An $18 million fixer-upper?

And that’s not all. The 20-acre Woodside estate needs about $10 million worth of work, according to listing agent Mark Benson of Cashin Co.

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“Only in California,” Benson added wryly.

On Monday afternoon, Benson held a “pre-market” viewing of the historic property for movers and shakers in the world of luxury Bay Area real estate. The party and staging, which included 1930s autos and members of a local Art Deco society dressed in period clothing, seemed more appropriate to a movie set.

The elaborate production was not only an attempt to reflect the home’s heritage — it was completed in 1940 by the architects responsible for the well-known Eichler houses — but also adorn a property that has clearly languished while its owner has grappled with legal and financial difficulties over the last couple of years.

In enclaves such as Woodside and Atherton, where technology luminaries such as Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison live, multimillion-dollar estates are not unheard of. But few properties have had such a potent mix of history, fame, money — and the loss thereof.

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“It’s kind of a rags-to-riches, riches-to-rags story,” Benson said.

Court records and public filings show that the Lakeview Drive home has been owned by End Real Estate, a company controlled by James Paulett “Paul” Charlton, since 1999. Public records did not disclose the sale price.

Around that time, Charlton sold the shares in a technology firm he had founded to Foster City’s Inktomi for $25 million. But a short time later, Charlton faced the technology collapse and the costs related to legal matters surrounding other failed companies. Last year, he filed for bankruptcy, and petitioned to sell some of his assets, including the Chagall painting.

A court-appointed trustee is now charged with selling the home.

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Although the sprawling seven-bedroom home harks back to Frank Lloyd Wright’s naturalist architecture and boasts a valuable fresco by Lucien Labaudt, much of the house itself and the grounds have fallen into disrepair. The stables, greenhouse and guest quarters are decrepit; the paddock fences, pool and footpaths need major renovation.

Inside the main house’s kitchen, under-counter holes and alcoves have been papered over with photos of shiny, high-end appliances, and some doors to the garden have handles on only one side.

It is a far cry from the property’s heyday in the years leading up to World War II.

Then, a young couple by the name of Davies bought the parcel to build a large country home on an open hillside overlooking Redwood City.

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Ralph Davies was a vice president of Standard Oil who served as petroleum administrator for Interior Secretary Harold Ickes during World War II. He made millions by buying oil concessions all over the world, and eventually ran American President Lines and Natomas Co.

He died in 1971. A decade later, his wife, Louise M. Davies, gave $5 million to build the landmark San Francisco Symphony Hall on Van Ness Avenue that was eventually to bear her name.

Louise Davies, who at one time was well-known in Woodside for throwing tea parties in the extensive gardens, died in 1998 at a retirement home in Portola Valley.

Woodside History Committee member Thalia Lubin said the home is significant because of its ties to the Davies family and the fact that it is “exemplary of country life” in Woodside at the time.

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But it is unclear whether the property will remain intact. Several real estate industry insiders speculated that an investor would buy the property to subdivide into several parcels.

And most experts said it may take some time for the property to sell, in part because it is in the less desirable part of Woodside east of Interstate 280.

“Eighteen million sure doesn’t buy you what it used to,” said Peninsula real estate broker Art Michael, who toured the home.

Benson said he set the asking price for the home after two appraisals put its value at $23.5 million and $11.5 million. In addition, two other properties of about the same size are on the market in Woodside — one for $15 million and one for $29.5 million.

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Though overall Bay Area home prices and sales continue to break records, the market for ultra-expensive homes remains somewhat unpredictable, in part because the pool of buyers of multimillion-dollar properties is so shallow.

The heirs to the Hills Bros. Coffee fortune recently sold an 11,000- square-foot Pacific Heights mansion for less than $30 million, after putting it on the market for $45 million two years ago.

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Every artist’s perspective is in some way shaped by the people who have surrounded them and the places they’re from. But for sculptor and performance artist Rose B. Simpson, painter, printmaker, sculptor, and collagist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and photographer Jeremy Dennis, the idea of home plays an especially urgent role in their work. All three are enrolled Indigenous American tribal members, and their practices don’t just honor their individual Native histories, cultures, environments, and traditions, they also seek to ignite conversations about historical oppression and the land theft their communities continue to face.

Both Simpson and Smith have had expansive exhibitions at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art this year, symbolizing what is an encouraging yet long-overdue shift in how institutions are showcasing and giving platforms to art made by Indigenous artists.

A member of New Mexico’s Kah’p’oo Owinge tribe, Simpson is best known for her mixed-media sculptures of large-scale beings, which she creates using a traditional hand-coiled method that she learned from her mother, a potter. Five such sculptures, part of a larger work called Counterculture, are on view at the Whitney through January 21. Simpson’s next show, Skeena, opening on November 9 at Jessica Silverman in San Francisco, will debut 10 new beings alongside a hanging wall work.

