FROM DREAM TO REALITY: An artist’s impression of the new Irish Cultural Center in San Francisco’s Sunset district

News
December 14, 2023
by Máirtín Ó Muilleoir

Plans for a state-of-the-art new home for the San Francisco Irish have moved a step closer with the decision of city leaders to back the ambitious new build plan.

This Saturday (December 16) city mayor London Breed will joins leaders of The United Irish Cultural Center for a signing ceremony signalling official support for the $74m flagship building.

On Tuesday (December 12), the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted unanimously in favor of the Project 2025 building plans for a complete redevelopment of the existing Irish Center on 45th Avenue in the city’s Sunset District.

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The ultra-modern new centre will match in architectural swagger and audacious scale the Irish Arts Center in New York.

Liam Reidy President of San Francisco United Irish Cultural Center addresses Big #IrishCampfire on $60m rebuild plan @IrishCenterSF @jimfrawleyNY @johnleemedia pic.twitter.com/YHG1jaazn9

— Irish Echo Newspaper (@IrishEcho) August 19, 2022

As the first Irish social center in the United States built entirely by volunteer labor and community contributions, the UICC has continued the work of its predecessors (such as the Knights of the Red Branch) in promoting and preserving Irish culture in the City by the Bay. Since the UICC opened its doors in the early 70s, it has been a welcoming space for Irish visitors and immigrants as well as community groups and a variety of organizations.

Celtic Women 2023

 “It has been nearly two years since we submitted our initial documents, and we are proud to announce that we are now on track to bring this dream to life with an actual building, not just a concept,” says Liam Reidy, UICC Board President and member of the Building Committee.

“Over the past year, we encountered several challenges, but thanks to the unwavering support of our community, we are moving forward and paving the way for construction.”

Six stories above ground with two subterranean levels for parking and an aquatics center, the reimagined Irish Center boasts a spacious lobby that welcomes visitors to experience a host of activities. The heartbeat of the Center will be its extensive library, museum, and digital gallery with educational resources, interactive exhibits, and scholarly research available to everyone. The Center will feature multi-use event space, pubs and fine food offerings, a gym, theater, and office and meeting spaces.

Dancers from 7 local Irish Dance Schools will be Rockin’ the Gates Saturday–check the schedule and see it all!

KIDS Under 18 are free.
TICKETS: https://t.co/g6MHsuZGw5 pic.twitter.com/eavZEGj68Y

— UICC San Francisco (@IrishCenterSF) August 23, 2023

“We want to exemplify the best of both the future and the past,” says Reidy, “sharing our history and traditions and continuing to build relationships with all of the cultures in San Francisco with whom the Irish have been partnering since the 1800s.”

The UICC team paid special tribute to Consul General of Ireland in the Golden Gate City Micheal Smith for championing the new build plan. 

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When a young San Francisco couple—a venture capitalist wife and tech executive husband, who met at a startup more than a decade ago—purchased their first home together in 2015, the small Laurel Heights condo was perfect for just the two of them. Looking to create a special first place together, the couple hired interior designer Lauren Nelson of Lauren Nelson Design to help them remodel the space with contemporary interiors anchored by a palette of blue, gray, and white. In the years following the renovation came an engagement, a marriage, and the couple’s first child—a baby girl.

“Fast-forward to 2020,” the wife says, “[and we are] now married, trapped indoors with a one-year-old in said condo during COVID. We longed for more space and a backyard and began the search during lockdown.”

The couple had always dreamed of owning a home in Presidio Heights—a family-friendly neighborhood that borders the Presidio: a 1,500-acre national park at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge. So, when a property with a classic 1930s Colonial Revival–style house became available just two blocks from the park, they jumped on the chance to view it. “When we saw this house come on the market, on the same block our family friends live on, and a few short blocks from my sister and her family, we just had a feeling this was our house,” the wife recalls.

The home’s stately exterior would remain, but the interiors needed a reconfiguration. “It hadn’t been touched in decades,” the client says, “and needed quite a bit of work not only due to general upkeep but also some bizarre design choices—like a tiny primary bathroom with one sink and then a random ‘bonus’ sink in the primary closet.”

“The language of the house was good, but the scale of the rooms wasn’t great,” explains architect Stephen Sutro, who, with Melissa Kim of Sutro Architects, helped Nelson and the clients rethink the layout. “Our goal was to design a home that would serve the functional interests of a growing family—when the children are little, you need more visual control of them, but as they grow up, they can have a separate space in the house to retreat to with their friends,” Sutro explains.

Nelson tapped into the client’s love of French design to create a sophisticated but non-fussy aesthetic. “We appreciated the home’s classic architecture,” Nelson says, “and we didn’t want every room to feel like a white box—we wanted something a bit more traditional balanced by modern details. Each room has its own identity.”

What started as a nip here and a tuck there turned into a full-gut remodel, with the design team opening up the back of the house and adding glass-and-steel bifold doors in the kitchen to establish a connection with the backyard and allowing in more natural light. Plaster, marble (nine different varieties), and patterned wallpaper bring color and texture to every room, creating a rich background for a mix of custom, vintage, and ready-made furniture.

The post Tour a Dream San Francisco House That’s All About Nice Marble appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

This $4.299 million home in Villa Park, center front, is up for grabs. It features an artificial grass field with a batting cage, a basketball court and a large pool area. (Photo courtesy of Estel Hilton of The Beverly Hills Estates)

• The main bathroom. (Photo by Sergii Dolgyi Real Estate Photography)

• The master bedroom. (Photo by Sergii Dolgyi Real Estate Photography)

• The pool area. (Photo by Sergii Dolgyi Real Estate Photography)

• The artificial grass field and the batting cage. (Photo by Sergii Dolgyi Real Estate Photography)

• The fitness center. (Photo by Sergii Dolgyi Real Estate Photography)

• A view of the house and the pool area lit up at night. (Photo by Sergii Dolgyi Real Estate Photography)

• This $4.299 million home in Villa Park, center front, is up for grabs. It features an artificial grass field with a batting cage, a basketball court and a large pool area. (Photo by Sergii Dolgyi Real Estate Photography)

A home in Villa Park with an artificial turf pitch and a batting cage in the backyard has hit the market for $4.299 million.

Described as “an opulent Hollywood Hills architectural style” by co-listing agent Estel Hilton of The Beverly Hills Estates, this modern five-bedroom, six-bathroom home was built in 2022 on nearly two-thirds of an acre lot.

There is a basketball court at the entrance in front of the property.

The house is located in the so-called Hidden Jewel, the smallest town in Orange County. Villa Park has been home to several famous people, including actor Kevin Costner, Yankees manager Aaron Boone, and singer Jose Feliciano.

Redfin data shows that prospective buyers from major cities including San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Washington, DC and Boston searched for homes in Villa Park from April through June. The median selling price per square foot in June was $513, down 8% year-over-year.

Although the square footage of this home is unknown, Redfin estimates its value at $4.315 million.

The front door is at the top of a flight of stairs. Upon opening, a bright and airy living space is revealed.

Accordion doors slide away, extending the great room, breakfast area off the gourmet kitchen, and master suite to the outdoor patio. It features a saltwater pool and spa, Baja pool, three fire pits, sunken seating area and BBQ island with refrigerator and sink.

The master suite has floor-to-ceiling storage and a luxurious bathroom with a glass-enclosed shower and bathtub.

At the rear of the property is a separate structure with a fully equipped gym, office, kitchen and bathroom. The roof of the building is covered with artificial grass.

Additional features include an attached three car garage with a large walk-in safe, additional storage and an electric car charger.

Estel Hilton of The Beverly Hills Estates and Katherine Candelaria of KC Realty Group share the entry.

