6 ms·

What happened when the San Francisco Bay Area rejected growth

syntheweave 4y ago
https://archive.vn/7UKwE https://archive.vn/7UKwE
Animats 4y ago
Here's the document they quote, but don't link: "Future development of the San Francisco Bay area, 1960-2020". The Internet Archive has a copy.[1] So does Google, but you have to have a Google account to read it. I have a boxed paper copy, with the maps. Bloomberg focuses on the growth/anti growth mantra. But that's looking at it wrong. This was written by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Their vision for the SF Bay Area was heavy industry, like Pittsburgh. Steel mills in Marin. Aluminum smelter at Tiburon. Great deep-water access for ore boats. This wasn't unreasonable at the time. The Bay Area had been a major production center during WWII, just 15 years before, with four large shipyards and much heavy fabrication capability. There's still an oil refinery in Richmond. The Corps took that idea as far as it would go. Five freeways up the Peninsula were to be built. US 101 and I-280 were built, and coastal CA-1 and mountaintop CA-35 were to be upgraded to freeways. Plus another freeway out on stilts in the bay. Another bay bridge near Candlestick was proposed. Possibly an SF-Alcatraz-Angel Island-Tiburon bridge so that there would be a full freeway connection north through SF. The plan called for filling in the bay below the Dumbarton Bridge and above the Richmond Bridge to get more land. Their plan was to make the SF Bay Area like Cleveland, Chicago, Pittsburgh, or Detroit. [1] https://archive.org/details/futuredevelopmen00unit https://archive.org/details/futuredevelopmen00unit
- AceJohnny2 4y ago
  It's fun to know that in the middle of Sunnyvale, right next to downtown and near many tech companies' buildings, is the big Northropp-Grumman Marine Systems site, that emerged from the Joshua Hendy Ironworks, and which continues to produce heavy equipment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Hendy_Iron_Works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Hendy_Iron_Works
  - andromeduck 4y ago
    Oh wow! Walk by that place once a week and never thought to go in haha.
    - Fatnino 4y ago
      There's a Hendy stamp mill on display in Murphy Park around the corner from the factory. It's larger than the one pictured on Wikipedia
- helsinkiandrew 4y ago
  > Bloomberg focuses on the growth/anti growth mantra. But that's looking at it wrong I came away with the impression that the growth planned/proposed by the Corps of Engineers, basically scared opposition groups into pushing for (and obtaining) too little growth/development than perhaps would have happened if SF had gone the middle way.
- Taniwha 4y ago
  And they'd never have been able to do that without winning the water wars with the Central Valley ..... instead you get almond milk
- pjc50 4y ago
  > Their plan was to make the SF Bay Area like Cleveland, Chicago, Pittsburgh, or Detroit. Good job somebody prevented that growth, really.
  - pcrh 4y ago
    Indeed. Detroit isn't looking too good these days. Heavy industry did pretty badly in the 1970's and 1980's. Most people appear to complain about high housing costs in SF, but that's a consequence of many factors. Filling-in the bay wouldn't impact house prices by much. Post-war urban development is widely criticized for destroying the character and liveability of cities.
TedShiller 4y ago
Worked out great actually. Less pollution, less crowding and noise, less crime, more nature, cleaner.
- barry-cotter 4y ago
  Indeed. San Francisco is meant to be a preserve for the upper middle class. Development can happen somewhere poor people are allowed, like Texas, or the inland desert areas of California no one with money wants to live in, that look like Nevada.
- TulliusCicero 4y ago
  Ah yes, all those people just disappeared into the aether. Literally a matter of, "well if I don't see any of it, it doesn't exist." Like the idiots who oppose dense urban development because of "the environment".
- danny_codes 4y ago
  Well I'm happy about open space preservation, but imo that's really tangential to facilitating urban development. A proper investment in urban density (land use) and public transport in the last 50 years would have resulted a vastly superior situation for both economic growth and improved quality of life. But the bay is in America so that was a long shot.
- thirdvect0r 4y ago
  SF has higher violent crime rates than most other parts of California, which can be attributed to its far higher rates of relative poverty,
  - bagels 4y ago
    The Bay area is more than just SF itself.
    - eloisant 4y ago
      The Bay Area was crowded already but for the last 10 years (until maybe the pandemic) all new companies have been flocking to SF. It doesn't make it any better.
danny_codes 4y ago
Wow this really exemplifies American urban planning. If only Americans could fathom infill density and public transit as the solution to scaling population centers. While it's tempting to blame NIMBYism for this, I think it's a more general reflection of America's backwards relationship with urban development. Hopefully we'll see a cultural reversion back to sanity with respect to urban planning in my lifetime. It would be so lovely to achieve the same convenience and economic potential properly designed cities have enjoyed for decades.
