Well, if they're going to move in a bigger way into SF, Mission Bay makes sense. It's basically a big ghost town. Lots of UCSF-owned medical facilities and lifeless condos. But plenty of space. And it's relatively close to the transit hubs in South Beach.
As a nearby resident and worker, though, I'm not looking forward to the traffic or the added residential real estate crunch. We've got the Giants, soon we'll have the Warriors, we'll have a few huge high rises going up, a huge Salesforce campus in the works, and maybe we'll have a Google office. Oy vey.
Agree on this sentiment; it's a quiet part of town compared to its surroundings, which is kind of nice. The coming boom in automobile traffic will compromise it as one of the relatively few peaceful places in the city to walk, run, and bike.
Small correction: according to the source article, Google is actually purchasing the land from Salesforce. So it may be one or the other.
We've got the Giants, soon we'll have the Warriors, we'll have a few huge high rises going up, a huge Salesforce campus in the works, and maybe we'll have a Google office.
Sounds like a boon, not a burden!
Maybe Google should move to somewhere people would be grateful to have them. People here in Philadelphia would love to see some business and industry come their way.
It's an economic boon, and it brings in a lot of smart people, and it makes the neighborhood more lively. All of that is awesome. I live in SOMA and believe me, I love how vibrant it is today, especially as compared to what it used to be: essentially, a dead zone of warehouses and shipping containers.
I love SF's ability to reinvent itself, to adapt its spaces, and so forth. I don't think the city gets nearly enough credit for that.
The problems are housing inventory and traffic. The city has not yet figured out a fantastic way to address either of those issues. Personally speaking, I'd freaking love a Tokyo-style mega-city of uber-high rises and elevated catwalks. I'd love for SF to become the dense, futuristic wonderland that Star Trek envisions its becoming. But a lot of regulations are in place that seem to prevent that from happening. And there's also the issue of seismic stability to contend with. SF is not exactly the sturdiest ground on which to build skyscrapers. But we need more housing, and we need more intra-city transportation that doesn't rely on the roads (which, if you've ever experienced gameday or rush-hour traffic in SOMA, you know can become hellish nightmares).
Essentially, SF is a very small space that experiences high density and is not (currently) built to accommodate such density.
All said and done, this stuff is sort of a mixed bag for me. I appreciate it in many respects, but I feel the pain in a lot of day-to-day life. It's not a binary, net-good or net-bad situation.
I really like your perspective on this. You seem very open to the idea that more public infrastructure needs to be built.
I think the first steps that we need to make are towards making the lack of public infrastructure feel more painful to the new implants. We need to do away with the private bus fleets and perhaps explore policies that would limit private and quasi-private modes of transportation like cabs, limos and car "shares".
Cities without any public infrastructure are terrible places to live and work in. We need to stop making "privatization" such an unarguable positive in the tech community. It is at ends with the needs of a population the lives practically on top of itself.
I'm all for the supposed decentralized and sharing-based economics of services like Lyft, but we can't forget that these are not democratic institutions. If we are intending to wholesale replace our existing methods of public transportation with something like this, we need to make sure that we retain public oversight in the matter. I believe the colloquial term for this is "to not throw out the baby with the bathwater".
Interesting points. I agree that privatization is not the cure-all it's been made out to be. I happen to think SF -- the Bay Area in particular -- is both a public and private success story. It's easy to forget that the rapid advances SF's private sector has made in the last few decades were largely built on the back of public-sector investment in sciences and tech companies in the '50s and '60s. But I digress.
Public transportation can and should get better within the city of San Francisco, and in my mind, the best place to build it is up. It's tough to build an intra-city subway for any number of reasons, not the least of which is the aforementioned seismic issue. Additionally, SF turns out to have been built largely (predominantly?) on landfill and liquefaction. Subways would be pretty susceptible to flooding, and would be massively expensive to keep in operation with all the pumping and maintenance requirements the city would force on them.
I really like the idea of a skyward-developing SF, though, not being a geologist or a structural engineer, I'm not sure how that would be achieved in a city like this one, with its inherent foundation issues. But we're starting to build a lot of giant skyscrapers, evidently, so perhaps someone's figured it out?
