You won't find a city in the world that doesn't have some dark little secret of a place. Perhaps it's a vast expanse of decaying factories, a massive tract of decaying public housing, an unseemly large highway interchange or any other experiment in urban planning gone awry. As the value of the proximity of this space becomes more apparent to those in the development world, the obstacles that once impeded development look smaller and smaller.
San Francisco is no exception to this truth. In the south east section of the city, an abandoned naval yard sits vacant. As the Navy nears completion of radiological clean-up of the Hunters Point Shipyard, the city is gearing up to develop the area. I have a lot of experience with a similar brownfield project (Southworks in Chicago) so I thought I would try to talk to somebody at city hall to see if San Francisco was doing anything differently than Chicago. Luckily, I managed to snag Thor Kaslofsky, the Hunter's Point Project Manager for the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency. As for any glimmer of hope that this "liberal Mecca" would be doing things differently...
When remodeling an old house, one of the first things to get an update is the kitchen. The reason for this is not technological advances. Rather, it is a result of sexism. Kitchens in old houses were designed by men who rarely--if ever--had to use the kitchen. Their ignorance about the use of a kitchen lead to remarkably dysfunctional spaces. After much scientific study, quantitative measures (the kitchen work triangle) of the kitchen were developed to aid designers yet truly excellent kitchens weren't introduced until people who used them began to design them.
It should come as no surprise then that the people tasked with designing an entirely new development are only working with their experience, some buzz words and a few blunt quantitative tools. Take a look at this document, the proposed streetscapes for the first phase of the re-development. You'll notice the excruciating detail given to the variety and location of plants to be used. You'll also find no explanation why the smallest streets are 60' across. What is all that space for?
Space is important. The number of inches between the sink and refrigerator is important. Why is it that we don't consider our urban space important? It is certainly more difficult to remodel a city that it is to remodel a kitchen. I can only come up with two potential answers. First, planners consider architect's designs so thoroughly appalling and distasteful that they feel compelled to provide a pedestrian with a visual escape from the sidewalk view: the vast expanse of the street. The second--and more likely--answer is that planners do not value space, in fact, they are only concerned with filling it.
Consider this situation: you are a planning firm that has just received an assignment to draw up a "Master Plan" for a given parcel. Luckily, you're not starting from scratch. The city has implemented a series of laws the govern how space should be developed. The number of housing units is likely prescribed, as is the minimum width of streets and the percentage of (non-street) open space. Is there really any decisions that the planner can make other than the exact placement of each street?
The short answer is no. Making any changes would require tedious meetings ($) to prove their worth, variances from the various code enforcement boards ($$) and enormous risk associated with making something slightly different ($$$). The longer answer is that the city--which essentially controls the entire process--has a vested interest in using space wisely. San Francisco in particular, has an enormous need to increase the amount of housing available in the city. They have an enormous incentive to find ways to hold as many people as they can in the little space the have remaining. Instead of providing quality living space for orders of magnitude more people, the city is left with thousands of plants and play structures to maintain.
Luckily for the country (though not San Francisco), business as usual seems to have taken a bit of a break. Here's to hoping that its departure is a permanent one.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
San Francisco - Hunters Point
Monday, March 23, 2009
San Francisco - The Mission
It seems that every city and town from San Francisco south and all the way east to El Paso had some sort of Mission District, Mission Hill, Mission Valley, Mission Street...etc. We were lucky enought to stay in the San Francisco Mission District which turned out to be a very interesting place. As it happened, it was our first true city stay since we were in Chicago. If you'll recall, Chicago was typified by large blocks of residential areas with a grid of commercial areas around them. By contrast, the Mission is a collection of long, thin strips of commercial areas with similarly long, thin strips of residential areas in between them.
Just by form alone, this was a new kind of place for us. The development of these sorts of near-by strips was likely a result of the frequent stops of a streetcar line along a main roads as opposed to the distant stops of subways. One of the most interesting aspects of these strips were their independent character and functionality. Valencia Street for example, runs just 500 feet parallel to Mission Street yet has its own unique character and feel.
