Trams, bikes and pedestrians: In San Francisco, the problems are familiar and so are the solutions.
Trams, bikes and pedestrians: In San Francisco, the problems are familiar and so are the solutions.
You'll definitely have heard this one before. The city is famous for the beauty of its old wooden houses and its harbour, for the diversity of its cultural and social life, and for its innovative tech industries.
But right now, in the wake of the pandemic, the centre of thiscity is a mess. By May this year, only a third of workers had returned to the office. Trips into the city had fallen from 240,000 a day in early 2020 to only 150,000. Shops are shuttered, more people than ever are sleeping in doorways. Crime, much of it committed by children, has exploded.
And across the city, property prices are astonishingly high – to the deep satisfaction of some citizens and the despair of others. Contributing to that, planning regulations make it extremely difficult for developers to build anything new or even modify what's already there. The result: an immense shortage of affordable housing and a downtown full of homeless people, many of whom desperately need healthcare they are not getting.
But wait. San Francisco now has a Public Realm Action Plan, created by urban design studio Sitelab. It's a design-led strategy to "create invitations" for people to return to the city centre. Because the city, they say, can't continue "business as usual".
BAU is dead. Sitelab says there is now "a competition for where we work". That's competition between your office and your desk at home, and competition between neighbourhoods that are dying and those that are thriving.
The urbanist Richard Florida, who invented the term "creative city", has weighed in. "A day at the office," he says, "will be spent less in a single building and become more like a localised business trip, with maybe an onsite meeting, checking some emails at an outdoor workspace, doing a group fitness session with colleagues and taking some offsite meetings over lunch or coffee."
There are opportunities for businesses in all that.
The night-time economy will also grow: a light show in downtown San Francisco last December brought an extra $3.5 million to local businesses. Auckland has also done this, with Queen St hosting some great lightworks during Matariki, but the shops didn't really seize the commercial potential.
The Sitelab plan is not revolutionary: "re-energising the ground floor" aka new uses for old shops, traffic restrictions, more pedestrian space and pocket parks, helping retailers with their marketing, food trucks, artist pop-ups, market stalls, protected bike lanes, more outdoor dining and events, events, events. Cars, including Ubers and Lyfts, are already banned on much of Market St, the city's main boulevard of shops and offices.
San Francisco's Market Street bisects the city.
San Francisco is like Auckland in so many ways: same problems, same proposed solutions, same opposition from those who can't see that change can be for the better. That city centres have to become attractive as destinations, as places to walk around in rather than drive through. That unwanted office space can become residential. We just need the will to do it.
This feature appears in the weekly Design for Living series in Canvas magazine.
