For a lot of property owners, the homes we own are our most valuable assets. They’re also a major pain and constant cash drain.

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From big-ticket items like faltering foundations and burst sewer pipes to simpler fixes like scratched floors and chipped paint, our homes are regularly in need of repair. Few of us have the tools and DIY skills to do it all. And lately, it’s been challenging even to find pros to do the work.

Enter startups. Against a backdrop of rising property values, an aging housing stock, and labor shortages among home services providers, investors have been pouring money into upstart companies aiming to help with upgrading and maintaining properties.

A Crunchbase analysis of funding to US home services-focused startups in the past year found at least $1.4 billion across 23 rounds (see funding round list). We put together a sample list of companies funded in the past year, shown below:

Where the money is going

By far the largest funding recipient is ServiceTitan, a provider of software for home service contractors in plumbing, HVAC, electrical and other specialties to generate leads and close sales. The Glendale, California-based company, founded by two sons of immigrants who built contracting businesses, raised $500 million in a March Series F round, bringing total funding to over $1 billion.

Next up is Thumbtack, an app for finding and hiring local professionals that is most popular for home services. The San Francisco-based company closed a $275 million late-stage round last month, bringing total known funding to nearly $700 million.

Neither ServiceTitan nor Thumbtack are new startups, having been founded in 2012 and 2008, respectively. However, there are also some newer players raising sizable rounds.

Super, provider of subscription plans to cover appliance and home systems breakdowns, raised a $50 million Series C in May. And Chicago-based HomeX, a 4-year-old startup that provides virtual support for home repair troubleshooting, raised its first reported institutional round of $90 million in April.

In announcing the round, HomeX founder and CEO Michael Werner pointed to home services as a $500 billion market that “remains highly fragmented and needs meaningful innovation.” He pitches his startup as a player that could bring to home services some of the kinds of transformations that telemedicine has brought to health care, by cutting down on costly in-person service calls.

HomeX isn’t the only company looking to make home services a more virtual business. HOVER raised a $60 million Series D in November to build up its service, which allows smartphone users to make an interactive 3D model of any property to measure, design and estimate home improvement projects.

Faster, cheaper, better… or at least available

As with startups in other sectors, home services upstarts are mostly marketing their offerings as a faster, cheaper or better solution than incumbents. But in the current market — with many contractors seeing more demand than they can meet — sometimes the killer app is simply having someone available to do the work.

With many areas of the economy facing labor shortages, home services are no exception. Operators of contracting businesses in HVAC, plumbing, roofing and other areas are reporting difficulty hiring and retaining employees in major markets across the country.

Home repair and remodeling costs have also been spiking, impacted by greater consumer demand and supply chain disruptions beginning amid the pandemic, alongside labor shortages.

Public markets like the space, too

Public markets also seem pretty convinced we’ll be shelling out more for home repairs and renovations.

Shares of both The Home Depot and Lowe’s — two companies seen as a barometer for consumer enthusiasm around home upgrades — are trading at around all-time highs. That’s likely another factor boosting venture interest in home services, indicative that public investors would be receptive to companies with innovative approaches to an already growing space.

Plus, our homes aren’t maintaining themselves. (Though it would be really nice if a truly innovative startup came up with a way to do just that.)

Illustration: Dom Guzman

Stay up to date with recent funding rounds, acquisitions, and more with the Crunchbase Daily.

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In a shocking and possibly illegal act of public absurdity, eight members of the board of directors voted to stop the construction of 495 new housing units on the site of a parking lot in the South of Market neighborhood. They did this by supporting a call for the project’s Environmental Impact Report (EIR) last Tuesday.

Regardless of the fact that San Francisco needs fewer parking spaces and more residential units – especially high-density apartment complexes in walkable neighborhoods on public transport routes to alleviate the existential threat posed by global warming. No, get that: the project’s opponents used some environmental protection practice to stop a good, sustainable project that would bring dozens of affordable units to the neighborhood.

“This single project would create more homes than many districts in our city have built in the last 10 years,” said supervisor Matt Haney, who represents SOMA and supports the project, in an interview.

Given the severe housing shortage in San Francisco, 27 stories of new homes on 28,790 square feet of land currently used for car parking could be a welcome addition. Lower Austria. Opponents of the proposed residential tower at 469 Stevenson tossed everything but the kitchen sink at the project in their determined effort to stop it.