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Smith, a Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribal member, had her first New York retrospective, “Memory Map,” at the Whitney this spring, bringing together nearly five decades of her work. Her latest curatorial effort, “The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans,” on view through January 15 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., highlights work by a range of artists who deal with Indigenous knowledge of their natural surroundings.

Dennis is the founder of Ma’s House & BIPOC Art Studio, a nonprofit and artist residency located in his childhood home and birthplace on Long Island’s Shinnecock Indian Reservation, which provides a space for marginalized artists to create and engage with one another. His cinematic fine-art photographs, which comment on the misrepresentation of Indigenous people in American media, probe subjects such as identity, cultural practice, and the history of forced Native assimilation. Dennis’s ongoing project On This Site maps out and documents ancestral lands throughout Long Island.

Simpson, Smith, and Dennis recently connected to discuss how their physical and ancestral homes inform their work, effecting change in the art world, and why community-building is inherent to what they do.

ROSE B. SIMPSON: I don’t think I really knew how impacted by home I was as an artist. I had to leave my ancestral homelands where I grew up and was born, in northern New Mexico, to realize how important it is to me—that it is not just the people but the place that is family to me. I feel like that lack of consciousness around our beings, our physical and spiritual and social existence, keeps us from identifying and having respect for home.

“I’m so proud of the place I call home, and I try to bring that with me when I leave the reservation.” —Jeremy Dennis

JEREMY DENNIS: I’m from Shinnecock, born and raised. Everyone there is related. There are about 600 of us, more or less. As an artist and a tribal member, I’m so proud of the place I get to call home, and I try to bring that with me when I leave the reservation. One way I do that as an artist is by making portraits of some of my relatives. I do interviews. Sometimes they share stories of resilience and pride or conflict and strain on the community. There’s so much of our important history that isn’t represented in photos or paintings or inscriptions. So, my work is about showing that history is always relevant and that how we’re living today is informed by the path that our community has traveled and survived.

JAUNE QUICK-TO-SEE SMITH: I am a mixture of Métis-Cree and Salish and am from the northern border of the United States in Montana. I was born at the St. Ignatius Mission on the Flathead Reservation, at a time when one in 10 babies born there lived. My dad was a horse trader and moved around often; when we were down-and-out broke, we had to go to a reservation. My sister was born at Hoopa, and I lived at Muckleshoot and Nisqually. In Nisqually, we had a one-room cabin that didn’t have furniture. There were three families of us in there. We didn’t have indoor plumbing or electricity. I remember being sick all the time and always being hungry. That was a normal upbringing for someone my age. I knew early on that white people had different lives than we Indian people. It was so distinct. I’m still riffing off of that in my work and with all my Native friends. My home is with them. It is on the reservation. But I’ve been living here in New Mexico for quite a few years, and it’s like another home. I have family everywhere when I get together with all the Indian artists because they are my family too.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Indian Madonna Enthroned, 1974, Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Purchased with funds from the Director’s Discretionary Fund, Fabricated by Andy Ambrose

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

JD: One experience that keeps recurring for me, unfortunately—and I’m sure we all share it—is I’ll get invited to do a show during November, Native American Heritage Month, and then it’s quiet the rest of the year. I’m always trying to advocate for Indigenous inclusion. We can participate anytime. It’s so important for our art to be institutionalized. When I think about themes of joy and beauty in Indigenous art, I think they come out of approaching difficult subjects and conflicts in our history. When we talk about these things, it’s a form of healing. The arts, especially, bring together different communities, so when I see work about colonization or suffering, I think it’s a step in moving toward a better future.

JS: In all my 50 years of traveling and lecturing and sharing slides of contemporary art by Native people, George Floyd, Black Lives Matter, and Standing Rock have all changed the scene. All of a sudden, museums and galleries were like, “Oh, we’re not including everybody.” We’ve been saying that for 50 years now! All of a sudden, though, arts institutions have started giving out fellowships and grants to Native people, and my younger brothers and sisters are all having big, major museum exhibitions. That is so incredible. That never was there for us. Before I curated “The Land Carries Our Ancestors” for the National Gallery of Art, the museum hadn’t had a show on Native art in 30 years. When the Whitney contacted me, I think they were nervous about it. But it actually was a good exhibition; it brought people to the museum, and we got a lot of press, which was shocking to me. I don’t know how long this is going to last, it’s like manna from heaven. But I’m doing it, and I’ll keep doing it if I can get the door cracked so that I can bring my community in with me.

