- By Owen Thomas | Examiner columnist
- 14 hrs ago (SFExaminer.com)
Olivia Wise/The Examiner
A “ring of stagnation, decay, vacancies and vestigial industries.”
You’d probably guess that’s some recent Miami transplant with a Substack describing downtown San Francisco.
Actually, it’s Jane Jacobs, writing about lower Manhattan in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” published in 1992.
Wall Street back then had many problems that sound like The City’s Financial District now: sidewalks left desolate after dark, empty office buildings, and retailers struggling to get by on sparse daytime foot traffic.
The problem in both cases was office workers going elsewhere. In Wall Street’s case, they’d migrated north to Midtown. In modern San Francisco, they’re staying home. But the effects are much the same.
New York’s answer was to turn Wall Street into a mixed-use neighborhood, building new housing and converting older buildings into apartments. It may have taken half a century, Justin Fox, recently wrote for Bloomberg, but the plan worked.
The area’s residential population boomed from 833 in 1970 to 60,806 by 2020. Hundreds more are moving into One Wall Street, a 566-unit former office building converted into condominiums.
It’s shocking how few people live in downtown San Francisco. A Census tract that includes most of the Financial District — roughly the triangle formed by Powell, Sacramento and Market streets — has a population of just 1,800. A similarly small number live in the blocks around the Transamerica Pyramid. Fewer than 2,000 people live in the strip along the Embarcadero south of the Ferry Building.
The daytime population of these areas soared pre-pandemic, as Muni buses, BART trains and ferries spilled thousands of workers into office buildings. Those commuters are slowly returning, at least some days of the week, though Mondays and Fridays remain sparse, local business owners tell me.
But residents would add considerably more value to the area than commuters. Elaine Petrocelli, owner of Book Passage in the Ferry Building, recently told me that the business from people living in nearby condo buildings along the waterfront was invaluable in keeping her bookstore going during the pandemic. As downtown businesses continue to struggle, people who might make dinner reservations, not just lunch, could really help.
San Francisco recently approved a Housing Element, a plan required under state law to accommodate expected growth. The plans for downtown are shockingly unambitious: Not counting housing developments already in the pipeline, the plan would only add 1,700 units to the neighborhood.
People naturally eye all of those empty office towers and like to imagine them as housing. The reality is it’s hard to turn high-rises into homes. I won’t bore you with the fire code problems or the logistical intricacies of installing “wet walls”:
Let’s just say it’s far harder, and more expensive, than you might imagine. One Wall Street cost its developer a reported $2.3 billion to turn an office building into 566 homes.
Still, there’s opportunity to turn older, smaller office and retail buildings into housing: Imagine some of the upper levels of buildings overlooking Union Square turned into apartments.
And there’s a fair amount of underused space. Poke around downtown and you’ll find a surprising number of surface parking lots, occupying about 4 percent of the space, according to the Parking Reform Network. Those could easily be built into more productive uses like housing.
Sure, people love to moan about the lack of parking in San Francisco, but we actually have 22.5 parking spaces per acre, according to a 2022 survey by the Mineta Transportation Institute. That’s more than any other part of the Bay Area. And downtown is awash with transit options.
We can’t wait half a century to populate downtown. But it makes little sense to reserve it purely for offices. Jacobs, an influential author who changed the thinking around urban redevelopment, loved lively streets with a mix of uses. If we want San Francisco’s downtown streets to show more signs of life, we ought to listen to her.
Owen Thomas
Owen Thomas is a journalist and a longtime resident of San Francisco who has thought about tech’s relationship with The City since the first internet boom brought him to town. His columns appear weekly in The Examiner.
