Las Urbanistas

By Carol Lloyd, Special to SF Gate; Friday, March 23, 2007

How did they get that?

I’d often heard the same question, from friends or readers, when talking about newly built affordable housing in the Bay Area. Sure, the lion’s share of new construction isn’t close to affordable (unless you’ve got some seriously deep pockets or a generous relative with same), but there are exceptions. Someone is moving into all those below-market-rate units and affordable-housing projects with their teakettles and toothbrushes. Someone is getting one of those sweetheart, first-time-buyer loans.

Over the years, I’d also heard plenty of theories about who was getting these deals — my favorite coming from a friend who speculated sotto voce, “Those units are never going to regular people — they’re just for the children of politicians and city officials — people in the know.”

The truth seems to be quite a bit less sexy than my conspiratorial friend imagined, though after some research one can see how only people “in the know” would dare venture into the marshland of affordable-housing opportunities. It’s not that any one program is so difficult to comprehend — it’s just that there are a lot of different first-time home-buyer programs administered by a number of agencies and businesses, each with its own focus, eligibility requirements, limitations and application processes.

If you’re serious about taking advantage of these deals, it helps to be thorough, to apply to as many as you are eligible for and to stay on top of the process to find out about the next great project or program. Affordable-housing projects usually take applications within a narrow time frame. And even home-loan programs may come and go as new programs are created.

So to aid those who have always dreamed of hitting the affordable-housing jackpot (or those who simply want to know enough to know it’s not for them), I waded into the acronym-filled waters, interviewed some experts who know every shortcut and pitfall and tried to figure out the lay of the land.

The first thing to know about the world of affordable housing is that it comes in many forms — rental, homeownership and first-time-buyer loans. For the purposes of this column, I’m only going to talk about the opportunities geared toward homeownership — which includes discounted housing, loans and grants.

Official Affordable Housing

Winning a unit in an affordable-housing lottery is probably the most obvious way to get in on homeownership, but it’s not necessarily easy. Typically, the programs require buyers to go through buyer-education classes and fill out more paperwork than is usual for buying a home. Depending on the city, the programs may require that the buyer share “equity” with the city or a nonprofit in accord with various formulas.

There also may be other limitations on the purchase and use of the property. For instance, in San Francisco, below-market-rate housing requires that purchasers own their homes for 50 years before they are allowed to reap the appreciated profit from a sale. The program — like many others — also requires that buyers occupy the home at all times, never renting it out. Similarly, Northern California Land Trust, an Oakland-based nonprofit that creates “shared equity” affordable housing, requires that buyers agree to permanently give up profiting from their home, to keep that home permanently affordable for the community.

Despite such limitations, getting an affordable-housing unit tends to be extremely competitive. For example, recently the Infinity — the luxury condo tower on Rincon Hill — held a lottery for its below-market-rate units, built off-site on Seventh Street. Four thousand people threw in their lots for only 170 units — one of the biggest affordable-homeownership lotteries in recent years. And even when owners do hit the jackpot, the complexity of buying into a market-rate building with a below-market-rate income can be complicated — as illustrated by the cautionary tale recounted in a previous column.

In San Francisco, the best place to find out about projects with below-market-rate housing is the Mayor’s Office of Housing Web site and the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency. In Berkeley, the Housing Department maintains information about their affordable condominiums and limited-equity coops. In Oakland, there is no office to administer affordable homeownership, but the city Web site keeps a good list of developments underway.

Indeed, nearly every city provides some sort of housing law that encourages, if not requires, the development of affordable housing. This may be “inclusionary housing” — in which a required percentage of affordable housing is built by developers or by nonprofit agencies who specialize in affordable housing projects for both rental and ownership. Such policies usually don’t require a developer to sell the same type of house to a moderate-to-low-income family for less than market rate. Instead, inclusionary homes may be apartments or smaller for-sale or rental homes. Cities also sometimes develop their own projects.

As in all real estate searches, your first step is to focus on what you really want and where you want to live — to prepare yourself for that particular market.