“We are so dynamic, and we come from so many different stories.” —Rose B. Simpson

RS: I think often about how those artists that came before us really did wedge that door. Someone said to me recently, “The water is rising for us all.” It’s rising, and we’re all floating together. I have the privilege to question whether the institution is the source of all power. Why do we give those colonial institutions the right to say we are someone and what we say is important? The reason that I feel grateful to be included in these exhibitions and spaces is that they reach the people I’m trying to have the conversation with. My work isn’t directed at my community here at Santa Clara; I’m trying to communicate something across a line that hasn’t been open to communication for a really long time. There are all these things—exploitation, stereotyping—that we all have to combat. I’m not Shinnecock, you know what I mean? I am not Salish. I’m a Pueblo person, and I’m from a specific pueblo, and I’m from a specific family. We are so dynamic, and we come from so many different stories. It’s so important to have that full spectrum of Indigenous experience in those spaces.

Installation view of “Rose B. Simpson: Counterculture” (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, October 4, 2023–January 21, 2024)

Ron Amstutz

JS: They stereotype us. I remember when I was going around to all of these galleries and museums, talking about contemporary art by Native people, and they said, “What is that?” And I said, “Well, we are not what you would call traditional. We are not weaving blankets, and we’re not making silver jewelry, but we are making art from our own experience.” That’s the point. We make art from our own experience just like all the white artists do. And there isn’t one style for white artists, but they expect it to be one style for us. Jeremy’s making art and creating Ma’s House and doing all those wonderful things that are community-building. I think each of us in our own way realizes that we have to do some of that, we have to do both things. We tend our work, and then at the same time we reach out to each other and make plans to do stuff together. Part of it is having each other’s backs. Part of it is being a support system. Our lives and our work are so fragile because there aren’t millions of us.

“Our lives and our work are so fragile because there aren’t millions of us.”—Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

RS: The pieces at the Whitney right now are five from an original series of 12. They are set up outside on the museum’s roof, and they’re called Counterculture. The original spot for them was [supposed to be] at Plymouth Rock. What I wanted to say with the pieces was, “You’re being watched.” Most people forget that we’re being watched by things that we deem inanimate. I think one of the main reasons that colonization happened in the way that it did was that colonizers had forgotten they were being held accountable by beings beyond people. I had qualms about putting my work at Plymouth Rock. I felt like I didn’t have the right to speak on behalf of all Native people. The organizers were approached by the Wampanoag community, which said to them, “This isn’t who we want making this work there.” That was a blessing for me. Who am I, a Pueblo person from New Mexico, having this conversation about an experience that was very much not mine? The work then got installed in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 2022, where we built some programming around it with the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican community. It felt really good to move it to where it was wanted. Now the other seven pieces are at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin. After they were moved, we took some of the clay from where the pieces were originally installed in Williamstown and made beads with the Wisconsin Stockbridge-Munsee community. We sat around and told stories and then fired the beads and made necklaces. That felt like the most important part of the whole exhibit. That piece taught me a lot about how to trust the art itself and where it needs to go.

Jeremy Dennis, untitled from “Sacredness of Hills,” 2020, Archival Inkjet Print, 30 x 40 in

Jeremy Dennis

JD: I do landscape photography, portraiture, and staged photography. I have a personal series from 2018 called “Rise,” and it’s all about reoccupying ancestral lands. It asks, what if Indigenous people never left? What if they’d continued to maintain their footprint and witnessed the transformation of the land, the colonization, the desecration of sacred sites? I also explore home in terms of expansion and abundance rather than being confined to the reservation. That’s just one of the unfortunate realities of growing up on a reservation; there are pluses, but at the same time, many tribal members never leave the territory. It becomes a small bubble of where we’re supposed to belong. We’re supposed to be not only invisible, but also non-existent. I think about what is owed to us and what we can still do to grant us that sense of home. Part of how I do that is through Ma’s House, which we started in 2020. It’s in an old family home on the Shinnecock reservation that was built in the 1960s by my grandfather, Peter Silva Sr. My mom and her five siblings grew up in it, and I did too, with my older sister. Probably 90 percent of my photography work gets done at residencies, so I wanted to offer that resource and space to other artists. Of course, it opened during a time of racial awakening in the nation, so it became a focus to support BIPOC artists. Since opening, we’ve had about 30 artists come through. We’ve had a couple of major exhibits. We’ve also had weekly workshops by my mother, including a leather-belt-making workshop. As we’ve been saying, new spaces are very much needed. Jaune, tell us about the show you curated this fall.

JS: The National Gallery of Art contacted me to curate a show there through my gallery. For two years, I worked on every committee that they offered, whether it was for the catalog, installation, or design. I had a road map in my head. For one, I wanted to make it about land, because the Land Back movement is front and center right now. I wanted the show to have parity between men and women and ages. There were limitations on the size of the space, so I came up with this idea: At home in Montana, we have checkerboard land. In 1887, the government came to the Flathead Reservation and divided up our land, which had been communal, and gave us allotments, which is not our way of life. Then they took the leftover land, put ads on posters for it in New York City, and invited people to come and farm it for free. So, for the exhibition, I made a checkerboard wall. It was my way of getting almost 50 people in the exhibition instead of 25. That’s our secret.

