Non-Family Friendly Housing Project in 'Zone of Stability' Nears Completion

Ocean Avenue Housing Project: End Run Around General Plan

News Analysis
As workers put the finishing touches at north Emeryville's newest apartment complex, 'Ocean Lofts', the units stand ready to receive their new occupants and the neighbors who railed against the project years ago can start to see their worst visions become realized and City Hall's stated housing goals subverted.  The project, at 1258 Ocean Avenue involved a small scale developer/builder tearing down a historic existing detached single family house built in 1913 to make way for much denser housing at odds with Emeryville's stated goals of making the town more family friendly and saving the east side housing from the wreaking ball as a General Plan designated 'zone of stability'.

Ocean Lofts street elevation.  Its back is turned to the
neighborhood. Oceans of stucco, sheer featureless facade
rises up and crowds the sidewalk, no 'eyes on the street' here.

The neighbors railed against the project approved in 2007 (the City granted an extension in 2009) quoting the General Plan's recommendation that single family detached housing in the Triangle neighborhood and the north side be protected against demolition but they were defeated by developer tactics some described as cynical.  The developer bought the existing house and requested a tear down and a new 4-plex building from City Hall regardless of the General Plan zone of stability prohibition but neighbors united against it.  Undaunted, the developer withdrew and allowed the house to be taken over by squatters who proceeded to strip out architectural details and damage the interior.  The roof was not repaired and rotted over several seasons.  Finally, the City Council, ignoring cries of foul from neighbors, relented to the tear down citing the damaged and rotted nature of the house.

The rarely-to-be-used front door (drive in, drive out garage
on the side). The vast featureless plane makes the laundry vent
to the left of the front door scream. In the '70's this kind of
architecture was called 'brutalism'.  A historic and family
friendly house in the 'zone of stability' was torn down for this.

And so the North Emeryville residential zone of stability gets Ocean Lofts with its interior courtyard and its back turned to the street and the neighbors.  The lofts crowd the former site of the single family house and so the developer was granted a variance from the Zoning Ordinance requiring a minimum of 15 feet of back yard, allowing the building to push up against the property line to four feet.  The City completed the deal by sweetening the pot, granting the developer private use of a Peabody Lane/Emeryville Greenway connection in the back of the project, forever shutting the public out of a critical bike/pedestrian connection in this city the General Plan identifies as "a connected place".

The big corporate developers in Emeryville haven't needed to use these 'hold, defer repair and let rot' tactics, relying instead on a compliant City Council who commonly engage in large General Plan amendments to accommodate the large development proposals.  1258 Ocean shows how a small scale developer, lacking the gravitas and therefore the capacity to garner City Hall largess like the big time developers, can through clever, some might say cynical scheming, still deliver the goods, maximize his profits and bypass our General Plan.

Sherwin Williams Developer Charts New Course; Skips City Hall

Developer Skittish About New City Council Majority, Bypasses City Hall

Telephone 'Push Poll' Suggests 
Ballot Initiative In The Works

'Supply and Demand' is the New Boss

News Analysis/Opinion
You know it's a new day in Emeryville when a couple of developers can't stroll into town and easily pull a favorable vote out of a compliant City Council, greasing the skids for a huge flawed housing project with practically no community benefits but lots of negative impacts for the residents.  A new day indeed...that kind of thing in the old days could be done with impunity, without the developer even breaking a sweat. But now after Emeryville citizens elected a new progressive Council majority...well, Joe Ernst and Bruce Dorfman, the developers of the Sherwin Williams project, the giant 100% rental residential proposal slated for the Park Avenue neighborhood, are charting a different course to get their project approved.  Starting with a city-wide telephone poll, it would appear they'll be taking their case directly to the people of Emeryville, ending in a voter's ballot initiative on the project, bypassing the newly resident friendly City Council majority and City Hall's pesky planning documents.

Ernst & Dorfman are starting with this...

If you have a telephone land line and you live in Emeryville, you've probably already gotten the call (or soon will); EMC Research, an Oakland based telephone polling and corporate PR company has lately been barraging our town with phone calls paid for by the Sherwin Williams developers.   They've probably called you around dinner time with their classic 'push poll' about housing, to see if you're aware of the law of supply and demand and how Emeryville hasn't built enough housing over the years and about how the low housing supply is why the rents are so high here.  Ostensibly the poll is asking us our opinion on the Sherwin Williams project but it's also pushing us toward the developer's position.  It's a terrible situation with the high rents in Emeryville they agree, but not to worry these pollsters tell us, help is on the way; the developers of the Sherwin Williams site are here to fix all that with their 100 unit per acre 100% rental project.  The Sherwin Williams project will drive down rents in Emeryville the law of supply and demand and the developers tell us in the push poll.

But like Washington's endless phony free trade deals touted to help average working Americans, we're left wondering; if they're right, why hasn't all the housing we've already gotten in Emeryville (and all the free trade deals in Washington) helped yet?  We keep building and the rents keep going up.  In fact, the more we build, the faster the rents rise.  What about the law of supply and demand the developers keep reminding us about?
And why are the developers of Sherwin Williams paying so much money to call Emeryville residents to poll us on this?

