dereksagehorn
Interested in figuring out how to build better housing, transit and cities. Construction lawyer for CAHSR; advocate for East Bay for Everyone. Oakland.
- Amazing image from Mel Scott of the Berkeley Planning Department in the 60s.
- It takes the T-Third 4 scheduled minutes to travel 3 blocks between 4th and Brannan and 4th and King after exiting the Central Subway. The multi-phase signal with pedestrian islands (seen along Line 3 in Montpellier) to allow absolute transit signal priority is right there as a fix.
- there is an institutional desire at SFMTA to provide pedestrians the ability to cross in a single phase w/o getting stopped at island. The trade off is that the LRV that travels at 45mph in the subway crawls at 4mph when it hits the surface. We might be able to learn from Dutch and French here.
- Interestingly enough SFMTA uses the multi phase signal island design for the E Line. Why can’t this be use for other transit lane intersections…?
- San Diego Unified School District has quietly embarked on a massive program to build educator housing. The focus has been on maximizing the number of units affordable to staff, not on deepest means-tested affordability. voiceofsandiego.org/2026/01/29/w...
- Many school districts in California have explored or even embarked upon educator housing. Many of those districts get snookered by consultants into choosing patchwork financing or LIHTC even with the massive downsides in terms of means-testing and construction costs. SDUSD has gone a different way.
- The initial program is 2500 units of jointly developed homes on district land. But SDUSD wants to pursue 2nd phase build out of bond/tax financed construction via a SB 440 (Nancy Skinner) Regional Finance Agency. That allows SDUSD to avoid oversubscribed LIHTC pipeline and construction costs.
- One of the YIMBY SDUSD trustees explicitly cites a junket to Vienna as inspiration. IMO, the focus on delivering broad benefits, using simple capital stacks, incremental scaling, and high density is more consistent with actual Viennese social housing than many other orgs that fixate on Vienna.
- North Concord (1995) & Dublin/Pleasanton (1997) extensions included a bunch of aspirational retail and station space. We knew that programming large station spaces in suburban locations was not cost effective 30 years ago but bc we defer design to local govts we’ve never learned the lesson.
- The exceptions might be eBART stations at Pittsburg and Antioch, where freeway median geometry constrained excess. Where there isn’t a spatial constraint, however, local governments leading design tend to get starry-eyed about the need for grand station architecture.