While staying on Valencia Street, we witnessed a public display of one of the rarest actions in cities; the public got its way. Two doors down from the apartment building we were staying in, American Apparel had posted a massive sign in an empty storefront, appealing to an unwilling community for support in their bid to open up shop along Valencia St. In 2006, San Francisco began a tedious certification process for new chain stores opening up in the city. Most stores, especially those like American Apparel (kind of progressive), are granted approval.
The residents of Valencia St were not keen on the idea of a major retailer moving onto their block though. They were proud of the myriad of local shops that had taken decades to establish themselves on the street and they'd be damned if they'd have to bask in the glow of American Apparel's ever-burning high-intensity fluorescent lights. If you're interested in urban activism, and how a healthy neighborhood flexes its power, read this entire blog, it details the unfolding efforts to stop the new shop from moving in. Over the course of 20 days, an entire neighborhood was able to mobilize sufficiently to prevent one of the nations largest retailers from opening up shop in a vacant building. That's a symptom of a pretty good city. For those out there that think that this was a stupid issue, consider that the people who live in a place had some say in defining it. That is far more important that any single issue. Moving on...
A distance that gets kicked around a lot is 1/5 of a mile. According to research (hmmm), that's about the distance that most people are willing to walk to get somewhere. Those 1000 or so feet are used to design and layout New Urbanist developments across the country. There were probably at least a dozen coffee shops within that radius from where we were staying yet every morning we went to the same one that was two doors down. As it turns out, convenience knows no limits. If there had been a coffee shop on the floor we were staying on, we would have gone there instead.
As planners begin to try and provide conveniences to residents by zoning in special use areas, they misunderstand how people relate to use and space. For example, a coffee shop 1/5 of a mile away gets added to the "places to go" mental file, but not to the "place you're buying" file. A coffee shop downstairs means you don't even have to get dressed to go there, it's an extension of your house. That adds to the price people are willing to pay. But enough about density and convenience.
The Mission is an economically and ethnically mixed neighborhood, to the benefit of all. The variety of retail options was astounding, from a high end health food store to vendors hawking produce on the street and from $4 burritos to $9 burritos. This district exemplified the benefits of living in a city.
One thing that struck me as I first began wandering around the Mission was the wideness of the main streets. Mission Street, pictured above, is an enormous street. Valencia Street was so wide that it seemed planners didn't know what to do with all the space; the bicycle lane was 10' wide! All my thoughts about cities would have left me thinking that with so much street, you couldn't get sufficient density to support such lively districts. As I continued to explore, the answer became clear.
It was the incredible density of the residential areas--tall, modest homes set along narrow little streets--that allowed enough people to live in close proximity to these districts to make them functional. Even with the wide main streets, the districts are compact and dense enough to support some of the old-school sorts of freight delivery.
These people care about their neighborhood, and one of the easiest ways to tell is from the murals that adorned any exposed and undecorated building surface.
The climate and wealth of the place make it an excellent place to paint, even the trucks have a pretty amazing look to them. If this is how all automobiles looked, I think I might be more supportive of them.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
San Francisco - Valencia Gardens
Public housing doesn't exactly have a stellar reputation in the United States. The "projects" began as an attempt to provide "adequate" housing to lower income families and individuals. In cities like New York, slums were demolished en masse to make way for sprawling public housing projects. The overall density (in DU/acre) of these places were always less than the tenements that they replaced and they introduced a feature rare to cities, mandatory open space. In most places, that meant pure, green lawn. As these projects descended into the very same chaos they were meant to replace (and the untouched slums slowly became valuable real estate), government funding for such adventures dried up.
But were there's a will, there's a way. San Francisco, faced with a decaying public housing project at the heart of the blossoming Mission District found a way to act. The liberal community would have never let the property be sold off to the highest bidder. Instead, the old project, pictured below (thanks Le Blog Exuberance) was replaced with a new one.
Before we get into how--and why--San Francisco developed this project and why others have difficulty, it's important to understand the concept of leverage. Just think JGWentworth (It's your money, use it when you need it!) only with way more risk than a structured settlement. Here's a page out of leverage's greatest hits (circa 2007).
