San Francisco Business Times
From the article:
What should you watch closely in the Bay Area housing market in 2015? Something you might not pay attention to unless you're an urban planning geek: The zoning processes in Oakland and San Francisco.
You don't need to go to every public meeting, read every policy paper or memorize height-limit proposals, but the ongoing Central SoMa Plan in San Francisco and the upcoming Downtown Plan in Oakland will lay foundations for parts of those cities with large pockets of underused buildings and crime-heavy streets. By raising heights and turning industrial uses into housing, developers could start to flock to those areas while the housing market remains hot.
Central SoMa's zoning process, which deals with the area around the future Central Subway, started in 2013 and won't finish until 2016 begins. The plan started to come into sharper view last year, with planners setting preliminary goals to ensure that the area includes one-third affordable housing.