If You Plan It

By John King
Photos by Sergio Ruiz

The corner outside Philz Coffee at Folsom and Beale Streets is as good a place as any to observe how San Francisco's Transbay district has been transformed over the past decade, on the ground and in the air. It's also the most vivid demonstration of how planners and city hall have used the extended economic boom to fuse high-density development with an array of social concerns.

The popular pour-over coffee shop is the lone retail space within an eight-story complex — developed and managed by affordable housing nonprofit Mercy Housing California — that contains 190 apartments reserved for families making no more than 50 percent of the city's median income, or $59,200 for a family of four. Alongside it is a 409-unit market-rate residential tower where starting rents for studios were recently listed at $3,200 a month.

On the next block of Folsom to the west, a 550-foot glass shaft has debuted with condos priced at $1.8 million — and up. On the next block of Beale to the north is another glassy newcomer, this one fully leased by Facebook.

Yet there's a human scale to this corner, which for decades was home to free-way ramps and then a parking lot. The sidewalks are 25 feet wide, with bulbed-out bioswales and a double row of Brisbane box trees that provide a landscaped respite and a nod to sustainability. Alongside Philz's outdoor tables there's a discreet entrance to a mid-block pedestrian mews.

It's a startling sight for people who still associate San Francisco's built terrain with Victorian homes at one extreme and the Transamerica Pyramid at another. There are even more startling sights to the north — where a new transit center cloaked in a perforated veil of white aluminum slides past the 1,070- foot Salesforce Tower, which opened in January 2018 and replaced Transamerica as San Francisco's tallest building.

All of this adds up to the 21st century concept of a pedestrian-oriented district outlined by the city's long-term Transit Center District Plan, one in which extreme density is linked to transit and the population is intended to be economically diverse. Other neighborhood plans have similar aims, but none with such a potent concentration. And even with all its ambitions, so much has already been completed that the initial vision and today's reality aren't all that far apart.

"None of us anticipated that the plan would be built out so quickly," says John Rahaim, the city's planning director. "I remember when there was a lot of concern about whether this was a reasonable plan to do."

The rooftop park atop the Salesforce Transit Center in early September. Photo by Sergio Ruiz.

At 55 stories, 181 Fremont is the tallest residential building on the West Coast. Facebook will lease the first 34 floors, with multimillion-dollar condos filling the rest. Photo by Sergio Ruiz.

Gaining momentum

Rahaim arrived in San Francisco in 2008, as work on the Transit Center District Plan was getting under way. But the underlying principles were already in place: A 21-block zone south of Market Street and the traditional Financial District would be upzoned to make room for as much as 6.5 million additional square feet of new commercial space and 4,400 new residential units. The rezoning had another purpose — to generate more than $1 billion in land sales and developer fees to help replace the aged Transbay Terminal with a new transit center equipped to handle commuter trains as well as bus service.

Midcentury commuters board a train at the old Transbay Terminal. Photo courtesy San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.

The new Salesforce Transit Center atrium, with Jenny Holzer's White Light visible behind the central columns. Photo by Sergio Ruiz.

The old terminal dated back to 1939, when streetcars pulled in after crossing the then-new Bay Bridge from Oakland. Trains were replaced by buses in 1958, and by the 1990s there was a regional consensus on the need to replace the grim, seismically obsolete concrete hulk. More than that, to replace it with a structure that would include both a direct connection to the Bay Bridge for buses and a train facility below ground to serve as a terminus for commuter trains from Silicon Valley and high-speed rail from Los Angeles.

Because of delays in California's high-speed rail program, as well the climbing costs that tend to accompany all megaprojects, the earliest projected arrival date now is 2027. But the first phase of the transit center opened last August with a futuristic design by Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects capped by a 5.4-acre rooftop park designed by PWP Landscape Architecture. Storefronts line redone alleyways. The building is so long that it spans two roadways to and from the Bay Bridge, First and Fremont streets.

Notoriously skeptical San Franciscans embraced the complex, especially the park with its lush calm amid sleek new towers — only to have it close abruptly a month later when two girders spanning Fremont Street were found to be cracked. At press time, a date to reopen the center had not been set.

Nine towers have opened in the district since the final version of the Transbay plan was adopted in 2012. Another five are under construction, including one that will be nearly as tall as Salesforce Tower, and at least four more are approved or in the works. With the new buildings come widened sidewalks and generously scaled 15-foot ground floors, as well as public plazas and through-block walkways. The premise is that density and urbanity can go hand in hand — a cosmopolitan sort of congestion.