Developer: If you give us 100 million, we'll build some apartments and pay you $200 million in 3 years. Here is a piece of paper with lots of numbers written on it. Since the $20 million project we did worked out, this one will too.
Banker: Sounds splendid. (To investors) Who wants to make some money? Put $10 million into this magic hat and in three years, you'll have $19 million back in your pocket! It's called investing, everybody is doing it!
The developer leveraged future earnings to obtain present money. What future earnings? The future rent money of the future inhabitants of the future building. The problem, of course, was that this model was so profitable, more future buildings popped up than there were future inhabitants to fill them, and they were certainly more expensive than the future rent money could pay for. But I digress, that discussion is for another day...
A city can leverage expected revenue increases (taxes) in exchange for cash that will be spent on generating that additional revenue. This pot of coins is known as TIF (Tax Increment Financing) money. Private developers generally try to dip into this pot when they develop infill sites, especially those that require a bit of clean-up. There's a lot of debate over the distribution of TIF funds.
The impediment with public housing, is that the federal money that subsidizes tenants rent can not be used to pay down debt. That is, public project money can't be leveraged. When faced with the prospect of raising funds to build a structure, that bag of loot is off limits.
In order to raise the money to build the structure, San Francisco did something somewhat odd. In order to create a larger tax increment (public housing residents don't have much in the way of tax bills) and to find a position to leverage, they created a mixed (gasp) public housing project. The city planner I talked to called Valencia Gardens a model that they hoped to use throughout the city.
I know, the picture is a bit rough. The financial model of this development might be seen as something to duplicate. Mixing the rich and the poor isn't as crazy an idea as most of us thought. The development itself though, while making some significant improvements over the traditional project model, leaves much to be desired. Is the fence intended to project exclusivity or to protect security? In the later case, a building front would have worked just as well. In the former... well, let's hope that wasn't their intention.
Why is this road so big for little three story buildings? Perhaps there are still open space requirements in the federal standards. And why does a city that actively discourages car ownership provide so much additional parking? The entire scene sucks away energy with vast stretches of negative space. The electrical boxes are more prominently placed than the entrances to shops. This sidewalk looks useful, no?
My biggest issue with this building is the attempt to imitate a collection of small scale projects. This is now common practice in the architectural world. Take a big project and slightly vary the material, setback, height...etc every 20'. That way it will look like it grew organically as a collection of many small buildings designed by many (not so proficient) different architects. Newer strip malls generally utilize this ploy.
While I understand that economic realities of the real estate world, I have seen with my own eyes large buildings that are designed as a whole yet detailed to the human scale. I suspect that it can even be done at a lower cost than trying to cobble together a half dozen different styles. While I'm not one to point fingers (architects fault), I do think it's important to realize that building "fake places" is a bad thing. Yeah, this project probably won't see the same degree of problems associated with other low-income public projects, but other than a place to sleep and some daunting storefronts, what does this place add to the city? In short, if you duplicated this development a thousand times, would anybody pay San Francisco rent to live in such a place?
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
San Francisco - Replate
This blog is mostly about the built environment and how creating positive space leads to positive action from ordinary people. While most American cities are largely devoid of these sorts of spaces, San Francisco is full of them. With that in mind, it seemed foolish of me to leave the city without finding some sort of evidence that might support my contention that good things happen in good places.
I head heard about a homegrown movement that was trying to address various issues relating to food waste and hunger and decided to look them up. The concept, called Replating, was started by Josh Kamler and Axel Albin. They had begun to notice doggie bags left atop public trash cans instead of inside them. After giving the idea some thought, they launched Replate, a website designed to spread the word about conserving food and helping out the homeless. I was able to track them down and have a quick chat with them before I left town.
Replating isn't for everyone. You have to eat out, order too much food and then be willing to part with it. Anybody with busboy experience could tell you that there's no shortage of these people. Restaurants are usually stuck throwing this food out. More enterprising individuals ask for the remainder of their meal to go, or perhaps the whole meal was to go and they failed to finish it. For many, cluttering the fridge is a bad option so the half-eaten and neatly packaged meal usually ends up in the garbage.
