford’s fair housing law and the Supreme Court, the Black population grew more fully into Northwest Berkeley and Westbrae. Census 1970 reveals that over 100 Black residents gradually extended east towards the middle-class white Upper North Berkeley neighborhood bounded by Shattuck Avenue and Hopkins Street. 420 Black people resided in the white lower-middle class North Berkeley flatland neighborhoods bounded by Shattuck and Cedar—mostly as renters. Over 100 Black residents moved into all-white communities like Northbrae between Solano Avenue and Hopkins Street—mostly as homeowners. The Berkeley Hills were finally in sight and a couple dozen Black homeowners made it there. Black residents had composed half the city geographically and were bound east by 1970.

But this is as far as Black people would go in Berkeley.”

read more: darrell owens, 25.10.21. 

“SB9, by Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, will establish a streamlined process to split lots and convert homes into duplexes, potentially creating up to four units on a property that had just one before.

Under the law, local governments will have to approve applications if the projects meet size requirements and local design standards, fall outside historic and environmentally sensitive districts, and do not require the demolition of housing that is rent-restricted or has been occupied by tenants in the past three years. 

A report published in July by the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley estimated that the bill would enable new development on about 5.4% of the approximately 7.5 million parcels statewide zoned for single-family homes, making up to 710,000 new housing units financially feasible under current housing conditions. By comparison, California built more than 100,000 housing units last year for the first time in more than a decade.

a fourplex in berkeley. flickr/melystu

“SB10, by Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, will allow cities to rezone some parcels in urban areas, including those near public transit, for up to 10 units. Wiener said in a statement that the voluntary process gives local governments, which can spend years on rezoning because of environmental reviews and other steps, “a powerful new tool to get the job done quickly.”

a victorian duplex in san francisco. flickr/sftrajan

read more: sfchronicle, 16.09.21. mercurynews, 16.09.21.  faq: mercurynews, 17.09.21. 

nagakin capsule tower, shiodome, tokyo. 

“Unfortunately an agreement has been reached with the remaining owners of the capsules, and demolition will now begin from March 2022 and the area will be redeveloped no doubt into another boring skyscraper. The Nakagin Capsule Tower designed by Architect Kurokawa Kisho and is regarded as a metabolist masterpiece.“

“The Bay Area has become more racially segregated since 1990, mirroring a long-running national trend of cities and neighborhoods dividing more starkly along ethnic lines, according to a new study by UC Berkeley researchers at the Othering & Belonging Institute.

Although the Bay Area has one of the country’s most diverse populations, researchers say ethnic groups have settled into homogenous neighborhoods, often hindering economic advancement in segregated communities of color. But the Bay Area is not alone—more than 8 in 10 metro areas have become more exclusionary in recent decades.

“The United States continues to be a place of segregation, not integration,” said report author Stephen Menendian. The study measured and ranked demographic, housing and income patterns in nearly 200 U.S. metros with populations greater than 200,000.

Menendian said land use policies, including restrictions on denser housing and apartments, have driven segregation, particularly in the Bay Area. “It’s crystal clear that excessive restrictive zoning plays a significant role.”

Researchers believe the analysis will give elected leaders and planners another tool to gauge housing disparities and re-evaluate public policy on economic equity, policing and systemic racial biases. 

Researchers used census data to track migration patterns, housing costs, income, education, and health metrics for every census tract in the U.S. They also incorporated exclusionary zoning maps from the 1930s, which barred people from communities of color from buying into many neighborhoods. An online map tracks segregation measures from 1980 to 2019. 

“You can shift the map view to see which highly segregated neighborhoods are white and which are communities of color. Go to "Measures of Segregation -> Overview -> Seg/Int-Detailed".” twitter/smenendian

“The Bay Area was more integrated in previous generations. In 1980, neighborhoods in Santa Clara, Mountain View, San Jose, Hayward,  Milpitas, Oakland and San Francisco were considered fully integrated, researchers said. By 2019, many of those neighborhoods became more homogeneous and considered lightly segregated. Most lightly segregated Bay Area neighborhoods have become highly segregated today, researchers say. 

The study builds off the researchers’ previous work on housing policy and analysis of zoning in the Bay Area. They found roughly 80% of the region’s residential property is zoned for single family homes—a telling indicator for racial segregation. Neighborhoods restricted to single family homes are more likely to be exclusively White than communities with a mix of apartments and homes, researchers found.”

read more: eastbaytimes, 21.06.2021. 

outer sunset, san francisco. 

