324 redevelopment, red development, and character development
When I moved to San Francisco in 1995, there were still quite a few vacant lots where buildings had been destroyed by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. It took a couple decades and a couple boom cycles, but they have pretty much all been filled in.
The history of redevelopment is pretty short in SF, which makes it very interesting. We are a relatively new city, and we wear our history on our sleeve.
There were the ten thousand years of shell mounds. Then seventy five years of enslaving the locals in the name of religion. Then twenty five years of clear cutting every tree in sight to build a boom town. Then a big fire.
Then a couple world wars, and more trees cut down. Then leaded gas and the rise of urban crime, and racist solution-slingers like Justin Hermann. He tore down a black neighborhood, the Fillmore, and widened and sunk Geary Boulevard so the neighboring rich so-called "white" people in Pacific Heights could have a moat.
He also tore down big parts of the working infrastructure of the waterfront, namely the Italian-dominated produce markets around Jackson Square, and turned them into an anonymous no-man's land of apartments above parking garages.
In the process of doing this, he removed 30 acres of streets from the San Francisco street map, forever.
All of which is a long way of saying, infilling our streets with more housing is actually doable. It's been done before. And it's happening again, right now, in front of our eyes, one tent at a time.
Regardless of your personal views toward the plight of houseless people, there is one undeniable fact: houseless people are urban pioneers. The cozy and comfortable afflict them with as many disdaining looks and policies as we can, and still, they come.
History doesn't care about our squeemishness, or down-putting labels. History gets spun many ways, white-washed more than not, yet, in a hundred years, what will be the story told about today?
Will it be about the heroic homeowners who saved their property values at the cost of a liveable city? Or about the brave souls who lined up their tents in order to live off the scraps of decadence?
File under: more redevelopment
Drawing a girl living on Mars in 150 years requires some imagination.
But even when you're drawing from fantasy, it's helpful to have some reference.
Here's where these planned experimental bubbles from Dubai wound up:
And more character development, meet Miley's mom and dad:
File under: kind of out of the way for a musical, but...
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