This is a very interesting report and I wish I had found you before I missed the chance to be on the tour! I recently moved from Santa Monica (LA) to Santa Rosa, an hour north of SF, as I'm transitioning to retirement. A new friend (also a retired new arrival) and I take a weekly field trip to experience our new region. In early Feb we spent the day in SF to see the Amy Sherold exhibit at the MOMA and then have dinner at Zuni Cafe on Market Street, taking the Metro between the two sites. The Market Street area was pretty grim, but we did find a coffee shop to hang out in before the restaurant opened, and it was bustling with laptop people. We saw an Urban Alchemy staff member on the Metro, and I explained to my friend what UA does. On a previous field trip we took the SMART train from Santa Rosa to Larkspur and took the ferry to the Ferry Building for lunch.
San Francisco will never solve homelessness until it overcomes the ancient, extensive, expensive barriers to building more housing for everyone. You cannot move people out of the doorways on Market Street if there is no place for them to go. Supply and demand is a law, and I'm seeing it work in Santa Rosa, where barriers to building were lowered when thousands of homes burned in 2017.
Perhaps the new mayor, and the young tech workers who skew to YIMBY, will have the courage to allow new housing in the City. It is one of the jewels of our nation! Thanks for your hopeful report.
I've spent the better part of 50 years now going to college nearby, working in, and often visiting the city, and while the streets and the rest of the city were in far better shape than most reports give it, I found the Financial District to be far more lifeless than I've ever seen it. And that's because of the historic separation of living and working that the American economy has operated under for the last 100 years. I've worked in those buildings, however, and many of them will be difficult if not close to financially impossible to convert from office to housing, because the work spaces are so deep and because they have central HVAC systems. Further, the Financial District has none of the amenities such as parks, open spaces and plazas that make for good neighborhoods. The streets are designed to get large masses of cars in and out of the city during commute hours, even if those commuters are no longer there. It's possible that the city could simply wait for the office space to lease up again, but that may take ten years and in the meanwhile the buildings will grow old and tired, to say nothing of the loss of activity and tax revenue. If the city wants to turn the area around and make it a truly 21st century place to live and work, it will need to do some massive interventions at the street level, possibly closing some streets altogether and turning them into greenways, and eliminating some of the travel lanes and much of the asphalt on others. It also needs to create a true plan for this area, one that will map out where people go to get outside and shop, where they will see their "neighbors" and work mates, and what will make this a truly exciting place to be. That may require wholesale rezoning to create view corridors, places to sit in the sun and central gathering places. (This was, after all, a place where the great majority of high-rise office buildings went up in a single, 20-year building boom that left little of the original urban fabric.). San Francisco is a world-class city and it can compete with the likes of Shanghai and Singapore and London for world-class talent and business activity, but to do so will require the kind of imaginative intervention that has transformed those cities in the last 40 years.
I want to put in place European-style urban alchemy throughout North America. Pedestrian streets, green spaces and third places, a funding boost for public transit, etc…
Thanks so much for this great recap, Diana. As a Bay Area resident (and participant in the tour!), I'm curious about your comment that you felt very little "of the pulse of the tech industry." What would you have expected to see or feel?
Thanks, Nancy! I guess I would have expected more evidence of tech companies - like when there was a Twitter sign on their building. I saw the AI ads, but not a ton of them. I wondered if more people would be wearing VR goggles or Meta Ray Bans but didn't see any. Stuff like that.
You were probably still getting acclimated, but there were tech companies (and logos) all around us at the Salesforce Transit Center — starting, of course, with Salesforce itself. Slack HQ is visible from the park; also Cloudflare and Grammarly. It’s true that you see far more bulk evidence of techworld down in Silicon Valley, but I’m willing to bet that most of the pedestrians we encountered in SoMa and the Financial District were tech workers: just look for the corporate-swag fleeces and backpacks. VR goggles? Only for gamers, as far as I can tell. Meta Ray-Bans? Never seen them on anyone. As for AI ads, they are ubiquitous on the approaches to the Bay Bridge (the bridge I know best). In fact, I don’t think I’ve seen any other kind of outdoor advertising there lately.
Great to see your positive take on SF. For placemaking in high tourist traffic areas like Fisherman’s Wharf, I’d love to see a food hall-type space with open seating and small format local restaurants showing off their best local cuisine. (My family just got back from a trip to Lisbon and enjoyed the bustling Time Out Market near their embarcadero.)
If you’re still in town, you should swing by Belden Place to see the pedestrian alley with bistros and patio seating. It’s like a nugget of what we should scale more broadly.
Thanks for these ideas— yes a food hall is a great idea for filling some of the big old vacant restaurants. Unfortunately I left town but I will check out Belden Place!