The post New Villa Park dwelling, listed at $4.3M, is a sports activities lover’s dream – Orange County Register appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

Houston’s second baseman hit three and registered a pair of RBIs against his former team on Monday.

May 2, 2023Updated: May 2, 2023 11:46 am

HOUSTON, TEXAS – MAY 1: Houston Astros’ Mauricio Dubon #14 reacts to hitting an RBI double during the seventh inning against the San Francisco Giants at Minute Maid Park on May 1, 2023 in Houston, Texas. (Photo by Carmen Mandato/Getty Images)

Carmen Mandato/Getty Images

Mauricio Dubón didn’t mince words when he met the media on Monday night after the Astros’ 7-3 win over the Giants.

Houston’s second baseman — at least until Jose Altuve returns — continued his brilliant 2023 season as he hit three, conceded two runs and registered two RBI against the National League West roster. And the strong performance came with a dose of revenge for the 28-year-old. What was once a rising player in the San Francisco organization was traded to Houston in May 2022, ending a period of frustration for Dubón after sporadic play with the Giants. He raised the issue when speaking to the media after the game, noting he now feels “in heaven” under the tutelage of Houston manager Dusty Baker.

“It’s just, you know, I wasn’t treated right [in San Fransisco]Dubón told MLB.com’s Brian McTaggart after the game. “Coming out here and being a family here and being able to play the way I’m able to play right now, it brings out the human side of me.”

Twitter

— brianmctaggart Twitter

The outstanding performance on Monday was not an isolated event for Dubón. He was one of baseball’s leading tablesetters in 2023, averaging a .317 batting average with 20 runs scored in 24 games. He recorded 20-plus games for most of April and, intangible, Dubón’s athleticism and aggression add serious spark to a Houston lineup currently plagued by injuries and some underperforming on the plate. It’s unlikely Houston would be above .500 on Tuesday without last season’s Dubón takeover.

Dubón’s spot as Houston’s second base could expire as early as this month as Altuve works his way back from his thumb surgery. However, a distance from his everyday spot in the infield shouldn’t stop him from playing at bats (at least semi-) regularly for the remainder of the 2023 season. Dubón has extensive midfield experience and he could either take on the job straight away or play a key role in a rotation with Chas McCormick and Jake Meyers. There will also likely be some stress management from Altuve ahead of the postseason, allowing Dubón to find additional at-bats both at second base and as a potential designated hitter.

Houston’s three-game streak against Dubón’s former team resumes Tuesday night at Minute Maid Park. The first pitch is scheduled for 7:10 p.m. CT.

Michael Shapiro is a sports reporter for Chron, covering the Rockets, Astros and every team in town. A Denver native, University of Texas at Austin graduate, Michael is a noted fan of three-piece pull-ups, wide receiver passes and a good hot fudge sundae.

The post Mauricio Dubón exacts revenge on Giants, continues dream season appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

Solano Real Estate Scene: Jim Porter

CALHFA launched the “Dream for All” down payment assistance program this week and has $300 million available for first-time homebuyers with incomes under $215,000 per year and FICO scores above 680. I have read all of the policies and Received a telephone briefing with our contact at CALHFA and now feel like I have all the answers to my questions.

CALHFA has been our go-to source for first down payment assistance for homebuyers for years, but this new stock program is the first of its kind and for some buyers it’s a dream come true.

For my fellow skeptics, I want you all to know that unlike some of the crazy adjustable rate loans that were made between 2003 and 2007 that allowed buyers to buy an $800,000 home without a penny out of their pocket and with no proof of income , the Dream for All program is different. The Dream for All program requires a FICO minimum score of 660 for low income (80% of the AMI) and 680 for income levels up to $215,000 in Solano County, along with an overall debt ratio of no more than 45% and a desktop loan by Fannie Mae approval.

Here’s a snapshot scenario of how it works and who it can help:

Let’s say we have a teacher and a nurse, and this 30-year-old couple makes $180,000 a year, rent $3,500 a month with a couple of kids, 700 FICO, $70,000 in student loan debt at $600 a month and none other debts. a whopping $20,000 in savings, a few small $401,000 plans and no gift money from family.

This stock program will allow them to buy a home for $800,000. The state will loan them $160,000 for the 20% down payment, with a 20% appreciation agreement that obliges the buyer to pay back the $160,000 plus 20% appreciation if they sell the home. The first mortgage loan as of this week would be a 30-year fixed rate loan with no PMI at 6.375% with a lending fee of up to 2%, giving an estimated APR of 6.55%.

CALHFA informed me that after 12 months they will subordinate their second position once for the homeowner to refinance at a lower interest rate with no payout and as this is so new further restrictions may follow.

As early as the mid to late 1980s, private equity investors became an option for buyers in the high-end coastal markets, where wealthy investors would partner with young, high-income couples for homes in San Francisco, Marin, and San Mateo. The investor would make the 20% down payment and the children would pay the mortgage and receive the home with an agreement to sell the home in five to seven years and split the equity growth 50-50.

This California program allows a buyer to live in the home for 30 years before repayment is required. After the 30-year first mortgage is paid off, a balloon payment of $160,000 plus 20% of gross equity becomes due and payable.

Let’s assume the value of the house in 30 years is $1.4 million. The children, who are now 60, must pay the original $160,000 plus 20% of the $600,000 equity through a loan or by selling the home and pay $280,000 to the state of California. The equity share partner is not responsible for 20% of the installation bill or any other repairs and DIY done over the 30 years.

Another thing to consider is that if the buyer sells the house in a few years, the state will receive 20% of the gross equity and will not have to contribute to the cost of the sale for commissions, repairs and closing costs. The best way to look at this program and $800,000 scenario is to think of it as a $160,000 loan with an equity participation agreement instead of traditional guaranteed interest payments.

I expect the $300 million will sell out in less than six months so get your kids checked out ASAP or better yet give me a call and I’ll show you how to get your kids the $160,000 for the down payment because I’m sure they would prefer to be an equity partner with you.

This is a no-brainer program that is making homes more affordable for thousands of first-time home buyers willing to partner with California. The total payment for the above nurse and teacher would be $4,940 per month, including property taxes and homeowners insurance, assuming the property tax rate is 1.25% annually and the home is not in a fire or flood area.

Jim Porter, NMLS no. 276412, is Branch Manager and Senior Loan Advisor for Solano Mortgage, NMLS no. 1515497, a division of American Pacific Mortgage Corporation, NMLS no. 1850, licensed in California by the Department of Financial Protection and Innovation the CRMLA / Equal Housing Opportunity. Jim can be reached at 707-449-4777.

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It is a humbling experience to try to learn any new skill as an adult. But there is a particular humiliation in learning to ride a bike. Not only because biking is something everyone already assumes you know how to do and the quintessential skill you never forget. But also because you have to do it in public, wobbling and teetering under the curious gaze of other adults who seem to be fully in control of their balance, pace, and place in the world.

So it’s nice that Anne-Lise Millan-Brun, the founder of a bicycle school in Paris, has chosen as a training ground one of the emptiest places in this crowded city. It’s shortly after sunrise on a wintry Saturday morning when her students begin to assemble by the Square Emmanuel Fleury, on the capital’s hilly eastern edge. All are women; most are first- or second-generation immigrants. All had to wait for months to enroll in the Bike School of the 20th arrondissement, which is so oversubscribed that I was allowed to visit only on the condition I not write about it in French. Millan-Brun does not need the publicity. This is in part because she charges just 50 euros for a trimester’s worth of Saturday morning lessons. But it is also because riding a bike has, rather suddenly, come to feel as Parisian as the Métro, and nearly as essential for getting around. To twist a French idiom, vélo, boulot, dodo—bike, work, sleep.

