The order was granted Monday after various agencies refused to provide documents by the deadline last Friday under the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

“We filed the FOIA lawsuit to understand ties between the Kushner family in relation to EB-5, to understand if strings were pulled. We want to understand whether he was involved in reauthorization of the program, which he [and his family] clearly stood to benefit from,” Democracy Forward senior counsel Josephine Morse told Newsweek on Tuesday.

“Bottom line: What could he be shielding?” Morse said of Kushner, who serves as a senior White House adviser.

Democracy Forward sued the Trump administration in February after the Department of Homeland Security, State Department and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services failed to disclose Kushner’s involvement in repeated renewals of EB-5, amid media reports of federal investigations into the Kushner family’s potential abuse of the program.

The EB-5 program provides green cards to immigrants who invest at least $500,000 in businesses in the United States that create 10 or more jobs per investor.

Last year, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and New York federal prosecutors subpoenaed Kushner’s family business, Kushner Companies, for information on developments it financed in part through EB-5. The investigation includes attempts by Kushner Companies to present projects in New Jersey as EB-5 investments to get funding from Chinese investors.

Shortly before the subpoenas, Kushner’s sister Nicole Meyer led a marketing campaign in Beijing and Shanghai seeking Chinese investors for Kushner Companies’ One Journal Square project in New Jersey. The marketing materials stated that up to 300 individuals who invested $500,000 each could be eligible for green cards through EB-5, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Democracy Forward, which filed its FOIA request in May 2017, has grown suspicious about the agencies’ delay in producing the documents.

“The amount of dragging and shifting stories about documents and whether we’re going to get them,” Morse said, “We’re wondering if there’s a cover-up and how Kushner was involved with the reauthorization of the EB-5 program.”

NEW: After over a year of illegal stonewalling, Trump officials were just ordered by a federal judge to appear in court and say whether they're withholding records of Jared Kushner‘s use of EB-5 visas to benefit his family business.

Watch this space: https://t.co/Gw81LIJIBx

— Democracy Forward (@DemocracyFwd) October 5, 2018

Morse said the court ordered the Department of Homeland Security to have a phone call with her and that said she would be more than happy to converse with a department representative “to get to the bottom of what’s happening here.”

“It’s just a constant pushback with no real explanation as to why, which obviously piques our interest even more,” Democracy Forward spokeswoman Charisma Troiano told Newsweek.

Troiano later said that Democracy Forward received a late-night communication Tuesday from the Department of Homeland Security contradicting past statements about the amount of responsive documents available.

“Our attorneys are reviewing to determine our next steps,” Troiano said.

Judge Tanya S. Chutkan set the status conference for December 19 at 2:30 p.m.

“The Government is ORDERED to bring in a Department of Homeland Security representative who is prepared to discuss the status of Plaintiff’s request, the number of documents pending processing, and anticipated production dates,” the judge’s order states.

Kushner’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, declined to comment to Newsweek Tuesday.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment from Newsweek.

https://www.newsweek.com/jared-kushner-company-visa-eb-5-1254829

That night, they got four beds. Soon after, they got something else: acceptance into a program that would get them into a full-time, permanent home.

Now, with a year of finance and life management sessions under her belt, Breitenbach, 36, and her now four children have a two-bedroom apartment in Buena Park. Breitenbach said rent is covered for three months and, after that, she’ll pay a below-market $1,230 a month with the help of federal funding. She’s looking for work.

“It helps me with the deposit, Edison, gas,” she said. “There’s not too much to complain about.”

Breitenbach’s story is an increasingly common solution for homeless people in Orange County, as some local and federal homeless agencies shift their focus and their money from temporary shelters to subsidizing full-time, below-market-rate housing.

It’s not yet clear if the policy shift will work. The relatively new idea hasn’t yet generated long-term data to show whether permanent housing keeps people off the streets forever. And many homeless agencies continue to emphasize temporary shelter, not housing, because that’s still where some federal money is available.

Experts also point out that a shift away from temporary shelters can add to the housing shortage, making it harder for some people to get off the streets.

Still, the shift represents one of the bigger changes in years in the fight to end homelessness.