Build Inc.’s 469 Stevenson project would not only replace one parking lot with housing, but also include 73 affordable units below market, 40% of which would be reserved for current residents of the city.

“Some of the community benefits that this project brings with it include 4,000 square feet of ground floor retail space dedicated to local nonprofits and retailers,” Lou Vasquez, General Manager of Build Inc. told supervisors. “Half of this is rented to tenants for $ 1 a year and the other half for $ 1 a foot, which is well below current market prices.”

In addition, Vasquez said the project would provide $ 579,000 in funding for community programs, a lot with the capacity for up to 20 additional affordable units, an ancillary fee “equivalent to 50 additional units, and funding for the arts, homeless services, and local employment programs .

Unfortunately, these benefits have not been important to the opposition, which blames private development and housing market development for evil gentrification and a host of other evils.

During Tuesday’s supervisory board hearing, opponents of the project worried about soil integrity and the potential seismic hazard.

They feared that the building’s shadow might spoil the vibrancy of the sparsely populated Mint Plaza.

They vaguely claimed that new housing for the current residents of the city might somehow reduce the historical sites in the area.

They lamented the dreaded specter of gentrification, as if the current use of the site as a valet parking with 176 parking spaces for Nordstrom buyers would benefit communities struggling with housing shortages.

Most of the concerns had nothing to do with the environment, but that hardly matters. If you want to stop a project, abuse of some aspect of California’s Environmental Quality Act is usually the most effective way.

CEQA, signed by Governor Ronald Reagan in 1970, requires local governments to consider a project’s environmental impact, usually through the EIR process. It has been used to block or delay bike lanes, homeless shelters, housing developments, university campuses, and hospitals. It provides a bottleneck for opponents to cause significant delays, with bogus environmental concerns being a fig leaf for NIMBY obstructionism.

It usually takes a CEQA-based lawsuit to cover up progress. However, 469 Stevenson’s opponents found an easier way. Their confused litany of complaints, disguised as an appeal by the EIR, convinced the majority of the overseers. The board voted 8-3 against the project, outweighing Haney’s support.

“I don’t think gentrification is preventing Nordstrom from holding valet parking,” Haney said, noting that the project had many community supporters. “If people are afraid of gentrification, it would help if they built apartments in their neighborhoods. One of the main reasons why we are building so many apartments in SOMA is that other parts of the city are not building apartments. “

On October 2, managers unanimously rejected a project at 450 O’Farrell St., fearing that the 316 micro-unit complex could become “dormitories” for technicians.

“That just doesn’t suit me,” said Supervisor Catherine Stefani, who supported the 469 Stevenson Project along with Haney and Supervisor Ahsha Safaí. “We just turned down a proposed project at O’Farrell for non-family housing, and this adds family housing to our portfolio. I just don’t understand how we can ever build apartments in this city if we continue to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. “

Earlier this month, The City missed an opportunity to convert a Japantown hotel into permanent housing for the homeless after the hotel owner pulled out in the face of opposition from NIMBY. All of this seems strange behavior in a city with 8,000 homeless people and some of the highest rents in the country.

Fortunately, the board’s outrageous vote did not go unnoticed. Housing officials made angry on Twitter, pointing out the absurdity of the decision.

“The San Francisco board of directors used a bill signed by Ronald Reagan to halt a union-backed housing project in the Nordstrom parking lot, citing shadows and gentrification,” tweeted housing attorney Jordan Grimes. “That sentence is both completely correct and completely insane.”

“A geotechnical analysis is indeed required in the CEQA,” tweeted supervisor Myrna Melgar, justifying her vote against the project to critics who accused her of abusing an election promise to support more housing.

The bizarre decision also caused a stir in Sacramento. The San Francisco Chronicle reported Thursday that the California Department of Housing and Community Development is investigating whether the decision may have violated state laws. One of the laws in question? CEQA.

“We want to make sure this project and projects get approved across the state,” Gustavo Velasquez, state housing director, told Chronicle’s JK Dineen. “Whenever one of these cases comes up, we will act carefully if it falls within our remit.”

“If prosecutors find the vote violates state housing law, the city would receive a warning,” Dineen wrote. “If the city still doesn’t approve the housing project, the attorney general could file a lawsuit.”