This is a very interesting report and I wish I had found you before I missed the chance to be on the tour! I recently moved from Santa Monica (LA) to Santa Rosa, an hour north of SF, as I'm transitioning to retirement. A new friend (also a retired new arrival) and I take a weekly field trip to experience our new region. In early Feb we spent the day in SF to see the Amy Sherold exhibit at the MOMA and then have dinner at Zuni Cafe on Market Street, taking the Metro between the two sites. The Market Street area was pretty grim, but we did find a coffee shop to hang out in before the restaurant opened, and it was bustling with laptop people. We saw an Urban Alchemy staff member on the Metro, and I explained to my friend what UA does. On a previous field trip we took the SMART train from Santa Rosa to Larkspur and took the ferry to the Ferry Building for lunch.
San Francisco will never solve homelessness until it overcomes the ancient, extensive, expensive barriers to building more housing for everyone. You cannot move people out of the doorways on Market Street if there is no place for them to go. Supply and demand is a law, and I'm seeing it work in Santa Rosa, where barriers to building were lowered when thousands of homes burned in 2017.
Perhaps the new mayor, and the young tech workers who skew to YIMBY, will have the courage to allow new housing in the City. It is one of the jewels of our nation! Thanks for your hopeful report.
Completely agree that more housing would solve so many issues for SF. It’s going to take time but I’m hopeful the tide is turning.
A good report. Heartfelt and sincere.
I've spent the better part of 50 years now going to college nearby, working in, and often visiting the city, and while the streets and the rest of the city were in far better shape than most reports give it, I found the Financial District to be far more lifeless than I've ever seen it. And that's because of the historic separation of living and working that the American economy has operated under for the last 100 years. I've worked in those buildings, however, and many of them will be difficult if not close to financially impossible to convert from office to housing, because the work spaces are so deep and because they have central HVAC systems. Further, the Financial District has none of the amenities such as parks, open spaces and plazas that make for good neighborhoods. The streets are designed to get large masses of cars in and out of the city during commute hours, even if those commuters are no longer there. It's possible that the city could simply wait for the office space to lease up again, but that may take ten years and in the meanwhile the buildings will grow old and tired, to say nothing of the loss of activity and tax revenue. If the city wants to turn the area around and make it a truly 21st century place to live and work, it will need to do some massive interventions at the street level, possibly closing some streets altogether and turning them into greenways, and eliminating some of the travel lanes and much of the asphalt on others. It also needs to create a true plan for this area, one that will map out where people go to get outside and shop, where they will see their "neighbors" and work mates, and what will make this a truly exciting place to be. That may require wholesale rezoning to create view corridors, places to sit in the sun and central gathering places. (This was, after all, a place where the great majority of high-rise office buildings went up in a single, 20-year building boom that left little of the original urban fabric.). San Francisco is a world-class city and it can compete with the likes of Shanghai and Singapore and London for world-class talent and business activity, but to do so will require the kind of imaginative intervention that has transformed those cities in the last 40 years.
I want to put in place European-style urban alchemy throughout North America. Pedestrian streets, green spaces and third places, a funding boost for public transit, etc…
Thanks so much for this great recap, Diana. As a Bay Area resident (and participant in the tour!), I'm curious about your comment that you felt very little "of the pulse of the tech industry." What would you have expected to see or feel?
Thanks, Nancy! I guess I would have expected more evidence of tech companies - like when there was a Twitter sign on their building. I saw the AI ads, but not a ton of them. I wondered if more people would be wearing VR goggles or Meta Ray Bans but didn't see any. Stuff like that.
You were probably still getting acclimated, but there were tech companies (and logos) all around us at the Salesforce Transit Center — starting, of course, with Salesforce itself. Slack HQ is visible from the park; also Cloudflare and Grammarly. It’s true that you see far more bulk evidence of techworld down in Silicon Valley, but I’m willing to bet that most of the pedestrians we encountered in SoMa and the Financial District were tech workers: just look for the corporate-swag fleeces and backpacks. VR goggles? Only for gamers, as far as I can tell. Meta Ray-Bans? Never seen them on anyone. As for AI ads, they are ubiquitous on the approaches to the Bay Bridge (the bridge I know best). In fact, I don’t think I’ve seen any other kind of outdoor advertising there lately.
Two of the many, many AI billboards around town: https://www.instagram.com/p/DEdSH2lTggg/?img_index=1
Great to see your positive take on SF. For placemaking in high tourist traffic areas like Fisherman’s Wharf, I’d love to see a food hall-type space with open seating and small format local restaurants showing off their best local cuisine. (My family just got back from a trip to Lisbon and enjoyed the bustling Time Out Market near their embarcadero.)
If you’re still in town, you should swing by Belden Place to see the pedestrian alley with bistros and patio seating. It’s like a nugget of what we should scale more broadly.
Thanks for these ideas— yes a food hall is a great idea for filling some of the big old vacant restaurants. Unfortunately I left town but I will check out Belden Place!