- rjzzleep 4y ago
  I mean it's not just America. I do however always wonder if it is American urban planning across the world though. Taichung looks like an American city, mostly designed around cars.Taipei highways have so many twists and turns that I know it's not German, but wonder if it's American or French. German urban planning has been "modernized" and somehow it seems worse for anything but cars. But then look at Tokyo and compare that to Tehran. Both of them with an Urban commuting population upwards of 20 million. Both similar in scale, but one of them an absolute nightmare in pollution(partly due to it being located in a basin, but part of it to the constant traffic and patchwork urban planning) and compare that to the other, where even though it's hilly, a lot of people commute by ebike, there is an extremely fast and efficient public transit system, and driving at high speeds is mostly limited to certain paths/streets. The problem is what do you with the places who's urban planning was terrible? You can't just tear down all the housing and then build public transit there. And due to its design, very often the just replace it by ebikes simply isn't a viable option. So, what can we realistically do besides just complaining how shitty it was designed?
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    Retrofitting is always possible. It’s just not satisfying to know that it takes decades. But as an example Amsterdam started its journey in the ‘70s.
    - lozenge 4y ago
      Did Amsterdam destroy low density (say, two floors) housing? I thought they just changed how they used the existing road space.
olivermarks 4y ago
'Dense in-fill development' sounds great in theory, but the reality is the elderly underlying infrastructure in the bay area is not capable of sustaining even more overbuilding within the larger cities. Far better to build new towns and cities with fresh infrastructure to meet specific needs now that so many of what Richard Florida called the 'creative class' are working from home. High density low income housing used the be called 'the projects', and don't have a good track record of being pleasant places to live not least because of 'criminal class' inhabitants terrorizing the other residents. I'm currently in London which I consider to be overbuilt, with the ancient underlying Victorian infrastructure struggling to cope with endless tower blocks of people, streets choked with traffic and tire pollution etc etc. In the US there is plenty of land to build new towns and cities, why wreck the existing historical places with overbuilding when it would be more economical to build fresh, more sustainably built places for people to live...
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  Ruining yet more ecosystems by paving them over is pretty much the exact opposite of fresh and sustainable.
  - DoneWithAllThat 4y ago
    Sorry are we trying to build more housing for tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people, or be “fresh and sustainable”? This is the thing that gets me about so called “YIMBY”s: they’re not so much yes in my back yard, they’re just urban density fetishists typically driven by a degrowth mindset. They claim to fanatically want as much development as possible but never on new land, they just want towering skyscrapers packed like sardine cans and no cars. Then they get upset when nobody supports that but claim it’s just being anti-development. No, we’re not anti development, we just don’t like the one specific narrow definition of development that YIMBYs want.
    - AlexTWithBeard 4y ago
      The irony is that most of YIMBY do not have a backyard. Once they buy some property and start raising kids, the attitude changes to "yeah, the syringe distribution center is very important... but can we please build it somewhere else?"
AlexTWithBeard 4y ago
TL;DR: The growth of Bay Area has stalled, because we don't build enough housing for homeless.
- marssaxman 4y ago
  The growth of the Bay Area has stalled because you don't build enough housing. Homelessness is the consequence of insufficient housing; those who are worst-off lose the game of musical chairs.
beastman82 4y ago
The amount of rationalizing and speculation in these comments is something to behold. This article presents a well-reasoned argument supported by data.
- Steltek 4y ago
  I dunno. I find presumed SF area residents soapboxing on how to build metro areas to be extremely amusing. It's like a gambling addict giving financial advice. The warning signs were there years and years ago when gainfully employed people started living in RVs on the street but from my outsider's perspective, absolutely nothing was done.
m0llusk 4y ago
Generalizations like this miss the important successes along the way. In the early 90s San Francisco permitted a particular form of loft development that created a large number of housing units before it was shut down. Then when Jerry Brown was mayor of Oakland his promise to build ten thousand new housing units was so successful that there was a period when the price of low end housing got pushed down if only briefly. When Mountain View started to grow robustly the commercial corridor was upzoned for larger buildings and adjacent parking garages were built. There are various other successes and each demonstrates a way out of the current extreme shortage of housing.