It’s a sad day that you must pray that the attorney general will sue your city for common sense to prevail. But such is the state of affairs in San Francisco, a besieged city influenced by incompetents who seem to believe they can solve the housing affordability crisis by killing good parking lot preservation projects.

Gil Duran is the opinion editor of the San Francisco Examiner. gduran@sfexaminer.com

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A vote by the San Francisco Board of Directors on Tuesday rejecting a new housing development in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood was criticized by Mayor London Breed.

The development, a 495-unit apartment complex, about a quarter of which is reserved for “affordable” units as required by the affordable housing mandates, was in a parking lot on Stevenson and Sixth Streets near the Suggested Powell Street BART station.

But a majority of overseers voted against the proposal, another focal point in the so-called “NIMBY vs. YIMBY” debate on development – an issue that has led one of America’s most expensive cities to rent and own homes.

Of the 11 seated supervisors, the three who assisted development are District 6 Supervisor Matt Haney, District 2 Supervisor Catherine Stefani, and District 11 Supervisor Ahsha Safai.

The project would have been in the area represented by Haney, who loudly denounced his co-supervisors for his rejection.

“Our city has a massively imbalanced ratio of jobs / apartments,” Haney said Tuesday evening on Twitter. “We approve and build office jobs, but not apartments. It is completely untenable. “

Tonight the board turned down a 495 unit housing project in my district in a parking lot on Stevenson / 6th.
It was about 24% affordable with 100+ affordable units, close to public transportation, communal areas on the ground floor, and extensive neighborhood support from residents and executives.

– Matt Haney (@MattHaneySF) October 27, 2021

He also argued that the project created jobs for construction workers, citing “comprehensive neighborhood help” for construction. (Haney did not immediately respond to a request for comment from SFGATE.)

Mayor London Breed agreed, held the eight supervisors who opposed the vote accountable and called their vote on Twitter part of an “anti-housing ideology”. Preston as “vague”.

Shortly after the vote, Stefani tweeted: “We have to stop allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good.”

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Tiny homes didn’t affect the U.S. housing and homeless crisis as some had predicted, but after years of resistance, San Francisco will install the housing in two parking lots the city has rented.

Seventy of the units – 64 square feet each – will be built at 33 Gough Street, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The land has been a city-sanctioned “safe sleeping village” with 44 tents for the homeless since December.

The tiny houses will be similar to those in Oakland and San Jose, the report said.

Each tiny home has a steel frame and 2 inch thick walls. The living units have a desk, a bed and a window and are heated. The property will have dining areas, storage rooms and bathrooms.

Nonprofits, DignityMoves, and Tipping Point Community will fund the $ 1.7 million cost to build and build the homes, the report said. The structures will remain on the property for 18 months until the city’s lease for the parking spaces expires. It is not clear what will happen after that.

Los Angeles’ efforts to install tiny homes for the homeless last winter sparked a backlash when a report showed that each 64-square-foot home would cost $ 130,000, if you factor in the infrastructure necessary to create it the community is required. The production of the structures should only cost around 8,500 pieces.

San Francisco has over 8,000 homeless, a number that has likely increased during the pandemic, experts said. The city will be raised around $ 800 million in funding to solve the problem, monies from a new tax along with state and federal dollars.

In addition to the tiny houses, city officials are also considering buying more properties for the homeless, including the potential to use empty apartments across the city and opening a RV park, the report said.

“Having your own room and a lockable door makes a huge difference,” said Elizabeth Funk, founder and director of DignityMoves, the Chronicle.

Those currently staying in the tents at 33 Gough Street will be offered spots in the tiny homes if they haven’t found accommodation before they open.

[SFC] – Victoria Pruitt

Contact Victoria Pruitt

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The Bay Area is never short of weird, often astounding, real estate stories, so San Francisco land sales that literally under the bay should come as no surprise.

What’s surprising is that an underwater property is listed for only $ 8,500.

The underwater residential lot in front of the Candlestick Point Recreation Area is 5,001 square feet at 610 Egbert Avenue.

The property is listed by real estate agent Trent Zhu, who auctioned 40 of these underwater lots from the city of San Francisco for $ 5,000 about six years ago. Zhu said the first time he heard about the auction that it was just too cheap to oppose.

