The two daily newspapers I look at regularly, the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, are full these days of weeping and gnashing of teeth. Why? Because the downtown areas that they used to rely on for advertising revenue are looking more and more like ghost towns. Reporters are using those clever new software packages that can generate multi-color bar graphs and pie charts to fill up lots of column inches to show what percentage of office and retail space has already been abandoned.
Yes, times are tough in the big city.
With online access at home so easy, many workers who used to flock to downtown offices and patronize restaurants and shops on their lunch hours just don’t need to be there.
But surely San Francisco is still an exciting destination? Well, not really. The Chron’s erstwhile architecture critic (now on an“urban design” beat) has fallen back on making lists of the old standby tourist attractions since show-off structures like Sales Force’s Phallus Building aren’t being built because no one wants to work in them.
But people have always been willing to work downtown. Why not now?
It’s the Manhattanization, stupid. In San Francisco’s chilly climate, sunshine matters year-round, and the windy concrete canyons which have been constructed in the last four decades are not appealing.
Poet George Sterling’s “cool, gray city of love” has become the cold, dark city of greed. It’s not, of course, that greed hasn’t always been a driving force in San Franciso: first the gold rush, next the robber barons and then the Hearsts, who now own the Chronicle brand, and their ilk.
Now the high tech companies are getting the blame, but the twist is that in today’s tech world you can be just as greedy in the comfort of your own country home. That's what’s always driven up house prices in the sunny suburbs which ring the city and county of San Francisco in Northern California. It’s just gotten even more intense during the pandemic.
And the business section of the NYT has started playing another variant on the same tune. Much of Manhattan’s housing is now just pricey pieds à terre for people who live most of the time in The Hamptons or Connecticut or Hunterdon County or The Hudson River Valley. That’s always been somewhat true, but the contemporary twist is that the cognoscenti almost never need to come into New York City any more. Office vacancies in Manhattan are lamented in the Times with the same anguish as they are in what we’ve always called The City around here, and the cause is somewhat the same.
In both cities hopeful electeds suggest daily that excess office space might be converted to dwellings, but that turns out to be technically difficult and therefore expensive. It’s likely that the bubble in demand for pricey “ market rate” apartments is about to burst as today’s techies age a bit and think about having kids and wanting backyards. It will be interesting to see how the neo-liberal fauxgressive promoters of unregulated for-profit development will react if and when that happens.
The city of Berkeley is a special case because the presence of the University of California, with its ability to gin up demand simply by increasing enrollment, continues to guarantee a very generous return to speculative developers of fancy private dorms. The big ugly boxes which are Manhattanizing the streets of what used to be called Downtown Berkeley are from the Stack’em and Pack’em school of design. They’re getting taller and taller.
These three-bedroom apartment complexes are pitched to pods of six or more undergraduates with bunk beds. They are not attractive to families with children who can afford to move to the suburbs, and they are too expensive for low-paid UCB employees who must accept long commutes to find affordable suburban rentals. Better paid UC administrators and faculty members don’t need to live here, and they often don’t. Teaching is most often left to poorly paid academic grad student temps while tech researchers count on corporate funding.
The school is increasingly dominated by what might be called an Edifice Complex. Building more stuff creates some jobs, which gets support from the building trades, plus generating big profits for contractors. What’s not to like? Well…
Example: The crazy expensive expansion of Cal’s Memorial Stadium with accompanying fancy gym for elite athletes. It will be a burden for California taxpayers for decades into the future, though the builders made out like bandits, as they always do. Reports that the Pac 12 is disintegrating suggest that the anticipated fantastic profits from ticket sales were just that, fantasy.
The Berkeley Daily Planet extensively covered UC’s foolish project of creating this football temple and the lengthy protests which tried to stop it, but there it stands today, with a gigantic debt, a losing team and declining attendance—all predicted.
Planet reporters and citizen commenters repeatedly told our readers that the stadium was doomed to fail, but they were ignored by the powers that be, who built it anyway. Something similar is now happening with Carol Christ’s cockamamie plan to pave People’s Park for more luxury dorms, this time with the collusion of our assemblymember, Buffy Wicks.
More examples: Bruce Brugmann’s SF Bay Guardian gets the credit for warning about the consequences of Manhattanizing San Francisco in the early 70s, but in the end his cautionary admonitions didn’t work and now the city is paying the price.. And remember when everyone made fun of the SFBG for harping on PG&E’s faults? The Guardian was not only right, at first it only had half the story of PG&E’s transgressions, with the rest now coming to light.
I did a story for the Guardian in the mid-seventies predicting the many problems with the proposed demolition and re-building of the Transbay Terminal in downtown San Francisco, to which no one in power in SF paid the slightest attention. Now, forty years later, it has all happened, and worse, and there’s nothing on the site but the “temporary” terminal. There are calls for it to be demolished.
It’s increasingly annoying to continue in the news media because the mantra for the publications I’ve been associated with in last three or four decades seems to be “I told you so, but so what?”.
We’ve been told that the truth will make us free, which might occasionally be true, but there’s little satisfaction in truth-telling if it makes very little difference in outcomes. Just sayin’.
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