|
It's fairly common European cities to be anti-height in the city center for reasons that seem somewhat similar to SF's, though seems less common elsewhere. Some of it is a reaction (sometimes overreaction) to tall modernist housing blocks which nobody really liked. That and other things led to a preference for "human-scale" 5-7-story mid-rises. Another factor is a desire for light to be able to hit streets and parks in the "common areas" in the city center. A common compromise is to have a mid-rise historical center, but high-rises a bit outside of it, connected to good transit, e.g. central Paris banned skyscrapers after the Tour Montparnasse was so badly received, but there are skyscrapers a short distance away in the "new downtown" area of La Défense. An SF version of that might be to keep central SF mid-rise, but allow high-rise towers near the BART/Caltrain stations in Oakland, Daly City, and Burlingame. The Bay Area's problem is that nobody wants the high-rises: putting them in the center or putting them near transit a bit outside the center would both work, but everyone, except to some extent Oakland, is anti-development, so they go nowhere. Heck, Palo Alto won't even allow mid-rise apartments near the Palo Alto Caltrain, so you actually have people "reverse commuting" from SF down to Stanford, because as crazy as living in SF is, trying to live in downtown Palo Alto is even crazier. A few livable, urbanized downtowns on the peninsula might siphon off some of the demand in SF, not solving the problem, but at least reducing it. Other problems that seem like they exacerbate SF's problems: 1) poor intracity transit, e.g. lack of an east-west subway, concentrates demand in a handful of eastern districts; and 2) large areas of the city are not even mid-rise, but full of two-story houses (partly historical, partly anti-development, partly related to #1). |