Now, he said, the real estate market is so good that he’s trying to get his money back. He says he sees potential in the site, even though he knows there are no guarantees. “San Francisco has a rich history of waterfront development. Much of the Marina District began as a waterfront property prior to 1915, ”the listing says. “… Seller is not sure whether this Wadden Sea can be expanded into a marina, houseboat park, pier or anything else. Buyer is encouraged to check with state, county, and city authorities for the highest and best use of the property. “

An underwater lot is for sale in San Francisco for $ 8,500.

Trent Zhu

Zhu would prefer to sell his 40 lots to a developer at once, but he said he is more and more open to selling them in bulk. He said with all of the residential and commercial development coming to the Hunter’s Point area in the next 10 years, space could be important to the neighborhood.

Just this week, Zhu said he had spoken to a property developer who wanted to check with the city to better understand development opportunities.

The total list price for the 40 lots is $ 375,000, which is a relative bargain considering the average single-family home price in San Francisco is $ 1.5 million.

Zhu said he made many individual offers for the packages, so he doesn’t worry about selling them one by one when it comes to that. “It’s a plan B,” said Zhu.

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The defense will look a little different this season. Most of the staff that will be deployed will return, but there will be some wrinkles. Brandon Staley has been known to be willing to take risks and make some changes.

One of the most significant changes will be the use of two players, one of whom was featured in Derwin James during his rookie season, while veteran cornerback Chris Harris Jr. has dominated cornerback and slot for years.

During his rookie season, James played linebacker, free safety, and sometimes even pass rusher, so the Chargers defense is trying to take full advantage. Also, Harris is thrown into the mix for being a smart player, whom Staley refers to as the defensive coordinator on the field.

“It’s huge,” said an excited Harris in June. “Me and he (James) are like the positional players. I would say obviously only DBs because he and me play in three different positions.”

The safety in the third year will play similarly to his rookie season, but will also be involved in the slot, especially when the team encounters larger receivers or even tight ends. Harris will play outside corner, slot and strong security.

Basically, Harris is in his position when James is in the slot.

“I really coach him on it because he’s something of a linebacker / nickel,” said Harris. “It just increases the speed. We play both the run and the pass in these packages. You have five defensive linemen that the offensive line will have a problem with blocking.”

For Harris it will be a game safety adjustment as he hasn’t done it since his rookie season, but time will help.

“I just have to get used to it,” said Harris. “I usually get out of here and just play corner or nickel, and I’m very comfortable with that. Now I have to move a lot more, communicate properly, learn how to play my corners and so on. ” It’s new to me, but it was fun. ”

When he signed with the Chargers last off-season, Harris said the main reason was that he wanted to play with James. He felt he could mentor him, but he relied on James to help him with the new fold of defense.

“Definitely in that defense,” declared Harris. “We’re just trying to find ways to fill that void, so this is something new. I can use a deeper part of the field because I’m usually like a linebacker in the pits. I see it the way you play in midfield and read the quarterbacks a lot more. That’s something I ask these guys. ”

James is not only enthusiastic about the various moves, but also about playing again. He has only played five games in two seasons with two different training camp injuries.

He played on the field with one goal. During practice on Friday, he intercepted Justin Herbert during a one-on-one against receiver Keenan Allen. On the first day of padded practice, it only took four games for James to deliver a big hit on Justin Jackson’s running back.

“There is always room to grow; you never quite have it in this game, “said James. “You will always find little things that you didn’t know. We work hard. I have a lot of people and a lot of great coaches to help me. It will be fun.”

When there are such moving parts, there is one thing that will be critical.

“A lot of people move around, have more moving parts, and all I can say has to be able to communicate, to communicate more in this system,” explained James. “Oh man. Oh like I said, we all learn and we all grow together.”

During practice, you can hear the players asking each other to speak to each other. There was one game during the week where receiver Keenan Allen stayed wide open and James came off the field and asked, “Why was Kee so open?”

When he was told, James looked at secondary school and said, “Guys, we need to talk out there. We can’t leave the boys so open.”

He had shown real leadership in his first three seasons but this season it comes to fruition. He is the signal caller and the leader of the defense.

“But you’ll see me everywhere,” said James.

Chargers’ defensive coordinator Renaldo Hill knows Harris from her time in Denver, but he really gets to see what James is about while he coaches him. Hill knows how beneficial this could be this season.