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Earlier this year at an event in San Francisco, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman dismissed the idea that fully remote work could replace the value of in-office collaboration. This week, his surging company signed the largest office lease seen in the city since 2018.

In a period of doom and gloom for the commercial real estate sector, hammered by remote work and high vacancy rates in cities across the U.S., the deal offers a dose of hope. And for San Francisco, whose struggles with crime and homelessness have been well documented, it adds to a growing presence of companies involved in the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence.

Since kickstarting the AI boom with the release of ChatGPT last year, OpenAI has quickly become one the world’s most valuable closely held companies. Bloomberg reported earlier this month that OpenAI is in talks to sell shares an $86 billion valuation, and it reported in August that the company is on track to generate $1 billion in annual revenue.

OpenAI is leasing two buildings from Uber, which is “right-sizing” its real estate usage, at the ride-hailing company’s headquarters campus in the Mission Bay neighborhood. An Uber spokesperson confirmed to Fortune that the deal had finally closed. (Since it’s a sublease, landlords had to give their consent, which meant longer negotiations.) OpenAI is taking 486,600 square feet in all in the four-building campus.

As the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month, office attendance in large cities is still only about half the level seen in 2019. That’s despite a slight uptick recently and tough talk from high-profile CEOs about enforcing return-to-office policies.

As for San Francisco, it notched a record-high 33.9% office vacancy rate—nearly 30 million square feet listed for lease or sublease—in the third quarter, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle. The paper noted that about 150,000 workers could fill all the empty office space.

The lack of all those employees hurts local businesses, including retailers and restaurants. That combined with the crime problem has prompted companies to give up on the city. In August, one of the city’s flagship retailers, Nordstrom, closed its once-vibrant store.

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As the owner of the mall that Nordstrom inhabited noted, “A growing number of retailers and businesses are leaving the area due to the unsafe conditions for customers, retailers, and employees, coupled with the fact that these significant issues are preventing an economic recovery of the area.”

The city’s “doom spiral” fears continue, but the move by OpenAI provides a bit of hope. And it helps that this year other AI firms have also leased office space in San Francisco.

As the Chronicle reported, Hive AI leased 57,117 square feet in a downtown skyscraper next to Salesforce Tower. Hayden AI leased 41,196 square feet, Anthropic leased 17,735, and Tome AI 16,887. (On Friday, Google said that it’s agreed to invest up to $2 billion in Anthropic, following Amazon saying it will invest up to $4 billion.)

That means five AI companies, including OpenAI, are leasing nearly 620,000 square feet of office space in the city. Of course, that’s still a drop in the bucket compared to amount of vacant space.

“There’s definitely a lot of hope and optimism that [AI] could be the catalyst for the next growth cycle not only for the office market, but for the San Francisco economy,” Colin Yasukochi, executive director of CBRE’s Tech Insights Center, told the Chronicle. But it could be years before “we see this growth cycle really explode,” if it does at all, he noted.

As it turns out, OpenAI’s office deal closed just as another San Francisco tech company ended a return-to-office experiment. Expensify, with a market cap of about $215 million, said this week that it’s closing an upscale office lounge where employees could enjoy champagne or a draft beer while collaborating in a restaurant-style booth or working on laptops at the bar.

In a blog post this week, Expensify CEO David Barrett described the lounge as an experiment on luring employees back into the office, and he concluded that remote work had won. “We’re just never going back to a regular nine-to-five office culture, a staple of not just our modern culture, but also the foundation of most urban planning,” he wrote.

For his part, OpenAI’s Altman—who has become a household name in the tech world and perhaps beyond—stressed the need for in-person collaboration and noted the shortcomings of remote work during a Stripe conference in San Francisco earlier this year.

“I think definitely one of the tech industry’s worst mistakes in a long time was that everybody could go full remote forever, and startups didn’t need to be together in person and, you know, there was going to be no loss of creativity,” he told attendees. “I would say that the experiment on that is over, and the technology is not yet good enough that people can be full remote forever, particularly on startups.”

OpenAI did not immediately reply to Fortune’s request for comments.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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• Residents in San Francisco’s Millennium Tower have been slapped with bills as high as $14,000 each following a project to stabilize the leaning building 
• One resident – who was not even living in the building when he received his bill due to sewage backup in his condo – received a bill for $14,000 over the summer
• Prior to the stabilization process, the tower leaned 29 inches 

Residents within the luxury Millennium Tower – dubbed the ‘leaning tower of San Francisco’ – are being slapped with bills up to $14,000 to fix the building’s issues which include raw sewage in their sinks and pipes.

Homeowners and renters have been shocked to receive the bills, which puts an estimated $6.8 million of the overall $20 million in overrun fixes on residents.