If somebody is homeless, the best answer might be to get them a home.

“We can serve more families and move them along, but the critical need in the county today is really all about affordable (permanent) housing,” said Margie Wakeham, executive director of Families Forward, an Irvine agency that helps the homeless.

PHILOSOPHICAL SHIFT

Local groups that help people get into permanent dwellings – groups such as Pathways of Hope, the Fullerton-based organization that helped Breitenbach – are following the federal government’s lead.

For the past couple of years, the Department of Housing and Urban Development has shifted money away from temporary shelters to a rapidly growing pool of money allocated for permanent dwellings. The department’s relatively new rapid-rehousing program offers temporary subsidies for below-market-rate rents for people like Breitenbach.

At the same time, HUD has been giving more money toward supportive housing programs, which provide indefinite leasing or rental assistance and other services, for people who are both homeless and disabled.

The concept of offering full-time housing grew out of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which included $1.5 billion for homelessness prevention.

One short-term study hints at success.

In July, HUD released data showing that among 2,282 homeless families surveyed over 18 months, the people who’d been helped with permanent housing were less likely to wind up back on the streets than those who were offered other interventions, including transitional housing.

The study also suggested that the cost of subsidies for permanent housing was comparable to, or substantially less than, other forms of intervention.

The federal department has used that study and others to justify its new philosophy about fighting homelessness.

“We have incentivized people to move in the (rapid re-housing) direction because that is what the data shows works,” said HUD spokesman Brian Sullivan.

And how HUD views homelessness affects virtually all publicly financed housing agencies.

Now, when seeking HUD money for housing, local agencies increasingly need to offer a plan that puts some of their clients into homes on a full-time basis.

Sullivan said that if an agency in a big, urban place like Orange County wants money for housing that’s not permanent, “they may not be funded at a level they really want to be funded at.”

Based on statistics from 2014, about 84 percent of HUD money to the county was for permanent housing; 12 percent was for transitional, or temporary, shelter.

A NEW APPROACH

The permanent shelter trend is picking up steam locally.

Last month, a partner of Pathways of Hope, Mercy House, got approval from the city of Santa Ana to convert half of Joseph House, historically a transitional housing shelter, into permanent supportive housing.

“What we expect to be able to do is to actually increase the number of persons that we’re serving,” said Larry Haynes, the nonprofit’s executive director.

And Wakeham’s group, Families Forward, recently sold one of its 26 transitional housing condominiums, in Irvine, to help pay for a fourplex in Lake Forest that will be used for permanent, below-market-rate family housing.

The fourplex opened last month. Now, Families Forward is rejiggering seven of its remaining 25 condos into below-market-rate housing. Wakeham said her group is keeping the rest of the condos as temporary housing “because we have very few family (emergency) shelter beds in the county.”

Others point out there is still a place for transitional shelters, the kind of help Breitenbach and her kids got during the year between sleeping at the shelter in Fullerton and moving into their Buena Park apartment.

In August, Yazmin Cerda, a Families Forward client and single mother of two, moved from transitional housing to a below-market-rate apartment in Irvine. She said both housing types are important.

Cerda, 36, said that while in transitional housing, she learned skills that helped make her ready to earn enough to stay in a permanent, though subsidized, home. She’s paying rent of $1,100 a month while studying to become a registered nurse, resuming a career she lost three years ago when she worked at a hospice.

Without that help, Cerda said, “I think I would be just renting a room with my kids because there’s no way I can afford to pay $2,000 for the apartment that I have right now.”

RESISTING THE CHANGE

Not everybody agrees with prioritizing permanent shelter.

Huntington Beach-based Colette’s Children’s Home, which serves homeless single women, mothers and children, is resisting the shift. The agency has nine emergency shelter units, 14 below-market-rate housing units, 22 permanent supportive housing units and 28 transitional housing units in Huntington Beach, Anaheim, Fountain Valley and Placentia. The agency is hoping to keep its transitional stock.

A lot of agencies “are putting all their eggs in one basket,” said Colette’s founder Billy O’Connell. “(But) there’s no data that supports some of the prerogatives that they’re moving to.”