https://archive.vn/7UKwE https://archive.vn/7UKwE

Here's the document they quote, but don't link: "Future development of the San Francisco Bay area, 1960-2020". The Internet Archive has a copy.[1] So does Google, but you have to have a Google account to read it. I have a boxed paper copy, with the maps. Bloomberg focuses on the growth/anti growth mantra. But that's looking at it wrong. This was written by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Their vision for the SF Bay Area was heavy industry, like Pittsburgh. Steel mills in Marin. Aluminum smelter at Tiburon. Great deep-water access for ore boats. This wasn't unreasonable at the time. The Bay Area had been a major production center during WWII, just 15 years before, with four large shipyards and much heavy fabrication capability. There's still an oil refinery in Richmond. The Corps took that idea as far as it would go. Five freeways up the Peninsula were to be built. US 101 and I-280 were built, and coastal CA-1 and mountaintop CA-35 were to be upgraded to freeways. Plus another freeway out on stilts in the bay. Another bay bridge near Candlestick was proposed. Possibly an SF-Alcatraz-Angel Island-Tiburon bridge so that there would be a full freeway connection north through SF. The plan called for filling in the bay below the Dumbarton Bridge and above the Richmond Bridge to get more land. Their plan was to make the SF Bay Area like Cleveland, Chicago, Pittsburgh, or Detroit. [1] https://archive.org/details/futuredevelopmen00unit https://archive.org/details/futuredevelopmen00unit

AceJohnny2 4y ago
It's fun to know that in the middle of Sunnyvale, right next to downtown and near many tech companies' buildings, is the big Northropp-Grumman Marine Systems site, that emerged from the Joshua Hendy Ironworks, and which continues to produce heavy equipment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Hendy_Iron_Works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Hendy_Iron_Works
- andromeduck 4y ago
  Oh wow! Walk by that place once a week and never thought to go in haha.
  - Fatnino 4y ago
    There's a Hendy stamp mill on display in Murphy Park around the corner from the factory. It's larger than the one pictured on Wikipedia
helsinkiandrew 4y ago
> Bloomberg focuses on the growth/anti growth mantra. But that's looking at it wrong I came away with the impression that the growth planned/proposed by the Corps of Engineers, basically scared opposition groups into pushing for (and obtaining) too little growth/development than perhaps would have happened if SF had gone the middle way.
Taniwha 4y ago
And they'd never have been able to do that without winning the water wars with the Central Valley ..... instead you get almond milk
pjc50 4y ago
> Their plan was to make the SF Bay Area like Cleveland, Chicago, Pittsburgh, or Detroit. Good job somebody prevented that growth, really.
- pcrh 4y ago
  Indeed. Detroit isn't looking too good these days. Heavy industry did pretty badly in the 1970's and 1980's. Most people appear to complain about high housing costs in SF, but that's a consequence of many factors. Filling-in the bay wouldn't impact house prices by much. Post-war urban development is widely criticized for destroying the character and liveability of cities.

TedShiller 4y ago

Worked out great actually. Less pollution, less crowding and noise, less crime, more nature, cleaner.

barry-cotter 4y ago
Indeed. San Francisco is meant to be a preserve for the upper middle class. Development can happen somewhere poor people are allowed, like Texas, or the inland desert areas of California no one with money wants to live in, that look like Nevada.
TulliusCicero 4y ago
Ah yes, all those people just disappeared into the aether. Literally a matter of, "well if I don't see any of it, it doesn't exist." Like the idiots who oppose dense urban development because of "the environment".
danny_codes 4y ago
Well I'm happy about open space preservation, but imo that's really tangential to facilitating urban development. A proper investment in urban density (land use) and public transport in the last 50 years would have resulted a vastly superior situation for both economic growth and improved quality of life. But the bay is in America so that was a long shot.
thirdvect0r 4y ago
SF has higher violent crime rates than most other parts of California, which can be attributed to its far higher rates of relative poverty,
- bagels 4y ago
  The Bay area is more than just SF itself.
  - eloisant 4y ago
    The Bay Area was crowded already but for the last 10 years (until maybe the pandemic) all new companies have been flocking to SF. It doesn't make it any better.

