oriana

It seems every other day I'm reading some news item or another on the San Francisco Chronicle lamenting the city is dying because downtown retailers are dropping one after another. And the latest one, as linked, tut tuts readers that without the once prospering commercial base catering to downtown's tourist and techworkers, so many of the city services will face budget shortfalls amid a fentanyl crisis that the mayor and the other powers that be have decided can only be solved by adding moar cops (Nevermind safe injection sites).

Everyone nags about what needs to be done. YIMBYs will stress adding housing to relieve exorbitant housing prices at whatever cost will solve things. Transit advocates will stress more trains and buses to move people around the city will revitalize the economy. Financial firms stress everyone should go back to work in the office so that it drives economic activity. There's some sense to all of these measures, but none of them are the end all argument that cures a city's woes.

Some guy today published an op-ed looking at how San Francisco could be improved by simply emulating Tokyo (nevermind our sister city relationship with Osaka) and I'm just here rolling my eyes because he has the gall to claim he has big ideas when he literally just visited Tokyo for the first time in his life last month and his takeaway was: "LESS CARS, MORE TRAINS AND BIKES" which is a very original concept, I assure you, and can only be wrought by visiting Japan (but also I keep telling people, no one actually wants to bike in San Francisco, you are all ridiculous, do you know how steep the hills are? Do you know how fast bikes cruise down Sutter and ignore the stoplights and almost run me over when I'm crossing the street? Please just let me ride a fast and efficient quiet bus.)

First and foremost, I just want to state for the record, the "car free streets" Mahmood yearns for already exist in San Francisco as an extended section of Buchanan Street has gradually been converted into a pedestrian-friendly park. And although just one central example and by no means a city-wide phenomenon, there is a proof of concept already enacted in the city, along with pandemic-era street closures.

Just the same, the man suggests widening sidewalks to let bikes also ride on them and, let me reiterate how many times I've seen some dickbag riding home from work downtown to the west side of the city on his bike down Sutter doing 40 mph and ignoring the red light, that I do not want to be walking down a path with some guy on a bird scooter or Lyft bike charging through full speed. There's solutions for this. It's a protected dedicated bike lane and we have them in the SOMA and Market area. I think they're way safer and more visible.

All of this to say, Mahmood touches on a solution that equally annoys me because he just recalls going to a banana smoothie shop in Japan near Ginza where the owners lived up stairs of their little business and I'm like, yeah, that's pretty typical in Japanese mixed-use zoning laws. Private homes often have ground floor commercial enterprise permitted as of right so long as they aren't that big. I think live-work communities are brilliant and I've always been kinda aghast at why Americans have never embraced it.

As an aside, when Cities Skylines first released, I was thoroughly let down by the lack of mixed use zoning because Colossal Order's earlier successful transportation simulator Cities in Motion had managed to implement European-style mixed-use buildings as the norm.

However, I do not think San Francisco can support live-work units like what Mahmood suggest. For one, property prices are exorbitant in the city and it is my opinion that it's untenable to rent a property to both live in and operate a commercial enterprise. That is to say, the amount of money and time it would take to permit develop and set up a single family home+small business would be too much of an investment unless you literally own the property you're planning to do business in. Once again, Mahmood seems so surprised Japanese people have figured this out, but I assure you, San Francisco had been able to do this in the past, but thanks to 1960s urban renewal, much of those businesses that had live-work situations have long since been taken out from the so-called "blighted" ethnic enclaves.

Indeed, it's these communities that once dotted the city (due to unwritten racial segregation rules and redlining and other policies) that sported mixed-use or live-work situations because residents couldn't afford or find a place to live anywhere else and they found work to serve their own communities.

And even still, even Japan is not all live-work development. Downtown cores and major shopping districts are heavily commuter based. Few people live in Ikebukuro, and fewer still are the people who venture out to shop there.