Emeryville Doubles RHNA

Supply and Demand
Build enough and eventually
the cost of housing will come down.

Emeryville has been on an apartment and condo building binge over the last 20 years.  We've built so much housing here, we've doubled what the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) recommended to keep pace with needs.  ABAG's calculations of how much housing is needed is compiled in an official assessment called the Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA, pronounced reena).  The law of supply and demand would assert all this new housing should be lowering the price of housing in Emeryville but in fact the price has been going up...way up.  This is because developers, who want to maximize their profits, have been building only luxury rental apartments recently and that's had the effect of raising rents elsewhere in town....everywhere in town.  What the developers of Sherwin Williams are selling us is simply more of the same.
The strange correlation between building more housing and rising rents has been documented in a recent city funded nexus study on San Francisco housing.  That study shows how counter intuitively, when developers build luxury units, an exponentially rising number of affordable units are needed to keep the city's housing affordability numbers on target.  It has to do with an exponentially rising number of service people needed to cater to the demands of the wealthier people moving in.  The study shows how if the city demands say 15 percent affordable set-asides, then every market-rate building adds more demand for affordable housing than it supplies. That means every new building actually makes the housing crisis worse. 
The counter intuitive notion of more housing causing higher rents creates a space for developers to assert the intuitive but false canard of supply and demand.  
And yet the supply and demand adage keeps running up against reality; everyone now sees how we keep building more housing at a frenetic pace and the cost of housing goes up, also at a frenetic pace.  
Perhaps the developers will tell us Emeryville's double RHNA is the problem....what we really need to drive down rents is quadruple or quintuple RHNA.  A 50 story apartment tower on every parcel in town ought to do the trick.  Emeryville is to become a battle ground...a sacrifice zone in deference to a thick-headed meme put in the service of profit maximizing developers. 

Ballot Initiative on the Way?

...and they hope to get this...

Mr Ernst and Mr Dorfman's  problem was revealed to them in the City Council residential building moratorium vote last February.  While the developers won the fight against the moratorium because it required a super majority of four votes on the City Council, they're now left exposed; the Sherwin Williams project needs a simple majority to pass, three votes out of five.  The moratorium vote clearly showed them they won't get three votes for their flawed project.
We don't imagine Mr Ernst and Mr Dorfman are paying for the telephone poll to try to convince the progressive Council majority they must sacrifice Emeryville to the supply and demand god.   Clearly that's a non-starter.  Their only option is to call a special election (paid for by the taxpayers) to try to convince the citizens it's in their interests to bypass the City Council and overturn Emeryville's General Plan and go all in with their proposed Sherwin Williams housing project.

...in order to overturn this...

The election will likely at least partially be about the abstract supply and demand idea since the Sherwin Williams project as proposed is so clearly not in Emeryville resident's interests.  Maybe our patriotism will be called into question: we've got to do it for the greater good.  But that's an argument the Republicans in Washington have been trying to make for the last six years...we've got to go with austerity because deficit spending is no good they've told us.  Social security must be cut, aid to poor families must be stopped in order to balance the budget.  Americans have rightfully rejected that lie from the Republican Party and we think Emeryville residents won't buy the patently false canard of supply and demand coming from Ernst and Dorfman or any other developers.  The developers have a right to force a special election if they can muster enough signatures, it's true.  But we'll have the right to say NO to turning Emeryville into a sacrifice zone.  We've already done our regional duty by building twice the recommended housing.  Ultra density comes with ultra problems and we're not thinking about abstract memes...we're thinking about our town and how to make it a livable place.

...ultimately getting them lots of this.

Pre-Fab Home Bucks Living Wage Goal

Downward Pressure on Local Construction Wages:

Emeryville Embraces 

Pre-Fab Home Idea

Opinion
The Planning Department was out in force on Beaudry Street, in support of and witnessing the erection of Emeryville's first prefabricated single family residence last Saturday. A small crowd gathered to watch the spectacle: a crane lowering pre-constructed rooms onto the rapidly growing house.  With this scene in the background, Charlie Bryant, head of the Planning Department, told cameras that Emeryville is supportive of this style of home construction.  Left unsaid by Mr Bryant though is how this style of building is a subversion of living wage policy: This comes at the expense of local Bay Area builders in the custom home building trade.

Middle Class Wealth Transfer
Some have previously argued that this style of building will help keep housing affordable but at $275 per square foot, there's no cost saving, at least not for the owner of the new house.  The contractor on site says the Beaudry Street house will be cheaper than a custom home but the price of $275 per square foot is the same as a comparable custom built house in the Bay Area (regardless of his claims to the contrary).  This style of building is a way to cut out more expensive Bay Area construction laborers since low cost factory workers actually build the houses, the parts being shipped in by truck.  This is just a shift in profit from workers to corporate fat cats and is another point of downward pressure on local tradesman's wages.

Emeryville needs more family friendly housing to be sure but not at the expense of fostering a climate where blue collar people could afford to live here.  This whole idea is counter to oft made claims emanating from City Hall about livability for all.  Our public policy shouldn't be encouraging this sort of wealth transfer especially since Emeryville is already losing working class people.  We should be making a REAL town.