When Millan-Brun arrived in the ’90s from Angoulême, in southwestern France, Paris had so few bicycle riders that they recognized one another. There were 3 miles of bike lanes; now there are more than 150. In October 2020, the number of daily bike trips likely surpassed 400,000—1 for every 5 inhabitants. And traffic in the city’s busiest bike lanes has grown by more than 20 percent since. Each rush-hour light change at the intersection of Rue de Rivoli and Boulevard Sébastopol, in the center of the city, brings a bewildering, silent dance of scores of bicycles. Paris is learning to ride a bike.

It’s part of a larger movement—spanning a half-century, two decades, or the mayoral tenure of the Socialist Anne Hidalgo, depending on whom you ask—to expel cars from the heart of the largest metropolitan area in the European Union. Car trips within Paris declined by almost 60 percent between 2001 and 2018, according to research from Atelier Parisien d’Urbanisme, the city’s planning arm; between the city and its suburbs, they have fallen by 35 percent. Car crashes have fallen by 30 percent; pollution has fallen too. A huge investment in bus corridors, tramways, and subways has caused mass transit ridership to jump by almost 40 percent in that time.

Henry Grabar

What’s to come is more radical still: a low-emissions zone for Paris starting next summer that will exclude older, high-emission vehicles. A total ban on gas-powered cars by 2030. A ban on through traffic in the city center, including some pedestrianized areas. A reduction of street parking by half. A redesign of the ring road highway. A pedestrian-friendly renovation of the Champs-Elysées. Paris will become a cleaner, greener, cooler, quieter city, the proponents of these measures say. But detractors say it’s on track to become a toy city—hostile to people who work with their cars, and increasingly inaccessible to residents beyond its walls.

Switching things up in France isn’t always easy, as the past few months of pension-reform protests demonstrate. “It’s not the street that decides,” French President Emmanuel Macron has insisted, though that isn’t always true. In 2018 Macron’s proposed gas tax was met with the angry demonstrations of the Yellow Vests movement, as fed-up motorists cut the president down to size; he withdrew the proposal. Hidalgo’s efforts in Paris, by contrast, have found surprisingly little opposition. Many people dislike her decisions, but there has been little organized protest—no one I spoke to could name a politician who incarnated the opposition.

For a city supposedly frozen in time, all this adds up to some undeniably dramatic changes, of which bicycles are only the most visible. A car-choked capital is transforming before our eyes, the dream of urbanites around the world who are eager to reassess the automobile’s dominant role in the city. The question posed by these changes transcends the daily debate over bicycles and cars. It is nothing less than this: Who is the city for?

In Paris, cars once represented a rising standard of living and industrial strength—the purring incarnation of the Trente Glorieuses after World War II. Spared damage during the war and growing rapidly afterward, French cities were particularly unprepared for rapid car ownership, but planners did everything they could. A postwar highway program wove a web of highways in the Paris region in the 1960s and ’70s, including the highway on the banks of the Seine (completed in 1967, later the site of Princess Diana’s fatal car crash) and the Périphérique ring road (completed in 1973), with arteries from the provinces converging on the city limits like spokes on a hub. The suburban highway network has continued to develop since.

Inside the capital, those projects were recognized as the most significant changes since the Baron Haussmann built his famous boulevards a century earlier. “We must adapt Paris both to the lives of Parisians and to the needs of the automobile,” President Georges Pompidou, whose name adorned the riverbank expressway, proclaimed in 1971. The 1976 film C’était un rendez-vous shows automotive Paris nearing its apex, as Claude Lelouch careens down the boulevards at dawn in his Mercedes 450SEL 6.9, hitting 120 miles an hour on his way to meet a woman on the steps below the Sacré-Coeur Basilica. In 1990 more than half of Parisian households owned a car—a higher rate than in New York City, and comparable to San Francisco. The French capital still has almost twice as many households with cars as Manhattan does.

But French planners got a later start than their American counterparts. Before Paris could be carved up by expressways, resistance mounted over the familiar objections that also characterized highway revolts in the United States: destruction, displacement, pollution, the oil crisis. These protests were nested in a trio of nascent trends: the rise of environmentalism, the historic preservation movement, and the early waves of gentrification.

By the 1990s, anti-car forces were playing offense. In 1996 came Paris Breathes, a series of periodic street closures on Sundays and holidays. In 1998 the city opened Métro Line 14—the first new subway in more than 60 years, and the first of a blitz of transit investments concentrated in and around the suburbs. In 2007 the city rolled out the bike-share program Vélib’, which now offers 20,000 bicycles over 1,400 stations in and around the city. Car ownership in the region peaked in 1990 and has been declining since, even as the metro area population has grown by 10 percent.

Traffic around the Place de la République in 2014 (left) and 2023 (right).
Google Maps and Henry Grabar

No one has taken credit, or blame, for this long evolution like Anne Hidalgo, the Socialist mayor now in her 9th year running the French capital. In 2017 she turned the city’s central expressway into a permanent riverside pleasure path, and prevailed in a subsequent court battle over it. She has since picked up the pace with a kind of anti-car shock doctrine, taking advantage of a long transit strike at the end of 2019 and the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020, which prompted behavioral changes and created an excuse to redesign the streets. In 2020 she renovated the Right Bank’s main east-west artery, the Rue de Rivoli. It has gone from six lanes of traffic (four moving, two parked) to one for taxis and buses, with the rest a bike path serving 8,500 riders a day. (In a pinch, the bike path is wide enough to serve as a traffic-free route for emergency vehicles; an analysis recently showed that this has helped the city lower fire response times to under seven minutes for the first time in more than a decade.) Tens of thousands of parking spaces have been commandeered for new uses. Streets have been permanently closed to traffic in front of hundreds of schools. Beyond physical changes to the streets, Hidalgo has instituted a citywide speed limit of 30 kph (less than 20 mph), forced the city’s ubiquitous motor scooters to pay for parking, and priced all-day street parking at 6 euros an hour in the city center.

A top official in New York or Chicago would never.

But most of all, she and her deputies have explicitly embraced the controversial idea that the automobile’s prominence in Paris is at the root of many of the city’s problems—its frequent smog days, lack of green space, vulnerability to heat waves, noisy streets, geographic inequities. And thus fewer cars will allow the city to become a cleaner, quieter, cooler, fairer place. Hidalgo puts Sempé’s whimsical bicycle cartoons on her greeting cards. She and her team are outspoken about cars in ways that, from the vantage point of a North American city, seem unadvisedly forthright. Speaking in a city meeting in April 2020, as Paris slumbered through its first COVID-19 lockdown, Hidalgo announced that the city would not be going back to the way it was before: “It is out of the question that we let ourselves get invaded by cars and pollution.”

Hidalgo’s Green Party deputy mayor for transportation, David Belliard, is even more strident: “The redistribution of public space is a policy of social redistribution,” he told me in 2021. “Fifty percent of public space is occupied by private cars, which are used mostly by the richest, and mostly by men, because it’s mostly men who drive, and so in total, the richest men are using half the public space. So if we give the space to walking, biking, and public transit, you give back public space to the categories of people who today are deprived.”

A top official in New York or Chicago would never. But in Paris, this is how City Hall talks.

Writers seeking to embellish their lamentation of a changing city often reach for a line by the 19th century poet Charles Baudelaire: “The old Paris is no more (the form of a city / Changes more quickly, alas, than a mortal’s heart).”

But I found a different line on a mock street sign on the Rue Charles Baudelaire, in a middle-class neighborhood of the city’s 12th arrondissement: “There, there’s only order, beauty: abundant, calm, voluptuous.” It feels like an auspicious quote to overlook one of the city’s newest experiments in car-free urbanism: the school street.

I came to those newly car-free blocks adjacent to a nursery school and an elementary school to meet Christophe Najdovski, the city’s stern, self-assured deputy mayor in charge of green space. Three years earlier, I had interviewed him in Paris’ Gothic City Hall. He was then in charge of transportation, and his office overlooked the antediluvian Rue de Rivoli. “Seems like a long time ago, and yet so close,” he mused. “Just goes to show how we can change things in a few years.”