O’Connell has written more than 30 letters to members of Congress on the importance of transitional housing.

“Do we accept whatever policymakers are giving us, or do we stand up and challenge them?” O’Connell said. “We’re going to continue to advocate for what we do and what we believe, and if we have to send out another round of letters to every congressperson in our county, we will do that.”

Orange County does not yet have a comprehensive study comparing success rates between transitional housing and permanent supportive housing, said Karen Roper, director of OC Community Services.

“The bottom line is our 10-year plan to end homelessness was never designed to be a one-size-fits-all plan,” Roper said.

“To end homelessness, different best practices and strategies are needed to effectively serve the different … populations.”

STILL WARY

Breitenbach, who has lived at her Buena Park apartment for a few weeks, said that “it’s hard to say” whether transitional or permanent housing should be the funding priority.

She offered herself as an example of a person living in a permanent apartment who still might wind up back on the streets.

“I’m still unemployed. Right now, I’m still needing to pay rent and try to secure a job,” she said.

“If there was more funds for rapid rehousing, it would help so much more to give that person more time transitioning from transitional housing into their own housing.”

O.C. SHELTER INVENTORY IN 2015

1,103 emergency shelter beds
1,578 transitional housing beds
3,466 permanent housing beds
Source: OC Community Services

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/housing-699379-permanent-transitional.html

Danny Haber, 26, and Alon Gutman, 27, first became involved in their communal housing setups last year with a live-work property at 200 12th St. called The Negev Twelfth. The property became a model for at least two other tech-infused dorm-style housing projects in SoMa that have recently sparked a series of investigations and a lawsuit.

The duo started The Negev Sixth at 219 Sixth St. early this year. It has been cited for possible habitability, hotel-conversion ordinance and room-count violations. They also have The Negev Folsom at 1040 Folsom St. that opened this past summer and is facing the same issues along with a lawsuit from displaced tenants.

Haber and Gutman championed The Negev properties as an innovative way of living amid scarce and expensive housing in The City. For $1,250 to $1,500 a month, tenants can rent a spot on a bunk bed in a single-room-occupancy unit or a single unit for about $1,700. Tenants also have access to common areas with a kitchen, games and a fratlike hacker-house atmosphere. The rents — targeted at tech workers and newcomers mostly in their 20s — overall are much higher than the rates at the properties before Haber and Gutman leased the buildings.

To create The Negev Twelfth, Haber and Gutman subleased a live-work space from the owner of an attached restaurant. The restaurant leased the entire building from the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corp., a housing and services provider for low-income San Franciscans.

The organization, through a donation from the St. Anthony Foundation in 1996, was gifted the parcel that includes the live-work space, restaurant and 12 units of below-market-rate housing at an adjacent space on Howard Street, which were renovated with a loan from the Mayor’s Office of Housing.

When the organization took over the property, one lease covered the live-work space and restaurant, and it was never separated so the restaurant had to lease the whole thing.

HISTORY OF COMPLAINTS

A complaint filed by a city resident in May about the number of people living at 200 12th St. led Donald Falk, the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corp. executive director, to discover what had become of the live-work space.

Brian Fernando, owner of the Sri Lankan restaurant 1601 Bar and Kitchen, had subleased it to Haber and Gutman.

“They pay the rent all the time. I mean, that’s kind of all you want in a tenant,” Fernando said. “They’ve had some issues with the neighbor next door with noise late at night but … apart from that, they’ve been fine.”

The sublease, Falk said, was done “without our permission or knowledge.”

“As soon as we found out, we issued a notice to our tenant to cure or quit,” he added.

The Planning Department launched an investigation in July after receiving complaints that there were a dozen tenants living at the live-work space zoned for only four people, and that the place was being advertised as a short-term rental on Airbnb.

During the summer, Falk said the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corp. worked with the Planning Department to rectify violations. He said that Haber — who takes the lead on the business side while Gutman fronts the technical side — was “extremely cooperative in every respect from the moment that we brought the parties together to tell them that the status quo needed to change.”

