Sustainable Development Focus
FAST COMPANY - Oct 8 Salesforce, led by co-founder and co-CEO Marc Benioff, aims to establish itself as the corporate citizen in San Francisco. Now the city’s biggest private employer–and tenant of its tallest skyscraper–has just thrown its weight behind solving a problem that tech giants like Salesforce get blamed for: gentrification that’s pushing poor and middle-class residents out of their homes and into the streets or suburbs. This week, Benioff and Salesforce announced moral and monetary support for Proposition C, the November city ballot initiative that aims to raise $300 million per year for housing subsidies and homeless services. Proposition C would more than double San Francisco’s housing-assistance spending by levying an average tax of 0.5 percent on business gross receipts over $50 million per year.
THE HILL - Oct 5 The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) last Thursday released its annual state ranking of efforts to cut their energy consumption, as efficiency spending rose to nearly $8 billion in 2017 from $7.6 billion in 2016. The 2018 State Energy Efficiency Scorecard showed a 7.3 percent increase in electricity savings last year, representing almost 27.3 million megawatt-hours, with Massachusetts and California leading in the ranking. New Jersey passed clean energy legislation this year, including new efficiency targets, and it was the most improved state in the rankings.
CURBED LA - Oct 9 State Senator Scott Wiener intends to introduce a new version of Senate Bill 827 (SB 827), a hotly contested transit density bill, next year in the legislature. He says he has been working closely with some of the groups that initially opposed the bill, including the transit coalition ACT-LA, which he met with at the Los Angeles Business Council’s housing summit last week. Wiener’s SB 827, which failed to get enough votes to advance out of the transportation committee, would have encouraged the construction of transit-accessible residential projects by creating statewide height and parking requirements for properties within a half-mile of transit stations. Virtually all California cities—97.6 percent of them—have not met their state-mandated housing requirements, according to a 2018 statewide assessment.
SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE - Oct 9 An initiative that would require San Diego voters countywide to approve large housing developments in the backcountry will appear on the March 2020 ballot. Enough verified signatures to put the measure on the ballot were collected earlier this year, but too late to have it voted on this November. The Save Our San Diego Countryside measure would take the power to approve big housing projects in unincorporated parts of the county out of the hands of the supervisors. If a project were approved via the normal planning process, voters would then have to give it the thumbs up.
THE MERCURY NEWS - Oct 6 The San Jose Unified School District has identified nine district-owned properties where it is considering building several hundred new units of affordable housing for teachers and other school employees. The district’s proposal calls for schools to be uprooted and relocated to make way for housing, a prospect that has some community members up in arms. The district says it is fighting to find and retain workers as rising housing costs outpace income. The district hasn’t yet secured funds for the proposed project, but it likely would be financed through city, county, or state housing bonds.
URBAN LAND - Oct 9 Ride-hailing services and autonomous vehicles are already starting to change the economic formulas for transit-oriented development (TOD), a panel of developers and investors said during this week’s ULI Fall Meeting in Boston. Public transportation ridership is declining in most major cities, holding negative implications for TOD projects, said David Bragg, managing director of Green Street Advisors, who moderated a discussion on the impact of changing transportation technologies and behaviors on TOD assets. Though new technologies may not have the predicted impact on transportation, “going forward, we expect the transportation revolution to be a game-changer,” Bragg said. Ride-sharing services are already having an impact on transportation planning in cities around the United States. In San Francisco, where ride sharing is widely used, single-occupant car trips have fallen from 82 percent of total trips in 2009 to an estimated 40 percent in 2019, according to Green Street data.
FRESNO BEE - Oct 5 This summer, De Young Properties claimed the title of largest zero-net energy home builder in the state with EnVision, 36 single-family homes in a southeast Clovis development, according to the company. Now it is going bigger. The company recently launched RidgeView, a 58-home development of zero net energy homes in north Clovis. The homes will also serve as a laboratory of sorts where researchers can collect data on how to improve energy efficiency and provide a template for how to meet a new state standard calling for solar power on most new homes by 2020.