Along with the much-discussed “15-minute city,” one of Hidalgo’s big promises of her 2020 reelection campaign was to close streets to traffic outside the capital’s schools. She has done so in front of 168 schools since. All are blocked to cars by painted metal gates; some have been renovated with benches and planted with street trees.

Najdovski brought a prop, which he held up in front of us: a printout of photographs that showed the street as it was in the spring of 2020, when the moving lane was flanked with two rows of parked cars. For two blocks, a low fence ran the length of the sidewalk to stop kids from darting into traffic.

By the spring of 2021, the cars (and the fence) were gone. On both blocks, the pavement is now painted to suggest playground games. It was a wet winter day, and the street was playing its most basic role as a way to get from A to B. But Parisians were walking three abreast, wheeling strollers, bicycles, shopping carts, and suitcases, a rare thing in a city where many sidewalks are just a few feet wide. For residents with disabilities, he noted, it’s a clear improvement on the status quo. It seems to be a law of the car-free city that people, once given the opportunity, will immediately walk right down the middle of the street.

It’s also a nod to a past Paris, when streets functioned as raucous, multipurpose extensions to cramped and inadequate apartments: hubs for vendors, entertainment, and children’s play. This was true especially in the city’s poorer neighborhoods, despite the fact that they never got as much public infrastructure—fountains, benches, and toilets—as its richer ones.

Warnings about how dangerous the city’s traffic could be to pedestrians are almost as old. In 1823 the prefect of the Seine wrote that Paris “offers pedestrians nothing but an extremely arduous and even dangerous road network that seems to have been conceived exclusively for vehicles.” The solution at that time was to install sidewalks, which, according to the city’s chief civil engineer, might have benefits beyond safety: “Busy people, no longer having to focus their attention on which stones to walk on as they pick their way through the street, will devote all the more thought to their own interest, their work, and will enlarge their ideas accordingly.” Some ideas may have been enlarged, but the sidewalks were later pared down to make more room for cars in the streets.

Najdovski made two arguments for closing the streets in front of schools. The first was, naturally, about the kids. “Children today, we tell them either to be at school, or at home, or at the park, and they’ve disappeared from the street,” he lamented. “We want to bring kids back to the street.” As if on cue, a girl rolled around the corner on a bike with training wheels while her father looked on. “I promise I didn’t pay them,” the deputy mayor said, smiling. It’s not just about creating spillover space for kids and their parents or nannies after school. The classrooms are also blissfully rid of the city’s trademark sound: the grind of the two-stroke engine whipping a moped forward from a green light. And the air is cleaner, which is associated with higher test scores.

Henry Grabar

Which leads to Najdovski’s second argument for the school streets: planting trees. “Our cities are going to be harder and harder to live in with these repeat heat waves,” he said, referring to the blistering summer of 2022, the hottest year in French history. “And if they’re going to stay livable, you’ve got to be able to find refreshing green space near your house. If we want to plant trees in Paris, we don’t have a lot of space. And if we want space, we’re not taking it from the sidewalks. It has to be here, in the street, which was used before by cars. Do we want a city that feels like an oven, where we store private objects that weigh 1.5 tons and are immobile 95 percent of the time? Or do we open it up for everyone?” He gestured to a row of freshly planted hackberry trees in the old parking lane. They were scraggly, too small to shade the street. But they were a long-term investment.

I asked Najdovski how the city has managed to change the streets to new uses so quickly without arousing widespread opposition. “People voted for this!” he responded. “It was in our platform, it was a promise we made, and now we’re following through on it.”

No one knows it better than Indigo, the company that runs the cavernous public garages that sit beneath almost every significant park or plaza in Paris. In some ways, these were the city’s greatest 20th-century adaptation to the car, or at least the most expensive—the private investment alone more than doubled the cost of the city’s other urban-renewal projects.

“Since about 10 years ago, we’ve noticed that we have fewer and fewer cars in our garages,” said Sébastien Fraisse, the head of Indigo France. “The traffic drops a few percentage points each year. Evidently, in the long term, it could have massive effects.” Even as the city has eliminated street parking and repriced meter rates to force commuters into garages, the trend toward fewer cars is overwhelming.

And yet his mood was buoyant. Fraisse and I were at a buzzy champagne reception organized by Indigo in the lobby of a climbing gym, below which lay one of the company’s garages. On this winter morning, it became the first underground garage in Paris to offer fast-charging stations for electric vehicles. With Europe set to ban new gas-powered vehicles in 2035, electrifying garages seems like a good bet—Indigo has also installed thousands of standard EV chargers in its French garages.

One garage has been turned into a farm for mushrooms and endives.

“There has been a slow erosion,” he continued, “and for us it’s been a few years now that we’ve been thinking about what else we could do with these spaces. Just the underground parking represents 14 Tour Montparnasse”—the city’s tallest building—“so you can imagine what’s available in terms of real estate. It’s enormous.” Last year, the company teamed up with the architect Dominique Perrault to launch an international architectural competition for the “car park of the future.”

Indigo was founded in 1964 to tackle a problem that was beginning to feel critical in cities from Washington to Tokyo: parked cars everywhere. In Paris, they marred the city’s famous public spaces, cluttering the Esplanade des Invalides, the Place Vendôme, the banks of the Seine, and the parvis in front of Notre Dame. The solution was underground garages, managed as a long-term concession by the new parking company.

Today Indigo operates 2,700 garages on three continents. But it’s here in Paris, where the company now manages more than a third of publicly accessible garage parking, that Indigo is beginning to develop a new underground commercial ecosystem. There are car repair shops, car rental offices, and click-and-collect lockers from Amazon. Larger-scale ventures the company is pioneering for lower levels include storage facilities and data centers. One private, non-Indigo garage has even been turned into a farm for mushrooms and endives.

Retrofitting parking is complicated, said Arnaud Viardin, Indigo’s director of partnerships. Counterintuitively, garage floors have less load-bearing capacity than homes or offices. Garages also have very low ceilings, threaded with beams and utility conduits that can limit adaptive reuse: It’s hard to market a storage facility that’s not accessible by box truck. Energy-intensive vehicle chargers require drilling through concrete to lay new electrical cables, and just about anything you do demands a time-consuming review with the Fire Department. Rarely do these new leases pay more than a constant stream of drivers charged hourly parking rates. But they pay more than an empty parking garage.

Indigo’s underground real estate has few competitors. Hundreds of thousands of square feet are now dedicated to alternative uses across France, mostly in Paris. “Finding real estate under Place Vendôme, under Place Dauphine?” Fraisse put it to me, pointing to two of the capital’s ritziest addresses. “We’re capable of proposing square footage at prices that have nothing to do with what you’ll find aboveground. Ten, 20, 50 times cheaper.”

A few days later, I went out to Paris’ western edge, in the shadow of the concrete soccer stadium where Kylian Mbappé and Lionel Messi play. Off-ramps from the ring road feed into a vast cobblestone traffic circle that rumbles under the passing tires.

Indigo’s garage here contains about 600 parking spaces, but there used to be more. Down a level is the company’s most ambitious adaptation to a city with fewer cars: a logistics hub for the grocery delivery company MonMarché. Mathieu Demond, MonMarché’s head of development, met me where the rows of parked cars gave way to a cluster of electric cargo tricycles. These are not the jury-rigged e-bikes that deliver Chinese food in Manhattan. They are 9,000-euro ($9,750) Yoklers, made in Lyon. They have windshields and seats with backrests, and they can haul 200 pounds of merchandise in a rear storage compartment the size of a washing machine.