Icebergs, Zombies, and the Ultra Thin: Architecture and Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century by Matthew Soules

“Icebergs are the homes of the superrich in London that, due to building height rules, can see their values increased by adding new levels deeper and deeper below ground. Zombies are the half-dead neighborhoods in places like Dublin and southern Spain where speculative development and investment homes often sit empty. Ultra-thins are the tall luxury towers now popping up in cities around the world that serve less as places to live than as places to invest and grow the buyer’s money. 

Each of these conditions, Soules suggests, is an architectural symptom of a financial system that is reshaping cities around the world. In this interview he explains the emergence of finance capitalism and how global investment patterns are changing cities and affecting the physical form of buildings.”

read more: fastcompany, 21.05.21. 

1150 3rd street, mission bay, san francisco.

The just-completed affordable housing complex is named in honor of the late former mayor, Edwin M. Lee, and will offer housing to unhoused veterans and low-income families. 

via sfyimby, 09.05.2021.

emerald village in eugene, oregon: a permanently affordable tiny home co-op, established in 2018. 

the tiny homes are all designed by different architects. 

cob on wood: community kitchen and healing space. 

donate to cob on wood. read more: eastbaytimes, 30.04.2021. 

“Sick of living without basic resources and tired of waiting for the city to help, a group of homeless Oaklanders and activists have built their own unsanctioned community center from the ground up — creating a kitchen, shower, toilet, health clinic, free store and more. 

The community center, located in the heart of Oakland’s largest homeless encampment, looks like something out of a fairy tale. Wind your way through a maze of trash piles, burned-out RVs and junked cars, and you’ll emerge into a collection of tiny cabins with round, stained-glass windows, the walls covered in hand-painted tree branches and colorful flowers.

Each cabin provides a free service for the dozens of unhoused residents who live in the massive camp off Wood Street, under the 880 overpass in West Oakland. There are amenities to meet people’s basic needs, including a shower cabin with hot water and a kitchen with a propane stove and stocked refrigerator. But there also are things built just for fun, such as the pizza oven, the communal fire pit and the stage for open mic nights.

“It’s sort of like a little oasis in the middle of nowhere that makes you feel like maybe you’re normal again,” said John Janosko, who lives in a trailer in the encampment.

““This place and what we created can serve as a model for other encampments across Oakland, across the nation and across the world,” said Xochitl Bernadette Moreno, co-founder and director of Essential Food and Medicine, which has been providing healthy food and holistic health services — such as herbal medicine and acupuncture — to residents of the Wood Street camp since last year.

“Oakland officials are drafting new rules that could expand permitting options for alternative housing, potentially including structures similar to the Cob on Wood cabins, according to Darin Ranelletti, Oakland’s policy director for housing security. He expects the new rules will come before the Planning Commission in the coming weeks.

The vision behind the cob community started in November when Living Earth Structures founder Miguel Elliott built a cob pizza oven in the encampment and threw a pizza party for residents. That led to organizers speaking with residents about their need to cook and store food without running the risk of fire— a constant threat in unhoused communities.

“The following month, Elliott started work on a community kitchen. Now, residents can cook a meal or raid the fridge whenever they want, day or night. The kitchen has solar power and running water (the sink is hooked up to a water tank outside). Donated food stocks the pantry shelves and fills the fridge.

The cob structures are fire-resistant, according to the organizers, though they haven’t received an official safety inspection.

On Sunday, the organizers opened the Wood Street community clinic—a medical cabin where residents can find everything from herbal tinctures and sage bundles to diapers, condoms and Narcan, the nasal spray that reverses an opioid overdose.

“Next door is the “cobissary”—a free store where community members can take their pick of donated clothing, shoes, water bottles and other essentials.

And last week, the organizers finished the community shower, an amenity that will be a highlight for many residents, including Denis Emery-Young, who lives in an SUV in the camp.

Emery-Young’s eyes lit up when Elliott told him the shower had hot water.

“Oh my God,” he said. “I’m going to be next in that.”

In addition to the cob community buildings, volunteers also are building tiny homes where people can live. Artists Building Communities has built four wooden, one-room homes in the Wood Street camp, and is fundraising to build more.”

read more: eastbaytimes, 30.04.2021.  donate to cob on wood.

