The Pier 70 Office Park
SPUR held a lunchtime get-together on The Future of Pier 70, which is being redeveloped for some as-of-yet-unnamed biotech company:
Located in the Central Waterfront, Pier 70 is a 65 acre site controlled by the Port of San Francisco. Currently the Port is conducting a public planning process to develop a master plan for the entire site - one which intends to balance regulatory, economic, maritime, historic preservation, open space and shoreline access issues. Come hear from David Beaupre of the Port of San Francisco, Boris Dramov from Roma and Jim Musbach from Economic Planning Systems as they give us a glimpse how the Plan for Pier 70 is shaping up.
The government-issued website is here.
For a quick summary of things that are going on with Pier 70 and Proposition D, read this Chronicle article.
From the moment I arrived, a few minutes late, the room had a very different vibe than that of the Jan Gehl meeting the other night. It’s possible that I gave Gehl a lot of leeway because I know he’s from Copenhagen and has a reputation for being bike- and pedestrian-friendly. In the case of the Pier 70 planners - mainly Roma Design Group - I knew nothing about them. I still know little about them, but feel fairly confident that allowing current plans to proceed with result in an unmitigated disaster for Pier 70 - a treasure will have been debased into another boring, dead office park.
Here are my notes:
- Person doing sign language at the front. Cool.
- Boris Dramov of Roma Design Group
- Spring 2008 is rollout of ‘Preferred Master Plan’
- 40 historical structured retained
- Coordinating with Eastern Neighborhoods Planning Group
- $2.2 million from DoD because yard used to be used for WWII-ear shipbuilding/repair
- Rebecca Benassini, Economic and Planning Systems
- Ships that come into drydock to be worked on employ lots of people–at least temporarily–up to 1,500 workers on the last one. 700 people living on the last one. [Do all those people come into the city? How do they get off the boat? Is there plank? And then how do they get around? Just walk the mile+ into SoMa where everything is closed most of the time?]
- Largest drydock on the west coast of the Americas. If it can’t fit here, it has to go to Asia or the Carribean - taking it out of service for two-weeks to a month or more.
- First speaker, David Beaupre from the Port of San Francisco, was talking crazy fast. I usually like that, but there was no context at all - just stats upon stats of meaninglessness.
- Carey & Co., Inc. Historic Preservation is doing a bunch of consulting.
- Irish Hill - what’s left of it - is back there. It’ll stay.
- 60 acres total, 15 is shipyard, 20 is open space [The rest of the biotech firms?]
- Food Hall - 16,000 square feet [Does this make it official? Another mall in our fair city?]
- Heigh limits of 90′ all along the coast, so as to not block the view of the folks in Dogpatch, Potrero too much.
- LEED-ish buildings.
- Possible new ferry terminal.
- Limited car parking. [I don't believe it.]
- $41 million of the $636 in development cost [which figures are these?] is for car parking, which includes any bike parking which may or may not happen. I asked about bike parking and got the brush-off - ‘too early to talk about that’. Used ’standard formula’ of 1 space for each 1,000 sq. ft. of land.
- Could include hotel(s) being developed.
- Prop D is on the ballot. Speakers and SPUR want it passed. [I'll vote 'NO'.]
- RFQ process could start happening soon/now, before the ‘preferred master plan’ is done.
- BAE is current shipyard operator. [For you nerds, that's not now-Oracle-owned BEA.]
When I asked about bike parking:
“Of course, bicycle parking is part of the program.”
R&D buildings are usually large, so we’ll have large buildings that block most of the waterfront, apparently. That biotech companies and their R&D departments will occupy these buildings is all but a foregone conclusion - the ‘biotech/R&D/large spaces’ connection was mentioned at least three times.
A girl in the back asked about the location of the complex of the 6 to 8 mammoth, 90′-high office buildings that will effectively block off the shore from the rest of the city, and that was a single use design, by definition, not mixed use, and we want mixed use areas for a vibrant city, so why design it like this? Why was the green space along the shoreline so far away from where the food will apparently be - the food court, situated way on the other side of the office buildings, past some other buildings? And all of this would create a situation where the space would be completely dead at night - it was not mixed use, it was single use - an office park. I was thinking the same exact thing. Boris Dramov of Roma dodged the question, effectively saying, ‘Don’t worry about it.’
Here’s my description of the area using a snapshot from the plan:
The big box-like buildings are supposedly just ‘placeholders’, even though we’ve also been told how much space R&D facilities require. I fear they will all be exactly the same size and shape, giving the area an even more desolate feel.
The entire plan seems to suggest to me that it’s a grand deception. The parking garages are not shown in most of the diagrams. We’re supposed to accept a whole bunch of promises about bike parking and transit and all that - ‘Trust us,’ they say. There is no mention anywhere of bicycle lanes - no mention of how how pedestrians will be kept safe from marauding automobiles.
Why is any new development in San Francisco allowed, much less required, to induce traffic by installing new parking? It doesn’t make any sense. There’s a reason San Francisco, like New York, is one of the highest-density regions in the country - there’s no room to grow but up. The Mission Bay are is filling up with parking garages faster than you can imagine, the streets are super-wide so cars are already roaring through there, and now we’re going to duplicate the process in the Pier 70 area [soon to be known as The (Dead-)Central Waterfront].
We need to seriously think about mandatory maximums for parking. If the world didn’t end (yet) under years of mandatory parking minimums, then surely it won’t end when we enforce mandatory maximums for a few years. Cities are starting to rethink their car-subsidizing, city-destroying laws, slowly but surely, but why shouldn’t we undo some of the damage? We should start ripping out parking, charging market rates for existing parking, etc. Any new development can only have traffic-calmed streets, with a maximum speed of 19 MPH, unless some impossible-to-meet requirement is met, but it should not be allowed to have more than temporary parking - for deliveries, maintenance, and emergency vehicles. Is there any other reason to allow car parking? Buses and other transit services can roll right through - no need to park, except temporarily, perhaps.
Suggestion to SPUR: Please do not allow food to be eaten during these lunchtime gatherings anymore. We’re Americans - most of are overweight (me!) — we can wait until 1:30 to stuff some MickeyD’s down our pieholes. The dude sucking on his gums next to me for 45 minutes was more than I could stand. And it’s not the first time this has happened - there are always one or two folks in the room who make you lose your appetite for the day. The unwrapping and paper-mashing and myriad other distractions take away from what is being presented, it disrespects the presenter, we can’t hear what the presenter is saying, we can’t concentrate on what the presenter is saying, etc. It doesn’t have to be like a funeral, but come on - we can take our lunches back to our desks - it works - I’ve done it before, as have most people. Nix happy meals at the lunchtime sessions.
…Important to note from the referenced Chronicle article is that this initial plan starts off as an illegal development, and will have to work its way towards compliance with the law:
But even if the financing is worked out, officials must grapple with state laws that dictate what can be built along the California shoreline. The laws generally allow maritime, historic restoration, recreation, retail and other commercial activities that are open to the general public.
Office development is not permitted, and while compromises have enabled other waterfront office development projects to go forward, they typically come with a lot of debate and negotiation.
But maybe it doesn’t matter if you have enough developers competing to rip the greatest return from the joint.
Save starving developers everywhere - vote ‘YES’ on Prop. D!
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