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Detestable New Apartment Complex Now Open For Community Criticism

Ever since the artisanally-located 299 Valencia sold out, I've been in the market for a new development to scowl at.

NeMa looked promising, with all their egregious and dated hipster appropriation, but their Mid-Market address was far too downtown for my decidedly tony Mission palette.  And there was whateverthefuckthey'rebuilding on the corner of 19th and Valencia, which will assuredly charge 650,000+ dollars (also payable in not-Zygna stock options) for a doghouse-sized studio, but, alas, it's hard to roll my eyes out of their sockets over a building still in the plywood phase.

However, I think I found my dream pariah: Vara, the soon-to-be-launched Mactastic crash pad at 15th and Mission, with studio apartments going for The Totally Not Dogshit rate of $2675/month.  Curbed SF has all the alluring details:

The wave of gentrification continues in the Mission. Vara, a 202-unit apartment complex with 40 below market rate units, readies to hit the market. The location at the corner of 15th and Mission streets is close to BART and several Muni lines, as well as the very popular Valencia Street. The studio, 1-, 2-, and 3-bedroom units will feature gourmet kitchens, in-unit washer/dryers, free Wi-Fi and walk-in closets. Building amenities include on-site carsharing, fitness center, and a clubhouse. Cats and dogs are also welcome, although breed restrictions apply. The units will start at $2675 for a studio, and up to $4830 for a 3 bedroom.

Curbed rhetorically asks, “Will this new rental building in the Mission face scrutiny?”  With reclaimed wood, the aforementioned Totally Not Dogshit rents, and wall art celebrating the basement's “Internet Ready Worker's Union” (which, ugh), we in turn answer, “Sure?”

[Curbed]

Anti-Gentrification Block Party to Provide Rare Opportunity to Beat Candy Out of Google Buses

I'm mostly interested in the “Google bus pinatas” (I love candy), but the rest of the copy reads:

In the last several decades, thousands of people have been displaced from the Mission District due to evictions, high rents, rising cost of living, transportation costs, and a lack of access to employment and education. In the last several years, rent for many has almost doubled. This Cinco de Mayo, (May 5th), join with Mission residents to speak out and gather to build a culture of resistance against gentrification in San Francisco and beyond.

The 5 Stages of Twitter Grieving in 30 Minutes or Less

Renowned film critic and one-time Uptown Almanac commenter Roger Ebert passed away earlier today. A sad day for movie-buffs, journalists, and American culture alike.  But in keeping true to its instantaneous, flash-in-the-pan fashion, Twitter has stepped through the grieving process with unparallelled quickness:

1. Denial

2. Praise

3. Viral Lift

4. Self-Congratulation

5. Jose Canseco (inevitably)

New Neighborhood Grocer Will Be Just Like Bi-Rite, Only, Like, Convenient and Stuff

Taking this whole “slow food” thing a bit too literally, the folks behind Local Mission Market are half a year past their originally-planned opening date—and their forthcoming 22nd and Harrison market is still enshrouded in plywood.  But they're nevertheless working hard on opening, and knowing better than to let a fresh plate of foodie buzz go cold, they laid out exactly how the future of Mission District markets will look to the critical eye of The Weekly:

How will the store be laid out?

It's going to be a full-service grocery store. There will be a produce section, a butcher, a fishmonger, and cheesemonger, all from the same sources we use at Local Mission Eatery and Local's Corner. A bulk section, wine and beer (if we get the permits), candies, brittles, dried fruits and local nuts. Everything you would expect to find at a European grocery store, we'll have here. Tomato sauce, apple sauce, ketchup, mustard, pasta, crackers, breads — all house-made from scratch, just like we do at the restaurants.

What is going to differentiate you from the other stores and markets around town?

From the initial concept, it was clear that we needed to make this convenient. Bi-Rite is one of the great grocers in the country, but it's hard to shop at Bi-Rite. We're not going to have more parking, so how can we make it easier to buy the food that we want to get to people? We are going to have an online web store that will make it easier for people to buy what they need. It will reflect what is in stock, and we'll have a pickup area to make it more convenient.

Oh man, just the other day I was in Bi-Rite dropping a small fortune on clementines and I was all, “Damn, this would be so much easier if I could order these with my phone in Dolores Park and pick 'em up at will call so I could ensure they don't sell out before I walk half a block.”  Great minds!