Demond pushed his way through a double-door air lock and into a series of chilly storerooms. Cooling fans hummed on the ceiling. Cardboard boxes stamped with QR codes sat on galvanized steel shelving in a kind of anti-market. There were no prices, no colorful labels, no deals. Demond, who has wild asparagus on his business card and knows when the last batch of Corsican clementines arrives for the year, pointed out a variety of things one doesn’t usually see in a public parking garage—or a Stop and Shop, for that matter—tiny cockerels, boxes of oysters, pied de mouton mushrooms, kumquats, fresh tarragon, and, of course, a whole bank of cheeses. These had been cut and wrapped that morning at a MonMarché facility below the Invalides, inside Indigo’s very first Parisian parking garage, adjacent to Napoleon’s tomb.

For logistics clients, the value of Indigo’s space is hard to beat. MonMarché is a spinoff of a larger French grocery chain, Grand Frais, whose stores are suburban big boxes with ample parking. “We had to find another solution for the Parisian market, which is the biggest,” said Demond, slicing open the packing tape on a Styrofoam box of durian, the odoriferous East Asian fruit. “The cost of real estate is so high.”

The reason for bicycles is a little different. Demond said the bikes are faster and cheaper than cars, and other logistics professionals in the capital are beginning to agree. Restaurant delivery is done by moped or e-bike—another pandemic-era boom. Mail carriers ride bikes. There is a bike-riding plumber and a cargo bike dog-walking service that hauls a basket full of canines to the Bois de Vincennes. Petit Forestier, a refrigerated truck fleet, is racing to bring cold-storage cargo bikes to market. You can even make your final passage through Paris in a casket hauled by a bike. There are a few explanations for this explosion, including subsidies for e-bikes, soul-sucking traffic, expansive bike infrastructure, and the fact that it is easier to hire (and insure) people who ride bikes than commercial drivers.

A representative from Stuart, one of Paris’ heavyweight bicycle delivery companies, told me that bike trips shave five minutes off the average delivery time. Unaffected by the vagaries of traffic and parking, they are more dependable too. One study of central London concluded that electric cargo bikes make deliveries 60 percent faster than vans.

Henry Grabar

“The biggest challenge is the perception of the service,” the company spokesperson wrote to me. “When Stuart first pitches to a client that his tour time can be reduced by 1.5 times due to route optimization and the ease of cycling, the client will often frown at first as he finds it hard to imagine that a vehicle that can carry 300 kg can be more efficient than a light commercial van, which can carry 700 kg of goods.” Eventually, though, they come around.

The final advantage of bicycle delivery is the ease of finding street parking. Since Paris has eliminated so many parking spaces over the past couple of decades, drivers of box trucks and delivery vans complain constantly about how hard it is to pull over. Not a problem for the city’s growing ranks of bicycle couriers rolling down its ever-growing network of bike lanes. A study from French researchers projects that 9 in 10 big-city deliveries could be accomplished by bicycle.

Back in the grocery warehouse garage, every few minutes a delivery worker took one whirring up the ramp of the garage at Porte de Saint-Cloud and out into the city’s wealthy western neighborhoods, where grocery delivery is beginning to carve out market share from the traditional petits commerces and the bright-aisled supermarket. The service isn’t profitable yet. But it is growing fast.

In the park at Les Halles, I met Ibrahim Souaré next to his cargo tricycle. The 23-year-old delivers groceries for a third-party contractor that works with Monoprix, a kind of French Kmart. Like most delivery workers I spoke to, Souaré said he used and appreciated the city’s bike infrastructure. Still, finishing the route isn’t the whole job. Many clients, he’s noticed, live on the high floors of buildings without elevators. Sometimes it feels as if his work is as much about carrying things up the stairs as getting them to people’s front doors.

The good parts of the job include flexibility, independence, and being outside (except when it rains). On the other hand, Souaré makes a little over a thousand euros a month—well below the French minimum wage—and there is no hope of a raise. He lives with roommates in Bobigny, a suburb northeast of Paris and one of the poorest communities in France. It’s hard work being on a bicycle seat all day. On his days off, he said, he rests up for the next shift. “When you’re an immigrant,” he said, “you’ve got to work. You want to eat? You don’t want to sleep outside? It’s obligatory.”

Traffic declines every year, but you will not find a driver in Paris who likes Anne Hidalgo.

His is a profile that’s representative of the shift in bicycle delivery, which, until recently, was more or less thought of as a fun job for young people who liked riding bikes. Now it’s a grueling, algorithm-driven trade practiced almost exclusively by recent immigrants, with routes that can lead all over town. The shift coincides with a broader rise in delivery, from e-commerce to restaurants to grocery, that was supercharged by the pandemic. Even in a city famous for its public life, delivery is now ubiquitous. Couriers with rented e-bikes and insulated bags from Picard (the frozen supermarket) zoom down the new bike lanes.

Circé Lienart, who runs Maison des Coursiers, a city-funded resource center for delivery workers, in Paris’ Barbès neighborhood, estimates that 2 in 3 delivery couriers do not have French working papers. The companies that employ them have been caught up in repeated scandals over legal workers farming out their accounts to their undocumented counterparts, often for a fee. That precarity is linked to poor working conditions. In addition to low pay, workers receive no bonus for bad weather and don’t get a minimum salary when business is slow. Their status is vulnerable to the whims of a restaurant or a customer, who can push their rating down with a click.

In a study of more than 800 Parisian delivery workers published last fall, researchers found that more than 9 in 10 are men. More than 8 in 10 were born abroad. Most are under 30. More than half ride bikes, with a third on mopeds and a few in cars. Most worry about the danger of traffic. In all these respects, Monoprix delivery worker Souaré—who arrived in France from Conakry, Guinea, three years ago—is typical. And in one more: 2 in 3 survey respondents told the researchers they had held the job for less than a year. Souaré is at eight months.

You don’t have to go far to find someone who hates all of these developments. Everyone is fed up with the unending construction, roads that change direction overnight, the light-running of cyclists racing against delivery software. The more conservative western neighborhoods have done their best to resist bike lanes. Left Bank art galleries protested the city’s plans for a no-through-traffic zone in the city center; now the proposed area may stop at the Seine. The national government won’t help develop a traffic camera system, like the congestion pricing ring in London, to enforce the low-emissions zone, and the police are wary to let the city make more substantial changes to the big boulevards. After Hidalgo instituted parking fees in September, moped riders rode through the city in protest. Pedestrians routinely complain about the rudeness of bike and scooter riders. Bus riders complain that the city is leaving them behind, with just one clogged lane for taxis and mass transit on the Rue de Rivoli, versus the rest of the roadway for bicycles. Traffic declines every year, but (or perhaps relatedly) you will not find a driver in Paris who likes Anne Hidalgo.

At a brasserie near the southern edge of the city, I met Thierry Véron, the president of the Parisian small-business federation FACAP. After Hidalgo closed the Rue de Rivoli to private cars in 2020, Véron was one of 10 business group leaders to write to the city and express their concern with the mayor’s decision-making, which they said would crowd mass transit, limit suburban access to the city, especially at night, and penalize older people and others with reduced mobility. “Don’t forget that Paris must stay an attractive global capital, clean and ready to remain the reflection of elegance,” they warned. Temporary street closures, they said, had led to a 30 percent drop in sales.

Rue de Rivoli in 2014 (left) and 2023 (right).
Google Maps and Henry Grabar

Three years and one coronavirus pandemic later, the results are mixed. Mass transit ridership is now about where it was in 2019. The city has made up its pandemic job loss and now has 90,000 more jobs than before the lockdowns. A French commercial real estate agent told me a joke: What month do merchants complain the least? February, because it has the fewest days. But, Véron said, businesses in car-free areas are hurting. In 2021 his group showed that while sales activity was basically even with 2019 levels nationally, it had declined by 20 percent in Paris. He conceded that it’s difficult to blame the city’s new mobility politics amid the coronavirus, the related drop in international tourism, and the rise of e-commerce. Still, his conversations with members make clear that they are suffering both with suppliers and with clients. The day we spoke, news broke that the beloved BHV department store, which sits on the newly car-free Rue de Rivoli, was being sold. Its numbers have suffered since the street was pedestrianized.