“For us, that’s all,” said the defensive coordinator. “Often times people don’t know where these guys are going to compete. We can swap them depending on the down-and-distance or situation. That gives us a lot of flexibility. These guys are locked up. come and meet all the time. They are the lute in the group. They talk about things that could happen within these defenses. It lets us know that they are taking in everything and that they are really receptive to it. ”

Both are the leaders that the defense will look out for during practice and will be the players that the defense will urge to play big games. They will line up across the field according to the matchups, especially if they face Raiders Tight End Darren Waller or Chiefs Tight End Travis Kelce. These are players James will take over.

It’s about matchups and getting players in the best positions to succeed on defense while trying to create confusion for offense.

“They have to find us and be able to plan us and we are going to make it really difficult for them,” Harris said in June.

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For many property owners, our homes are our most valuable asset. They are also a huge pain and a constant drain of money.

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From bulky items like wobbling foundations and burst sewer pipes to simpler repairs like scratched floors and chipped paint, our homes need regular repairs. Few of us have the tools and home improvement skills to do it all. And lately it has even been a challenge to find professionals for the job.

Enter startups. Against the backdrop of rising property values, an aging housing stock, and a labor shortage at home service providers, investors have poured money into emerging companies looking to help modernize and maintain properties.

A crunchbase analysis of funding for US startups focusing on household services last year found at least $ 1.4 billion in 23 rounds (see list of funding rounds). We have compiled an exemplary list of companies that have received funding over the past year, see below:

Where the money is going

By far the largest recipient of funding is ServiceTitan, a provider of home improvement software in the plumbing, HVAC, electrical and other specialty areas to generate leads and close sales. Founded by two sons of immigrants who built contractors, the Glendale, California-based company raised $ 500 million in a Series F round in March for total funding of over $ 1 billion .

Next up is Thumbtack, a local talent finding and hiring app that is most popular for home services. The San Francisco-based company closed a $ 275 million late-stage round last month, bringing the total known funding to nearly $ 700 million.

Neither ServiceTitan nor Thumbtack are new startups that were founded in 2012 and 2008, respectively. However, there are also some newer players who raise substantial rounds.

Super, provider of subscription plans to cover device and home system outages, raised $ 50 million in Series C in May. And Chicago-based HomeX, a four-year-old startup offering virtual home troubleshooting assistance, raised its first reported institutional round of $ 90 million in April.

Announcing the round, HomeX founder and CEO Michael Werner pointed to home services as a $ 500 billion market that “remains highly fragmented and in need of meaningful innovation.” He presents his startup as an actor who could bring some of the transformations telemedicine has brought to healthcare to home services by reducing costly in-person service calls.

HomeX isn’t the only company looking to make home services a more virtual business. HOVER raised $ 60 million for the D Series in November to build its service that enables smartphone users to create an interactive 3D model of any property to measure, design and estimate home improvement projects.

Faster, cheaper, better…. or at least available

As with start-ups in other sectors, start-ups in the home services sector usually market their offers as a faster, cheaper or better solution than established companies. But in the current marketplace – where many contractors see more demand than they can meet – sometimes the killer app is simply having someone available to do the job.

With many sectors of the economy facing labor shortages, domestic services are no exception. Contractor operators in the HVAC, plumbing, roofing and other sectors report difficulties in hiring and retaining employees in key markets across the country.

Home repair and remodeling costs have also skyrocketed, influenced by greater consumer demand and supply chain disruptions after the pandemic, as well as labor shortages.

Public markets like space too

The public markets also seem pretty confident that we will be spending more on home repairs and renovations.

The shares of The Home Depot and Lowe’s – two companies known as barometers of consumer excitement for home upgrading – are trading at around all-time highs. This is likely another factor driving business interest in home services, suggesting that public investors would be receptive to businesses with innovative approaches in an already growing space.

Plus, our homes don’t sustain themselves (although it would be really nice if a really innovative startup found a way to do just that.)

Illustration: Dom Guzman

Stay up to date with the latest financing rounds, acquisitions and more with the Crunchbase Daily.

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San Francisco has always been a passing city, a place where people come to work for a couple of years and maybe find a good time or romance and then go to a cheaper and more boring place when it comes to “settling down” “.

Well, somewhere around 40 or 50 percent of the people who live here – people who live here, who answer surveys – say they want to leave the country in the next few years. And many of these people have told pollsters that the biggest problems facing the city these days are crime, homelessness and “street behavior”.

