The Limiting Vision of "Revitalizing Downtown"
Recently, I visited Portland, Oregon, and Seattle to see family and friends, and to be in town during the US Men’s National Team World Cup game against Australia. I had visited both cities previously, but it had been a few years, and since then I’ve learned a lot about urban development and evolved on what I value in places — both places to live and to visit.
I wasn’t there to pass judgment on whether Portland and Seattle are “good,” but my experiences did prompt me to think a lot about San Francisco’s mayor, Daniel Lurie, and the anxieties about my city that apparently motivate a good chunk of its leadership, which in turn get transferred to media members and everyday people who take their cues from those leaders.
A major driving force in Lurie’s politics right now is “revitalizing downtown” by making that part of the city more business-friendly in various ways. On its own, that’s fine, but the mayor and those who think this way reveal something, perhaps unintended, about what they think cities and urban spaces are.
For me, the crux of it is that as much as his statements mention that he wants people to live in San Francisco’s downtown, he doesn’t want to do the thing that would have the most dramatic impact: commit to building loads of new housing all over the city, including downtown. There are lots of reasons for that, the main one being the significant chunk of NIMBYs who want to keep their neighborhoods exactly as they were when they bought their homes. But it also remains that converting commercial office buildings into residential properties can be a wildly difficult problem to solve because of basic issues like insulation, plumbing, and access to windows, such that it’s often more cost effective to just build to purpose for residential, both downtown and elsewhere in the city.
For an example of what this means in practice, I enjoy the Noe Valley neighborhood as it is, but I also think it would be amazing if more people were able to live there — it’s a huge problem that centrist (for San Francisco) news outlets like the SF Standard will cruise through a sentence saying “starter homes” there cost $3 million. If we were truly building a city with the idea that we wanted more people to live here, there would be 30-story apartment buildings at 24th and Church, where there are a confluence of Muni lines, a walkable commercial stretch, and more. That’s a complete non-starter with the current leadership in San Francisco, however.
The worst part of engaging with all this, though, is that I constantly get the sense that Lurie’s attempts to “revitalize downtown” are rooted in disgust that visitors see suffering people. I can’t prove that’s how Lurie feels, but his inability to express that people who live on the streets deserve housing and that getting people into long-term stable housing is the best solution for reducing the numbers of the unhoused in favor of police-focused sweeps of encampments suggests an inability to escape a mindset that, at core, the unhoused have brought their situation on themselves and have received their just desserts. Also, punitive treatment for being unhoused empirically doesn’t work, and doing those things just exacerbates the negative dynamics that lead to the suffering.
I visited Portland first. As an outsider, I understand many residents have similar anxieties about the city, its unhoused population, and downtown office occupancy, with the added complication that it is a smaller metro area with a much more tenuous hold on being considered a “major” city. In my short time there, I could see why people worry. I encountered many people sleeping under cardboard on sidewalks and under overpasses, and there were many empty street-facing properties in the downtown area. At the same time, I went all over the city and loved those places because there were people out and about, talking with their neighbors, visiting shops, eating at restaurants, and just hanging out with each other.
Since I was taking a train from Portland to Seattle, I stayed in a downtown hotel so I could walk to the train station, and my entire time there I was easily able to walk or take public transportation to go to the International Rose Test Garden, the esplanade on the river, a family member’s home on the southeast side of the city, thrift shops on Mississippi, Prost!, Kinboshi Ramen (legit!), et cetera. I rode a bike around the waterfront loop, going over a couple different bridges. I walked a couple miles on the east side of the river on a couple different days, from one neighborhood to another, past homes with yards, crossing a freeway at one point.
In Seattle, I spent a significant amount of time at a friend’s home on the north side of the city. He drove us to T-Mobile Park for a Mariners game and to Archipelago for dinner (10/10, highly recommended). I also took public transportation to the Mural Amphitheatre, near the Space Needle, for the USMNT-Australia game watch party, and I walked and rode a Lime bike around my friend’s part of the city one sunny morning that I had to myself, cruising residential streets, several of which were closed to car traffic. On previous trips, I’d spent a bunch of time tooling around Queen Anne, Capitol Hill, and other spots.
All that’s to say that “downtown,” as a concept, holds only a vaguely nebulous attraction for me, and I don’t put much stock in the idea that downtown is inevitably the heart of a city. Even when I worked in a city center for 10 years in Charlotte, it was nice to be walking distance from the arena for NBA games, and there were a couple decent lunch spots nearby, but I definitely would have preferred to work in one of many other different neighborhoods, or at home. Moreover, growing up, neither of my parents worked in San Francisco’s downtown, so we rarely went there because it was the place where office workers gathered in offices to work. When we went out in the evenings, it was to neighborhoods in the city with minimal hotel presence, like Noe Valley, the Richmond, or Chinatown, and so on, where we would meet my parents’ friends at their homes or at a restaurant. When we went out on weekends, it was to go to parks, the waterfront, or anywhere that wasn’t amidst empty office buildings.
What I saw in Portland and Seattle, what I see in San Francisco, and what I have seen in Charlotte, New York, London, Chicago, Paris, Los Angeles, Dublin, San José, Puerto Vallarta, and other places where I’ve lived and visited, is that neighborhoods where people live are the human-scaled unit of city vibrancy, and that trying to build goodwill for a city by creating a theme park downtown area fails because it’s an incredibly limiting vision of what a city can be. (I suppose Las Vegas tests this notion, but even there, the Strip is but one part of a big city. And also, I hate the Strip.)
Of course, some visitors want that theme park experience, but it sure seems like folly to shape a city’s priorities around them instead of residents and future residents. I know my beliefs are not universal, but it hit me during my vacation that, given the places I was visiting, building a city for residents is also building a city for visitors.
San Francisco is a place many people want to live, which we know because the price to attain housing here is astronomical, which, in turn, is a big reason so many people here are unhoused. Therefore, we should both dramatically increase the amount of housing here, both for those who are already here and those who wish to come live here. The demand is so strong, we may have to also use legal mechanisms to further constrain housing costs, but the main thing we have failed to do for decades is build enough housing for people to live here without taking on eyewatering rent or mortgage burdens.
Maybe San Francisco’s downtown needs to be “revitalized,” but what if all the energy, resources, and political capital Lurie is spending on that instead went into enabling more housing construction throughout the city? What if my city’s leadership framed housing availability and affordability throughout the city as the crisis instead of embarrassment that downtown doesn’t feel like Disneyland? What if our leaders treated our city’s primary problems, including lagging commercial activity downtown, as downstream of housing availability and affordability? I refuse to believe that NIMBYism cannot be overcome, and that my city’s housing crisis is an intractable condition. I also don’t have all the answers.
But I think whatever the best answer is, it is grounded in neighborhoods built for people all across the city, not just where business travelers stay.
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Previous related posts:
The Chinese restaurant at the end of a long argument about housing
Mamdani Beyond New York
The $6 game with as much relevance today as in 1993
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Thanks for reading, you crazy kids. Let’s do this again, sometime.
(Photo: "Aerial views of Portland bridges" by Oregon Department of Transportation. Used under CC BY 2.0 license.)