"There's no one definition of a neighborhood," says Paul Chasen, an urban designer who leads the planning department street design advisory team. "You can have dense housing in a very green landscape, and a bright lively community with big new buildings."

Many aspects of the plan build off an earlier effort — the 1985 Downtown Plan that lowered heights north of Market Street but kept them as high as 550 feet in the blocks near the Transbay Terminal, directly south of the Financial District. Nearly 300 buildings were given historic protections. New commercial buildings were required to provide public spaces. Fees were imposed for transportation improvements and low-cost housing.

The entrance to the transit center's Grand Hall at Mission and Fremont. The building's perforated outer skin is made of white aluminum. Photo by Sergio Ruiz.

"We steered development toward an area that was seen as a bad address," recalls Dean Macris, FAICP, the city's planning director at the time.

Macris left City Hall in 1992 but returned 12 years later under then-mayor Gavin Newsom, now California's governor. Planning the transit center and searching for funding had begun in earnest. Loosening height limits to generate revenue was an obvious tool. In prior decades, and in a city that attracted national attention for fighting growth, the notion would have been political kryptonite.

"It's hard to describe how intense the debate over height was in 1985. That was the peak period of old San Franciscans' revolt against the changing city," Macris says. "We proposed it [in 2006] and nobody said a word. Everyone wanted that transit center, the progressives as well as more moderate people."

Height concerns weren't all that had changed in recent years. Downtown housing is in vogue across the nation, especially in cities like San Francisco with a younger workforce. Nor did growth-wary neighborhoods object, since development in the Transbay area meant less pressure on them.

Another boost came from the need for affordable housing in a city where the median price for homes last fall was $1.3 million. When the state of California handed off the blocks that once held freeway ramps, it required that 30 percent of all new housing units be reserved for lower-income residents.

That term is subjective, of course, but there's no denying that the Transbay population will be varied. Besides the 190 low-income family apartments at Folsom and Beale, two short blocks to the west there's a supportive housing complex reserved for formerly homeless people. Two blocks to the east, a 392-unit tower designed by Chicago architect Jeanne Gang will offer 156 units for sale to households at the 120 percent regional income level, which means a couple making $114,000 would be eligible. Market-rate one-bedroom condos in Gang's tower, meanwhile, start at more than $1 million.

In the works is the South Downtown Design and Activation Plan, which aims in part to respond to transportation factors that weren't foreseen a decade ago — including bikes, scooters, and delivery and ride-share vehicles. Photo by Sergio Ruiz.

Ironing out the wrinkles

When you pair Transbay's boom with the dozen residential towers that have been added since 2000 to nearby Rincon Hill, between Folsom Street and the Bay Bridge, the result is a high-rise neighborhood of the sort once reserved for cities like Chicago and New York.

But there's wide agreement that services are lagging behind development: The only new food market so far, for instance, is a 9,000-square-foot boutique grocery with $25 boxes of truffles on a shelf near the check-out counter.

Urbanistically, it can seem as if the glass towers rising from vaguely contextual bases are indistinguishable from one another. The wide landscaped sidewalks dubbed "living streets" look good but attract little use, despite planners' hopes that they would function almost as linear parks.

"The area needs a little more messiness and flexibility, less sterility," Rahaim says. But overall, he argues, "The basic bones of the plan are still solid. It's also added value in such a way that sites are being developed we hadn't anticipated," such as a cluster of three small buildings near the transit center's bus bridge. They'll be replaced with a hotel-condominium tower designed by Renzo Piano.

What also wasn't anticipated was the new world of urban transportation. This is the city where Uber and Lyft were born. While storefronts sit empty, new housing towers are designed with secure lobby spaces to hold packages from the likes of Amazon.

To address these issues, Chasen's street design team is currently working on the South Downtown Design and Activation Plan, which aims in part to fine-tune the public realm concepts in Transbay and Rincon Hill. It's not intended to start from scratch, but to respond to transportation factors that weren't foreseen a decade ago.

"There's all this intense activity along the curbside now," Chasen says. "We want to find ways to add more spaces for loading, but also make a really good bike network — and not just bikes but scooters and all that stuff."

For Macris, who has been retired for the past decade, the tweaks themselves are a tribute to the larger plan's success.

"The story here is that public policy can shape a city," he says. "The key is to think about what's needed and then do a plan that's rational for its time and place."

John King is the San Francisco Chronicle's urban design critic.

Photographer Sergio Ruiz is a planner based in the San Francisco Bay Area, specializing in pedestrian and bicycle transportation. In his spare time, he uses photography to promote good urbanism and sustainability, with an emphasis on cities for people. He is a frequent photo contributor for public agencies, advocacy groups, and organizations such as SPUR (the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association).