The SF Chamber of Commerce released the results of its annual CityBeat poll Thursday, which asks San Francisco voters a series of questions about the state of the city and their perception of it.

This year’s survey found, like last year, 70% of city dwellers who say that the quality of life in the city has decreased. 80% of residents surveyed said tackling homelessness must be a high priority for the city, and 88% said the problem had worsened in recent years.

71% also said that “road behavior” has deteriorated. And 80% of San Franciscans support extending conservatory laws and making it easier for the mentally ill to be sent for treatment.

Additionally, 76% of San Franciscans said increasing the number of police officers in high-crime neighborhoods should be a high priority for the city, and 60% supported prioritizing funding for police academy courses and recruiting new police officers.

“San Francisco has suffered over the past year, highlighting and exacerbating issues such as homelessness, road conditions and safety concerns,” Chamber President and CEO Rodney Fong said in a statement. “Public infrastructure and the ability to handle road conditions have also pushed their limits, and it’s not surprising that residents have a strong sense of it.”

The Chamber of Commerce unveiled a data dashboard earlier this year listing 311 complaint dates across the city, and overall the data shows that complaints about theft and homeless tent camps have been on the decline since 2019.

This is just the latest poll from a local organization that has registered the growing public perception of worsening crime and found that many San Franciscans dream of escaping it all. As reported by the SF Business Times, a recent survey by the Bay Area Council found that nearly half of respondents plan to flee California entirely in the coming years.

Dignity Health was the presenting sponsor of the chamber’s survey, and a Dignity representative, Mark Klein, flipped the survey data on people who want to go to Business Times this way: “They are expressing their intentions to move. We still have the ability to “make changes that keep them here.”

Photo: Karam Alani

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Desi Danganan had a clear vision when redesigning the former parking lot at 967 Mission Street in San Francisco. Filipino community activist and SoMa resident who is a driving force behind the area’s cultural district, SOMA Pilipinas, envisioned an active space with a basketball court, food trucks, and surrounding murals.

Then COVID-19 arrived. “Full contact sports were basically illegal at the time, and crowds were illegal,” he recalls. “We have decided not to fight COVID and only to design the space for COVID.”

The result is Kapwa Gardens, which opened this April with lots of greenery, techno-colored meeting rooms and a redesigned jeepney bus (which will be converted into office space and a sound booth) painted with a giant bird’s head. It is designed to help the neighborhood “recover from the devastating psychological, physical and economic effects of COVID-19,” according to the website. It’s also the latest offering in a growing cultural district that is anchoring a Filipino trade corridor on Mission, an up and coming block of the city.

The city recognized SOMA Pilipinas in 2016; The cultural district honors and presents the 120-year history of the Filipinos in San Francisco. Danganan, who is part of a SOMA Pilipinas working group and who founded the local non-profit incubator Kultivate Labs hosted a series of night markets and holiday pop-ups known as UNDSCVRD SF to highlight the area.

He saw a great opportunity in Mission 967, which had been a parking lot for decades. As part of a massive real estate development nearby, the city acquired the 8,777-square-foot lot and published a tender in fall 2019 to activate it. Kultivate Labs had already built and activated a two-month meeting room and basketball court called the UNDSCVRD Court on city-owned property just blocks away. The city gave Kultivate the tender to build a more permanent common room here.

The UNDSCVRD court was taken into account an early prototype for Kapwa Gardens. (Kapwa in Tagalog roughly translates to “neighbor”.) Kultivate Labs, in collaboration with CAMO Studio, also led community engagement with residents, seniors, and a local school to develop potential designs.

COVID-19 paused community engagement, but with few public meeting rooms in the neighborhood, the team didn’t want to give up. “We couldn’t do what we were going to do, but we had to do something“Says Marcus Owens, co-founder of CAMO. “It was supposed to be much more of an active pre-COVID space, with an adventure playground and basketball hoop, and it became a completely peaceful, serene calamansi grove.”

The team opted for plenty of green – calamansi trees are native to the Philippines and are considered medicinal plants – versus bright colors for the room and the surrounding works of art. “Calamansi trees are very special to a lot of people because we don’t have the space to grow them in our own four walls,” says Kimberley Acebo Arteche, who curates the artistic component of the garden. As for the giant bird painted on the converted school bus: “It’s a Sarimanok, a kind of mythical creature that interweaves everyone’s wishes and dreams,” she says.

