- Hog Obituary
- Jun 11, 2006
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start the day right
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Perhaps this is a little hyperlocal, but there was this blog post about some lady's experience at a neighborhood planning meeting (and why SF residents are the reason we can't get more housing)
http://bernalwood.wordpress.com/201...ousing-problem/
quote:As you know from this post, there is a proposed 6-unit development attempting to go in at two of the empty interior lots inside York, Hampshire, Cesar Chavez & Peralta. I live on the 200 block of Peralta, not immediately bordering the land, but up a bit.
This meeting was bigger than the last I went to, which was also very frustrating. (That one was about the house on Alabama near the cafe that’s currently under construction. The woman that owns that Alabama house left the meeting in tears because she was being hated on for wanting to renovate and move into her own home).
This proposed development is mainly reasonable. Offering four single-family homes with 3-car parking, water capture & recycling and solar panels and 2 unit townhomes on the 25′ lot / access way on York. While the final “design” hasn’t been done, what was shown looks fine, if generic.
As far as I understood, both by the committee’s acknowledgement & the owner & architect, this is the fourth or fifth visit to the NE slope special committee with as many different proposals. The most recent previous proposal was for 12 units total, instead of six.
The entry to the interior lot containing the 4 single-family homes is through the garage on York shared by the townhouses. So, in theory, if each unit had two cars, there would be a total of 12 cars coming and going every day from a single 12′ garage. In my opinion, this is the most troublesome part of the proposal, but that’s part of city life. I can’t imagine if they had the 12 units with 2 cars per (24 cars!) going into one garage on narrow York.
According to the owner, he bought the land in 1979, and has been “trying to build ever since.” Wow.
After presentations from the owner, the architect, the fire deputy for our part of Bernal, and the geology expert who did the land and grading surveys, questions were flying.
The stuff you’d expect to hear was in abundance: Blocking light & views, the entrance on York, traffic behind people’s houses on the “driveway”, where will the garbage bins go, how will they prevent landslides, how tall are the units, how tall are the retaining walls, where will the water go, etc.
While I understand that people’s most valuable possession is their home, the objections to this eminently reasonable proposal began to feel more and more outrageous. People were saying, they bought their houses because of access to the “nature” lot behind their houses, the trees and quiet, concern about electromagnetic sensitivity” to a proposed car turntable, etc. Legally, homeowners have no right to “light, views, or nature” of undeveloped lots. This should have been part of research done during the purchasing phase and a risk taken by homeowners purchasing homes bordering undeveloped, but owned, land.
To me, it was a lot of “we like it the way it is” even though the development, in my opinion, would bring much needed housing to desirable Bernal and create more neighbors to add to our community of awesome folks.
There were objections to the (legal) heights of the roofs, the height of the retaining walls, fundamental misunderstandings about the way cisterns and water recycling works (I can’t tell you how long we spent on fundamental mis-understanding of the water re-direction) , and objections to things that are relatively new or rare like the car turntable (we spent a good 15 minutes on making sure everyone understood it was an electric turntable, not a turn around circle).There were even more objections about the construction noise, parking during construction, and the construction starting just after the Cesar Chavez construction was ending.
There were people challenging the experts on their reports. Particularly the fire marshall and the geologist. Challenging him on what was bedrock, exactly. Saying that the excavations would cause the collapse of the hill and surrounding retaining walls (many of which were hand-made by the owners). Challenging the fire marshall on the ins-and outs of his experience fighting fires at properties like this one.
All of this, in my opinion, is fine to bring up as a concern. But once the question was answered by an expert, it was challenged and re-challenged. There were people saying it was wrong to remove mature trees, chasing off the “nature” permanently. (If anyone wants extra squirrels, they can have mine!) There were even people simply saying “we like the way it is” and the standard “it doesn’t fit the character of the neighborhood” argument – which seems to be a catch-all when reason fails. (There were even jabs and jokes made about how “rowdy” the patrons of Precita Park Cafe were, twinged with resentment. I’m so grateful for that cafe, it changed in a huge way, how we live and participate in our neighborhood).
In my opinion, we are in a desperate housing crisis in SF. There are not near enough available units to cover the number of people trying to live here.
As a homeowner who recently purchased a home (4 years ago) that 20 years ago was in an IDENTICAL situation, with two interior lots that their owners worked for YEARS to develop, I can feel the pain of the owner and architect acutely.
I’m SO grateful for my home, and my neighbors, and we watch out for them and they watch out for us. But our lot was the same as this one before the development. The neighbors used to run and play in our lots with their dogs and plant plants and treat it like public land, even though it never was. This created deep resentment during planning and development, which lingers to this day.