“We all want to lower the number of cars in Paris. But if our clients can’t reach us, we’re impacted. If our suppliers have to go to point B from point A”—Véron ran his index fingers frantically across a round-top table—“and you’re obliged to do a whole circuit, a whole labyrinth, high and low, delivery men have big problems.” Delivery costs are rising in the city center, and he was not convinced by the potential of bicycles. “Do you know much freight gets delivered [in the region] every year? Twenty million tons. Imagine how many cargo bikes that is.”

Véron does not come across as a partisan so much as a problem-solver. His members—less bakers and butchers and more stores that sell clothing, furniture, musical instruments, and other specialty items—depend on both clients and suppliers from the suburbs. The 15-minute city is an existential threat to them. As a Parisian himself, he doesn’t deny that it’s a nice concept for people who live here. But. “Paris—it’s not a city for Parisians. It belongs to all French people,” he said. “So it has to be open to everyone.”

Historian Mathieu Flonneau, the author of a dozen books on Paris and the automobile, is sympathetic to this point of view. “Canceling automobile culture in Paris”—he said the first word in English—“is not coherent with the history and the part the automobile has played in the capital.” Paris, he reminded me, was an auto manufacturing city. The rise of the car was intertwined with the social mobility of the tens of thousands of workers who toiled in auto plants—not an imposition on the city but a literal product of it. Deindustrialization has come for the plants. But it has not, in Flonneau’s view, severed the link between the automobile, workers, and the regional economy.

Flonneau does not see anything positive about the precarious, two-wheeled workforce that flits about the city on bicycles to cater takeout orders for millennial tech workers. Or in the chaotic interactions that have come to characterize the city’s hastily installed bike infrastructure. (Hidalgo has promised to unveil new “rules of the road” this summer to govern unruly cyclists, e-scooters, and other new forms of mobility.) He suggested that less traffic in Paris comes at the expense of more traffic in the suburbs. “Ninety-five percent of traffic in Paris isn’t people joyriding. It’s not people having fun getting into traffic jams. It’s people who need their vehicle, who work with it. People who need many steps in the day, with their kids in the morning, with errands, older people. They now find themselves excluded from this inclusive city. It’s an incredible paradox,” he said.

This specific critique, that Hidalgo is improving Paris for those lucky enough to live there car-free at the expense of the region’s car-dependent suburban majority, echoes other cities’ debates over undoing the urbanism of the automobile. The right-wing regional president, Valérie Pécresse, sued Hidalgo over the riverfront highway conversion. (She lost.) The administration does not deny that its policies might be decreasing suburbanites’ access to the city. “The city cannot be a place in which we say everyone can access at the same time coming from outside,” Najdovski said when I put the question to him. “We make choices weighing things and trying to give residents a good quality of life. And business—if it was bad for business, we wouldn’t do it.”

Hidalgo’s administration points to fewer vehicle trips between Paris and its suburbs as evidence its strategy is working, but this could also be understood as the hardening of that old barrier—physical, metaphysical—that divides the capital and the banlieue. There’s a lot less parking for suburban families driving in for shopping and a show. And it is extremely expensive: Parking on the street in the central 10 arrondissements costs 6 euros for the first hour, and 50 to 75 euros after six hours.

At the same time, Parisian real estate is among the most unaffordable in Europe. The average household income is higher in the capital than in all but the richest suburbs. The population has declined by 100,000 people since the start of the pandemic. Surely that’s not the bike lanes’ fault. But critics have a point that the fight against cars in Paris has always been a movement of the bobos—the bourgeois bohemians. Roger Lapeyre, a union member who founded the capital’s Pedestrian Rights organization in the 1960s, once recounted his surprise at the group’s troubled recruitment efforts: “We began by defending the humble people, those who didn’t have a car. We thought we’d recruit from the most modest backgrounds. But it was exactly the opposite that happened. Our organization became ‘aristocratic.’ ” The capital’s poor may not have had cars, but they sure as hell wanted them.

Parisian elected officials deny that the city is some elite bastion; incomes may be higher here than in the suburbs, but so is the rate of poverty. Furthermore, many suburban communities are pursuing the exact same changes in their own neighborhoods. The Socialist president of Seine-Saint-Denis, the department that abuts Paris on the northeast and counts as the country’s poorest (excluding France’s overseas departments), is an ally of Hidalgo and a big proponent of bicycle infrastructure.

Above all, reducing the outsize role of Paris in the region has been the goal of metropolitan planners for decades. “We already have centralities outside of Paris,” Paul Lecroart, an urbanist at the regional planning association, said recently. “You have to imagine a polycentric system, where each center plays its role in the setting of an orchestra.” That’s one reason the investment for next year’s Olympic Games is centered in Paris’ northern suburbs. Planners, expecting that athletes, spectators, and workers will use bikes, are building special lanes to connect Olympic sites.

What say do suburbanites deserve in core-city politics? Do Parisians need to make sacrifices for their neighbors in the suburbs? These are political questions that can’t be solved with traffic counts or parking studies. Flonneau argues that residents of neighboring cities deserve a say in the fate of major infrastructure—like pedestrianizing the Seine highway or scrapping half the capital’s parking spaces—and that Hidalgo should not rule alone. There is historical precedent for this: Paris didn’t even have its own mayor until 1977. Even within Paris, the only plebiscite on Hidalgo’s anti-car policies will be an April vote on the rather frivolous question of whether dockless scooters should be permitted. And her reelection in 2020? It was with the vote of 1 in 10 Parisians. Besides: “Paris,” Flonneau said, “is too important to be left to a local election.”

To some extent, the changes that Flonneau decries—the home-price run-up, the deindustrialization, the Uberization of work, the recent population decline—have happened in all of Paris’ peer cities, whether they pursue anti-car policies or not. What sets Paris apart isn’t really the degree that it has become bourgeois (the rich own more cars and drive them more than anyone else) but the rapid rollout of its anti-car policies. That is because of a structural fluke of municipal boundaries: The city line here was drawn in the 1860s and hasn’t moved since, even as the metropolitan population has grown sixfold. (The land area of New York City, by contrast, is 15 times larger than it was in 1860.) As a result, Paris proper accounts for less than 1 in 5 residents of the metro area—a lower ratio of core-to-suburb population than in London, Madrid, Barcelona, Berlin, Hamburg, Milan, or Rome. Hidalgo’s voters really can ride a bike to get where they need to go.

It was on a beach vacation several years ago that Abi Tall finally had enough. A long summer day was winding down, and Tall’s husband, daughters, and friends sat on the sand, waiting for the sun to sink into the sea. They had all brought bikes, except for Tall. She had to leave before sunset to catch the last bus back into town. “When we got back, I said, ‘I swear I’m going to learn.’ ”

Her first attempt to ride a bike was in the Bois de Vincennes, the big park on the capital’s eastern edge, with the help of her 15-year-old daughter, who had learned to ride a bike in school. Now it was mom’s turn, and the teenager was frustrated. “I’m going to see on the internet if you can learn, because you are hopeless,” she told her. A year later, Tall was spending her Saturday mornings with Anne-Lise Millan-Brun on that peculiar blend of fine gravel that makes Parisian parks perfect for pétanque—and for learning to ride a bike.