The Planning Department closed the case Oct. 29 because Haber proved that the remaining tenants were staying more than 30 days, said Gina Simi, spokeswoman for the department.

“A number of people left because their lease was up and it just wasn’t renewed. Some were already leaving. There’s no way to really pinpoint who was doing what, but nobody was evicted,” Simi said of the reports that more people were living at the property than zoning allowed.

Falk said he hired an architect to inspect 200 12th St. to ensure the electrical, plumbing, chemical and physical elements were up to code, and explore what would be required to separate the live-work space from the master lease with the restaurant.

“If we were going to do that, we would have to do some renovation work to make that legal,” he said, adding that he has not heard complaints since the investigation closed.

Rent from the live-work space and restaurant allows the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corp. to keep the Howard Street apartments affordable to low- and extremely low-income residents, Falk said.

“It helps us keep the rents lower at the 12 units next door because it’s all one property,” he said. “The money all goes into one pot.”

But on Nov. 6, the Department of Building Inspection received a new complaint that 200 12th St. was being operated as a hostel with up to 15 people, that the makeshift bedrooms had no egress or windows, and plumbing work was done without permits.

Haber could not be reached for comment.

‘AN AWESOME IDEA’

Jared Smith moved to The Negev Twelfth to participate in a coding boot camp and serve as an intern at the payroll company ZenPayroll. He said about 22 people were living there while he stayed from June 2013 to February of this year.

The ground floor was an open space with couches and a kitchen, while the upstairs had a main room with seven bunk beds divided by sheets, a large walk-in closet with two bunk beds separated by a curtain and two more rooms with two bunk beds each, Smith said.

Smith said he found The Negev Twelfth on Airbnb and paid Haber $2,186, which included cleaning and service fees, for 65 nights.

Eventually, Haber stopped using the Airbnb platform to find tenants. Smith said he was charged for the entire month of February while living there only two weeks.

“In the beginning, The Negev was an awesome idea because housing is too expensive and you really meet new friends,” Smith said of the living quarters. “But towards the end, it seemed more like just a way to make money.”

http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/first-negev-tech-commune-in-sf-also-faced-legal-problems/Content?oid=2913251

While that might be true, there is a different side to life behind the bright-red metal gate of The Negev Sixth.

Nearly all tenants in the single-room-occupancy building — mostly in their 20s and newcomers to San Francisco with few if any local acquaintances — pay $1,250 a month for a spot on a bunk bed inside a unit, share couches and a kitchen on the first floor and recreation tables and a mini movie theater in the basement of the tech co-op.

With the makeshift-style amenities come many issues. Several complaints beginning in the summer to The City’s Department of Building Inspection make the place out to be a slum. A complaint by resident Zachary Howitt, 26, on Oct. 9 identified an inoperable heater, faulty electrical wiring, no deadbolts on some doors, a faulty fire escape and smoke detectors, no secure mail receptacle, cockroaches and mice, no hot water, a consistent odor of gas from a broken water heater and 60 people living in a place with a 22-person occupancy limit. To top it off, the complaint alleges, the person behind the operation reportedly refused to fix the issues despite multiple requests.

The latest inspection came Wednesday. City Housing Inspector Luis Barahona found that debris and personal items that were blocking the fire escape were removed, light fixtures were repaired, a shower door was fixed, some work was done on electrical outlets and deadbolts were installed on several rooms.

However, the people running the property neglected to address six violations — failure to provide identified caretakers for the building, repair all windows and latches, fix self-closing doors, move garbage receptacles to an open area, provide heat to all units and have an installation permit for a hot-water tank. For all its problems, Barahona did say other single-room-occupancy buildings in San Francisco are worse off than The Negev Sixth. But he added that during the inspection, the number of units appeared to exceed the 19 residential rooms stated in the building’s certificate for use.

“I counted more than 19 rooms,” Barahona said. “I don’t know for sure. I think there are about 22 to 25 rooms, but some of them aren’t labeled.”

Today, The Negev Properties LLC, run by Danny Haber, 26, and Alon Gutman, 27, is expected to take part in an audit of records for the past two years so the department’s housing division can determine whether the company is complying with its designation of residential units. According to San Francisco’s hotel conversion ordinance, units with a residential designation must be occupied for more than 30 days, whereas tourist units — which The Negev Sixth has none of — are for stays of fewer than 30 days.

