Tour an Eichler Collaborator's Midcentury Stunner in Stanford
All photos by David Wakely/Ira Kahn via Matt Kahn Living TrustLocated just on the edge of the Stanford University campus, the Matt and Lyda Kahn house is a midcentury stunner with an incredible design pedigree. The 1959 residence was a collaboration between famed modernist A. Quincy Jones, Joseph Eichler, and Matt Kahn himself—who, along with wife Lyda, served as the principle design consultants for Eichler for a decade, designing much of the interiors and branding graphics for the famous tract homes. Kahn, who was also a longtime Stanford art professor and onetime student of Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen, passed away two years ago at age 85. His house, impeccably maintained and gloriously maximalist, is now for sale, albeit only to Stanford faculty.
Someone started a Reddit thread seeking answers to the question "What characterizes SF for you?" So far the response with the most votes is "Sidewalk poop," followed by "Rent is too damn high." Sounds about right. This is, after all, the place that inspired its very own poop map. [Reddit; previously]Tesla's Game-Changing Home Battery Is Sold Out Till 2016
Photo via The Verge
Two weeks ago, electric car company Tesla announced it will debut a new line of storage batteries for homes and businesses, sparking widespread enthusiasm for an energy revolution. Consumers, it seems, are on board. In an earnings call last week, Tesla CEO Elon Muskrevealed that more than 38,000 of the home-focused Powerwall units had been reserved in the first week after the announcement—that means they're sold out until mid-2016. As a refresher, the Powerwall is a six-inch-thick shieldlike pack that measures three feet by four feet in size and stores electricity generated from solar or other renewable sources for use at night or as a backup supply.
This week, Mission neighbors debated the appropriateness of Sutter Health's plan for an affiliate medical center at 20th and Valencia streets at the new V20 condo building. Local residents expressed concern about traffic and parking, storefront attractiveness, and patient privacy. The area is zoned for retail, and neighbors also felt that the medical center was the wrong fit for the location. Sutter Health chose the location because the Mission has been identified as a medically underserved area. [Mission Local]Flashy Bernal Showstopper Sells for $3.15M, Sets New Neighborhood Record
The big, modern house at 3407 Folsom Street in Bernal Heights has been an attention-grabber ever since it was first built back in 2011. It was designed by architect Gary Gee and sits just below the north entrance to the park on Bernal Hill with views that basically look right onto the hill itself. It was featured on the 2012 AIA home tour shortly after it finished construction. The home's original owners bought the house for $1.65 million, and now they have just sold it off-market for $3.15 million, making it a new record for the neighborhood. The previous record-setter was a $3 million house that sold just a few months ago. 
When this quasi-fixer in the Excelsior listed for more than 1,000 per square foot last month, we found the ask a tad audacious. The home has a high-selling neighbor (a beautiful two-bed artist's cottage that sold for more than $991K), but the homes' similarities end with their GPS coordinates. Happily, buyers seem to agree on this point, since the home has just taken a $100K price chop. [Previously; Redfin] Supervisor Jane Kim Proposes Law to Curb Some Evictions
Photo via Erik WilsonAt yesterday's Board of Supervisors meeting, Supervisor Jane Kim unveiled new legislation designed to reduce incentives for landlords to evict rent-controlled tenants. To discourage property owners from evicting in order to raise rents to current market rates, the law would give new tenants who move into rent-controlled units that have just gone through an eviction the right to pay pre-eviction rents. (Sidebar: Landlords of rent-controlled buildings who evict and seek market-rate rents are still bound by rent control, but changes in tenancy allow them to set a new rent-controlled rent at a higher level than what existing tenants pay.) The legislation is still being written, as the San Francisco Business Times reports, and would need a six-vote majority to go though. The law also seeks to undercut evictions for minor infractions like laundry hanging out the window. A vote could come in July.
