JOHN KING Transbay District has arrived
High-speed rail or not, S.F. neighborhood is transformed
No matter what happens at the star-crossed Transbay Transit Center — whether or not trains ever pull into its $400 million basement station— it has altered the character of central San Francisco once and for all.
South of Market’s glassy new skyline didn’t come about by chance. Neither did the landscaped mid-block passages, or the 2,083 apartments and condominiums along the north side of Folsom Street that have opened or are under construction.
All this was set in motion by planning initiatives based on the idea that intensive development could help pay for a world-class transit center. Political factions in the city that often spar joined forces in support. A resurgent economy took it from there.
Today the transit center sits empty, awaiting the repair of two cracked girders. The murky expectation of train service being extended north from Mission Bay to Mission Street is even cloudier thanks to new Gov. Gavin Newsom’s pessimistic assessment of high-speed rail. But none of this is likely to hamper the transformation around it — because now more than ever, cities such as San Francisco take on a life of their own.
“The transit center primed the pump, in a way,” suggested Monica Smith, a UCLA professor and author of the forthcoming “Cities: The First 6,000 Years.” “In terms of changes within the city, it already has done its job.”
This isn’t to say that San Francisco and the Bay Area wouldn’t benefit from the completion of the long-promised bullet train that would take riders in three hours
from Los Angeles to an underground platform at Mission and Fremont streets. The now-closed transit center, which may reopen in June, includes such amenities as a rooftop park that attracted larger-thanexpected crowds during the six weeks before discovery of the cracked girders.
But in terms of the blocks around it, the genie is out of the bottle.
The obvious symbol of all this is the tapered girth of Salesforce Tower, which at 1,070 feet easily tops the 853-foot Transamerica Pyramid as the city’s tallest highrise. On the next block is 181 Fremont St., an 803foot tower where all 432,000 square feet of office space was leased to Facebook. The 67 ultra-luxe condominiums include a $46 million penthouse that will go on the market this spring.
The signs along the sidewalk are equally telling, though less obvious. There’s the colorful plaza outside a new apartment building on once-forlorn Tehama Street. A new pet shop at Beale and Folsom streets focuses on upscale dog and cat food.
Without the transit center — at least for now — life goes on. Without the assertive planning tied to the transit center’s birth, much of this lively scene might not exist.
The explanation lies in a series of policy decisions between 2002 and 2006 that accomplished two things.
First, the state agreed to give 12 acres of land between Mission, Second, Folsom and Main streets to the city. This included the land for the three-block-long transit center, but also a dozen development sites that until the 1990s had been covered by freeway ramps. The money raised by selling those sites — $670 million — went to the Transbay Joint Powers Authority, which built and manages the transit center.
Second, the city crafted a new plan for the area that raised heights significantly. Not only did it boost the value of the publicly owned sites, the plan also requires that extra taxes and development fees tied to new projects be steered back to the transit center as well as upgrades to streets and sidewalks in the emerging high-rise district.
The upzoning was dramatic: Salesforce Tower is nearly twice the height of what was allowed previously. Joining it will be the 900-foot tall Oceanwide Center at 50 Mission St., now a hole in the ground.
The plan that allowed these growth spurts was approved in 2012 with little controversy.
“We were floored,” recalled Dean Macris, the city planning director from 2004 until 2008. With good reason — he also was planning director in the 1980s, when downtown heights were lowered because of public complaints that included a series of voter initiatives to squash tall buildings.
The difference a generation later was that growth-wary groups on the city’s progressive flank strongly supported the goal of improved transit. And the area where extra-tall buildings would be allowed, once home to blue-collar firms that mostly had moved on, wasn’t in anyone’s backyard.
“Everyone wanted that transit center, the progressives as well as the more moderate people,” Macris said last year. “We could tie the added height to the cause of the transit center and get what we always wanted — a peak skyline for the new downtown.”
But a skyline doesn’t happen unless there’s a need. By raising heights at the beginning of an economic boom that has blurred the boundaries between Silicon Valley and San Francisco, the city set the stage for Transbay to respond to a pent-up demand that hadn’t been obvious.
Facebook has leased not only the space at 181 Fremont St. but also the entirety of Park Tower, a 46-story office high-rise that will open this spring at Beale and Howard streets. Salesforce, meanwhile, has leased all the available office space at 550 Howard St. — a proposed tower that hasn’t even been approved yet.
The same demand exists for housing, obviously. But the residential buildings that have sprouted along Folsom Street and on Rincon Hill don’t just serve the wealthy. More than 30 percent of the units planned for the Transbay area must be reserved for lower-income residents, a state requirement when it transferred the 12 acres to the city.
Like other planners, Macris said he didn’t expect Transbay to fill in at such a rapid pace.
In retrospect, though, he’s not surprised.
“We live in an era when things are changing more rapidly than before,” he said.
By laying out rules and regulations before the boom caused a backlash, a local economy driven by global forces had room to grow.
“All those high-tech companies that live on virtual platforms (increasingly) want to be in the center of the action,” Smith suggested. Which is tied to the underlying appeal of vibrant cities, no matter what day-today problems they face or the strains that come with growth.
“It’s all the people who want to be there,” Smith said. “All the workers pushing brooms, and all the investors, and all the artists looking for an audience for what they do.”
The problems at the Transbay Transit Center and the larger quest for high-speed rail demonstrate how tough it can be in today’s America to take on ambitious, forward-looking endeavors. But large-scale change can still happen. Sometimes, all a city needs to do is clear the way and then see what follows.
“We could tie the added height to the cause of the transit center and get what we always wanted — a peak skyline for the new downtown.” Dean Macris, former S.F. planning director