The department will be looking into whether construction work was done without proper permits.

“It looks like they have too many rooms, so that could be the main point of contention,” said Jamie Sanbonmatsu, acting senior housing inspector for the department. “Work without a permit is a life-safety issue.”

On Thursday, the department served another notice of violation to the property for electrical, plumbing and mechanical work done without permits and requests to replace a gas stove with an electrical stove and relocate mailboxes so they do not block the exit. A Department of Building Inspection hearing on the living conditions is scheduled for Dec. 4.

Should violations remain outstanding at The Negev Sixth, the operators will be penalized and tenants are eligible to go to the San Francisco Rent Board for rent reductions. Tenants found to be living in illegally converted units could be evicted, but it would take more to shutter the entire building.

“When you’re talking about shutting down an operation, you’re talking about a lot of people without homes and making a lot of people homeless is something we try to avoid,” Sanbonmatsu said.

Prior to becoming The Negev Sixth, 219 Sixth St. was the San Francisco Gospel Mission, a nonprofit, Baptist-based mission for homeless people. Joann Knight said she sold the building in August 2013 after the death of her husband, who ran the mission that housed people until the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.

“We had three different people bidding at $1.5 million,” Knight said, adding that it was sold to a party that “paid all cash.”

Beyond the building issues documented on paper, some tenants at The Negev Sixth have had relational problems with Haberand Gutman.

According to Superior Court records obtained by The San Francisco Examiner, The Negev Properties filed an unlawful detainer summons, the first step in an eviction proceedings, Sept. 30 against Howitt, claiming he owed $625 in unpaid rent.

Howitt said the eviction was retaliatory and, following legal advice, he complied with a law allowing him to deposit the rent into an escrow account instead, because of concerns over the legality and habitability of the building. These violations included heating, electrical and sanitary deficiencies. A judge on Oct. 21 dismissed the complaint after she agreed that Howitt had no opportunity to respond because he was never served with the complaint in the first place. According to court documents, Gutman signed that he allegedly served the complaint.

Haber and Gutman also run The Negev Folsom at 1040 Folsom St., which was the subject of a lawsuit filed Nov. 12 from tenants displaced by a fire there who claim they were not offered their units back at their former rent rate, as required by the San Francisco rent-control ordinance. Before opening The Negev Sixth, Haber and Gutman started The Negev Twelfth at 200 12th St., which is an open room stocked with bunk beds.

Other tenants say Haber, who leased 219 Sixth St. from Howard Six Bros LLC, intimidates residents into making repairs themselves or kicks them out of buildings if they consistently complain about living conditions.

Dewaine Torregroza, 28, moved into The Negev Sixth in February and paid $1,000 per month for a shared bunk-bed room. He said Haber then tried to increase rent to $1,250 for everyone paying $1,000. Since the rent-control ordinance applies to the building, the maximum allowable rent increase this year is only 1 percent.

Haber also assigned director roles to tenants, Torregroza said. As director of the basement, Torregroza was expected to revamp the dingy basement on his own time and with his own money.

“He was kind of preying on the weak in a lot of ways,” Torregroza said of Haber. “A lot of people moved in from different parts of the world without any experience in California or San Francisco as far as tenants’ rights. As far as they were concerned, things were going OK.”

The final straw for Torregroza — he moved out in early October — was when construction workers entered his unit without notification and drilled holes through his closet for water heater piping.

Group housing like The Negev seems to be popular among younger residents, said neighborhood Supervisor Jane Kim, but the company needs to clean up its act.

“The limited facts that we’ve gotten do not reflect well on this company,” she said. “It seems to be a company that is willing to break the law and exploit residents in order to make a profit, and we do not support that type of behavior.”

Haber refused to comment on The Negev Properties’ operations.

If run right, the communal type of living behind The Negev “would be brilliant,” Torregroza said.

