["Enjoy Coca-Cola," via Curbed SF Flickr photog Troy Holden]
· The neon Coke sign's getting an efficiency revamp [Biz Wire]
· Another Embarcadero pier fixed up, turning resto [SF Examiner]
· Stocking stuffers: John King's architecture book list [SFGate]
· Nation's superproject [...]
The Tenderloin's community court is all hugs and kisses for the neighborhood's minor-infraction offenders. The court's modeled on a similar one in Manhattan, and is meant to help people get on their feet and help themselves, rather than repeatedly jailing them. Do well and get a $10 Safeway gift [...]
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Then: $825,000
Now: $765,000
You Save: $60,000, or 7.2 percent!
"Detached on three sides," this Mission (Noe-ish) top-floor condo looks almost like a single-family house. (Just forget about that fourth side.) It's got 3 beds and 1 bath, [...]
Megadeveloper Lennar has been tasked with cleaning up not one but two former Navy sites in the Bay Area. The first, and our favorite by far, Hunters Point/Candlestick Point, and the second, Mare Island Shipyard in Vallejo. Given the wobbliness of the economy, in particular for people [...]
Remember those neighbors in the Upper Haight who wanted a couple's solar panels down, or moved out of sight, because they were a hazard to "safety"? It's happening down in SoCal too, with homeowners associations denying people their "solar rights" — then themselves getting a little [...]
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A couple things in curious combination: maxed out ornamentation with columns and chandeliers, and... the Tenderloin. Made us wonder for a second if this penthouse was once the temporary home of Yahoo millionaire G, who's' [...]
"Defenestration," the endearingly psychedelic furniture art project embedded in the Hugo Hotel, has gotten a stay of execution. The decrepit building on 6th and Howard went to San Francisco Redevelopment Agency control after its owners were forced to sell it in an eminent domain battle. [...]
["Freewheeled Freedom Machines" via Flickr/meligrosa]
The three-year-old injunction against any bike infrastructure in the city has been partially lifted, Streetsblog reported last Wednesday just as we all bolted for our four-day weekends (just like last year!). That means, well, actual if very modest movement [...]
[It's not turkey-themed, but it'll have to do. Happy Thanksgiving, people! Via bats...]
· RadioShack: the most depressing Thanksgiving spot ever [SF Appeal]
· Hotel Whitcomb's sidewalk "green pods" [THE LOIN]
· Thanksgiving miracle: judge clear's Long Island family's mortgage [Developments]
·
Golden Gate Bridge officials are going "full steam ahead" with an "experiential tourism" proposal for the bridge, allowing people to walk its catwalks or "hang out with bridge workers." Thrilling! The proposal apes a similar catwalk climb at Australia's Sydney Harbor Bridge, and if started by 2013, [...]
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One of the 36 luxury condos at 1635 California, just off Van Ness, has hit the market. The building was built in 2005, making it somewhat of a special case in that whole Nob Hilly/Polk Gulch area. [...]
We're a bit late to this, but last week the Wall Street Journal caught up with a number of Ferry Building wannabes in the Bay Area, concluding essentially that no one can top the original. The copycats in Napa, Oakland, and Santa Rosa (launching in 2013)' [...]
The ubiquitous Academy of Art University, often said to be the largest property owner in the city, recently bought the former Mercedes showcase at 950 Van Ness, and will be moving their classic auto collection there from 1849 Van Ness at some point in the future. The [...]
[Via San Francisco Citizen]
· Market Street: great streets are beige streets [SF Citizen]
· Mom and pops vs. chains: locals win [CoolTown Studios]
· Neighborhood's dog poop watch: in effect [The Front Steps]
· San Francisco's "Vancouvertown" not really full of [...]
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Once: $2,448,000
Then: $2,248,000
Now: $2,148,000
You Save: $300,000, or 12.3 percent!
The Cape Cod style home at 66 Sea Cliff Ave. has lost a lot of heft on its asking price in the last couple months, and [...]