When I joined them recently, the trimester was coming to a close. There were about as many students as monitors—the volunteers, including some recent graduates, who help out. The students’ numbers had dwindled as the quicker studies dropped out, and those who remained had been, like Tall, among the last to figure it out. Tall, who grew up in Senegal, said it was not part of her upbringing for little girls to learn to ride bikes. She didn’t even know the French word for bike seat, selle, when she enrolled, and when she fell behind the rest of the class, she got so frustrated she burst into tears.

But then, one day, it clicked: She spun around the Parc Floral, screaming with delight. She cycled in the Bois de Vincennes with her daughter. “It was too cool,” she said. “It was my dream to ride with my daughters.” She bought a bike in a small town outside the city and hauled it back on the train. On her lunch break, she biked around the little park near her house.

Today Millan-Brun was leading Tall, and the rest of the women, through the final frontier: onto the streets of Paris. Bicycle infrastructure is often criticized as an amenity for young men, and it’s true that many early bike lanes are used by the very people who felt comfortable riding without them. A decade ago, this was the case in Paris as well. But the city has built so much bike infrastructure that it is impossible to go nearly anywhere without sharing a busy street with cars. And Paris has encouraged the adoption of e-bikes, which has drawn in older people and parents, whose tyke-hauling cargo bikes are ubiquitous. Since 2010, Paris has offered to cover a third of the cost of a resident’s e-bike purchase. In 2020 more than 20,000 people—1 in 100 Parisians—took advantage. Users of the city’s Vélib’ bike share program were 44 percent female in 2020, up from 37 percent in 2019.

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That meant that Millan-Brun could lead her students on a 90-minute ramble that rarely put us in contact with fast-moving traffic. When we did face a busy street, she had the group pause. “I have a declaration to make. Seine-Saint-Denis”—the suburban department we had crossed into—“is the department of the victims of toxic masculinity. It’s full of men who think their virility is under the gas pedal.”

The students gamely plowed on. On the uphills, they resembled skiers on a bunny slope, veering from side to side and trying to keep their speed. On the downhills, they reminded me of drivers learning to use a standard transmission, wary to stop for fear of starting from a standstill.

But when we returned to the humped, steel lockers where Millan-Brun keeps the bicycles, they were ecstatic. “You can give yourselves a hand,” shouted Olfa Mazouz, dismounting on the sidewalk. “We suffered today, girls—we struggled.” Someone asked if it was the last day. “No,” Tall said. “But it was our first real bike ride.”

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A recent Monday, 2:05 pm: Tim Armstrong always thought of himself as an artist. He sacrificed the middle-class lifestyle his parents gave him as a child to follow his creative dreams.

“I came out to pursue the neo-beat culture in San Francisco, the ’90s version, which was to be romantic, pursue your art and live in North Beach,” Armstrong said. “I think of myself as a (Lawrence) Ferlinghetti. Look at this beard.”

He signed up for classes at the San Francisco Art Institute, but gave up one semester short of graduation. His professors wanted to groom artists fit for galleries, and Armstrong was into large-scale, temporary art made from flour that lasted only as long as the rain held off and hungry birds stayed away.

He found a small apartment in North Beach for $200 a month and soon landed work at the San Remo Hotel on Mason Street as a handyman. It didn’t pay a lot, but it gave him the flexibility to pursue his art.

Seventeen years later, the 53-year-old Armstrong has become an integral part of the quirky hotel on the edge of North Beach, which was built in 1906 to house refugees from the great earthquake and fire.

“He knows where all the bodies are buried, he’s been around so long,” said Tom Field, who has owned the San Remo with his brother Robert since 1972. “He is our curator, handyman and decorator. He does all kinds of things that I’m not even aware of.”

Wearing suspenders and signature green Carhartt work pants, Armstrong scurries about the 65-room hotel with “bathrooms down the hall,” looking for the next problem to fix.

“Sometime people vomit in the sink and toilets overflow. I have to deal with it,” Armstrong said. A more pleasant duty is maintaining the Field Brothers’ collection of a dozen-plus antique cars, one of which he drives to the front of the building every day — eye candy to attract customers.

It’s all part of a job that allows the bohemian lifestyle he relishes. Ironically, he doesn’t have much time now to create art, but he still has that mind-set.

As he organized 100-years worth of junk in the hotel’s storage areas, he came across all manner of old photographs and interesting objects. Now, one wing at the San Remo is devoted to antique baby photographs he found and framed. Another is lined with rock posters from the 1960s.

In a way, the artist who shunned the gallery path now hath his own gallery. Nothing is for sale.

“I curate whatever I find and put it on the wall,” Armstrong said. “If it looks good, it stays.”

When he was evicted from his apartment two years ago, the Field brothers let him stay for free in cramped sleeping quarters in the warehouse where the vintage cars are kept. They say he can stay until the right place comes along.

“All my friends have been evicted, and I’m living rent-free in San Francisco. I’m easy to please,” Armstrong said. “Other guys my age, they want to be in love and want their own private bathroom, but I’ll just take what comes my way. What else can you do? I mean, I get to live in San Francisco.”

To see a multimedia production of this piece, go to http://blog.sfgate.com/cityexposed. If you have ideas for the City Exposed, e-mail Mike Kepka at mkepka@sfchronicle.com.

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• With mortgage rates and home prices higher than they were last year, it’s even harder to buy a home.
• With those challenges, Americans fantasize about moving to places with lower costs of living.
• Redfin found that eight cities online house hunters clicked on most had relatively affordable homes.

Finding a home anywhere may feel daunting for the typical American family.

And in popular cities in the Sun Belt — the 18 states that make up the Southern US, from California in the West to Florida in the East — it could feel even more impossible. In places like Austin, Texas, and Miami, pandemic-era demand drove prices up over 30% last year.

Many of these Southern cities’ new residents moved from big, expensive metropolises like New York and San Francisco during the work-from-home revolution. They opted for less expensive places where they could live in close proximity to nature.

Now, as home prices continue to rise and mortgage rates hold steady at over 5%, Americans are still hunting for new places to live.

Redfin analyzed website visitors’ behavior in perusing property listings to figure out where they’re considering moving to. Using search data, the brokerage compiled a list of the 20 places that had the most “net inflow,” or how many more Redfin users looked to move into an area than leave it.

Twelve out of the 20 places Redfin where saw user search interest — from Phoenix to Nashville, Tennessee — had home prices above the country’s median price of $424,400. Eight places, however, had homes prices below that threshold.

“Now that homes everywhere have become more expensive, buyers searching for deals should expand their horizons,” Redfin’s chief economist, Daryl Fairweather, said in the report. “The good news is that even with surging prices and mortgage rates, there are plenty of relatively affordable options.”

While these places have more attainable price tags than cities like Austin and Miami, they share many of the same characteristics. All eight are in the South, and most are known, at least in part, for their proximity to hiking trails, beaches, or farmland.

These features could explain why these places are so popular.

Insider’s personal-finance desk suggests keeping monthly housing expenses under 30% of total income, and the typical cost of a home in each place ranges from $315,000 to $418,000.

Given that the 30-year average mortgage rate is hovering at around 5% and that down payments often range between 5 and 10% of a home’s purchase price, almost all the mortgages on houses in this range is about what the typical American household — which earns about $69,000 a year — can afford.

Here are the eight cities, listed in order of affordability.

The post 8 Cities Most Individuals Dream of Shifting to That Are Additionally Inexpensive appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

Nearly 100 people turned out for a town hall rally outside City Hall on Friday to honor Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and draw attention to the stubborn distance between his dream and reality for many of San Francisco’s black residents.

The three-hour event, organized by Bay Area grassroots organization Wealth and Disparities in the Black Community, featured a variety of speakers — including local politicians, civil rights attorneys, community organizers, city workers and residents — who hammered out a unanimous conclusion:

On the eve of the civil rights leader’s 93rd birthday, being black in San Francisco hasn’t gotten much easier.

