Mission Bay and San Francisco’s Future
MISSION BAY’S REDEVELOPMEN FROM THE 1980S TO THE 2000S, by Fred DeJarlais*
The Mission Bay redevelopment area’s long history began in 1981 when the Southern Pacific Railroad company, which owned hundreds of acres of disused yards, embarked on a campaign to develop its property with a plan for 9,000 residential units, 2,100 hotel rooms, 10 acres of parks and 10 million square feet of commercial space. Nothing came of this plan.
In 1983, at the Southern Pacific Development Company’s invitation the architectural firm of Pei Cobb Freed proposed a visionary plan with 7,000 housing units, 16 million square feet of commercial space, and 40 acres of parks in a setting that featured canals and lagoons. This glamorous plan failed, in part because the designers did not anticipate the infrastructure challenges their plan entailed. Their central lagoon, basically a widening of the southern part of Mission Creek would have removed a key section of the city’s wet weather combined sewer storage box—a massive reinforced concrete conduit, seventeen feet square and several hundred feet long. Moreover, the lagoon and the related system of interconnected canals would have created a serious water quality and odor problem because of poor water circulation and occasional combined sewer overflows during peak winter storm events.
However, the infrastructure challenges paled in comparison with the storm of protests over the plan’s density: 43 million square feet of office space, 15,000 housing units, almost 636,000 square feet of retail, and three towers over 30 stories high. Despite winning an urban design award, the plan disappeared without a trace.
In 1985 the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe railroads merged their real estate operations and created the Santa Fe Pacific Realty Corporation, which accepted the City’s proposal for a more public and participatory planning process led by the Planning Department. The corporation assumed the landownership and obtained the right to create a plan slated for completion in eighteen months. Although the resulting scaled-down plan received awards, the developer was not pleased with it.
Skidmore Owings and Merrill was given the task of refining the plan, which resulted in a long laborious back-and-forth process involving the developer, the City, the Port Authority, and the State Lands Commission. A tentative project-wide subdivision map followed.
After further revisions the plan was presented to the Planning Commission. It had 8,270 housing units, of which 3,700 units were designated affordable; 4.1 million sq. ft. of office space; 900,000 sq. ft. of light-industrial space; 700,000 sq. ft. of retail, 64 acres of open space, and a 500-room hotel. In 1991 the City adopted the tentative map, which was accompanied by a two-volume public improvement plan.
Development seemed imminent, but a real estate recession and a major change in Catellus’s corporate organization doomed this third grand plan.
After five years of inactivity, Mayor Art Agnos’s
administration released a new plan for 8,000 residential units of which 3,000 would be affordable–a new label for subsidized housing for low and moderate income residents. The amount of commercial space shrank to 6.4 million square feet, and the acreage for parks increased to 52 acres.
This plan sank from view, but in 1992 the first Mission Bay office building was approved, and Catellus, the new owner and master developer, announced the start of construction for 500 or so housing units in 1993. None were built.
The next year witnessed a joint proposal from Catellus and the Giants for a 50-acre project focused on sports and entertainment.
The plan was approved, but Catellus withdrew it in 1996 in favor of residential development north of Mission Creek. Concurrently, Mayor Willie Brown set about persuading UC San Francisco to build its second campus at Mission Bay. In 1997 the UC Board of Regents voted in favor of building this medical research campus on 43 acres of Mission Bay donated by Catellus and the City.
The model, shown below, of the location and massing of development on the 303-acre Mission Bay Redevelopment area shows it defined by freeways and former railroad yards and endowed with a generous waterfront. It is not so much a new city suburb as a new-town site in the British sense of new-towns-in towns.
Although in the recent aerial photograph at the beginning of this article, the area still appears quite undeveloped after twenty years of planning, it is now possible to see a new city center in Mission Bay North. Since 2001, when ground was first broken for housing, this new center has grown and will continue to grow despite the current recession.
In 1998 the San Francisco Board of Supervisors adopted the present plan for Mission Bay shown below. In addition to the UCSF campus indicated in the blue blocks, the plan called for 6,000 residential units, 6.8 million square feet of commercial space, a 500-room hotel (removed from the plan in 2007), and 43 acres of public parks.
This article traces the progress to date of this plan, focusing on the Mission Bay North and South Redevelopment Project Areas that border Mission Creek. The UCSF campus and related development will be reviewed in a future article.
Mission Bay North consists of approximately 65 acres north of Mission Creek and adjacent to the AT&T (formerly Pacific Bell) Ballpark and the Caltrain passenger terminal. Mission Bay South includes approximately 238 acres of land south of Mission Creek, bounded by the 280 Freeway, Mariposa Street and the San Francisco Bay.
Why did development take so long to get started? Although there are many reasons for the slow start, it is generally true that progress is halting for redevelopment areas the size of Mission Bay. Returning to the aerial view, one can see that the most developed areas are those which were legally defined and formally adopted in 1999; that is, the UCSF campus, more or less in the area’s center, and the North and South Redevelopment area projects along Mission Creek from I-280 to the bay.
Transportation improvements in Mission Bay encouraged development. Third Street was rebuilt to accommodate Muni’s light rail line, the T-3, completed in 2005. The T-3 trolleys run south on The Embarcadero and out Third Street past the UCSF campus to the present end of the line at Sunnydale Avenue. Residents of Mission Bay can take the reverse route to a downtown stop on Market Street that is linked to other lines. Either way the trip takes fifteen to thirty minutes.
*Fred DeJarlais is an urban planner with 35 years experience working with public agencies and private consultants. He has been with KCA Engineers since 1980 and for most of that period he has worked on the Mission Bay project.