Mehrdad Mostafavi, who owns a condo on the third floor of the building, recently received a bill for $14,000, which amounts to $10 per square foot of the apartment.

‘It’s a luxurious building and famous building, but unfortunately it is not like this for me as an owner,’ Mostafavi told NBC Bay Area. ‘I am really suffering.’

To make matters worse, Mostafavi was not living in the building when he got the bill as he was dealing with a sewage backup purportedly caused by the tower’s tilt.

The Millennium Tower – designed by Gary Handel and Handel Architects – is still tilting at 29 inches but the sinking has stopped following a stabilization project.

Residents within the luxury Millennium Tower – dubbed the ‘leaning tower of San Francisco ‘ – are being slapped with bills up to $14,000 to fix the building’s issues Sewage overfill from the tilt Sewage overflow from the tilt inside the building

Mostafavi was just one of a number of residents to find a bill from the Tower owners’ association and asked to pay it by October 1.

He told the Bay Area outlet it may be the final nail in the coffin for him.

‘I don’t know what to do with this place, because it is costly – I cannot live in it,’ said Mostafavi.

The San Francisco resident had already moved out in June after a sewage backup in his kitchen sink, which some engineers had warned could happen due to the tilt.

At the time that he received the bill, he was already in the middle of trying to figure out who should pay to clean up the sewage mess in his place.

He also told NBC that he had already had to tap into his retirement savings to cover the costs of the kitchen issues.

‘I’m really having a hard time seeing how can I leave for the retirement – how to get out of this apartment and do my retirement’ Mostafavi said. It is very costly.’

‘They keep asking for more money and this is not acceptable for me,’ he said.

DailyMail.com reached out to management for comment but did not receive a response by the time of publication.

According to Harry Poulos, a tall building expert, efforts to stop the building from sinking were successful but the tilt has not been fixed.

‘Their objective of correcting that tilt to a significant extent – I fear that expectation has not been met,’ Poulos told NBC in September.

‘I don’t know what to do with this place, because it is costly ¿ I cannot live in it,’ said third floor condo owner Mehrdad Mostafavi in an interview with NBC Bay Area Workers repair crumbling walls that have been the result of leaking water in the garage of the Millennium Tower in San Francisco A stress gauge is seen on a wall with floor-to-ceiling cracks in the parking garage of the Millennium Tower

Overall, residents of the building have been saddled with $6.8 million of the roughly $20 million extra the project ended up costing over the original budget.

It had originally been calculated as costing some $100 million.

During construction, however, the tower experienced more sinking and leaning.

Along with the bills sent to homeowners, the Tower owners’ association included a letter that said residents are being compensated for lost property value.

In total, the association was allotted  $150 million to pay for securing the high-rise, pay for legal bills, restore reserves and pay for other expected costs.

It ended up costing more than that, the association said.

‘The delays and the city’s heightened requirements resulted in significant unforeseen project cost increases,’ the association’s letter to residents said.

The Millennium Tower was designed by Gary Handel and Handel Architects By 2016, the building (to the right of the tallest building) had sunk nearly a foot-and-a-half into the soft soil and landfill upon which it was built. Residents of the building subsequently sued the developer and designers

Earlier this year, lead engineer of the project, Ron Hamburger, told NBC data taken from rooftop measurements regarding the lean are prone to weather fluctuations.

He also said that and that data on the building’s foundation was more reliable.

That data indicated that the tilt was more significant than previously noted, only by about of a quarter of an inch, however.

Hamburger at the time claimed the number was ‘negligible.’

‘We are fully confident that following transfer of the remaining design load to the piles,’ said Hamburger, adding that ‘there will be no further … movement of the roof to the west,’ he said.

The luxury 58-story tower opened in 2009 and quickly sold out its 419 apartments, with buyers including former San Francisco 49er Joe Montana and former Giants outfielder Hunter Pence.

By 2016, the building had sunk nearly a foot-and-a-half into the soft soil and landfill upon which it was built in San Francisco’s financial district.

It was also leaning, creating a two-inch tilt at the base, and a 6-inch lean at the top. Residents of the building subsequently sued the developer and designers.

A confidential settlement reached several years ago included $100 million to install 52 concrete, 140,000-pound piles to anchor the building to bedrock located 250 feet below ground, with the idea that the piles would provide foundational support to the leaning, sinking tower.

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Human Interest

By Taylor Knight

Published
Sep. 23, 2023, 12:24 p.m. ET

He sacrificed a few years of comfort for a lifetime of financial freedom.

Arizona man Nicholas Bauer says he went to extreme lengths to save cash in his 20s, living in cars in order to pay off all his debt.

“When you have no rent and no bills to pay, that money just stacks,” Bauer, 32, declared in the latest episode of “Big Super Living In Arizona.”

In the series, which showcases America’s most affordable housing options, Bauer boasts that he saved up so much cash that he was able to buy a home outright, and is no longer dependent on a job to get by.