[SF Weekly | Photo by Nat]

Future Mugging Victim Cruises Capp Street With Google Glasses, Bluetooth, and iPhone

Earlier today, this hyper-connected cyborg cruised up and down Capp Street wearing Google Glasses, a bluetooth, and holding an iPhone, frequently jumping off the sidewalk and walking down the middle of the street (pictured above).  One can only assume this human trifecta of douchebaggery was field testing the hardware, but the choice of location seemed particularly poor.  I guess his Google Glasses don't have a crime statistics overlay for his heads up display map.

Apple Picking Straight Out of Your Hand While Napping In Your Car

A few weeks ago, I read that iPhone theft had become so common in SF that thieves had started (hilariously?) referring to it as “Apple picking.”  Now it seems thieves are breaking into people's vehicles around 18th and Valencia while they take early morning booze-naps to pick apples:

[My friend] got home super late a few days ago & realized she didn’t have the keys to her apartment. story goes, she didn’t want to wake her roommates, & decided to just sleep in her car for a few hours. she woke up when she heard her car door opening & felt her phone being taken straight out of her hand. when she looked up, some dude was running from her car with her phone. apparently, dude had been watching her, realized she was asleep & decided to open her car door & take her phone straight out of her hand, all in broad daylight. the whole time she was telling me this story, she kept reiterating how it’s her fault for being irresponsible, & yeah she probably should have made sure her doors were locked, but that has to be one of the most absurd phone jacking stories i’ve ever heard. who the hell even thinks about stealing a phone from someone while they’re holding their phone in their hand inside their car in broad daylight?!

I guess it's time to start sleeping with a can of mace under your car dash?

[ohheykiran]

John Avalos's Twitter Account Hacked By People Who Think John Avalos's Supporters Could Stand to Lose A Few Pounds

Earlier this morning, former mayoral candidate and current San Francisco Supervisor John Avalos's Twitter account was phished by an elite team of weight-conscious hackers.  In a probably not exclusive DM to Uptown Almanac, Avalos's hackers asked if we saw this pic of us, noting the picture was pretty “lol”.  They then went on to imply all Avalos's fans and followers were fat, suggesting we look into “the fastest ways to lose body fat in 2 weeks” (corrected for grammar).  Bummer, dude.

Did Mark Zuckerberg Pay $10 Million to Move to the Mission?

When news broke in mid-October that Facebook founder and one-time MDMA user Mark Zuckerberg moved to the Mission District, it stirred quite a bit of debate as to where exactly he moved and what it meant for the neighborhood.  Over the weekend, The Wall Street Journal seemed to unknowingly figure it all out:

A 5,542-square-foot home in San Francisco’s Mission District has sold for $9,999,000, according to public records.  The price could be a record for the increasingly trendy neighborhood, based on a search of the San Francisco Multiple Listing Service’s records for the last 30 years.

The price is breaking new ground,” says real estate agent Dennis Otto of Pacific Union International, who was not involved in the deal.  “It speaks to the desirability of the location.” The location in recent years has gone from being the grittier side of San Francisco to one that is now a favorite with the young tech crowd, as it offers easy access to the freeway connecting the city and Silicon Valley as well as to an ever growing number of artisanal chocolate shops and hipster coffee outlets.

The article doesn't mention the address or Zuckerberg, but does say it was purchased by SFRP LLC. from Cary S. Collins.  Through some rather trivial Googling, it would appear the house is 3450 21st Street (at Dolores), which was originally purchased for $1.2m in 1997 and only estimated to be worth $3.2m by Zillow, meaning the holding company—registered by a lawyer who specializes in forming trusts for rich folks—overpaid by nearly $6.8m for the privilege of quick access to artisanal chocolate.

All this info matches up with the info dropped by SocketSite over the fall, with the exception of a half-block discrepancy in their reported address:

While Zuckerberg does appear to have bought a home in San Francisco, according to a plugged-in source and due diligence, the house in question is actually atop Liberty Hill on the non-Mission side of Dolores. The property was never openly listed for sale, for which Zuckerberg paid a premium, and Zuckerberg's name is not attached to the house.

Okay, so what if was him?  After all, $10 million is nothing to the kid—especially considering he paid double that to shut down complaints about privacy “concerns.”  However, it's less about the man himself and more the trend it signals.  As Curbed put it:

The Mission has already made news for asserting itself as the latest hot 'nabe. It's a bit of a Cinderella story: What was once a lowly stepchild, cowering in the shadow of real estate giants Noe and Castro, has emerged…and suitors are lining up. Earlier this year Redfin predicted the Mission would be among Bay Area locations to witness the steepest home price increases in 2013. […] With “easy access to the freeway connecting the city and Silicon Valley,” plus SF's local tech corporations setting up shop nearby and the full gamut of new shops and eateries (who could forget “gourmet gulch?”), the Mission is officially the hottest neighborhood for residential real estate.