I'm sure there are plenty of engineering and architectural solutions to building upwards.
How about instead of putting our resources in to "seasteading" and other libertarian ideologies, we put instead explore more humanistic and social endeavors like Buckminster Fuller's "“Proposed Tetrahedral City"?
The thing with trying to leave and start your own community, be it on a floating platform in the middle of the ocean or in outer-space, is that it will still heavily depend on the rest of humanity for support. We don't have any self-supporting mechanisms for life other than Earth.
The irony is that the idealic hippie communities that were inspired by the musings of guys like Fuller fail from the same basic principles.
I think the lesson here is that at least for time being, we can't achieve true self-sustaining communities. An effort needs to be made to interact with humanity at large, no matter how ideological impure that endeavor is.
I'd freaking love a Tokyo-style mega-city of uber-high rises and elevated catwalks...SF is not exactly the sturdiest ground on which to build skyscrapers.
Uh, did you just use Tokyo as an example of the city you want SF to be and then say that it can't because of earthquakes?
Yeah, it's absurd how many SF residents are reacting to all this economic activity. There are so many cities across the country that would love to be in the position SF is right now.
It's almost like a good number of SF residents aren't sharing in this economic activity and are instead being forcibly removed from their homes to make way for the imported worker bees who can actually contribute to and benefit from the industry.
Hogwash. SF residents are being forcibly removed from their homes because they refuse to allow more housing to be constructed. They keep supply artificially low through a lot of ridiculous ordinances, pushing up rent and the cost of living in many ways.
Also, there is nothing preventing many from benefitting from the growth here. For example, every single blue collar worker in construction with unions should be fighting to permit a housing boom here. It increases demand for their services, giving them more work and putting them in a better bargaining position. This city could easily grow 50 to 100% over the next decade if it wanted to. A 50% increase in population would be awesome economically for just about everyone who lives and works in the area and provide goods and services for people living in San Francisco.
If you want to keep it cheap, you need to dilute the 1%ers so they represent a percent of the city instead of like 25% of the city.
Comments
Well, if they're going to move in a bigger way into SF, Mission Bay makes sense. It's basically a big ghost town. Lots of UCSF-owned medical facilities and lifeless condos. But plenty of space. And it's relatively close to the transit hubs in South Beach.
As a nearby resident and worker, though, I'm not looking forward to the traffic or the added residential real estate crunch. We've got the Giants, soon we'll have the Warriors, we'll have a few huge high rises going up, a huge Salesforce campus in the works, and maybe we'll have a Google office. Oy vey.
Agree on this sentiment; it's a quiet part of town compared to its surroundings, which is kind of nice. The coming boom in automobile traffic will compromise it as one of the relatively few peaceful places in the city to walk, run, and bike.
Small correction: according to the source article, Google is actually purchasing the land from Salesforce. So it may be one or the other.
Sounds like a boon, not a burden!
Maybe Google should move to somewhere people would be grateful to have them. People here in Philadelphia would love to see some business and industry come their way.
It's an economic boon, and it brings in a lot of smart people, and it makes the neighborhood more lively. All of that is awesome. I live in SOMA and believe me, I love how vibrant it is today, especially as compared to what it used to be: essentially, a dead zone of warehouses and shipping containers.
I love SF's ability to reinvent itself, to adapt its spaces, and so forth. I don't think the city gets nearly enough credit for that.
The problems are housing inventory and traffic. The city has not yet figured out a fantastic way to address either of those issues. Personally speaking, I'd freaking love a Tokyo-style mega-city of uber-high rises and elevated catwalks. I'd love for SF to become the dense, futuristic wonderland that Star Trek envisions its becoming. But a lot of regulations are in place that seem to prevent that from happening. And there's also the issue of seismic stability to contend with. SF is not exactly the sturdiest ground on which to build skyscrapers. But we need more housing, and we need more intra-city transportation that doesn't rely on the roads (which, if you've ever experienced gameday or rush-hour traffic in SOMA, you know can become hellish nightmares).