Bauer told the program that he started living in cars in 2015 while working as an automotive engineer, making $11.50 per hour. At the time, he says he had racked up extensive debt.

He was determined to find a “solution to the housing crisis,” so he decided to permanently “live a debt-free lifestyle by living in vehicles.”

The creative engineer parked his Dodge Dakota truck, which he had driven since high school, at his workplace’ parking lot and attached a camper to the back.

Arizona man Nicholas Bauer says he went to extreme lengths to save cash in his 20s, living in cars in order to pay off all his debt. Youtube

Bauer now lives in a “compound” on two-acres of land, which he paid for in cash. Youtube

Bauer’s boss allowed the unconventional living conditions on company property since he was often required “to pull all-nighters” and would use the vehicle for off-roading.

Eventually, the self-proclaimed “full-time desert dweller” moved into his next vehicle, a 404 Series Unimog truck. The vehicle’s interior had a bed, wood flooring, a 40-inch flat-screen TV, and internet.

The one thing his humble abode was missing was a bathroom, forcing him to urinate into a Nalgene water bottle. When it came to more serious bathroom business, Bauer planned his toilet breaks at work since he didn’t have one at home.

The scheduled bathroom breaks were enough to convince Bauer to upgrade to another vehicle.

“When you have no rent and no bills to pay, that money just stacks,” Bauer, 32, declared in the latest episode of “Big Super Living In Arizona.” Bauer is seen with one of the vehicles he lived in. Youtube

Bauer moved into “the dragon wagon,” a merger of two military trucks with a 1987 Fleetwood Prowler trailer on the back incorporating solar panels.

He described the vehicle as a “Frankenstein contraption.” However, just like the monster, his truck fell apart during a road trip to San Francisco. While saving money to restore the dragon wagon, he transitioned into a Chevy pickup.

His pickup, parked outside a Planet Fitness lot, operated like a work camper and included a fold-out bed, heater, and CCTV cameras.

When things got serious with Bauer’s girlfriend, who became pregnant with a baby girl, the pair knew it was time to settle down in a more permanent home.Youtube

Bauer lives in a mobile home with his girlfriend and daughter. The modest interior is pictured. Youtube

However, when things got serious with Bauer’s girlfriend, who became pregnant with a baby girl, the pair knew it was time to settle down in a more permanent home.

Now, the family of three lives in a mobile home on Bauer’s two-acre “paid-off compound,” where he also stores all the cars he used to live in. He didn’t disclose how much the property cost, nor how much money he still has left in his bank account.

Although Bauer recently lost his job, he has no worries about providing for his family, especially after years of saving.

Now the 32-year-old lives in a mobile home on his paid off compound.Youtube

“I don’t really have to worry about anything because there’s no rent, there’s no mortgage,” Bauer shared, also adding that he was now debt free.

But the Arizona man hasn’t given up on his love of automobiles.

Even with a more anchored lifestyle, he still has dreams “to live in the woods with 50 trucks.”

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Elon Musk said Twitter’s headquarters would stay in San Francisco.LUDOVIC MARIN/POOL/AFP via Getty Images; Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

• Elon Musk is encouraging workers to move to San Francisco to help the city survive its doom loop.

• The billionaire said Twitter’s headquarters would remain in the city despite its ongoing struggles.

• Other tech companies, including Meta, Snap, and Salesforce, have reduced office space in the city.

Elon Musk is encouraging people to move to San Francisco and work there because he says the “city can’t survive” unless it overcomes the urban doom loop.

The billionaire owner of Twitter tweeted on Monday that it was “important for more people to come to work in San Francisco or the rest of the city can’t survive.”

Musk recently had the Twitter sign removed from Twitter’s headquarters in San Fransisco. The company recently changed its logo to X, and a giant sign was put on top of the building that has irritated some neighbors.

Musk tweeted on Sunday that he wouldn’t move Twitter’s headquarters out of the city despite ongoing reports about the city’s deterioration.

He wrote in the tweet: “Many have offered rich incentives for X (fka Twitter) to move its HQ out of San Francisco. Moreover, the city is in a doom spiral with one company after another left or leaving. Therefore, they expect X will move too. We will not.

“You only know who your real friends are when the chips are down. San Francisco, beautiful San Francisco, though others forsake you, we will always be your friend.”

The urban doom loop refers to negative beliefs about a city deterring people from living there and causing those issues to proliferate. San Francisco is struggling with a huge homeless population and increased crime, including theft and assault, according to retailers.

In May, Musk said that downtown San Francisco was a “once beautiful and thriving” area but that it had become a “derelict zombie apocalypse.”

The city has seen retailers such as Walgreens, Whole Foods, Anthropologie, and Nordstrom close stores because of rising crime and concerns about employee safety. Critics said these store closures were also a result of changing consumer-shopping habits and retailers closing pricier locations.