“It really is a beautiful thing and I’m hopeful that someone, some tech entrepreneur can figure this out legally and do it right,” he said. “Because I really feel that I grew a lot there and there are friends I still have there because it’s an awesome community. At the heart of it, everyone wants to be a part of something.”

http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/sro-tenants-tales-tell-scary-story/Content?oid=2912562

Boarded up and draped in scaffolding until recently, the single- and double-occupancy-room Park Hotel at 1040 Folsom St. appeared uninhabited.

Kirkbride said she had no idea the building repairs were complete until one of the new building lessees, Danny Haber, 26, knocked on the door of her new home at another single-room-occupancy hotel a few weeks ago and offered her $500 in cash if she waived her right to return and all claims against him — basically a buyout. She didn’t take the money.

Chinatown community advocates warn that this latest trend of placing SRO units on short-term rental sites, such as Craigslist and Airbnb, could exacerbate The City’s housing crisis by displacing vulnerable families, many of whom don’t speak English, who have traditionally relied on these less expensive accommodations.

Privately owned SROs have traditionally been rented for $650 to $700 per month and on a word-of-mouth basis, but listings on Craigslist and Airbnb show furnished units going for $800 on average and sometimes more than $1,000 per month, said Tina Cheung, a housing counselor with the Chinatown Community Development Center. Those listings, and others, could be violating San Francisco law.

“Folks that we normally serve would not know to access Craigslist, nor can they afford to pay that much for a single room,” Cheung said. “So we can speculate who those rentals are going to. They’re definitely not going to people we normally serve.”

The Department of Building Inspection is charged with investigating violations to The City’s administrative code, and Chapter 41A prohibits any building with four or more units to engage in short-term rentals.

More than a decade ago, a hotel conversion ordinance was passed, allowing SRO hotels to rent up to 25 percent of vacant residential units for tourism on a short-term basis between May and September, but on the condition that they don’t displace residents to do so. Cheung said she is concerned that these units are now being pushed out of the reach of families who need them.

“It was drawn up originally to make sure that there was residential housing and that a lot of things didn’t get converted for only tourism purposes that would take away from residential housing stock,” said William Strawn, a Department of Building Inspection spokesman.

So far this year, nine complaints citywide have been investigated for Chapter 41A violations and five proceeded to administrative hearings, a noticeable increase from the 15 years prior in which three complaints were reported and none had merit, according to Andrew Karcs, senior housing inspector for the Department of Building Inspection.

Meanwhile, the city’s Planning Department, which has its own process of investigating short-term rental violations, has received about 119 complaints this year. San Francisco law prohibits residential units in buildings with four or more units from being rented for less than 30 days.

New legislation by Supervisor David Chiu, scheduled to go before the Planning Commission on Thursday, would amend city code to permit permanent residents of residential units in buildings with two or more units to rent their unit as short-term rentals for up to 90-days per year.

The legislation, Chiu said, is designed to reinforce the prohibition of “hotelization” – when residential units are converted into full-time, de-facto hotels.

Cheung said she found a Craigslist post, which has since expired, that advertised an SRO unit at 705 Vallejo St. in North Beach on the Chinatown border for $215 per week, with a photo that showed a bed, desk, chair, lamp and microwave and promised free in-room Wi-Fi.

Such furnished listings suggest the SRO units are targeted at students, said Angela Chu, a community organizing manager for CCDC.

Another concern for housing advocates is seeing SROs on Airbnb, which allows tenants to lease their residences on a short–term basis.

Two Airbnb listings online Tuesday showed accommodations available at the Balmoral Hotel, showing a building at 640 Clay St. in Chinatown, for $40 a night and $280 per week, with a minimum stay of seven days.

Cindy Wu, the CCDC’s community planning manager and president of the Planning Commission, said she has noticed the Craigslist and Airbnb “phenomenon” since last year.

“Every one of these postings to me is like a small red flag,” she said. “Where is the tipping point?”

http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/community-advocates-concerned-short-term-rentals-are-edging-low-income-tenants-out-of-sros/Content?oid=2866887

Neither he nor his wife had a clue, so Grieshaber decided to call Caltrans. After being rerouted to a half-dozen representatives, he was informed that the majority of the scraps likely would be shipped to China.

