View Single Post
  #407  
Old Posted Dec 3, 2008, 2:46 AM
peanut gallery's Avatar
peanut gallery peanut gallery is offline
Only Mostly Dead
 
Join Date: Apr 2007
Location: Marin
Posts: 5,234
From today's Chronicle:

Quote:



Yes. Mission Bay is still a work in progress.
John King
Tuesday, December 2, 2008


As soon as the first block of Mission Bay Commons was landscaped in 2002, the sloping lawn and redwood trees were encased by a chain-link fence. The park had empty lots for neighbors on three sides. One lot was studded with steel piles driven into the ground - an office building put on hold.

Today that six-story structure is finished, as is a nine-story condominium project across the way. But to the west are more fences, more empty lots and another set of rusting piles left by another development firm biding its time.

This is San Francisco's newest frontier: the east edge of Mission Bay, a redevelopment district that has advanced in fits and starts for 20 years. The gap-toothed topography doesn't signal failure. Rather, it demonstrates how economic cycles move at their own pace, no matter what planners or politicians might want.

Certainly that's the case where I sit the day after Thanksgiving, far from the shopping throngs of Union Square.

Traffic is light, parking's a breeze, and I'm the only person using one of the 12 benches in this first piece of the Commons, which eventually will march across the 303-acre district. Because of this first block's age, the wooden benches are weathered and the shrubs have filled in.

To the west, the remaining five blocks of the common are dirt. But streetlights have been installed, the sidewalks are paved, shade trees are taking root.

The infrastructure signals the future waiting to happen. Just beyond where I sit, a developer is poised to build a laboratory for drugmaker Pfizer Inc. Across from that site, Bosa Development drove the piles now on view in anticipation of erecting 318 condominiums to accompany the nine-story complex dubbed Radiance that faces my bench.

But things may not happen as fast as planners expected. Bosa stopped work because the housing market is so soft, and the Pfizer building isn't even piles yet. As for that new six-story office building behind my bench, 500 Terry Francois Blvd., it's waiting for somebody to sign a lease.

If this were all I knew, what I see up close, I'd be ranking Mission Bay as a development folly on par with Ralph Nader's latest presidential bid. After all, why would anyone pour money into landfill south of South of Market, south of the parking lots for the Giants' ballpark that itself seemed off the map when it opened in 2000?

The answer can be gleaned from other buildings nearby - the ones that sprang up between the Dot-com Bust 0f 2001 and the Economic Meltdown of 2008.

One block to my west stands UCSF's Mission Bay campus, a 45-acre facility devoted to biomedical research and the reason that companies such as Pfizer are looking this way. The first laboratory building opened in 2002; now there are nine large structures finished, and another should be open next summer.

South of where I sit, along Terry Francois Boulevard facing the bay, an office building that stood empty for several years now houses Old Navy's headquarters. Keep walking and you encounter a pair of granite-and-glass structures across from the raffish Mission Rock Cafe. The life science firm Fibrogen is moving this week into one of the buildings, with an option to lease the other.

Cities evolve by their own set of rhythms, to a variety of tempos at any given time. A place like Mission Bay - where the slate is blank and every physical change comes in large-scale increments - reflects this more than most.

"There's such a diversity of land uses built into Mission Bay that there's a flexibility. Things keep moving," says Kelley Kahn, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency's project manager. "Housing may be dormant, but biotech comes alive."

Remember: The residential buildings north of Mission Creek along King Street seemed to spring up overnight, sparked by the housing boom that now has run its course. At some point down the road - perhaps sooner than we expect - the holes in the map south of the creek will "suddenly" fill in. More lab space, more offices, more housing.

Urbanistically, the danger is that this new neighborhood will look as though it was shipped in from the suburbs, albeit with more sophisticated plantings and public art. It's fair to say that nothing built so far is likely to dislodge City Hall from the list of beloved local buildings.

But we'll also get well-paying jobs, housing at all price ranges, and well-maintained parks and trails. Mission Bay Commons won't be an attractive one-block oddity; it will tie a Marina Green-like bayside park to the open space along Mission Creek that already exists.

"What's down there now is a little snapshot," Kahn says. "You get an inkling of what's going to be, but that's it."

In the meantime, if you're looking for a quiet vantage point from which to contemplate the city, I know just the spot.
__________________
My other car is a Dakota Creek Advanced Multihull Design.

Tiburon Miami 1 Miami 2 Ye Olde San Francisco SF: Canyons, waterfront... SF: South FiDi SF: South Park
Reply With Quote