Better lock in those rent-controlled apartments, folks.  It's going to be a brutal year.

Update: A couple of commenters and email tipsters put Zuckerberg safely in Noe/Castro at 3660 21st Street—not the $10M property originally mentioned, but a couple blocks west.  This property was sold for $3M in May (only $1.2M over the asking price) and registered to a Palo Alto lawyer who specializes in aiding corporate execs with estate planning, so all that matches up.

Should this update prove to be true, it makes the record-breaking $9,999,000 sale all the more curious.  Who the hell else threw a bonus $6.8M at a Mission District address?  Is paying over three times the home's value really what it takes for lowly non-Time's Man Of the Year mega-millionaires to score a crash pad these days?

It seems 21st Street is becoming San Francisco's new billionaire's row.  Anyone want to go halvsies on opening a new artisanal chocolate shop?

Update II: It seems Mark bought both houses, because why the hell not?

[WSJ, via Curbed]

Frontierism 2.0

Google Buses have been around for a while, but with the mobile boom raising rents and giving way to weird new semi-spiced fusion restaurants, they are suddenly BIG NEWS.  So big that the controversy surrounding them has leaped form humble stencils outside of coffeeshops to the likes of NY Mag.  And now the London Review of Books is getting in the mix with an essay by 30+ year San Franciscan Rebecca Solnit.

It's long and comprehensive, tackling more than I could possible summarize in an early morning blog post.  But it goes beyond the usual whine of rental costs and Those Damn Kids With Their Cellamaphones and tries to give the boom some historical context.  So rather than pick out some highlights, I'll just leave you with the first few paragraphs and encourage you to read on:

The buses roll up to San Francisco’s bus stops in the morning and evening, but they are unmarked, or nearly so, and not for the public. They have no signs or have discreet acronyms on the front windshield, and because they also have no rear doors they ingest and disgorge their passengers slowly, while the brightly lit funky orange public buses wait behind them. The luxury coach passengers ride for free and many take out their laptops and begin their work day on board; there is of course wifi. Most of them are gleaming white, with dark-tinted windows, like limousines, and some days I think of them as the spaceships on which our alien overlords have landed to rule over us.

Other days I think of them as the company buses by which the coal miners get deposited at the minehead, and the work schedule involved would make a pit owner feel at home. Silicon Valley has long been famous for its endless work hours, for sucking in the young for decades of sixty or seventy-hour weeks, and the much celebrated perks on many jobsites – nap rooms, chefs, gyms, laundry – are meant to make spending most of your life at work less hideous. The biotech industry is following the same game plan. There are hundreds of luxury buses serving mega-corporations down the peninsula, but we refer to them in the singular, as the Google Bus, and we – by which I mean people I know, people who’ve lived here a while, and mostly people who don’t work in the industry – talk about them a lot. Parisians probably talked about the Prussian army a lot too, in the day.

My brother says that the first time he saw one unload its riders he thought they were German tourists – neatly dressed, uncool, a little out of place, blinking in the light as they emerged from their pod. The tech workers, many of them new to the region, are mostly white or Asian male nerds in their twenties and thirties; you often hear that to be over fifty in that world is to be a fossil, and the two founders of Google (currently tied for 13th richest person on earth) are not yet forty.

Another friend of mine told me a story about the Apple bus from when he worked for Apple Inc. Once a driver went rogue, dropping off the majority of his passengers as intended at the main Apple campus, and then rolling on towards San Jose instead of stopping at the satellite location, but the passengers were tech people, so withdrawn from direct, abrupt, interventionary communications that they just sat there as he drove many miles past their worksite and eventually dumped them on the street in a slum south of the new power centre of the world. At that point, I think, they called headquarters: another, more obedient bus driver was dispatched. I told the story to another friend and we joked about whether they then texted headquarters to get the email addresses of the people sitting next to them: this is a culture that has created many new ways for us to contact one another and atrophied most of the old ones, notably speaking to the people around you. All these youngish people are on the Google Bus because they want to live in San Francisco, city of promenading and mingling, but they seem as likely to rub these things out as to participate in them.

Read on.

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