Advocacy group members and union construction workers cheerfully toted signs that read "Cities are not Museums" and "Affordable Housing Can't Wait." As they see it, the city's failure to build housing at scale for the past decades has contributed to the city's affordability crisis, and the solution is to build at scale - which the zoning plan will enable.
We are one week away from the Recall Joel Engardio election, which is motivated mostly by animus over the Great Highway closure, but also to some degree over the fact that Engardio supports upzoning the west side so that it can be more than just mostly single-family homes in the future. Yet despite that headwind, SF Mayor Daniel Lurie remains determined to upzone the west side so it's more than just mostly single-family homes.
The Trump Administration is signaling that it intends to attack the affordability crisis and chronic undersupply from multiple angles talking openly about declaring a national housing emergency, freeing up federal land, leaning on localities to permit faster and denser, trimming closing costs, exploring rate-transfer ideas, boosting construction capacity, revisiting mortgage product design (including multigenerational mortgages), lowering MBS spreads via capital and liquidity moves, and potentially releasing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from conservatorship.
According to the county, the proposed amendments are designed to help farmers and ranchers access undeveloped and actively farmed properties in unincorporated rural areas of Santa Clara County. These properties are being advertised for home development, which in turn has inflated land values. The proposal seeks to mitigate this by updating exclusive agriculture, agricultural ranchlands, hillside and rural residential zones.
Traditional construction methods are often labor-intensive, noisy, and wasteful. In contrast, ICON's 3D printing systems automate wall structure creation, improving efficiency and reducing waste.