The Transbay Joint Powers Authority is getting ready to hold a live auction for Parcel F, a midblock lot very close to the upcoming Transbay Transit Center. The parcel is entitled for a 750-foot office tower and is one of 12 sites being sold to raise funds for the transit center. Unlike the previously sold parcels, however, there will be no drawn-out proposal process. Whoever buys the land during what is likely to be a hotly contested live auction will win the site "as is," with no due diligence or further negotiations. [SF Chronicle]SF's Median Home Price Hits $1.225M, Another New Record
San Francisco's median home sale prices have, as expected, continued to soar upwards this spring, hitting a new record high of $1.225 million in April, according to the latest market report from Paragon Real Estate. That's well above March's mark of $1.15 million, which was a new record itself. This time last year, the median price hadn't quite yet cracked $1 million. The undisputed most expensive areas in the city this year so far have been Pacific and Presidio Heights, where sale prices of single-family homes hit a mind-blowing median of $5.995 million. Sea Cliff is second, with a median house price of $3 million, while the Excelsior and the Bayview are the most affordable, at $782,500 and $610,000 respectively. Cow Hollow has had the most expensive condos and co-ops so far this year, with a median price of $1.6 million for one- and two-bedrooms.
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Yesterday the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to name the former home of Rube Goldberg, at 182-198 Gough Street in Hayes Valley, a historic landmark. The building has been at the center of an Ellis Act disputebetween the current owner Kenneth Hirsch and four tenants. According to the Chronicle, the new landmark designation makes it harder to convert the units to TICs, but Hoodline's earlier reportsuggests that landmark status will have little effect on the eviction proceedings. Stay tuned. [SF Chronicle; Hoodline]City Goes After Sketchy Haight McDonald's; Leap Hurdling Regs
Two women walking pets on Persia Avenue, via Charlie & Melody Wambeke· Intersection where boy was fatally struck by Muni train was earmarked for safety upgrades [SF Examiner]
· SF puts McDonald's on notice over drug sales at Haight Street restaurant [CBS]
· Leap's private buses continue to hurdle regulations [SFist]
· Tiny Menlo College is like home for Saudi elite [SF Chronicle]
· Airbnb, channeling Uber, mobilizes customers in dogfight over regulation [SF Business Times]
· Bay Bridge costs growing for tests, demolition [Contra Costa Times]
· The problem with CA's water-bottling plants isn't the water [CityLab]
· Why one Silicon Valley city said no to Google [Next City]
Kilroy Realty, the developers planning an office complex on the site of the San Francisco Flower Mart, could potentially scrap their plans to put the Flower Mart underground, beneath their new buildings. A new design has been proposed and sent to Planning after existing Flower Mart tenants expressed concerns over an underground market's lack of visibility and accessibility from street level. The new plans include a multilevel plaza in the center of the buildings. [SocketSite]
Lego-Style Street View Map Is Flummoxed By Lombard Street
A Swedish developer by the name of Einar Öberg has created a Lego-style version of Google Maps (not actually affiliated with Google), which renders city streets the world over in a blocky style that could be construed as Lego-like—or what Legos would look like if they had been smeared with a mess o' Kragle and then blurred partially by an overzealous censor. Anyway, as CityLab notes, you can test-drive this familiar-strange landscape over in Brick Street View, and despite the lack of Legosimilitude, it's fun to see what the software does with San Francisco's twisty streets. As you might expect, Brick Street View cannot compute curvy Lombard Street, and just renders it as a blank gray block pocked with green egg-trees. Honestly, we're none too surprised, given that our city's topography is a proven pain point even for real Google developers.
Mayor Ed Lee wants to put a $250 million housing bond on November's ballot to subsidize rental housing for the middle class. A small amount of the money from the bond would be used to pay real estate developers building new market-rate buildings to set aside some rentals for households making $100,000 to $140,000 per year. According to city officials, this program would likely be the first of its kind in the US tailored to middle-class residents. [SF Business Times]Help the 'Last Black Man in San Francisco' Search for a Home
When 20-something Jimmie Fails was growing up in San Francisco, his family lost the three-story Fillmore home that his grandfather had built back in the 1940s. That story forms the centerpiece of Last Black Man in San Francisco, a nascent film now raising money on Kickstarter. Fails spent the rest of his childhood bouncing between foster homes and homeless shelters, but would go back to his family's house every month to imagine ways he could buy it back. The film, however, is about more than the lost house, and takes Fails' story (in which he plays a version of himself) as a starting point to explore a San Francisco that is changing racially, politically, and culturally. According to the Kickstarter page for the movie, which centers on Fails' character and a friend, it is "a story about two inseparable misfits who are searching for home in a city they can no longer call their own." SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER
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