Open Houses:
Saturday Feb 4th, 1-3pm & Sunday Feb 5th, 1-3pm

Spacious top-floor Victorian condo in a two unit building. This home is loaded with old world charm – high ceilings, original detailing, crown molding and wood floors. The gracious floor plan includes a sun-filled living room with built in bookshelves and decorative fireplace. Double parlor pocket doors connect through to the over sized dining room. There are two bedrooms plus an office or nursery. The updated eat-in kitchen opens into a large utility/laundry room with direct access to an outdoor deeded deck with room for a barbeque and dining table. Landscaped shared yard. One car garage parking in tandem and an abundance of extra storage.

Walkscore of 91 = A Walker’s Paradise, plus great MUNI access.

HOA dues $300 per month; Built in 1900 (per tax records); 1242 square feet (per tax records)

www.1311Baker.com

The Essentials:

• Top Floor Condominium
• Two Bedrooms and one Bathroom
• Original Detailing Throughout
• Eat-in Kitchen
• In-unit Laundry Room
• Outdoor deeded deck and Landscaped shared yard
• One car garage parking in tandem
• Abundance of extra storage

Active – $689,000

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Did you know that the Chinese New Year is actually a two week Spring festival celebrated for over 5,000 years in China. The San Francisco Chinese New Year celebration originated in the 1860′s during the Gold Rush day and is now the largest Asian event in North America.  The celebration includes two major fairs, the Chinese New Year Flower Fair and Chinatown Community Street Fair, and culminates with The Chinese New Year Parade.

The 201 feet long Golden Dragon is always featured at the end of the parade as the grand finale and will be accompanied by over 600,000 firecrackers! It takes a team of 100 men and women to carry the Golden Dragon!   Rain or shine, come watch the parade!

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The different cultures that formed San Francisco, now flourish giving the city many unique and varying neighborhoods. Exploring the city’s neighborhoods is a great way to get to know and enjoy the city. It is also an important factor to consider when deciding where in the city to buy a home. Test your knowledge – how well do you know your city?

Click here for a great guide to the San Francisco Neighborhoods.

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Sam Mogannam, who owns both the market and a nearby creamery, wanted his Web sites to capture the spirit of his stores. “We wanted the experience of logging on to biritemarket.com and biritecreamery.com to be as similar to the experience of walking through the door of our market and creamery as we could,” Mr. Mogannam said.

Although the market has been around since the 1940s, its first Web site wasn’t introduced until 2003. Last year, Mr. Mogannam invested $18,000 in a redesign, hoping to solve problems with both the site’s design and its back-end administration. “We’d had a site for several years but it was static and difficult to update,” he said. “Making our site more dynamic was the No. 1 priority in creating a new biritemarket.com.”

The NYTimes asked readers to take a look at the site and at Bi-Rite’s social media efforts. Here’s what you had to say, along with my take and Mr. Mogannam’s response. http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/category/site-analysis/

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Let’s Rock the Stick!

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As one of the Bay Area’s largest construction firms, Webcor Builders provides a handy barometer of the region’s economic vitality.

The San Francisco company’s workforce, which topped 2,200 in 2008, has shrunk to about 1,200. But this year it plans to add about 500 workers, primarily skilled union tradespeople – many of the same folks who’ve been languishing on unemployment since the housing collapse and economic downturn began several years ago.

“Bottom line, 2012 will be a good year,” said Webcor CEO Andy Ball. “We had some economic recovery in 2011 but didn’t see the benefits of it. We started hiring within the past six months and definitely will continue to add jobs.”

Local companies across a range of industries sound a similar refrain: They are cautiously optimistic about this year’s economic prospects. And economists concur that the Bay Area is likely to experience moderate growth that outpaces that of the state and the nation – particularly good news, given Friday’s report of 200,000 jobs created in December nationally.”

“Overall for the Bay Area, I expect continued progress, somewhat faster than we saw in 2011,” said Jon Haveman, chief economist at the Bay Area Council. “It’s going to be uneven as it has been for at least the past year. There’s nothing out there that shows the economy ready to roar back again – except in the tech sector, which is booming.”

But this year, technology’s rising tide could boost other industries.

“The recovery will broaden a bit in 2012; it was narrowly concentrated in technology in 2011,” said Stephen Levy, director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy. “The tech surge is so large that the income generated there will spread to other sectors. That’s traditionally what happens once your leading growth sector gets going fast enough.”

The complete article is here:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/01/08/MNRS1MLRTK.DTL&tsp=1

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Visit The Legion of Honor Museum this weekend – located at 100 34th Avenue at Clement Street in Lincoln Park – and see the current exhibit, Pissarro’s People, before it ends next Sunday, January 22nd.

Camille Pissarro had a unique and lifelong interest in the human figure. From his earliest years in the Caribbean and Venezuela until his death in Paris in 1903, Pissarro drew, painted, and made prints featuring human subjects from every walk of life. The cast of characters Pissarro represented reflects his unique engagement in contemporary political, social, and economic issues. The exhibition reconsiders Pissarro’s people within this rich contextual setting.

Why not bring a picnic and make a day of it?

For more information, go to the Legion of Honor website: http://legionofhonor.famsf.org/legion/exhibitions/pissarros-people

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Over that same period, tech job growth in San Francisco surged by 16.1 percent — the fastest of any area in the country, according to the report. That’s one and a half times the rate in Silicon Valley during the past year and a half — and growth has been the largest in SoMa. If tech is one of the most resilient parts of the U.S. economy, the strongest part of tech is in SoMa.

These jobs are largely generated by eager young companies champing at the bit to become the next Google or Microsoft, and they all need somewhere to house their employees.

In October, the real estate firm Colliers International released a report that found 40 tech companies were looking for approximately two million square feet of office space in San Francisco, primarily in SoMa. Mayor Ed Lee noted that the space they were seeking to fill was “[the] equivalent of nearly four Transamerica Pyramids.”

Read more here:  Social Media Fuels SoMa Rental Boom

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For more information on additional programs at the Academy, click here: http://www.calacademy.org/holidays/

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