“When Dorothy Walker was looking for a place to live in Berkeley, California, it didn’t take her very long to learn that half the city was off-limits to her family. It was 1950, and the rules were clear: “Because my husband was Japanese, we couldn’t live east of Grove Street, because no one not white was allowed to live there.”

dorothy alford (later walker) and joe kamiya in 1950.

“Congress outlawed explicitly racist real estate covenants in 1968, and around a decade later, Berkeley changed the name of Grove Street, which divides the wealthier eastern half of the city from the west, to Martin Luther King Jr. Way. But some 70 years after she first went house hunting with her husband, Walker argues that, though the rules that kept the city divided by race and class have evolved, their effects remain.

a multifamily home (apartment building) in an area of berkeley where people of color were once limited to living in.

“Each time judges or federal lawmakers tried to make racial segregation illegal, starting in 1917, Berkeley and other cities around the country replaced them with ordinances that entrenched segregation by income and wealth instead, reserving certain parts of town for people who could afford their own house and a roomy yard. By requiring only single-family homes set back from their property lines in the white parts of towns, “municipalities basically codified existing patterns of demographics,” said Stephen Menendian, who researches the way policies affect inequality at the University of California, Berkeley.

Walker spent the bulk of her life fighting to open up neighborhoods to more people. Now it’s finally happening: A wave of cities and states are eliminating single-family zoning to allow the development of denser housing stock in previously exclusive areas. Minneapolis legalized triplexes in 2018, and Oregon effectively eliminated single-family zoning the following year. Recently, California and Seattle partially followed Oregon’s lead, allowing people to build small backyard houses without a lengthy review process. In January, Massachusetts told 115 municipalities around Boston to legalize the construction of multi-family buildings, and Sacramento voted to legalize fourplexes. Berkeley’s City Council could join them this week, making Walker’s 50-year dream of a more urban and diverse Berkeley come true.

It’s a long-overdue trend, said Muhammad Alameldin, an economic equity fellow at the Greenlining Institute, an Oakland, California-based nonprofit founded to undo the legacy of race-based housing rules. “The general consensus is that exclusionary zoning raises housing costs, and that disproportionately hurts people of color,” he said. Greenlining and others have prioritized eliminating those practices for decades, Alameldin explained, “but it’s finally getting some momentum because housing costs are starting to hurt the wealthier, whiter residents, as well.” 

Housing experts agree that loosening zoning won’t bring down Berkeley’s stratospheric housing prices. “There’s no hope; it will never be affordable again,” said Karen Chapple, a city planning professor at UC Berkeley. But making it possible for more people to live in the city, she said, would put less pressure on residents to flee to surrounding cities and tamp down the growth of sprawling exurbs. “

read more: grist, 24.03.2021. 

“In a blizzard of transactions that sidestepped many of the local rules that make California one of the nation’s hardest places to build, the state spent $800 million on 94 projects that will become permanent supportive housing, or housing that is paired with on-site social services. It has been a clear success for Mr. Newsom, a Democrat who was popular statewide but is now facing a potential recall. 

What was once a half-baked idea that in February 2020 got a sentence in his State of the State speech has since created 6,000 new supportive units, or about triple the usual pace of around 2,000 units a year. Hotel Diva, which in December was bought from an investment group by the nonprofit Episcopal Community Services of San Francisco with help from a state grant, accounts for 130 of them. 

the hotel diva, a seven story, 130-room former boutique hotel in san francisco, is being used to house the homeless during the pandemic as part of a state and federal effort.

“California’s hotel buying program, officially called Homekey, is both a drop in the bucket and a remarkable achievement. The state, which has 40 million residents, still has a crippling housing affordability problem, and even the most successful outcome would do little more than buy time to confront the decades-old structural issues—high housing costs, low wages, poor mental health care—that keep new people falling into homelessness faster than those on the streets can get out.

It has also set up a national model to fashion tens of thousands of new homeless quarters for less than the cost of new construction, and in a fraction of the time, by repurposing hotels, strip malls and other distressed real estate that has been heavily discounted by the pandemic and its economic fallout. Several other state and local governments, including Oregon, Austin and King County, Washington, have since begun similar efforts. The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, signed by President Biden in March, allocates $5 billion to fund efforts to provide housing for homeless people, including through conversions.

gregory sanchez at the site where he slept in a tent for six months in the mission district, before he got moved into a room at the hotel diva thru the homekey program. 

“Academics started documenting people sleeping in parks and bus stations in the early 1980s. Then, as now, researchers ascribed it to a mix of falling wages, rising housing costs and a fraying safety net combined with addiction and untreated mental illness.

