Back to the Future

In a future San Francisco, workers disembark at Downtown factories at space-age, rooftop zeppelin moorings, then assemble high-tech clipper-ship masts.

Or there's the alternative view, where once-homeless people are housed; jobless have jobs; the poor, aged, and infirm are taken care of; and the city shines as a beacon for people seeking a better life.

I throw out these two fantasies of San Francisco as exercises in two mutually exclusive techniques for envisioning tomorrow.

The first, familiar to fans of old pulp science futurism or Disney's Tomorrowland, is about colonizing the future with personal interpretations of the past. The second, known as ordinary problem solving, involves looking ahead with an idea of what could and should be, rather than what was, then trying to imagine ways to change. Sadly, this city suffers from too much of the first and almost none of the second.

Take, for example, two separate proposals to house the disadvantaged now being considered by S.F. bureaucrats, one in SOMA, the other in the Richmond District. Both are blinkered by nutty, nostalgic futurism.

In SOMA an apartment building for the homeless has been swept up in a de facto moratorium on new apartment construction. This was imposed recently as the result of a Board of Supervisors action aimed at preserving a 1920s-era eastern San Francisco industrial zone. In the Richmond District, meanwhile, the Board of Supervisors has agreed to consider this week a petition from a group of neighborhood gadflies who wish to reverse the approval of 150 subsidized apartments for the elderly. The reason: this complex of charity services for the aged would replace a 60-year-old movie theater neighbors falsely believe is a vital "historical resource."

Mind you, there's nothing wrong with considering which parts of our built environment we ought to save. But in San Francisco this impulse has regressed into fetishism that impairs our ability to see what's in front of us. And it's made us lose sight of the fact that what we preserve is far less important than what we decide to build from scratch.

Over the winter and into spring, San Francisco's ailment of backward-looking futurism became epidemic, as Mission District and South of Market activists demanded a moratorium on non-subsidized apartment construction. The thinking behind this demand was of the sort that might have once imagined a sky filled with 2006-model zeppelins. Eastern San Francisco has, since the 1920s, been the site of warehouses and workshops that provided hundreds of blue-collar jobs near Downtown, and with access to a once-bustling commercial waterfront that went dormant a few decades ago. If apartment buildings encroach on these warehouses, this "industrial preservation" view maintains, they will endanger the growth of middle-income jobs, because that's where city employment has come from in the past.

Never mind that mid-sized and large industrial buildings in San Francisco are one-third vacant these days as manufacturers and warehousing companies relocate to modern, truck-and-rail-friendly industrial districts in Bay Area suburbs. Or that an acute shortage of S.F. apartments has driven market prices so high that new employers now avoid San Francisco, taking thousands of jobs elsewhere. Or that in cities such as Vancouver, New York, Chicago, and wherever else logic trumps nostalgia, policy makers long ago decided that cargo-oriented development belongs where there's an abundance of freight transportation. And transit-oriented development belongs where it's easiest and most efficient to move people where they want to go. That's to say, bus- and commuter-rail-rich neighborhoods near Downtown jobs such as San Francisco's Mission, Potrero, SOMA, and Central Waterfront areas, which are now subject to a misguided apartment-building moratorium.

Sadly, old-time futurism trumped logic in March, when Supervisors voted to block construction of an apartment building at 2660 Harrison St. They were inspired by the idea that planners hadn't sufficiently considered the misguided theory that the Mission District apartments might run afoul of the city's mid-town industrial preservation goals, and harm opportunities for developing subsidized housing.

Last month, a Planning Department official extended the board's logic to thousands of apartments on the city's eastern side, including a planned 134-unit apartment building for formerly homeless people backed by the Mayor's Office of Housing and Episcopal Community Services of San Francisco. The building at 275 10th St. had already been delayed by requirements that the new building's backer prove that the project won't harm the integrity of an imaginary, not-yet proposed SOMA historic district. This study is necessary to comply with historic preservation laws.

Additionally, thanks to the board's March ruling, the nonprofit developers of the 10th Street project must demonstrate that these apartments will not significantly displace industrial jobs located near the downtown Financial District. The site is now occupied by a couple of 1920s-era brick warehouses that employ 12 people.

The 10th Street housing developers must also prove, in a bizarre bit of backward-think, that these apartments for the impoverished won't harm the city's supply of low-income housing. Planning officials say a final decision on the project should come by this Halloween. Meanwhile, the waiting ties up land, financing, and consultant time, adding to the project's cost and postponing the day when the 134 units can be used to keep homeless people off the street.