Uptown giiiiirl, she's been living in her whitebread worrrr— oh hey. Uptown Tenderloin, added earlier this year to the National Register of Historic Places, also has its own history museum in the works. Major Tenderloin booster Randy Shaw, of BeyondChron and the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, went a [...]
How best to distill numbers from the Case-Shiller home price index into a quick headline? The Associated Press says, "Home prices up slightly in September." The Wall Street Journal: "Home prices post monthly gains." And so on. But then the New York Times, parade-rainer: "Home prices" [...]
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This little "warehouse in the heart of SOMA" is, for once, the kind of live/work space that isn't advertised as such in a glossy brochure. With a total square footage of 3,750, 472 Tehama certainly couldn't look [...]
CityPlace, the seven-story value-retail mall on Mid-Market, is scheduled for its first Planning Commission meeting soon— Dec. 10! According to the SF Business Times developer Urban Realty got busy a few years ago quietly snapping up properties all over the Mid-Market area. In addition to the [...]
In today's dose of John King, the urban design critic does a rundown of downed projects in the city. Toyo Ito's Berkeley Art Museum? Check. Don Fisher's Presidio art museum? Check. Rem Koolhaas' Prada building, check. Renzo Piano's 1,200-foot-tall Transbay towers, check. And' [...]
[A cartoon dramatization of CitiApartments. Aerial SF via Flickr/ATIS547]
CitiApartments, the real estate and apartment management company with its tentacles all over the city, already had a pretty bad reputation before this year. But in the past several months, with the forced returns of a ton [...]
[Symbiotic green wall as construction barrier, via Inhabitat]
· What to do with those ungreen lightbulbs: terrariums! [ATSF]
· A four-part interview on green things with Gavin [Inhabitat]
· For the city nerd: a San Francisco tie [Planetizen]
· Blight watch: the [...]
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The 1-bed, 2-bath tenancy in common at 8 Russian Hill Place promises "spectacular" bay views, and the pictures seem to bear that out. The 1,282 square foot home was renovated recently "using the finest materials and textures," [...]
[Photo by Matt Baume]
Time to move on to the lighter stuff: the crane that's been parked at Geary and Arguello for the past several months was caught folding itself up and packing away this weekend. The nest it was building: the Institute on Aging you [...]
The Infinity's first tower, with 237 luxury condos, has completely sold out. That "caps off an extraordinarily successful year" where the entire two-tower development sold nearly 45 percent of its total units. Tower II, which just opened earlier this year, is catching up too, with just about [...]
We are a city addicted to house porn. The SF Appeal delves deeper into our sick, sick minds: "Seeing a house that is for sale causes San Franciscans to become so overwhelmed by a doomed sense of love and longing that they realize they've never understood the Twilight books'" [...]
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The penthouse belonging to Twitter CEO @ev is being marketed as part of a thrilling pair that includes another Heublein penthouse— "with the suggestion that someone purchase both for $2,313,000 and combine the units," says [...]
John King has read between the lines of last week's Transit Center plan, and sees Mission Street as the new Market. Surprise! But if anybody's been paying attention, the 50-year "move south has already occurred," with the Yerba Buena museum district stomping out residential hotels and [...]
Local firm BDE Architecture is responsible for this Nob Hill project, submitted to the Planning Department sometime two years ago (they refer to it as Russian Hill). The six-story, 65-foot-tall mixed-used building would replace a shorter auto repair shop at 1645 Pacific, just off Van Ness. It'll' [...]
The blight cops are after the owners of the city's 500-ish vacant buildings. The crackdown follows a law passed unanimously by the Board of Supes and then signed by the mayor a few months ago that would charge owners of empty or abandoned buildings a yearly $765 [...]
[The real Batman building in Nashville, TN, via Flickr user howieluvzus]
· Golfers vs. garter snake: decision delayed [City Insider]
· Google's landing pages for real estate listings [Search Engine Land]
· Fun with line graphs: SF real estate values [The Front [...]