We fell in love with Bernal Heights because the neighborhood felt like a community. We could go the park with our dog and have people asking after us and catching up. For me, this meeting was extremely frustrating because it seemed like people felt entitled to things that ultimately weren’t theirs. It felt very uncompromising, negative and un-neighborly.
Is the owner going to get rich over this? Probably. Are we going to get six great new neighbors to watch out for our ‘hood? Likely. Are six families going to get to move to the neighborhood of their dreams? Yes. Will people’s lives be impacted in the short term? Definitely. Is everything ultimately going to be fine? Yes. Better, even.
One friend later told me I had seen “the dark heart” of the housing problem. Other friends said they stopped going to their neighborhood meetings because they couldn’t take it. The folks at these meetings are driving new and different perspectives away through their sheer endurance.
We live in a city. Cities are dense. We need to progress. This is not the face of progress.
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May 20, 2014 01:33
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May 4, 2024 15:22
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- Hog Obituary
- Jun 11, 2006
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start the day right
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There must not be any good articles on the Bay Area housing problem then, because it's really dumb to blame a single breeding colony of burrowing owls for lack of density in an area covered by single family homes and sprawling business parks.
 that's what you got out of the article?
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May 21, 2014 06:38
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- Hog Obituary
- Jun 11, 2006
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start the day right
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Sacbee has a long article about the Bay Bridge construction and quality concerns.
http://www.sacbee.com/static/sinclair/sinclair.jquery/baybridge/index.html
quote:Caltrans asked an outside expert to assess whether ZPMC [Shanghai Zhenhua Port Machinery Co. Ltd.] could do the job, and Jim Merrill, a senior materials contractor for the bridge project, gave the company a “contingent pass.” He also labeled it “high risk.” Among other problems, ZPMC didn’t have enough qualified welders or inspectors, the audit noted, and routinely welded in the rain, a basic error that often causes defects.
Undeterred, Caltrans signed off.
quote:Caltrans overrode bridge welding codes and near-universal requirements for new bridge construction when it deemed many cracks in welds produced by ZPMC inconsequential and left them in place to hurry construction along, Caltrans documents show.
quote:Caltrans diaries also indicated that ZPMC violated the job contract by delivering key documents in Chinese instead of English. ABF lacked sufficient quality-assurance staff to speak directly to its own subcontractor – also a contract violation. “Although I can jump in when misunderstanding between ABF and ZPMC developed,” Caltrans engineer Stanley Ku wrote in a report, “I do think ABF should have a (quality expert) who can speak Mandarin to reduce the ‘misunderstanding’ situation.”
Without actually being involved in the industry, I can't tell how much is "par for the course and Sacbee just as an axe to grind" or if these are "disastrous revelations and the bridge is going to fall down tomorrow"
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Jun 9, 2014 23:44
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- Hog Obituary
- Jun 11, 2006
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start the day right
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huh, I've never seen one that looks like that. They usually look like this:
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Jun 17, 2014 04:18
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- Hog Obituary
- Jun 11, 2006
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start the day right
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Woooooo Tim Draper got enough signatures to get his 6-state plan on the ballot! 
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/07/15/us-usa-california-breakup-idUSKBN0FK03P20140715
quote:Salazar said Monday that the campaign had gathered more than the roughly 808,000 signatures needed to place the measure on the November, 2016 ballot. Draper and other supporters plan to file the signatures with California Secretary of State Debra Bowen on Tuesday.
But the plan has raised bipartisan hackles across the state, and opponents say it stands little chance of gaining voter approval. If it does win the support of voters, it must still be passed by Congress, which opponents say is also unlikely.
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Jul 15, 2014 06:35
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- Hog Obituary
- Jun 11, 2006
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start the day right
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I haven't been following the district 17 race, but I was surprised to see the SF chronicle endorse Ro Khanna. Is that a big deal?
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Sep 27, 2014 20:22
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- Hog Obituary
- Jun 11, 2006
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start the day right
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YES MEAN YES
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/09/29/352482932/california-enacts-yes-means-yes-law-defining-sexual-consent?sc=tw
quote:"Lack of protest or resistance does not mean consent," the law states, "nor does silence mean consent. Affirmative consent must be ongoing throughout a sexual activity and can be revoked at any time."
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Sep 30, 2014 06:20
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May 4, 2024 15:22
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- Hog Obituary
- Jun 11, 2006
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start the day right
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Median rent regardless of home size is a weird statistic. Wouldn't $/sqft be more useful in comparing cities? It also seems like the median alone would hide a lot of interesting multi-modal distributions. A city could have a ton of affordable housing, but also some very wealthy neighborhoods, but the median would hide this fact and make it seem comparable to a city that had no affordable housing, but little high end housing as well.
Hog Obituary fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Nov 17, 2014
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Nov 17, 2014 17:14
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May 20, 2014 01:33
