Curse of the reluctant metropolis
Region must solve housing, transportation problems
Iwant to share some reflections about where we’ve been and where we are and where we’re going as a city and as a region. To sketch out where we’ve been, I looked up what was happening in 1997, the year I started at SPUR. It was the year that: The first Harry Potter book was published. Steve Jobs returned to Apple. Bill Clinton was in his fifth year as president.
Willie Brown was in his second year as mayor of San Francisco.
We were on the cusp of a lot of big changes then, but the way history works, you don’t always know what’s right around the corner.
We didn’t know that samesex marriage would soon be legal or that Burning Man would still be going 20 years later.
We didn’t know we were amid something that would later be called the dot-com boom, closely followed by the dot-com bust. We told ourselves, “this city has always been a place of boom and bust, maybe things will go back to normal,” and we went back to worrying about the future of our economy. But underneath the drama of the up-and-down of the business cycle, the economy of San Francisco and the economy of Silicon Valley were merging.
The Bay Area was becoming a single integrated economic unit, and, in one of history’s great ironies, this most anticapitalist of U.S. cities would become a true center of capitalism.
It soon became clear that the contrast between this growing, increasingly integrated regional economy and the hyperlocalized, hyper-fragmented system for planning and governance was going to cause serious problems. We’ve been “the reluctant metropolis.”
Today, the Bay Area is the most important center of economic innovation in the world — and yet this is a place that has been very ambivalent about growing. It’s a place that has not been willing to add housing or transit in proportion to the jobs it’s added. As we’ve scaled up the economy, we have not scaled up the urbanism to match — and that divergence is the essence of our planning problem.
On the housing side, we have had a hard time welcoming new people. That is the dark side of Bay Area liberalism: We believe in immigration in theory, but in practice we are not willing to allow new buildings in our communities so that actual people have an actual place to live. Because of the choices we have made to “protect neighborhood character,” every person who comes here pushes out someone who was here already.
The same story plays out with transit. The Bay Area has grown too big to function with so many people driving, but we have not been willing to invest in new transit at anywhere near the necessary levels.
So it’s no mystery why housing costs so much, no mystery why it’s hard to get around. Those are the choices we have made.
The only way out of this is to stop being the reluctant metropolis and to become the enthusiastic metropolis — to move with energy and commitment to scale up the urban systems of the Bay Area. I’m not saying this is our only problem, but all the other things we need to do in the domains of economic inclusion and governance and culture are going to be so much more possible if we become the enthusiastic metropolis.
This is why SPUR has put so much emphasis on helping people to imagine what this future metropolis could look like: A place that will have room for the people who are here now as well as for immigrants. A place with economic opportunity for everyone, no matter where they started out. A place that is not just diverse — because that is simply a fact about the Bay Area — but a place that is putting its creative energy and wealth into the problem of how to build a truly inclusive society.
Such a place will have: A truly great transit system, like some of us experience when we go to London or Paris or Tokyo. Roadways that offer livability, like we see in the great European cities, by making it safe to bicycle.
We have taken some steps toward such a place. Over the last 20 years, SPUR has done some things of which I am quite proud: We’ve worked on transit expansions.
We’ve gone under the hood to improve the inner workings of public agencies. We’ve worked to upgrade buildings to survive earthquakes and replanned our shorelines to survive climate change. We’ve promoted ballot measures in public and mediated conflicts in private.
But what matters even more, we’ve changed the way people think. We’ve helped people imagine how an urbanized region could work, how it could succeed at solving the problems we face.
These days it’s easy to tell stories about the future that are apocalyptic, whether about climate change or about our country. It’s harder to tell stories that show how things could work out the right way. But that’s what we need to do: We need to be able to tell stories that show a path from where we are to where we want to be.
What has motivated me during my time in this role is that I believe that San Francisco and the Bay Area have a mission within the United States. For me, the story of this region and the story of our country are very connected. The Bay Area is supposed to be:
A haven for people fleeing oppression.
A place of opportunity for people seeking to better their economic condition.
A model that helps America rediscover the lost art of citybuilding.
In short, the Bay Area is supposed to help America become its best self.
The work we do here — the work that you all will continue — matters for us and for the story of our country.