"Nothing wrong with that place that a wrecking ball couldn't cure. Oh wait, the neighborhood." —phlavor [The Bayview's Reddest Kitchen House Returns, With a Higher Price!]
' [...]
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Once: $4,295,000
Then: $4,095,000
Now: $3,800,000
You Save: $495,000, or 11.5 percent!
Nimble on its little asking price feet, this one. The latest chop to this 4-bed Pac Heights house at 2333 Octavia St. is enough to draw [...]
Thanks to the 2008 stimulus act, the federal government has been insuring about six mortgages a week in San Francisco — compared to none for all of 2007. Traditionally, loans underwritten by the Federal Housing Administration are for the poors ("in low-cost states like Texas and" [...]
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In other urban transformation news, the Balboa Park Station Area Plan that got passed back in April is just about getting its start. With a land swap between the Redevelopment Agency and the SFMTA, the city [...]
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For real? The Reddest Kitchen at 1358 Shafter has updated its listing, and if we're not mistaken, the $150K asking price has actually gone up by more than $100K, to $269,950. What's more, the 4-bedroom horror' [...]
[Via Burrito Justice]
In the wake of the Mission's failed American Apparel, movement has been spotted in their would-be spot at 988 Valencia*. Burrito Justice asks: "What kind of establishment would want a wall of horizontal beat-up two-by-fours?" We don't know, but if [...]
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The city has just released the draft plan to build up in SoMa, dramatically reshaping the city's skyline and shifting downtown's beating heart onto Mission Street. That beating heart: the Transbay Transit Center with rooftop park. [...]
["any given corner at sunset" via carla la]
· "The new age of bamboo": maybe it's for real now [NYT]
· Commercial real estate: too tough to save? [WSJ]
· Vacancies mean more holiday pop-up stores than ever [MSNBC]
· City treasures: [...]
"I find myself thinking of the Millennium as the 'Batman building' because of its pointy ears when seen from the south... emphasized by the blinking red lights." [The Best New Buildings of the Decade: The Ones That Didn't Make It]
' [...]
The city's facing a budget deficit of $500 million next year, but adding to the pain will be a likely drop in property taxes. Those taxes are pegged to the consumer price index, which is expected to drop this year, meaning lower property taxes for everyone, [...]
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Contemporary and traditional married and decided to raise their baby in Bernal Heights. The "fab home" at 64 Prentiss St. was built this year, and as is the norm now, begs for some green cred with bamboo [...]
Yesterday we brought you Curbed's Best Buildings of the Decade, a meandering list of 10 that represented, each in some way, the city's awesomest new buildings. But there's more fun, yet! Here now in no particular order are the runners up that, for all intents and [...]
Could the discovery of a plant that was thought extinct in the wild derail the Doyle Drive replacement project? Probably not. But it's not like things like that haven't happened in the past. Instead, botanist types are suggesting that the Franciscan Manzanita that was recently found' [...]
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Then: $15,200,000
Now: $13,500,000
You Save: $1,700,000, or 11 percent!
Still enjoying the thinner atmosphere up there in high asking price land, 2100 Vallejo has nevertheless jumped down a couple rungs on the price ladder. Consider, for instance, [...]
Berkeley's city council has given cautious support to a ferry terminal that would be located near the city's fishing pier. They did list a number of conditions they attached to their approval, including environmental considerations and not messing with the windsurfers. The ferries would connect San [...]
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Here's something architects don't normally flat out admit about their designs: "I wanted someone to barf when they look at it." That's Berkeley-based Thom Faulders, obviously on the warped work above. Deformscape was created in the backyard' [...]
["Either/Or," via Curbed SF Flickr photog Troy Holden]
· California's TV efficiency rules: no more power hogs [Wired]
· Jobs are up for architects as projects get going again [LA Times]
· Fannie Mae's letting families rent their foreclosed homes [Forbes]
· [...]
"I used to live downtown Minneapolis and loved-loved-loved when the Target opened over there. There were some fears about parking shortages before the store opened, but the shopping pattern at that store ended up being different from the usual Target. People didn't drive specifically to'" [...]
