San Francisco's revitalization plans emphasize transit oriented development: density and sustainability.
By John Ritter
Originally published on October 14 in USA Today.
SAN FRANCISCO - Where else but here, the cradle of psychedelic, would you expect a sleek, skyline-dwarfing skinny office tower crowned with a spin-in-the-wind, glowing, turbine-powered light show?
It's all part of a $1 billion development the city - like a few others with major projects underway - is betting will be the wave of the future: building up instead of out, the denser the better, stressing trains and buses over cars.
The proposed Transbay Transit Center with its possible 1,200-foot tower, elevated public park the length of five football fields and room for high-speed trains someday linking California's major cities, will be a "symbolic expression of our environmental values," says Gabriel Metcalf, executive director of the San Francisco Planning & Urban Research Association, a public policy think tank.
"It's a statement that our highest value is ecology," he says. "Just as church steeples were always the tallest buildings in the Middle Ages, we're marking our transit hub as the most important spot on the skyline."
The joint agency formed to handle this project approved the skyscraper's design last month. Its developer, Hines, has announced a tentative financing deal. City officials have said they hope to move the project through the planning bureaucracy in 18 months.
According to David Goldberg, a spokesman for Smart Growth America, a national coalition working to slow sprawl, other sprawl-spoiled cities are embarking on long-term developments aimed at getting commuters out of cars and encouraging mass transit to cut pollution and traffic congestion:
Atlanta's BeltLine project is an example: a rail loop around the city core with parks, trails and dense neighborhoods clustered at station stops.
Another is Denver's voter-approved regional light rail and rapid bus system designed to concentrate future growth closer in.
Salt Lake City's light rail system would do the same.
Dallas has plans for "transit-oriented developments" around light rail.
Even Los Angeles "is trying to figure out how to retrofit the prototypical automobile-driven metro area" around subway and light rail lines, Goldberg says.
"In a place like San Francisco, the notion of higher density and a mix of uses is not radical," he says. "But even there that kind of planning and development hasn't been real common."
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