Month: October 2014
Rusty’s Retreat: A model to make red-tagged homes livable and benefit local nonprofits
Local trio sees Zayante rehab as a new model to legalize red-tags
by Jondi Gumz
Santa Cruz Sentinel
October 27, 2014, Felton — Rusty Hartman was a thorn in the side of the Santa Cruz County Planning Department but his dying wish, at age 75, was that his red-tagged retreat in the Zayante Hills would benefit children at risk. That was a tall order for his friend Wallace Wood, 75, trustee of Hartman’s estate, which owed money to contractors and was embroiled in legal disputes with former tenants.
Nonetheless, nine months after Wood asked a friend, real estate agent Lizabeth Morell, for help, and she called Michael Bethke, a contractor with 30 years of planning and construction experience, the trio is about to make Hartman’s impossible dream come true.
They will host an event 6-8 p.m. Thursday at the Santa Cruz Police Department community room to explain how red-tagged properties in the county could be rehabbed and legalized, making more housing available, providing jobs and generating income for local nonprofits.
“It’s definitely been a labor of love,” said Morell, an agent with Bailey Properties, enjoying the view of the fir trees and blue sky from sandstone deck with the tinkle of wind chimes above.
Hartman was an independent sort, doing most of the work at 9779 Rosebloom Ave. himself. “He was an amazing stone mason,” Wood said. He installed a rock path, built a gazebo and a water fountain. But he didn’t see the need to get county permits for improvements he made over 20 years, like enclosing a second floor deck to create more living space. The roof of the enclosed deck turned out to be too high by county regulations.
In terms of code violations, this was the worst Bethke had seen — “with a file yay thick,” he said, spreading his hands, and “82 trips to the dump” at the outset. Morell described Hartman as a hoarder, and as he got older, less capable of doing the work he wanted to do.
Bethke tapped Sid Slatter of Slatter Construction as general contractor while he navigated the permit process. The county called Hartman into court but the appearance came two months after he died and the judge ordered a $10,000 fine. Bethke tried in vain to get the fine waived. The county’s legalization assistance permit program, in the works for months, wasn’t effective until Oct.
Banks were skittish about making a loan. Morell said Jim Chubb of Pacific Inland Financial found a private investor from Monterey willing to take the risk. “Nobody in this county was interested,” Bethke said. The lender demanded 12 percent interest but tolerated complications, like paying that $10,000 fine along with the deferred property taxes and liens on the property.
Monday, two men from the Day Labor Center in Live Oak were working along with David Haltum, whose father Chris Haltum, is doing the hardwood floors. Sierra Azul is providing plants and San Lorenzo Rotary members have offered to help put them in.
Morell hopes the four-bedroom hillside home with jaw-dropping views on a acre of land will be worth “in the low-$700,000s.” That would cover the $350,000 loan with the remainder going to the Boys and Girls Clubs of the Valleys, 50 percent; Jacob’s Heart Children’s Cancer Services, 20 percent; antigang efforts PRIDE and BASTA, 20 percent; and the Resource Center for Nonviolence, 10 percent.
Morell welcomes donations of materials. “Any dollar we can save, we can send to the Boys and Girls Club or Jacob’s Heart,” said Bethke, who envisions his startup, dubbed For Sale For Good, becoming certified as a B corporation for benefitting the public good and turning more red-tagged problem homes into opportunities.
Rusty’s Retreat
What: An opportunity to learn about Rusty’s Retreat, a formerly red-tagged home at 9779 Rosebloom Ave. in the Zayante Hills that is being rehabbed for sale to raise money for nonprofits in Santa Cruz County serving children at risk; screening of “Rusty’s Redemption,” a film by Romney Dunbar.
When: 6-8 p.m. Thursday
Where: Santa Cruz Police Department Community Room, 155 Center St., Santa Cruz.
How to help: Call Lizabeth Morell, 831-688-7434, ext. 458, or email lmorell@baileyproperties.com
Here’s how many houses you can buy in other cities for the price of one in Silicon Valley
by Zainab Mudallal
Quartz.com
October 25, 2014, San Jose, CA — When the owner of a crumbling, uninhabitable house in a flood zone is asking for a cool $1.8 million, you know the market is hot. Amid signs that the national housing market is cooling, property prices in tech-heavy Silicon Valley show few signs of sanity.
The median single-family home costs $900,000 in the San Jose metropolitan area, according to the latest figures from the National Association of Realtors. The area around San Jose, the biggest city in Silicon Valley, is closely followed by nearby San Francisco, with a median price that’s still more than $100,000 short of the typical home in the technology hub. And prices in both areas are rising by double-digit percentages, versus a low single-digit national average.
