Is San Francisco The Brooklyn To Silicon Valley's Unbuilt Manhattan?

[M II A II R II K]

Is San Francisco The Brooklyn To Silicon Valley's Unbuilt Manhattan?


January 8th, 2013

B Ken Layne

Read More: http://www.theawl.com/2013/01/is-san-francisco-the-brooklyn-to-silicon-valleys-unbuilt-manhattan

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In 2013, the bigger tech companies are still in Silicon Valley, but the people working there—from Mark Zuckerberg to the newest $100K hires straight out of college—want to be in San Francisco. Zuckerberg is a part-timer, with a fancy apartment in the Mission. The rest are part-timers in Silicon Valley, commuting to and from work on immense luxury buses run by Google, Apple, EA, Yahoo and the rest. This has caused problems, notably for San Francisco residents unlucky enough to survive on less than a hundred-grand starting salary.

- Talk of raising the city's skyline is met with anger. People argue endlessly over the appropriate comparisons to New York. Is Oakland the Brooklyn to SF? What about Berkeley, or Marin, or the Outer Sunset? And what does that make Bayview or Burlingame? All of this assumes that urban San Francisco equals Manhattan. It does not. San Francisco, with its leafy parks and charming row houses and distinct villages and locavore restaurants and commuters fleeing every morning to work, is the Brooklyn to an as-yet-unbuilt Manhattan.

- There are tech companies in San Francisco, with Twitter's takeover of an unloved chunk of Market Street at the foot of Polk Gulch the most conspicuous new example. But there's no room in the city for anything like Apple's 176-acre spaceship headquarters being built in Cupertino, and there's no reason for the whole of Silicon Valley to gaze up at the peninsula, and the whole problem in San Francisco today is there's not enough housing for humans when they're not at work.

- As disappointed visitors and new employees discover, Silicon Valley is a dull and ugly landscape of low-rise stucco office parks and immense traffic-clogged boulevards. The fancy restaurants are in strip malls, like you'd find in Arizona or something. There is nothing to do, nowhere to go. Massive arcologies like the new Apple campus are where the tech giants are headed, but until there are living urban neighborhoods connecting these monstrosities, anyone with hopes for a life outside of work will pay a ridiculous premium to live in San Francisco and spend two hours of every day sitting on a bus.

- Meanwhile, the areas around and in between the tech giants of Silicon Valley are mostly ready to be razed and rebuilt. There are miles and miles of half-empty retail space, hideous 1970s' two-story apartment complexes, most of it lacking the basic human infrastructure of public transportation, playgrounds, bicycle and running and walking paths, outdoor cafes and blocks loaded with bars and late-night restaurants. This is where the new metropolis must be built, in this unloved but sunny valley. And then the new supercity gets linked to San Francisco by an existing boulevard of run-down old malls and decrepit car lots that pours right into the Mission District and downtown SF, 40 miles north.

- The boulevard is El Camino Real, or California Route 82, the one-time king's highway that could be a new corridor of high-rise apartments and HQs and restaurants and museums filling in the long gaps between downtown San Jose and Apple/Google/HP/Yahoo/Intel and Stanford University and San Francisco. With local light rail at street level and express trains overhead or underground, the whole route could be lined with native-landscaped sidewalks dotted with pocket parks and filled on both sides with ground-floor retail, farmers markets and nightlife districts around every station. Caltrain already runs just east of Route 82, and BART already reaches south to Millbrae now.

- El Camino Real is already the focus of various plans to connect Silicon Valley and San Francisco, from Caltrain's own future scenarios to the Grand Boulevard Initiative, the dozens of cities and towns and jurisdictions on the peninsula are beginning to figure out the old way of just building cheaper crappy suburbs all the way to the Central Valley is not going to work any longer. Nobody wants to move to the Bay Area for work and then discover they actually have to live in a completely different climate an hour's drive (without traffic) from the actual bay. The magical part of the Bay Area is really confined to the Bay Area, with its relatively green hills and foggy mornings and cool ocean air. And in the post-automobile era, where else would you look to expand your metropolitan area other than the underused sections in the middle of your metropolitan area?

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