Another factor, which has been mostly lost to history, was the loss of single-room-occupancy (SRO) hotels, which served as a crucial source of last-resort housing. 

There is broad agreement that converting hotels to homeless housing can work, at least in some instances. For years, hotels have been made into supportive housing, though never on a large scale, because they often cost less than new construction. Episcopal Community Services bought the Hotel Diva for $50 million or $385,000 per room, roughly half what it costs to build an affordable housing unit in San Francisco. They also filled it in a few weeks. Contrast that with a 256-unit supportive housing development the organization is building a mile away: E.C.S. was awarded the project in 2018 and after years of process and a neighbors’ lawsuit should finish the buildings next year.

The question is whether the urgency of the pandemic can be maintained as the virus fades. No matter how many units the state buys, there is no way to make lasting progress on its homeless problem without reforming its land-use laws to make housing easier to build—something legislators have generally been reluctant to do.”

read more: nytimes, 17.04.2021. 

“Clearing the Echo Park tent city quickly blossomed into a crisis of its own: Advocates and allies showed up to defend the park against authorities looking to sweep the encampment. Law enforcement made at least 180 arrests over two nights of protests. In the wake of the incident, the Los Angeles Police Department has announced an internal review of its procedures for closing encampments. Some city officials are demanding to know how much the effort cost the city in terms of overtime, equipment and helicopter expenses. 

In many ways, the standoff in Echo Park illustrates the complexity of a problem that city leaders and residents struggle with across the country. Among the factors in play: dignity for unhoused people, political pressure from neighbors, concerns for safety and sanitation and stopgap solutions that seem futile against the backdrop of an affordable housing crisis. The strategy that cities have adopted—clearing and closing encampments, with varying levels of support for people living in them—comes with high costs and mixed results. 

the encampment of tents along echo park lake in los angeles has been the focus of city efforts to address a growing homelessness crisis.

“That’s according to a first-of-its-kind report on tent cities, conducted by Abt Associates and commissioned by the federal government. Analysts spoke with people living in encampments as well as leaders and advocates in four cities—Chicago, Houston, San Jose, and Tacoma in Washington—and interviewed stakeholders in five others. The report finds a spectrum of policies in place and a growing awareness that simply sweeping away encampments is an ineffective response.

oceanside approves emergency measures to clean up homeless camps. sd u-t, 08.04.2021. 

“Clearing tent cities, it turns out, is expensive: The report determined that Chicago paid $3.6 million to respond to encampments in fiscal year 2019. San Jose, with a much higher proportion of people sleeping outdoors, paid $8.6 million. Costs for smaller cities also ran high: Tacoma paid $3.9 million to manage its encampments, several hundred thousand more than Houston despite having only a fraction of its population. The report doesn’t study what happened in 2020, but if anything, encampments have only grown in these cities since the beginning of the pandemic.

Overall, cities in the study paid between $1,672 and $6,208 managing camps per unsheltered person per year in 2019, requiring coordination across multiple agencies, with little to show for their efforts. Abt also says that there are costs that can’t be easily quantified, such as the trauma and losses endured by unhoused people when cities clear their communities. Few cities have dedicated funding for any approach.

The study points to three factors driving the growth of encampments: a lack of decent shelter options, a lack of political will to solve the problem and, above all, a lack of affordable housing options. Encampments pose unique challenges for local governments and for people dwelling in tents. Local agencies not traditionally tasked with or especially suited for serving homeless people wind up bearing a lot of responsibility for encampments, such as sanitation or environmental departments.” 

read more: citylab, 12.04.2021. the report: “exploring homelessness among people living in encampments and associated cost: city approaches to encampments and what they cost.” 05.04.2021.

the 418-residential unit 100 van ness building was converted from offices in 2015. 

“Once home to the California State Automobile Association, the 1970s concrete tower was regarded as an eyesore looming near City Hall.”

read more: “SF has nearly 16 million sq. ft of vacant office space. why can't it become housing?” sfchronicle, 25.03.2021.

marc norman. 

read more: “what does home mean to us? not the same thing it did before the pandemic.” 23.03.2021. 

“Climate researchers at UC Berkeley created a local government climate policy tool to measure policies based upon how well they reduce carbon footprints. In their analysis of 700 cities, these researchers determined that infill housing has the biggest impact.”

related: “we can design our way out of berkeley’s housing crisis with ‘missing middle’ buildings.” berkeleyside, 19.12.17.