San
Francisco's Mistake
Steve Boland
If any city should understand the New Urbanism,
it's San Francisco. The city is a textbook example of old urbanity, literally -- city
living advocates from Jane Jacobs to Andres Duany have cited it as a model.
San Franciscans don't have front or side yards, only
modest courtyards out back. We aren't stacked atop one another like New Yorkers, but
one-story buildings and vacant lots are rarer than a fog-free day in August. People walk
to the corner store for a loaf of bread, and talk to their neighbors. There's a bus or
streetcar stop within three blocks of 90 percent of residents. Twenty-nine percent of San
Francisco households don't own a car, a remarkable number by Western US standards. Of all
these things, we are justifiably proud. They are what set us apart from Des Moines and Los
Angeles.
Why, then, are we so afraid of more of a good thing? Why
do "progressives" talk about "Manhattanization," "greedy
developers" and "gentrification," rather than "smart growth" and
"mixed-use"? Why is "density" a dirty word in America's second-densest
city?
Partly it's because of San Francisco's byzantine
politics. But it is also because San Francisco is America's second-densest city. There's a
vague sense, rarely enunciated, that we've done our part, that we've gained all there is
to gain, that our soup is just right. Of course such beliefs are rooted in the same, tired
anti-urban sentiments expressed a century ago by Ebenezer Howard, the same beliefs that
have wreaked havoc on North American cities over the last half-century. And in a city
whose self-image is built on its urbanity, they're ironic at best, hypocritical to say the
least.
But you can't blame San Franciscans too much. In this,
we're just like folks from any place else. We see less parking, more noise, longer lines.
What we don't see, what's difficult to see, is that density is its own reward.
If there's any such thing as a grand unified theory of
urbanity, it's this: Build Dense Housing. Dense housing makes all the other good things
about cities possible: walkability, transit, neighborhood retail, social interaction. And
the equation is simple: The more density you have, the more you'll get of everything else.
That's not to say that every city should look like Hong Kong or New York. There are
obvious drawbacks associated with density, and people should be able to choose from a
range of living arrangements.
But we don't have to choose between three- and 30-story
buildings. The number of floors New Urbanists most often mention as ideal is six --
usually in a sentence with the word "Paris". And just look at Paris. You don't
need to be expert in streetscape height-to-width ratios to see that it's crowded, but not
oppressively so. And the livability of Paris is beyond dispute.
The San Francisco neighborhood that New Urbanists most
often mention is North Beach, where the population density is more than 80,000 per square
mile -- about triple that of most of the city. But there, too, "overcrowded" and
"oppressive" are not words often used.
Throughout most of San Francisco, we already have the
essential elements of New Urbanism -- relatively dense, mixed-use neighborhoods, narrow
streets, transit that's omnipresent if not always reliable, neighborhood parks and
important buildings at important locations. We're fortunate to have the infrastructure in
place; we don't have to build transit villages, or New Urbanist subdivisions that for all
their virtues, lack the charms of age, diversity, and an organic history. All we need is
to build a bit bigger here and there, along corridors like Third and Mission streets, and
Geary Boulevard, and in underutilized pockets of neighborhoods. We can grow gradually.
But we do need to grow. Not just to make our lives
better, but to keep them from growing worse. Cities can't survive as museums; when they
stop growing, they die. Much has been made -- too much, probably -- of the biological
model for society, of diversity and holism and evolution. But the belief that change is
turning San Francisco into a playground for the wealthy and white, a Disney version of
itself, is exactly wrong -- resistance to change, to density, is making the city
monocultural, more expensive. It ignores not only the laws of urbanity and of nature, but
another if-not-quite immutable, then at least undeniable law: that of supply and demand.
San Francisco can remain an example of vibrant, healthy
urbanity. But not if we remain the way we are.
Steve Boland is a former journalist
and web designer. He is now the editor of
San Francisco Cityscape. He lives
in San Francisco.