To fully appreciate how frothy Silicon Valley’s property market is, consider how many houses you can buy elsewhere for the same price as one in Apple, Google, and Facebook’s back yard.
Few people see the New York metro area as a particularly affordable place to buy a home, but your budget would just about fetch two houses in the Big Apple for the median price of one in San Jose. Or three in Portland, four in Philadelphia, and five in Orlando.
Looking at these sorts of numbers, it’s no wonder that people are worrying about a potential property bubble, particularly at the high end of the market—homes over $1 million in San Jose have seen a 76% jump in price over the past year. But others think the boom has more room to run—newly minted tech millionaires can pay cash for their mansions, so there isn’t a particularly daunting debt overhang.
But how long will the Valley’s budding captains of industry put up with just one place in San Jose when they could spend the same amount on an entire subdivision in an equally sprawling, featureless city somewhere else in the country?
———————-
Original article: http://qz.com/286239/heres-how-many-houses-you-can-buy-in-other-cities-for-the-price-of-one-in-silicon-valley/
Silicon Valley sprawls East: How tech jobs, housing and transit are shaping a megaregion
by Lauren Hepler
Silicon Valley Business Journal
October 21, 2014, Santa Cruz — On the outside, the SpinDx technology pioneered at Livermore’s Sandia National Laboratory looks like little more than a beige cube with a retro CD player on one end. But the “lab-on-a-disk” tool developed with $4 million in federal funding has been hailed as a potential game changer in the detection of biological warfare agents, like anthrax, for its capability to manipulate and identify unknown substances.
Now, startups in the Tri-Valley area of the East Bay — a region immediately northeast of Silicon Valley, centered around the cities San Ramon, Danville, Dublin, Livermore and Pleasanton — want to harness the technology’s healthcare potential to diagnose cancer or conduct in-home fertility testing. The technology represents the crystallization of the type of public-private business development work that Tri-Valley officials and economic boosters want to use to foster a growing local tech industry.
In addition to research spun out of national research centers in the area like the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, they cite the region’s highly educated workforce, strong base of corporate tenants, an emerging startup scene and increasing economic ties to Silicon Valley as variables working in their favor. Though the Tri-Valley’s billion-dollar research tenants offer a potential leg up, the business push also comes as outlying regions from Santa Cruz to the San Joaquin Valley up to Davis also look to strengthen ties to Silicon Valley. It all adds fuel to demographers’ predictions that Northern California will likely look like a 24 million-resident “Megaregion” in just a few decades.
“This is not simply a story about the Tri-Valley,” said Tracey Grose, the author of a new Bay Area Council report on tech growth in the region. “There’s growing economic activity taking place in collaboration with the rest of the Bay Area.” Beyond the flows of technical talent and venture capital funding spreading out from what is traditionally thought of as Silicon Valley, the increasing economic interconnectedness between the Peninsula, San Francisco, the East Bay, the North Bay and parts of California’s Central Coast is also driven by more banal factors.
Housing, that most basic necessity, has become so expensive in the Peninsula, the South Bay and San Francisco that area workers are pushed to far-flung suburbs in the Tri-Valley, or even farther toward Sacramento or the Central Valley. That disconnect between where jobs are located and where housing is located, in turn, manifests day-to-day in gridlocked highways or packed public transit (in the select areas that effective public transit is an option).
For the Tri-Valley, all those forces resulted in a 66 percent increase in the number of commuters heading to Silicon Valley each day, according to the new Bay Area Council report. The region itself also grew its employment number 21 percent from 2000-2012, adding 40,000 jobs. When it comes to bolstering the local tech industry, the Tri-Valley’s 925 area code attracted $272 million in startup investment during 2012 — a relative drop in the bucket compared to the $4 billion in capital that cycled through Silicon Valley proper that year, according to the National Venture Capital Association. But that number gives local tech advocates hope for future growth.
“The Tri-Valley is certainly part of the Bay Area, but it hasn’t been part of the Bay Area’s startup community in the past,” said Brandon Cardwell, senior management analyst for regional incubator i-Gate. ” I think you’re going to see more of that as Silicon Valley grows.”
Branching out
From public universities to large research institutions, like the Tri-Valley’s 6,000-person Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California has aggressively pushed to make the most of its public assets while trying to jumpstart more than a dozen innovation hubs, or i-hubs, throughout the state. For Livermore-based i-Gate, which operates a nonprofit incubator focused largely on life science and biotech startups, the process has entailed a shift in mentality from top-down, government-mandated innovation to heavier reliance on advice from tech-industry veterans.
“It turns out our methodology was a little bit backward,” Cardwell said of the initial “if we build it they will come strategy.” He added that, “If you don’t have an ecosystem, those commercializable ideas don’t have anywhere to go.”