“The big question is, how are Black San Franciscans doing right now?” said Phelicia Jones, founder of Wealth and Disparities. “I would say not too well.”

African Americans moved to San Francisco in large numbers during World War II to work in shipyards amid segregation, increasing the local black population from less than 5,000 to 32,000 in 1940, or 5% of the city’s population. According to recent city data, blacks still make up just 5% of San Francisco’s residents, but that’s down from 13% in 1970. And today, they make up 35% of the city’s homeless.

The average income for a black household is $31,000 compared to $110,000 for white families, and about 19% of black children in the city live in poverty.

“We’re the exact same people who fled the South’s lash, only to face housing discrimination, over-policing and mass incarceration,” said Adante Pointer, a civil rights attorney. “They unleashed the gates of hell on the church to repel our pride.”

Supervisor Shamann Walton said the Board of Supervisors is trying to fill some of these systemic gaps. The city established a redress task force in May and, starting last year, diverted $120 million in funds for local law enforcement agencies (about 7% of the sheriff’s and police department’s budget) to the city’s black neighborhoods. Funds are earmarked for small business grants and loans; educational and social justice programs for youth; and assistance with drug and mass incarceration rehabilitation, among other services.

“We’ve accomplished some things, we’ve channeled resources to the black community,” Walton said. “But even with these steps, there is still a long way to go.”

Walton said he doesn’t think it’s a coincidence that sensationalized petty crime coverage increased after the board agreed to shift funds from law enforcement to the black community.

“Every step we take forward, they try to hold us back,” Walton said. “It’s not surprising, it’s not new.”

The rally comes as Mayor London Breed is pursuing a controversial strategy to crack down on crime, drug use and public nuisance in the Tenderloin, an area home to homeless people who are disproportionately black and brown.

Supervisor Matt Haney, whose district also includes the tenderloin, said it was important to continue King’s fight.

“Black people continue to face inequalities in many areas of life, whether it’s education, housing or dealing with law enforcement,” he told The Chronicle. “This is a time to recommit to the work of civil rights and social justice for every black resident of our city.”

Police Officer Domingo Williams said he attended the event to show solidarity with his black community and to establish himself as an “access point” for local residents who mistrust his profession.

“I’m here to build confidence and I understand it’s going to take a while, and for good reason,” Williams said. “Black people have every reason to distrust law enforcement. I’m here to let people know I’m an option and a resource.”

Other Bay Area residents such as Dellfinia Hardy, Lynn Westry and Ramona Massey, all City of San Francisco workers, said they were at the event to show their support and agreed that the pitch that night would be a long-distance effort .

“Two years isn’t enough to fix that,” Westry told The Chronicle of the city’s black neighborhood investment plan. “Yes, funds have been diverted and that’s great, but we need to make sure we approach change in a systematic way if we want real change to reach the next generations. That would have dr. King wanted.”

Shwanika Narayan is a contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: shwanika.narayan@sfchronicle.com Twitter/Instagram: @shwanika

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It took months of work – between the City of San Francisco, Warner Bros., and the good folks at the Castro Theater – and featured many movie stars, starting with Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss. But the US premiere of “The Matrix Resurrections”, partly shot in San Francisco, on Saturday, December 18, was primarily a tribute to the visionary director Lana Wachowski.

Twenty-five years ago she and her sister Lilly Wachowski – then known as the Wachowski Brothers – had a Bay Area premiere of “Bound” in the historic Castro Film Palace during Frameline, the biggest LGBTQ + film festival worldwide. Lana, a transgender resident in San Francisco, who was directing this time alone, was determined to bring the latest chapter in the “Matrix” series to her favorite theater, which will be 100 years old next year.

“In high school, I struggled with my identity. I went to the movies with popcorn and sticky bottoms and it was a kung fu movie and I knew everything would be fine, ”she told the crowd. “I didn’t think I could become a Hollywood director. I didn’t think I could be a transgender woman and a director. “

Lana Wachowski comes to the premiere of “The Matrix Resurrections” at the Castro Theater. Photo: Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle

The Castro demonstration of “Bound” helped her “imagine another outcome for my life,” she continued. And now: “I would like to say ‘thank you’ to this beautiful city, in which I fell in love with my wife 20 years ago.”

Karin Wachowski, who was in attendance, is an executive producer on the film.

Undoubtedly, the premiere of “The Matrix Resurrections” was a more gigantic affair than “Bound”. Castro Street was cordoned off in front of the theater and the security precautions were strict, even SWAT team members were stationed on the roof.

“It’s like the president is coming,” said a Castro employee.

A video was projected on the front of the theater and people unable to get tickets for the special screening could wait in a “fan zone” for Reeves and his cast to wave their hands and maybe sign autographs.

The crowd in the “fan zone” watches as the actors arrive. Photo: Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle

Mayling Suazo was right at the front of the fan zone with books, magazines and a “John Wick 3” Blu-ray with Reeves. Suazo and her husband drove out of Sacramento that morning to get a seat, even though they didn’t have tickets, in hopes of getting Reeves’ attention.

“Maybe he’ll sign my album,” said Suazo.

Fans started gathering as early as 9 a.m. for the 7 p.m. event. Castro Theater owner Steve Nasser, whose grandfather built the theater, which opened in 1922, bought coffee for everyone who got there early.

“This is one of the biggest premieres we’ve ever had,” said Nasser. “It cuts right at the top with ‘Milk’ premiering,” he noted, referring to Gus Van Sant’s 2008 biopic, in which Sean Penn played San Francisco-based gay politician Harvey Milk.

Keanu Reeves arrives at the Castro Theater for “The Matrix Resurrections”. Photo: Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle

The premiere and after-party, which included Waterbar and Epic Steak along the Embarcadero with nightly fireworks in the bay, was filled with celebrities: Reeves, Moss, Wachowski, Neil Patrick Harris, Yahya Abdul Mateen II from the Bay Area, Jonathan Groff, the new star Jessica Henwick, Jada Pinkett-Smith and son Jaden Smith, Priyanka Chopra Jonas and husband Nick Jonas, the Mayor of San Francisco London Breed and even former San Francisco Giants player Hunter Pence who spent the night with his wife Alexis Cozombolidis danced in the waterbar.

Wondering what the fireworks display is all about? It’s for the #Matrix US premiere in SF pic.twitter.com/kV3We05a8T

– Mariecar Mendoza (@SFMarMendoza) December 19, 2021

Speaking at the Castro’s opening address, Breed noted that “when The Matrix was filmed in San Francisco, Lana Wachowski committed herself to that city and committed to doing more.” That meant creating jobs, even for some local kids from Opportunities for All, a youth development program in San Francisco who served as paid interns.

Wachowski responded by thanking the mayor, who makes a cameo in the film, for “turning no to yes” during filming across town.

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II at the screening of “The Matrix Resurrections” at the Castro Theater. Photo: Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle

Reeves, who was particularly shy about public appearances, also enthusiastically thanked San Francisco on stage before quickly passing the microphone over to Moss, who was delivering one of the most moving speeches of the evening. Although in constant demand since her breakthrough with the first Matrix in 1999, which starred in two Marvel series – Jessica Jones and Daredevil – and many other film and television projects, she didn’t become the breakout star some have predicted.

“The Matrix Resurrections” should dispel all doubts: at 54 she still has it. In fact, her pairing with Reeves, 57, makes the film one of the few action franchises with a middle-aged romance.

Carrie-Anne Moss arrives for the premiere of “The Matrix Resurrections” at the Castro Theater. Photo: Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle

“I didn’t know how much I needed to be Trinity again,” she said of her Matrix character. “I hope from the bottom of my heart that you love the film as much as I made it. It was such a nice experience with Lana and all the beautiful artists who made this film. “

“The Matrix Resurrections” (R) opens in theaters on Wednesday December 22nd.

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