Major tech firms such as Meta, Snap, Salesforce, and Paypal have also reduced office space in the city because employees continued to work from home after the pandemic.

Read the original article on Business Insider

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• San Francisco remains firmly at the bottom of US rankings when it comes to office attendance. 
• The city has famously cool summers, so workers don’t need office A/C as much as other cities.
• Washington DC, which is hot and muggy in the summer, ranks top in terms of office attendance.

A tech industry source was in Tokyo this summer, and they came back with an interesting story: More workers in the city are heading back to the office because it’s so damn hot there. When the company is paying for air conditioning, why not go in and stay cool?

This got me thinking about San Francisco’s infamous “doom loop.” This is the cycle where workers stay home and downtown remains relatively empty, hurting businesses that then close, making the location even less inviting. 

This week, in the middle of summer, it was in the 90s and humid in Tokyo. In San Francisco, it was 65 degrees fahrenheit. When it’s this cool, you can comfortably work from home without A/C. 

It’s probably another reason why San Francisco remains firmly at the bottom of the rankings when it comes to office attendance by employees. 

Placer.ai tracks this stuff. Its report for July 2023 shows visits to office buildings in San Francisco are still almost 50% below 2019 levels. That puts it firmly last among major US cities.

What’s the top city in terms of office visits? Washington DC, which is forecast to be 99F on Tuesday. It’s muggy as hell in DC in the summer, too. I know, I lived there for 3 years. And I recall that the A/C was particularly refreshing in the office where I worked back then. No way was I going to sit at home in my small apartment without A/C and sweat all week. 

Tokyo’s office attendance stats are pretty good, too. According to a survey earlier this year, 49% of organizations in Japan’s largest city reported that more than 80% of their employees had returned to the office in 2022.

It’s even happening in the UK, a formerly cold and rainy place that has become blisteringly hot during recent summers. There’s not a lot of A/C there, and many British office workers are yearning for any source of cool breeze, according to Heating & Ventilating Review. 

This HVAC industry publication reported on a recent survey that found Brits are spending an extra 9.2 days per month in the office this year, compared to 2022. Almost half (46%) of those surveyed planned to take advantage of office air conditioning, and 35% said they go into the office when the weather is hot to make use of the A/C.

More CEOs are keen to get employees back to the office now, including several leaders of tech companies in the San Francisco Bay Area. If the city weren’t so cool during the summers, they might get their wish. 

Although, that would mean more energy use for A/C, yet another example of how the RTO craze is bad for the environment.

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Data shows that people who work remotely were more likely to move to a new city during the COVID-19 pandemic and in the years that followed. And while that meant many were leaving expensive metropolitan areas like Los Angeles and New York City, Philadelphia has been less affected by the trend.

According to Census Bureau American Community Survey data recently analyzed by The New York Times, the pandemic has caused an abrupt shift in the number of people working remotely and the number of remote workers willing to go somewhere else. In fact, people working from home were more likely than all other workers to move during the pandemic.

But the effects were not the same everywhere.

While many cities grew the number of remote workers living there, data for 2020-2021 shows that expensive metros lost more residents than they gained, the Times analysis found.

While cities like New York, Chicago, Washington, and Seattle had higher percentages of remote workers than Philadelphia, significantly more remote workers moved out there as well.

New York lost 116,000 remote workers that year. Chicago lost 29,000 players, Washington lost 11,000 players and Seattle lost 3,000 players. Meanwhile, Philadelphia has only lost an estimated 1,000 remote workers, putting it in a neutral zone compared to cities the Times found in the red or “loss” zone.

Larry Eichel, senior adviser to the Pew Charitable Trust’s Philadelphia Research and Policy Initiative, said it’s difficult to quantify exact net gains or losses from survey data, but it’s safe to say that the city isn’t doing well even when it comes to patterns of migration to remote work have made a breakthrough, according to the most recent data.

“Philly obviously doesn’t seem to have been hit as hard as other places,” said Eichel, who has researched the impact of remote work on the city’s economy. “These numbers show that many people who are able to work fully remotely relocated early in the pandemic because they were able to.”

Areas like Austin, Denver, Boston, and Raleigh saw increases in both the number of long-distance workers moving to the city and a net increase in the number of long-distance workers living there. The Times viewed these cities as “win” zones.

Part of this phenomenon is due to remote work becoming more normalized during the pandemic.

Suddenly, employees could keep their current job while working in a more exciting or affordable city. This was particularly the case in cities like New York and San Francisco, where tech workers took part in what has been called the “Great American Migration of 2020” and “urban exodus.”

The most recent data is only up to 2021, as people are surveyed at different times of the year. Therefore, it is difficult to get a complete overview of the impact on cities.

“It’s hard to say because remote work and hybrid work are always changing,” said Eichel.