One potential source of help: The Tri-Valley is already home to offices for Cisco Systems Inc., Accenture Plc and EMC Corp. Other business technology leaders like Oracle Corp. and SAP AG have acquired local companies including Dublin-based Taleo Corp., Pleasanton-based PeopleSoft and Berkeley-founded Sybase. I-Gate also has new office space in downtown Livermore that provides startups with workspace, and several alumni have since cycled through name-brand Silicon Valley incubators like Y Combinator or received capital from organizations affiliated with big-name entrepreneurs like Peter Thiel.
Though the organization doesn’t require companies to commit to staying in the Tri-Valley long term, Cardwell said $1-per-square-foot real estate costs and highly-educated local talent are strong draws.
When it comes to developing the existing local workforce, he said one priority is to encourage highly educated researchers used to Lawrence Livermore’s $1.5 billion-a-year budget to flex their entrepreneurial muscles. “We believe in unlocking the entrepreneurial potential of a region by removing the barriers,” Cardwell said. “We are often dealing with first-time founders with a technology background who don’t have as much experience with the business side.”
In addition to giving researchers some leash to develop promising products outside the lab, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia National Laboratory’s 1,200-person Livermore site are also embarking on a joint effort to add up to 200,000 square feet of R&D office and laboratory space to better connect with the outside world. “It offers a new front door into both of these national laboratories,” said Camille Bibeau, who handles program development and academic alliances for the facility, called the Livermore Valley Open Campus. “It allows us to hold workshops and various engagements with the public and the private sector that are otherwise difficult to do behind a security fence.”
In reporting this story, I heard from people who didn’t want to be quoted because they weren’t authorized to speak on the matter that Google Inc. and IBM Corp. could be two tenants in the new space. IBM has already worked with Sandia on a deep computing project. A Google spokesperson declined to comment. Bibeau said the laboratories are awaiting permitting clearance on the office expansion, which they hope to receive in the next 6-9 months before an anticipated 18-24 months of construction.
Drawbacks of sprawl
Even a relatively short commute in Silicon Valley proper — say, from the suburbs of San Jose to work in a tech hub like Palo Alto — can take upwards of an hour on an average day by car. Those going from downtown area to downtown area might get lucky with a shorter Caltrain commute. But light rail, buses and even carpool lanes generally don’t offer quicker alternatives. Those dynamics are becoming even more extreme in the Tri-Valley area, where commuters from the Central Valley now converge with East Bay traffic heading into San Francisco, the Peninsula or the South Bay.
The new Bay Area Council report indicates that commuters to San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties have increased 66 percent since 2007, while the amount of time spent sitting in gridlocked traffic on Highway 580, a north-south artery in the East Bay, has increased 26 percent since 2011.
“First we bragged about 580 and 680 and being at the crossroads and all that,” said Dale Kaye, CEO of regional business group Innovation Tri-Valley. “We do have a good transportation system, but it’s clogged right now.”
As I have reported, unaffordable housing is a huge driver of traffic throughout the Bay Area. “Megacommutes,” where workers travel more than 50 miles to work, are increasing in large metro areas nationwide, but Northern California’s fairly unique concentration of so many mid-sized or large cities have seriously strained existing infrastructure.
The new Bay Area Council report advocates for voters to pass an East Bay transit funding measure that would allocate some $840 million to expand highways, add carpool lanes and extend BART to Livermore — following Silicon Valley’s lead trying to invest in both roadways and public transit, which some Bay Area urban planning advocates oppose. In the meantime, Grose said the region will look to play up its best existing assets.
“Part of what has driven people out to the Tri-Valley is the quality of life” said Grose, mentioning abundant single-family housing, warmer weather than San Francisco and more open space. “Today there’s a lot of high-end housing out there. Dublin is going gangbusters building denser housing around the BART station.”
Original Article – http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2014/10/21/silicon-valley-sprawls-east-how-tech-jobs-housing.html
Why not Commons?
Newly finished Walnut Commons is a Santa Cruz experiment in cohousing
by Cat Johnson
Good Times
October 9, 2014, Santa Cruz — For Cecile Andrews, living at Santa Cruz’s new cohousing project Walnut Commons is a lot like being back in college. There are neighbors in close proximity, shared community meals, and generally always something happening.
“There are people to talk to, and they’re not just superficial conversations,” says Andrews, a longtime community activist and author of several books, including Living Room Revolution. “They’re ongoing conversations, particularly about community. Most people here are interested in the idea of community, but it has to be figured out: what is it, and how we do it.”
Located on Walnut Avenue and Center Street downtown, Walnut Commons broke ground in March of 2013, and was completed this summer. At this point, all of the units have been purchased and the residents have started moving in.