There were also design and programming considerations for security. Kapwa Gardens was designed for 56 people who are socially distant and the team grew internal contact tracing for visitors.

With a limited budget, Kultivate Labs organized a team of volunteers who built the space over several months. “It was part of a mental health reduction to give people a safe place to gather and focus on something other than zoom,” says Danganan. The request for volunteers was well received – about 350 people helped build the garden, who traveled as far as San Jose. 65 percent of the volunteers were non-Filipino, according to Danganan. “It shows that our work doesn’t only appeal to Filipinos,” he notes.

Kapwa Gardens opened with limited entry in April to maintain social distancing, temperature controls, contact tracing, and hand sanitizer throughout. It also hosted weekly COVID-19 tests. In addition to quiet meeting rooms, an open space offers socially distant activities like yoga, dance, and self-defense classes. There were no associated COVID-19 outbreaks here throughout the expansion and opening, according to Danganan.

Kultivate Labs also wanted to pay attention when San Francisco moved out of its housing mandates. When the city’s mask restriction was lifted, the team interviewed community members about the lifting of mask restrictions in Kapwa Gardens. (Masks are now optional.) Kultivate will increasingly host food trucks, vendors, and programs as part of the economic recovery for Filipino business owners. “We have to do it really slowly, as a recreational space”, Danganan says. Still, he adds: “We see Kapwa Gardens as part of the recovery of SOMA Pilipinas.”

Ideas and programs for the future cultural center of the region are tested in Kapwa Gardens, Balay Creative. It won’t open until 2025, but Danganan believes the lessons of designing, building, and opening a common room will go down strongly during the pandemic.

“Everyone’s talking about the San Francisco exodus … our church, we’ve made a decision to adapt,” he says. “It’s just part of the DNA of the Philippines, and that resilience is part of the Filipino-American culture here.”

Emily Nonko is a reporter from Brooklyn, New York who writes on real estate, architecture, urbanism, and design. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine, Curbed, and other publications.

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At 9 a.m. on Monday, skid steer loaders and dump trucks were parked in front of the abandoned state parking lot under Highway 101 in Soma. A few tired residents, who lived there in tents, trucks, and a half-built tiny house, dragged their belongings onto a nearby sidewalk as social workers and California Highway Patrol made their final rounds.

Traffic thundered above us when San Francisco woke up after a year in a pandemic-induced limbo. Slowly the tents, tarpaulins and other makeshift structures fell down.

“You’re acting like this is a dictatorship,” said Ashante Jones, a 44-year-old Oakland native who has lived on the Merlin Street property for six months. “Where are the people going to?”

Until the coronavirus crippled daily life, the property was one of many in the Bay Area that served a mix of daily commuters and people in vehicles, some for up to five years. But on Monday, after the operator that the state leased the property to cease business and more people moved in during the pandemic, officials came down to evacuate the camp despite opposition from remaining residents and homeless lawyers.

For those who were still there when the heavy equipment arrived, the Merlin Street lot symbolized everything wrong with the city’s reliance on short-term pavements like sanctioned warehouses and motel rooms, while thousands still lack stable housing Were available. But for city officials and social workers who said they had spent the past six weeks pushing residents to accept alternative housing, it was a sign of progress.

“This is one of the last major camps in the city,” said Jeff Kositsky, director of the Healthy Streets Operation Center of Mayor London Breeds, a coordinated group of city officials tasked with responding to homeless camps. “It’s not perfect, but we’re doing our best to provide services to everyone.”

By late Monday morning, Kositsky said 10 of the property’s few dozen residents had accepted offers from the city to switch to either sanctioned parking spaces for “safe sleeping” or temporary hotel rooms. Others lingered in front of a chain link fence with their packed clothes, instruments and tools. Those who were still inside rushed to dismantle tents, pack up whatever was left, and figure out what to do with large items.

Similar scenes have often played out in San Francisco and the surrounding cities, where in recent years a housing affordability crisis has collided with chronic homelessness and strong opposition to the construction of new shelters. However, much is at stake right now. Homeless advocates are pursuing multiple camp sweep lawsuits and Governor Gavin Newsom proposed $ 12 billion last week to target the state’s 160,000+ homeless.

