[Pedestrian]

Originally Posted by colemonkee

Holy fuckballs, those skyline shots are amazing. Market Street has to be one of the best grand boulevards in the United States, up there with Park Ave. and Michigan Avenue.

I don't know when you were last in SF but Market St. currently is looking rather sad and partly it's the fault of development.

Mid-Market's vacancies, stalled developments trigger plans to activate dormant sites
By Katie Burke – Food/Hospitality/Retail Reporter, San Francisco Business Times
Apr 29, 2019, 7:00am PDT Updated Apr 29, 2019, 5:40pm EDT

A 14-story residential tower with ground-floor retail space has been in the works for the Mid-Market triangle bordered by Jones Street and Golden Gate Avenue. For the past five years, however, it has been a vacant shell awaiting transformation.

As developing sites throughout San Francisco has becomes increasingly expensive and time-intensive, city officials have struggled with how to activate the often vacant space on these properties. This week, the Planning Department approved extending temporary uses at these sites while developers wait for the required approvals for permanent projects.

Temporary uses were previously limited to 60-day, one or two-year, 24-hour or intermittent activity. That period has now been extended to 36 months, with the ability to apply for extensions up to three times for periods of up to 12 months per extension.

"Projects slated for redevelopment are particularly vulnerable to lie vacant, boarded up and unused for prolonged periods of time," the ordinance states. "Often, these redevelopment projects occupy a large amount of street frontage, making an even greater impact on the health of the corridor when they are vacant."

A report from A Better Market Street, a multi-agency city project aimed at improving the stretch, found the areas of Market Street with the highest concentration of storefront vacancy rates also had a drop-off in pedestrian activity, and that the number of shuttered storefronts was one of the neighborhood's biggest turnoffs.

The idea is to make it easier for pop-up tenants to fill spaces that would otherwise sit empty.

Allowable uses would be entertainment, arts and recreation tenants, arts activities, social services, philanthropic facility use, agriculture and beverage processing, a homeless shelter and certain other types of office tenants . . . .

https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfranc...-activate.html

All the vacant and boarded up storefronts of planned redevelopment not only mean that "regular" folks have no need of being there but that the area is open territory for the homeless, drug and stolen goods salesmen and other problem users.

The good news is that several long-planned developments are under construction and our better photographers have posted pictures of them in previous pages (we could use more--several looked more advanced to me than any pictures posted). Also, 2 new boutique hotels in rehabbed buildings have recently opened. But there remain some conspicuous empty and decrepit buildings with the aforementioned hangers-on hanging on out front. The truth is that Mid-Market remains one of the scary places to stroll in San Francisco. I know at least one person who won't go there at all. There's no place in SF I won't go but I tune my urban radar before going there.