From the outside, it looks like any other condominium or apartment building. There are 19 units, a shared laundry facility and a patio space with tables, benches and a small herb garden. But while members own their own units with kitchen, bedroom and living areas, it’s far from your average apartment building. The building also has a shared kitchen, a community room, two guest rooms and a dining area that seats more than 30 people, and members agree to share community meals three times a week, take a turn cooking once a month, collaboratively build the community, and help to maintain the space. Many cohousing projects consist of standalone houses with shared common buildings and outdoor areas, but at Walnut Commons, everyone is in one building. It’s like having an entire well-connected neighborhood under one roof.
Ownership of a unit also includes partial ownership of the common areas. Members pay Homeowner Association dues each month that cover the building insurance, yearly maintenance, utilities for the common areas and funds for the community’s reserve.
City council requires all new projects to comply with its Green Building Program, so the new space was built to conserve water, energy, and material resources. It also has 29 bike parking spaces—eight more than it has for cars.
With its proximity to downtown and the increase in urban density that Walnut Commons provides, the project is a small move in the direction of meeting the city’s Climate Action Plan goal of reducing local car trips by 10 percent by 2020.
“This is really an ideal infill project,” then-councilmember Ryan Coonerty told the Santa Cruz Weekly when Walnut Commons was in the planning stages. “It’s built at a location where they won’t generate much traffic, because they can walk to everything they need.”
Walnut Commons is an experiment in living intentionally in community. But Sandy Lansdale, chair of the membership marketing committee for Walnut Commons, explains that the shared vision does not necessarily mean close relationships between all members. “Not everybody is going to be your best friend,” she says, “but there’s a respect, and a mutual sense of giving everybody the benefit of the doubt and working toward the common good.”
With origins in Denmark in the 1960s, there are now hundreds of cohousing communities around the world, and while there are guidelines and best practices for cohousing, each community is different and designed around its specific needs, interests, and strengths. In Santa Cruz County, there are two other cohousing projects, Coyote Crossing on the Westside and New Brighton Cohousing in Aptos, both of which have stable, long-term, inter-generational communities in place.
While some cohousing projects cater to seniors, Santa Cruz’s latest version is not a retirement community. Most of the members are over 50, although the plan, from the outset, was for the project to have an inter-generational community. Lansdale says, “I’m not ready to move into a retirement community.” Andrews adds with a laugh, “No one here is.”
One criticism levied against cohousing in general is affordability: an owner buy-in model is an entry barrier for many people, and Walnut Commons is no exception. With prices starting around $400,000, the project was out of reach for many. Lansdale explains that the high price is due to the fact that the building, with its green materials and earthquake-safe construction, cost a reported $9 million to build, and it’s sitting on prime downtown real estate. “This is not a cheap variety of cohousing,” she says. “We’re on a piece of land that is prime land, and the building itself had to be built really strong to the earthquake code.” The building, she explains, has 69 piers going deep into the ground.
There are affordable cohousing projects out there though, and there’s a growing global movement to create more. A pioneering model is LILAC (Low Impact Living Affordable Community) in Leeds, England, which is the first affordable eco-cohousing project in the U.K. Through a “mutual ownership scheme,” members pay a flat 35 percent of their income toward their housing. The Partnership for Affordable Cohousing, based in Amherst, Massachusettes, is a nonprofit working to promote and establish affordable cohousing throughout the U.S.
With its collaborative ethos, cohousing challenges not just traditional notions of housing, but also traditional American values of self-sufficiency and independence. “This culture is a really isolated culture,” says Andrews, “It’s in our DNA. Americans are always self-reliant; we don’t need anybody, and that has led us astray.”
Living in community requires active participation from its members. At Walnut Commons, decisions are made by consensus, which means that everyone has a chance to speak on an issue before a proposal is stated. If consensus is blocked and not obtained after several tries—which Lansdale explains could mean a couple of meetings—the group can fall back on voting.
Andrews explains that consensus doesn’t mean everyone has to agree on everything all the time, but that every voice is important, even when members don’t reach total harmony on every issue.
“Learning to work with consensus is something everybody should learn,” she says. “It may not work for everything, but that’s one of the learning tools of how do you make decisions. The big thing in consensus is everyone talking, listening and being heard.” Lansdale adds, “It’s about trying to draw out the wisdom of the group to make a stronger decision.”
While Walnut Commons is still in its early stages, there’s a vision that the community will be a strong and supportive one that will find ways to integrate with the larger Santa Cruz community. “This is a laboratory,” says Andrews. “We’re trying this out, and we want to communicate it to the wider world.”
Original Article posted at: http://www.gtweekly.com/index.php/santa-cruz-news/santa-cruz-local-news/5991-why-not-commons.html
Santa Cruz Real Estate News 