Getting a Good Deal From Market Housing

If you can’t manage to win the lottery or stomach the idea of limitations on your equity, then you might decide to go straight to the developers that build more affordable housing in the Bay Area and get on their advance lists. According to Jack Robertson, president of A. F. Evans Development, some eager home-shoppers contact developers directly far in advance of a project’s completion.

“Usually, they are the first people to get called. And the first units that sell have the best pricing because as the project gets nearer to completion, we can ratchet up the prices,” says Robertson.

The company, which built the below-market-rate units for the Infinity, builds more affordable projects than many other local condo developers. Currently, there are five projects in San Francisco, Oakland and Pittsburg to be completed this year, with nearly 500 units coming on line with prices ranging from the high $300,000s to $600,000. (But in a down market — like last fall’s — the early buyers may have missed out on the desperation incentives given to latecomers, including trips to Hawaii and high-end finishes. It all depends on the market.)

Figuring Out How to Pay for It

Another source of information about affordable-housing opportunities is the California Housing Finance Agency, which provides information about a number of first-time home-buyer loans and down-payment assistance programs. Although getting a secondary loan to help with a down payment or an especially low interest rate might not seem as miraculous as winning a homeownership lottery, in the long run these loans may offer an even greater and less constrained form of assistance. There are also federal programs, like HUD’s Homeownership Voucher Program (though many public housing agencies don’t participate in it), as well as specialized programs created by particular lenders.

Finally, some businesses, schools and hospitals in the area are taking on the task of helping their employees buy homes in the form of secondary loans and down-payment assistance. Although many of these perks are offered as recruitment tools, it can’t hurt to inquire and educate your employer in the process. According to Ed Obuchowski, president of Bank of San Francisco, these programs have been extremely successful in helping employers retain qualified staff.

Wherever your search takes you, remember that all real estate pursuits are fraught with complexity, so it’s wise to do your research, stay calm and keep your eyes peeled for the next program or project coming on line. If the value of real estate is based on location-location-location, the trick to finding affordable housing is all about timing-timing-timing.

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William McDonough and Partners

In San Bruno, Calif., a building holding offices for the Gap is also home to a coastal oak savannah landscape.

CARMEL VALLEY, Calif. — It is the green season, when the rains give way to a landscape of renewal, and gardeners clutching copies of Sunset magazine’s Western Garden Book emerge exultantly from their winter dens.

Theodore Rigby for The New York Times
Cooper Scollan, who is managing the green roof project for the academy, planting one of the more than 50,000 trays that will be placed on its roof.

In this place where the political climate, too, is green, it is perhaps not surprising to encounter a hardy new perennial in the world of horticulture — the green roof gardener.

While others nearby toil over grapes and artichokes, Cooper Scollan spends his days hunched over some 1.7 million baby sedum and other native plants destined for hillocks atop the green roof at the new California Academy of Sciences building, nearing completion in Golden Gate Park.

Mr. Scollan, 30, is a green collar worker, responsible for the safety and well-being of what soon will be the largest continuous swatch of vegetation in San Francisco. The academy, designed by the architect Renzo Piano, whom Mr. Scollan has seen only on television, will feature the country’s most technically ambitious eco-roof, the latest example of what is known in highbrow circles as “regenerative” or “living” architecture.

It is a growing movement that originated in Germany and now includes, to name a few, bottlebrush grasses and wild rye atop Chicago City Hall, succulents on the 10-acre roof of Ford’s River Rouge truck plant in Dearborn, Mich., flowering chives and dianthus on the Bronx County building in New York, and, at an office building for the Gap in San Bruno, Calif., a coastal oak savannah landscape.

Though green roofs are hardly new — think of the fabled hanging gardens of Babylon — eco-roofs may represent gardening’s next frontier, as cities from Los Angeles to Chicago offer incentives, including fast-tracking development, to builders who forgo drab stretches of concrete in favor of a living roof. The reasons are pure Al Gore: the new California Academy of Sciences roof is expected to reduce storm water run-off by half. That water will then be used, instead of potable water, to flush toilets.

The design is also calculated to prevent the release of more than 405,000 pounds of greenhouse gases and substantially reduce the urban “heat island” generated by roads, sidewalks and parking lots.