Essentially, SF is a very small space that experiences high density and is not (currently) built to accommodate such density.
All said and done, this stuff is sort of a mixed bag for me. I appreciate it in many respects, but I feel the pain in a lot of day-to-day life. It's not a binary, net-good or net-bad situation.
I really like your perspective on this. You seem very open to the idea that more public infrastructure needs to be built.
I think the first steps that we need to make are towards making the lack of public infrastructure feel more painful to the new implants. We need to do away with the private bus fleets and perhaps explore policies that would limit private and quasi-private modes of transportation like cabs, limos and car "shares".
Cities without any public infrastructure are terrible places to live and work in. We need to stop making "privatization" such an unarguable positive in the tech community. It is at ends with the needs of a population the lives practically on top of itself.
I'm all for the supposed decentralized and sharing-based economics of services like Lyft, but we can't forget that these are not democratic institutions. If we are intending to wholesale replace our existing methods of public transportation with something like this, we need to make sure that we retain public oversight in the matter. I believe the colloquial term for this is "to not throw out the baby with the bathwater".
Interesting points. I agree that privatization is not the cure-all it's been made out to be. I happen to think SF -- the Bay Area in particular -- is both a public and private success story. It's easy to forget that the rapid advances SF's private sector has made in the last few decades were largely built on the back of public-sector investment in sciences and tech companies in the '50s and '60s. But I digress.
Public transportation can and should get better within the city of San Francisco, and in my mind, the best place to build it is up. It's tough to build an intra-city subway for any number of reasons, not the least of which is the aforementioned seismic issue. Additionally, SF turns out to have been built largely (predominantly?) on landfill and liquefaction. Subways would be pretty susceptible to flooding, and would be massively expensive to keep in operation with all the pumping and maintenance requirements the city would force on them.
I really like the idea of a skyward-developing SF, though, not being a geologist or a structural engineer, I'm not sure how that would be achieved in a city like this one, with its inherent foundation issues. But we're starting to build a lot of giant skyscrapers, evidently, so perhaps someone's figured it out?
I'm sure there are plenty of engineering and architectural solutions to building upwards.
How about instead of putting our resources in to "seasteading" and other libertarian ideologies, we put instead explore more humanistic and social endeavors like Buckminster Fuller's "“Proposed Tetrahedral City"?
The thing with trying to leave and start your own community, be it on a floating platform in the middle of the ocean or in outer-space, is that it will still heavily depend on the rest of humanity for support. We don't have any self-supporting mechanisms for life other than Earth.
The irony is that the idealic hippie communities that were inspired by the musings of guys like Fuller fail from the same basic principles.
I think the lesson here is that at least for time being, we can't achieve true self-sustaining communities. An effort needs to be made to interact with humanity at large, no matter how ideological impure that endeavor is.
Uh, did you just use Tokyo as an example of the city you want SF to be and then say that it can't because of earthquakes?
Yeah, it's absurd how many SF residents are reacting to all this economic activity. There are so many cities across the country that would love to be in the position SF is right now.
It's almost like a good number of SF residents aren't sharing in this economic activity and are instead being forcibly removed from their homes to make way for the imported worker bees who can actually contribute to and benefit from the industry.
Hogwash. SF residents are being forcibly removed from their homes because they refuse to allow more housing to be constructed. They keep supply artificially low through a lot of ridiculous ordinances, pushing up rent and the cost of living in many ways.
Also, there is nothing preventing many from benefitting from the growth here. For example, every single blue collar worker in construction with unions should be fighting to permit a housing boom here. It increases demand for their services, giving them more work and putting them in a better bargaining position. This city could easily grow 50 to 100% over the next decade if it wanted to. A 50% increase in population would be awesome economically for just about everyone who lives and works in the area and provide goods and services for people living in San Francisco.
If you want to keep it cheap, you need to dilute the 1%ers so they represent a percent of the city instead of like 25% of the city.
Lots of soon to be vacant land in the city of Detroit. Google could be the catalyst to remove blight and create a city within a city.
I bet the city would be wiling to even give them the land.