While politicians debate how much money to spend and where to spend it, outsiders indicate that they still often have difficulty accessing basic services. You feel forgotten in a familiar alternation between shelters, camps and other precarious makeshift homes.

“People don’t just disappear,” said Kelley Cutler, a human rights organizer with the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness. “You call them resolutions, but they’re sweeps.”

The showdown on Merlin Street escalated last week when Cutler and other activists took to social media to urge the public to require Caltrans to “stop the eviction.” A verified Twitter account for the transport company’s Bay Area office replied last week that the warehouse poses a fire hazard to the freeway and that Caltrans has been working with the city to provide “housing options” to residents.

“Caltrans carries out inventory cleanups when there are immediate safety concerns or a threat to critical infrastructure,” the agency said in a statement on Monday. “We continue to work with the city and the service providers to bring people into safer situations.”

It was around 7 a.m. on Monday when the first city and public work teams began filtering into the 41,000-square-foot fenced-in property previously operated under the name Delta Parking Management LLC. Although officials said camp residents usually zipped their hands to avoid clashes with police, those on Merlin Street were allowed to continue packing.

Greg Smith couldn’t bear to see it all, so he sat down the block in his blue van while social workers tried to convince him to move into a hotel room. Smith still has the colorful monthly parking passes, which he bought for about $ 400 a month for the past five years, to rent two parking spaces on the property.

“If they got new owners, I would stay,” said Smith, who has lived in San Francisco since 1973 and spent many years moving around various lots. “It’s my place, you know?”

Kositsky said the rate of campers accepting housing services has fallen from around 85% to 30% in recent months. Activists and some local residents say the problem is more with the type of services offered. Sleeping safely can seem like another camp with more rules. During the pandemic, the shelters will operate with reduced capacity. And it can still take months to find a landlord willing to accept a permanent housing voucher.

Jennifer Friedenbach, Executive Director of the Coalition for Homelessness, is campaigning, among other things, for the city to convert 1,000 motel rooms into studio apartments, with state and federal economic funds coming up. San Francisco’s own funding from the 2018 homeless tax measure, Proposal C, should provide additional housing – if and when city officials push more concrete plans.

“We have the money. We have the property, ”said Friedenbach. “We need the political will.”

Meanwhile, Merlin Street neighbors Dominic Russo and Lakrisha Harper have been scrambling Monday morning to figure out where to go before implementing their own longer-term plans.

Russo, a former music teacher from San Francisco, desperately chose a tow truck to move the tiny house he’d built in the front corner of the Merlin Street property. Harper and her 13-year-old boyfriend were trying to track down a missing iPhone while debating where to go because the studio apartment she wants to rent with a voucher wasn’t ready.

“It’s hectic and frustrating and exhausting,” said Harper, who grew up in the Sunnydale neighborhood. “It makes you say, ‘I’m giving up.'”

From San Francisco to Santa Cruz, cities across northern California are discussing how to deal with warehouses like the one on Merlin Street when public spaces reopen. Meanwhile, lawsuits are flying against cities that activists claim did not offer alternative protection, as a landmark 2018 court ruling mandated, and against Caltrans for destroying the belongings of East Bay residents in recent years.

Newsom also allocated $ 1.5 billion to its homeless budget to clean up public spaces and $ 50 million to cities to get people out of camps. The governor’s office declined to answer specific questions from The Chronicle about whether its instructions to Caltrans and local authorities regarding warehouse evictions have changed since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention served governments across the board last year Land have advised leaving homeless people where they are if no alternative is available.

Meanwhile, proponents fear cities will continue to focus on the symptoms of the homelessness crisis rather than the causes.

“The eviction process is more focused on removing tents,” said Francisco Herrera, chair of the Latino Task Force Street Needs Assessment Committee. “They just create a carousel effect.”

Late Monday morning, Russo’s tiny house was loaded onto a tow truck to try one of the last lots he’d imagined. Stragglers kept filling suitcases around the polluted parking lot, and Jones still wasn’t sure where to go.

“I’m really panicking now,” he said. “I just got a good poker face.”

The bright yellow loader started at around 1 p.m. It fell hard on a blue-gray tent that had already left the owner.

Lauren Hepler is an employee of the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: lauren.hepler@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LAHepler

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