Below is a San Francisco Chronicle article about the new home:

Prefabricated homes go upscale Carolyn Said, Chronicle Staff Writer Saturday, July 16, 2011 IMAGES Paul Chinn / The Chronicle A module of Simpatico Homes' prefabricated house is lowered into position at the construction site in Emeryville.  View All Images (8) EMERYVILLE -- Prefab houses aren't just for trailer parks anymore. Two Bay Area startups are crafting factory-built homes and rooms for the high-end market, the kind of people who want an architect-designed custom house with all the latest green features. Simpatico Homes in Emeryville and hybridCore Homes in Santa Rosa both have partnered with architects. Each has a proof-of-concept model home and both are now on the verge of building for clients. They say their approaches cut costs and reduce construction time while incorporating high-quality finishes and designs. "Within the past few years, we've seen a number of very talented architects become interested in the possibilities of prefabrication to bring architect-level design to people who don't have time or resources to develop a unique design for a custom home," said S. Claire Conroy, editorial director of Residential Architect magazine in Washington. The two companies take different approaches. Simpatico builds the entire home in a factory as several giant modules that are assembled at the home site. HybridCore factory-builds the house's most complex portion - kitchen, bathrooms and laundry room - then places them on the site and "stick builds" the rest of the home around them. Market void "I really love quality architecture and saw a real void in the market for people who want it" but have more limited budgets, said Simpatico founder Seth Krubiner, who grew up in an Eichler home. Early last Saturday a convoy of flatbed trucks carried five modules from a factory in San Jose to a pre-built home foundation in Emeryville, where Simpatico is erecting its first structure. It will serve as a model house for potential clients and builders to tour, as well as a residence for Krubiner. A crew of 25 worked from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. as about a hundred curious neighbors watched giant cranes lift the modules into place as if they were building blocks. By evening, a 2,400-square-foot modern dwelling was in place, the modules bolted to the foundation. It will take another six weeks to "button up" the home, finishing such tasks as tying in the utilities and seaming the modules together with a "marriage line." All told, construction should take about 18 weeks - 12 in the factory and six on the site. (The foundation was built concurrently with the factory prefabrication.) Green features The house incorporates such sustainable features as a solar array to provide all its power, hydronic radiant floor heating, a living green roof and a rainwater catchment system. "My partners (Swatt Miers Architects) are very established, high-end modern architects who build multimillion-dollar designs," Krubiner said. "We want to take that level and quality of architecture and put it into a system for people who have more modest means. Through prefabrication, we can standardize and make it faster and more affordable." Chrissy Schwinn and her husband, David Cherry, both self-described fans of prefabrication and of modern architecture, have hired Simpatico to build a four-bedroom house for them and their two young children in Orinda starting this fall. "It fit our aesthetic and level of customization and our budget," she said. "The house will have a lot of green features, which we wanted. We don't have the final cost, but our hope is that it's about 20 percent less than a custom-built house." The shorter construction time is another plus, both in having fewer carrying costs on their current house and having less impact on their new neighbors. For Simpatico's first house in Emeryville, construction costs, excluding land and permits, pencil out at $275 per square foot, Krubiner said, versus about $375 per square foot for a comparable house built from the ground up. That's still not cheap. But Krubiner said the company can get costs as low as $225 per square foot. "It takes a lot of scale - multiples of prefab houses - to deliver the economies that are promised by manufacturing houses instead of site-building them," Conroy said. Economies of scale Santa Rosa's hybridCore Homes hopes to achieve those economies of scale by working with giant home builder Champion Home Builders of Troy, Mich., which has 27 factories nationwide and will both build and market the modular cores. He said the cost savings over complete ground-up construction are about 20 to 30 percent. The company offers 100 floor plans with nine variations and styles of each, such as Mediterranean or Craftsman. It built a 1,600-square-foot demonstration home in Santa Rosa last fall, with construction costs of $147,000, or $92 per square foot, he said. The home is open for visits by interested clients and developers. Faber's architecture firm, Farrell Faber, was approached about designing a manufactured home a couple of years ago. "Typically our firm does high-end stuff, so we weren't interested," he said. "But then we two partners, along with two developers, started playing with the idea, and after numerous studies developed this concept of manufacturing the core of the home." Now hybridCore is gearing up to build proof-of-concept homes in North Dakota and Maryland that are being considered for large developments. A 213-home project in Santa Rosa is on tap for next spring. Harold Robinson, who develops homes in Los Altos in the $1 million to $2 million range, hopes to use hybridCore's modules. "There is a lot of design flexibility, and the final product will look just like a traditional, high-quality custom home," he said. "At the same time you end up getting higher-quality construction and it's a really green way to do construction; there's a lot less waste by building offsite in factories that are controlled environments. Being able to build faster is a big benefit in high-end neighborhoods because the whole construction process has a lower impact." E-mail Carolyn Said at csaid@sfchronicle.com. This article appeared on page D - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/07/15/BUUK1KA3RS.DTL&ao=2#ixzz1SJINkdBf

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/07/15/BUUK1KA3RS.DTL#ixzz1SJHuCzwf