Other Census Bureau data has shown that younger generations will flock to Philadelphia in 2021, which some attribute to the city’s potential for remote work.

“With the rise of remote or hybrid work schedules, Philadelphia is an ideal home base or work-from-anywhere location for Gen Z seeking the ultimate live-work-play urban experience,” said Angela Val, CEO of Visit Philadelphia , told The Inquirer in March .

» READ MORE: Generation Z is moving to big cities – including Philly – while older generations are fleeing

Experts warn that population datasets are evolving as they include phenomena including students returning home from temporarily closed colleges and wealthy city dwellers fleeing to their beach homes.

Eichel also said the focus on remote workers misses another important group of workers in Philadelphia: hybrid workers.

“I think it’s important to look at remote and hybrid work as two different phenomena,” he said. “When it comes to hybrid working, it makes a big difference for the city whether you come into the office two days a week or four days a week.”

He added that there is evidence that some employers require their employees to come into the office more often, which can help a city’s economy.

Comcast recently announced that starting in the fall, employees would have to report to the office four days a week instead of three. A SEPTA spokesman said the company looks forward to servicing the potential increase in commuter traffic. A pizzeria owner in the Comcast Building said increasing office demands will improve his bottom line.

» READ MORE: At Philly’s largest job fair, some candidates looked for hybrid hours, but there were fewer employers to hire

Eichel said that hybrid work is increasingly reflected in population studies.

But in the meantime, it’s too early to say what that means for Philly’s future.

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Twitter still needs to do more to comply with the European Union’s tough new digital rules, a senior EU official said after overseeing a “stress test” of the company’s systems in Silicon Valley.

EU Commissioner Thierry Breton said late Thursday he had taken note of Twitter’s “strong commitment to compliance” with the Digital Services Act, which sets new standards that all of the world’s largest online platforms will have to comply with in just two months.

However, “work must go on,” he said in a statement after discussing the results of the voluntary test with owner Elon Musk and new CEO Linda Yaccarino at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters.

Breton, who oversees digital policy, also meets with other tech bosses in California. He is the EU’s point of contact working to prepare Big Tech for the new rules that will force companies to crack down on hate speech, disinformation and other harmful and illegal material on their websites. The law comes into effect on August 25 for the largest platforms.

The Digital Services Act, along with proposed new data and artificial intelligence regulations, have put Brussels at the forefront of the growing global movement to fight tech giants.

The practice exercise tested Twitter’s readiness to comply with the requirements of the DSA, including protecting children online and detecting and mitigating risks such as disinformation, in both normal and extreme situations.

“Twitter takes the exercise seriously and has identified the key areas it needs to focus on to comply with the DSA,” Breton said, without giving further details. “Two months before the new EU regulation comes into force, work must continue so that the systems are in place and working effectively and quickly.”

Twitter’s Global Government Affairs team tweeted that the company was “on track to be ready when the DSA goes into effect.” Yaccarino tweeted, “Europe is very important to Twitter and we are focused on our continued partnership. “

Musk agreed in December to let the EU run the stress test the union offers to all tech companies before the rules come into effect. Breton said other online platforms would conduct their own stress tests in the coming weeks, but did not name them.

Despite Musk’s claims to the contrary, independent researchers have found that since the company was acquired by billionaire Tesla CEO last year, misinformation and hate speech has been circulating on Twitter. Musk has reinstated notorious election deniers, overhauled Twitter’s verification system and fired much of the staff responsible for moderating posts.

Last month, Breton warned Twitter that it “must not hide from its commitments” after the social media site abandoned the block’s voluntary “code of conduct” on online disinformation, which other social media platforms pledge to support have.

Combating disinformation is legally mandated by the Digital Services Act.

“When laws are passed, Twitter will abide by the laws,” Musk told France 2 TV this week when asked about the DSA.

Breton’s agenda on Friday includes discussions of the EU’s digital rules and upcoming artificial intelligence regulations with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, whose company makes the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT. But a briefing for journalists was canceled.

The DSA is part of a major overhaul of the EU’s digital rulebook designed to force tech companies to clean up their platforms and better protect users online.

European users of major technology platforms will find it easier to report illegal content, such as hate speech, and receive more information about why certain content has been recommended to them.

Violators face fines of up to 6% of annual global sales – which amounts to billions of dollars for some tech giants – or even an operating ban in the EU of 450 million consumers.

Breton also meets with Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, the dominant supplier of semiconductors for AI systems, to discuss the EU chips law to boost the continent’s chip manufacturing industry.

The EU, meanwhile, is putting the finishing touches on its AI law, the world’s first comprehensive set of rules for the new technology, which has sparked both fascination and fears that it could invade privacy, destroy jobs, violate copyright law and more.

Final approval is expected by the end of the year, but will not come into effect until two years later. Breton has proposed a voluntary “AI Pact” to help companies prepare for adoption.

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