More poetically for Mr. Scollan, who is fond of comparing his favorite plant, the towering blue “Pride of Tenerife,” to Marge Simpson’s hair, the poppies, strawberries, sedum and other California native plants on the roof will provide a wildlife park in the sky protected from windblown weeds and the vagaries of man. Should all go well, it will also attract the endangered San Bruno elfin butterfly, a coppery brown temptress.

Like meditation, he said, gardening is repetitive yet constantly changing. “Plants, like insects, metamorphize,” he philosophized, “transforming from a tangled mass of cells into a fig hanging in midair.”

As nursery manager for Rana Creek Habitat Restoration, an ecological design firm, Mr. Scollan is one of a growing number of green roof gardeners. According to a survey last year by Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, a nonprofit industry association based in Toronto, over 3 million square feet of green roofs were planted in North America in 2005, worth about $60 to $80 million. This year growth is expected to rise 125 percent, between 6 and 7 million square feet, said Steven Peck, the group’s founder.

Gardeners like Mr. Scollan are tackling challenges at once similar and distinct from “terrestrial” gardening, in the words of Ed Snodgrass, a pioneering green roof nurseryman in Maryland who writes an “Ask Ed” column for green roofs.com and is the author of the definitive “Green Roof Plants: A Resource and Planting Guide” (Timber Press, 2006).

Mr. Scollan checks his brood each morning, when this stunningly pristine valley is still swaddled in mist. The plants’ environmental pedigree does not fend off nature’s whims: Mr. Scollan buys copious amounts of chunky peanut butter to put in mousetraps — 20 traps a week — to discourage mice from dining on mosses or on the prunella, a plant with tubular purple flowers beloved by hummingbirds.

Mr. Scollan personally raised the prunella from seed, hand-collected in Point Reyes, starting with a couple of hundred that, in less than a year, have generated more than 200,000 plants.

Although his enemies are typical — mites and aphids are high on the hit list — the unusual configuration of the roof has required horticultural derring-do. Mr. Piano’s third-story design resembles the downhill ski run at the Winter Olympics: it includes seven steep undulating hills. (Mr. Piano, who designed the new building for The New York Times, created his first green roof for a project in Berlin.)

Plants will adhere to the daunting slopes by way of 50,000 “bio trays,” biodegradable planters made from coconut fibers that allow roots to attach the trays to one another and also to the soil. (A waterproof membrane and fabric mats protect the roof from water.). As on all large green roofs, the soil is not dirt exactly but a gravel-like growing medium of granulated pumice, shales, clays and other minerals.

Paul Kephart, the founder of Rana Creek, calls the roof “the most challenging vegetative structure in the world.” The need for gardening ingenuity is likely to increase as green architecture gets ever more sophisticated, Mr. Kephart said. “The cultural idea of a beautiful place now includes ecology, aligning nature’s life cycles to ours,” he said.

Although less prone to weeds than earthbound gardens, green roofs tend to be drier and windier, said Mr. Snodgrass, a fifth-generation alfalfa farmer who saw a market niche and established one of the country’s first green roof nurseries. The logistics of roof gardening — in the case of the California Academy of Sciences, 2.6 million pounds of plants and soil — require immense forethought, especially the issue of weed-hauling.

“You do need to think about how you will get everything on and off the roof,” said Mr. Snodgrass. “It’s a whole different world than pulling up to the sidewalk in a pickup truck.”

Daydreaming while gardening is not a good strategy. “You have to be mindful that there’s an edge,” he said.

If drought-tolerant green roof grasses and other plants are a new American crop, pioneers like Mr. Scollan, who carries a pruner, assorted plastic frogs and a beat-up copy of Scientific American in his Honda, are brave new harvesters. His passion for plants started early: his mother has a green thumb. He first studied ornithology, including a stint in Central and South America with Roger Tory Peterson, who, he recalled, “could hear an Eastern meadowlark a quarter mile away with the radio on.”

Green architecture may one day be the equivalent of medieval cathedrals, but with living things the architectural inspiration, rather than soaring stone and glass.

For Mr. Scollan, creating life for the tops of buildings is “Jack and the Beanstalk” redux, but with an eco-twist. “Plants are the true magicians,” he said. “With just a few seeds sown, a whole new world is grown in the sky.”