danny_codes 4y ago

Wow this really exemplifies American urban planning. If only Americans could fathom infill density and public transit as the solution to scaling population centers. While it's tempting to blame NIMBYism for this, I think it's a more general reflection of America's backwards relationship with urban development. Hopefully we'll see a cultural reversion back to sanity with respect to urban planning in my lifetime. It would be so lovely to achieve the same convenience and economic potential properly designed cities have enjoyed for decades.

rjzzleep 4y ago
I mean it's not just America. I do however always wonder if it is American urban planning across the world though. Taichung looks like an American city, mostly designed around cars.Taipei highways have so many twists and turns that I know it's not German, but wonder if it's American or French. German urban planning has been "modernized" and somehow it seems worse for anything but cars. But then look at Tokyo and compare that to Tehran. Both of them with an Urban commuting population upwards of 20 million. Both similar in scale, but one of them an absolute nightmare in pollution(partly due to it being located in a basin, but part of it to the constant traffic and patchwork urban planning) and compare that to the other, where even though it's hilly, a lot of people commute by ebike, there is an extremely fast and efficient public transit system, and driving at high speeds is mostly limited to certain paths/streets. The problem is what do you with the places who's urban planning was terrible? You can't just tear down all the housing and then build public transit there. And due to its design, very often the just replace it by ebikes simply isn't a viable option. So, what can we realistically do besides just complaining how shitty it was designed?
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  Retrofitting is always possible. It’s just not satisfying to know that it takes decades. But as an example Amsterdam started its journey in the ‘70s.
  - lozenge 4y ago
    Did Amsterdam destroy low density (say, two floors) housing? I thought they just changed how they used the existing road space.

olivermarks 4y ago

'Dense in-fill development' sounds great in theory, but the reality is the elderly underlying infrastructure in the bay area is not capable of sustaining even more overbuilding within the larger cities. Far better to build new towns and cities with fresh infrastructure to meet specific needs now that so many of what Richard Florida called the 'creative class' are working from home. High density low income housing used the be called 'the projects', and don't have a good track record of being pleasant places to live not least because of 'criminal class' inhabitants terrorizing the other residents. I'm currently in London which I consider to be overbuilt, with the ancient underlying Victorian infrastructure struggling to cope with endless tower blocks of people, streets choked with traffic and tire pollution etc etc. In the US there is plenty of land to build new towns and cities, why wreck the existing historical places with overbuilding when it would be more economical to build fresh, more sustainably built places for people to live...

bobthepanda 4y ago
Ruining yet more ecosystems by paving them over is pretty much the exact opposite of fresh and sustainable.
- DoneWithAllThat 4y ago
  Sorry are we trying to build more housing for tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people, or be “fresh and sustainable”? This is the thing that gets me about so called “YIMBY”s: they’re not so much yes in my back yard, they’re just urban density fetishists typically driven by a degrowth mindset. They claim to fanatically want as much development as possible but never on new land, they just want towering skyscrapers packed like sardine cans and no cars. Then they get upset when nobody supports that but claim it’s just being anti-development. No, we’re not anti development, we just don’t like the one specific narrow definition of development that YIMBYs want.
  - AlexTWithBeard 4y ago
    The irony is that most of YIMBY do not have a backyard. Once they buy some property and start raising kids, the attitude changes to "yeah, the syringe distribution center is very important... but can we please build it somewhere else?"

AlexTWithBeard 4y ago

TL;DR: The growth of Bay Area has stalled, because we don't build enough housing for homeless.

marssaxman 4y ago
The growth of the Bay Area has stalled because you don't build enough housing. Homelessness is the consequence of insufficient housing; those who are worst-off lose the game of musical chairs.

beastman82 4y ago

The amount of rationalizing and speculation in these comments is something to behold. This article presents a well-reasoned argument supported by data.

Steltek 4y ago
I dunno. I find presumed SF area residents soapboxing on how to build metro areas to be extremely amusing. It's like a gambling addict giving financial advice. The warning signs were there years and years ago when gainfully employed people started living in RVs on the street but from my outsider's perspective, absolutely nothing was done.

m0llusk 4y ago

Generalizations like this miss the important successes along the way. In the early 90s San Francisco permitted a particular form of loft development that created a large number of housing units before it was shut down. Then when Jerry Brown was mayor of Oakland his promise to build ten thousand new housing units was so successful that there was a period when the price of low end housing got pushed down if only briefly. When Mountain View started to grow robustly the commercial corridor was upzoned for larger buildings and adjacent parking garages were built. There are various other successes and each demonstrates a way out of the current extreme shortage of housing.