“After that, I thought, ‘Wow, it’d be great to make a house with all this material, that is self-sustaining as well as financially self-sustaining,'” he said.

But Grieshaber let the idea die up until a few months ago, when media outlets spotlighted bolt complications on the new eastern span that jeopardized the scheduled opening over Labor Day weekend — a problem mitigated by a temporary fix announced in mid-August.

Now with the new bridge scheduled to open at 5 a.m. Tuesday and demolition of the old span beginning soon after, Grieshaber has launchedBayBridgeHouse.org to pitch his Bay Bridge House to governing agencies and locals. He envisions using less than 200 feet of the 10,176-foot-long span to construct the most modern eco-house in the country with the help of cutting-edge Bay Area green technology companies.

“I heard there is the potential that pieces are being saved for a park or going to Oakland,” Grieshaber said. “Those seem to be antiquated ideas that are great, but we should be doing something different. Combining the eco-house idea and the bridge seemed like a logical step to change the way we think in the Bay Area.”

The roadway, with lane lines preserved, could serve as the bottom floor of the house, explained the 44-year-old computer engineer and entrepreneur from Brisbane. The bridge’s sides could act as walls, and pieces of concrete and asphalt could be ground up and reformed to avoid using plaster and wood.

The first floor would accommodate parking and possibly an office. The main living room would take up the second floor, and the third floor could feature a loft. A green roof with solar panels, windmills and fiber-optic lighting would occupy the fourth floor. Rainwater could be stored for use and a home-size desalination plant installed.

Grieshaber, his wife and two cats would live in the house and act as caretakers for an adjacent building that could be utilized as an eco-workspace or, ideally, a bed and breakfast.

“We want the idea to generate its own income so that it’s not a burden on any kind of taxpayers or government organization,” he said. “It would either be a nonprofit organization, if we can get away with it, or it’s going to be a B [benefit] corporation, which means you have a company charter and ethics.”

Grieshaber’s idea is innovative, but not the first of its kind.

Houses constructed with bridge pieces in Spain and the Big Dig House built from Boston’s central artery and tunnel project serve as successful examples on his website. Equipped with this research, Grieshaber recently reached out to architects, universities and agencies overseeing the Bay Bridge work.

“Unfortunately, it seems like everyone is either working on the Bay Bridge project and is in a frantic mess right now, or is at Burning Man,” he said.

The idea had not reached Bay Bridge officials, said spokesman Andrew Gordon.

“I’m sure there is some hazardous material,” he said of the pieces in their current state. “It’s one thing to drive over it; it’s another thing to live on it.”

In talks with agencies working to create Gateway Park in Oakland, it’s become clear that pieces going to a museum or for public view would need thorough cleaning.

“The bridge was repainted, but there are coats of lead paint underneath and asbestos that would have to be stripped,” said Caltrans bridge engineer Mike Whiteside, who added that the fate of the rest of the bridge parts is at the discretion of companies contracted for the demolition.

Still, Grieshaber hopes government agencies will donate bridge parts for the house and a plot of land as small as 50-by-50 feet. If those ventures fail, he said he’s still confident he can make the Bay Bridge House a reality out of pocket by buying the scraps from the demolition contractors themselves.

Grieshaber might have to go the extra mile, though.

“We wouldn’t be able to [sell pieces] at the site; it’s a liability issue,” said Rich Rigg, project manager for Silverado Contractors, one of the companies handling the demolition. “It’s already been decided the remnants will be sold to Schnitzer Steel in Oakland and Sims Metal in Richmond. We bring it straight to the recycler; he can always ask them.”

Grieshaber’s remaining challenge would be staking out a piece of land that isn’t government-owned and that fits his vision.

“No matter what, I would hope to have a view of the new bridge from the old bridge,” he said. “The Bay Bridge is on the National Register of Historic Places, and once it’s torn down it’s gone from our history — unless we keep some of it around for future generations to be a part of.”

http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/bay-area-man-envisions-environmentally-conscious-home-built-from-old-bay-bridge-scraps/Content?oid=2563072