The behavior can be observed directly and indirectly, as the hungry go through garbage cans looking for something to eat. The alternative is called Replating, where the doggie bag is instead placed on top of--or next to--a garbage can. It requires an individual to acknowledge that they hold something of value in their hand and that it is something they ought to share.
It would be wrong to look at this as an environmental issue, though there is probably some small benefit (food morsel vs. doggie bag). This is a consciousness issue. An individual must be aware that less fortunate people exist and that they would appreciate a bite to eat. That awareness provides some small measure of defense against ever-growing excess and consumerism.
Replate is not the solution every problem anywhere, but it does a small part to make the world a better place. In essence, a movement like Replate is a symptom of a good city. I'll have one more report on symptoms of good cities before I'm through with San Francisco.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
San Francisco - Chinatown
Some of the most fascinating and appealing attractions of large diverse cities are their isolated ethnic communities. These communities are typically well established enclaves within a city. Often times, they cater to tourists who are eager to catch a glimpse of a distant culture without spending the coin on airfare. The most successful of these cultural attractions are able to provide a vastly different experience for visitors and residents alike as they cross a street or turn a corner into the ethnic district. Naturally, the built environment plays a huge roll in setting the atmosphere.
The San Francisco Chinatown is the oldest and largest in the hemisphere and has direct ties to the Chinese laborers who built the first transcontinental railway. Vegetable stands line the streets and every sort of business caters to the Chinese-language population. Despite sitting in the standard grid layout of the rest of the city, Chinatown is a vastly different place with a vastly different feel. As the modern day "placemakers" would say, it's quite a place. To fully understand why this historic collection of 16 or so blocks is so special, it is important to understand the two most important factors in "placemaking" (and no, hiring a consultant isn't one of them).
The Chinatown in San Francisco dates back to the 1850s. It didn't take long for the "natives" to see the Chinese as an economic and cultural threat so by the 1870s, ordinances were passed and deed restriction put in place to severely limit the ability of people of Chinese descent to own property outside of the historic Chinatown boundaries. This created one of the most important conditions for the creation of a thriving place, scarcity of space.
Every inch of space was valued and there was no chance for sprawl. Dark alleys became vibrant streets and every bit of open land was built as close to the street as it was allowed. The size of the historic Chinatown district--16 blocks--made it perfect for foot traffic. Every place in the district was less than a five minute walk to any other. Conditions varied over the years, and much of Chinatown was "westernized" after a failed attempt by city officials to clear out the neighborhood following the devastating 1906 earthquake however old Chinatown lives on in the small streets and alleys that were made precious by racist legal codes.
There are two generators of space scarcity, natural limits--water boundaries, poor transportation infrastructure, mountains...etc.--and artificial limits like cultural boundaries, racist deed restrictions, green belts, regional growth boundaries...etc. In the case of Chinatown, a natural boundary (San Francisco sits on a peninsula) encouraged city officials to implement an artificial boundary (racist deed restrictions and property ownership ordinances). Space scarcity alone though, isn't enough to make an interesting place. 
San Francisco is full of places that have no extra room, some are happening and some are avoided. The difference is culture. It turns out the melting pot analogy of America doesn't make much sense. I don't think many people want the entire country to look the same, feel the same, taste the same... Truffles are a nice treat, but I doubt most would adopt a truffle-only diet. Culture means contrast, and contrast can only develop in isolation. Old Chinatown was an incredibly isolated place. Much of the city was off limits to the Chinese and much of Chinatown was off limits to Caucasians. An incredibly strong language barrier maintained this isolation even when legal restrictions were removed.
Of course, the Chinese started off with quite an advantage. As immigrants from a distant land, their various traditions were all different enough from the dominant American culture of the time that they were melded together out of mutual isolation. Overall though, culture develops quickly in relative isolation. In contemporary communities, this is most often done by providing sufficient services within a small geographic area so that nearby residents will be forced to interact primarily with one another.
Architects still struggle with the "lost art of placemaking", perhaps one day they will realize that their job is to design buildings, the inhabitants of which will be glad to "make the place" ... free of charge.
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