And for that matter, it goes without saying, having a single family home and a cute shop is the idyllic dream (for me), but I'm sure some folks in San Francisco would be turning red with fury that I'm commandeering precious land all to myself for my own benefit so that I can run a cute little cat cafe. Ultimately, what most may envision as ideal is closer to a high-density walkable community with a healthy collection of neighborhood-serving commercial services (although with the advent of online retail, the reality is that local commercial zones are suffering even as the affluence of local residents goes up).

And so the idylic concept of a neighborhood commercial district breaks down when faced with today's late-stage capitalist hellscape. As much as we want to support the local corner store and tailors in concept, consumerist culture has gone so far these businesses no longer thrive at a community level. They can, but, once again, the cost of doing business in San Francisco is so high, it's hard to build something for the local community and still be able to thrive themselves.

Off hand, retail space in San Francisco is $3.50 per sq/ft (it's like $2.50 in LA, $2.20 in Seattle), add common area fees, blah blah blah, you're paying $7 a sq/ft. to run a business. People have complained to me they're only able to stay in business because they're the sole proprietor and owner of a business, they can't afford to hire additional help. (or so they said as they closed their shop up due to rent prices). So often times, the people moving in with the capital capable of creating new businesses are people with capital, and that runs into a separate issue of neighborhood commercial district appeal. That is to say, a local business that caters specifically to a neighborhood's needs by a person from that community has less of a chance of even opening up for shop compared to a corporation that can throw down the money to open their thing, and that kills diversity.

And so it's hard to realize an ideal city. You want small local businesses and walkable neighborhoods, affordable rent, safety and efficient public transit to go wherever. Maybe a soccer stadium instead of a soon to be defunct mall. But all of these things are dependent on the assumption people can just not only want to build it, but CAN build it. Short of a communist revolution that repossesses all private landownership, the kind of community development folks want to see is nigh impossible today because it is cost prohibitive, or seen the other way: not profitable.

But I'm not saying you should host a violent overthrow of capitalism and practice anarchy. No really, don't do that. That would inconvenience me.

#urban planning #housing politics #cities #The Cohost Local Feed (San Francisco)#I wrote this while my room was 35C so I am half delirious

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in reply to @chiaki747's post:

chaos gf @zip7/23/2023, 9:58 AM

I have a theory that Americans visiting Tokyo for the first time are 80% experiencing not being in car-dependent North America and about 20% experiencing Tokyo being particularly car-free. It's a little silly from a journalist but the revelation that the US is structurally miserable to exist in is a pretty normal reaction.

I was particularly struck by how it was possible to have a little 8 foot wide unit for a tiny melonpan bakery and that I've never in my life seen a new building go up with shopping units sized for that kind of usage instead of yet another Old Navy. It's not just cost per square footage, it's also a scarcity of small units. The ground floor business thing strikes me as something that works not for major commercial districts but rather as a way of providing a minimal risk way to bootstrapping a small business: no commercial 5-year leases, no extra expense over your existing living costs, and inherently somewhere you could already afford to be. I've also never seen multi-storey multi-business developments anywhere else, which again must take off rent pressure because street food and browsable shops can take the ground floor while specialist businesses and the local Jonathan's are higher up. It seems like the regulatory environment provides a pretty smooth path from starting a business in your home and expanding it into a sustainable local shop, whereas in the US and indeed the UK you have to throw thousands at the project in rent and business rates before you can even dream of turning a profit. Access to healthcare compounds this risk even harder in the US.

But as you allude to, San Francisco isn't incompatible with that. Before the 1960s or so everyone was walking or using public transit to get around. Downtown has survived the common danger of being 50% converted into parking lots and the freeways, while damaging, don't feel like they rip the city in two as much as they do elsewhere. The motor car didn't arrive and squeeze the heart out of the city, the dot com boom did. If anything I would suggest SF is a victim of its own success: the last walkable city within commuting distance of Silicon Valley. A place you can live without owning a car in the place in the US most likely to attract people accustomed to living without owning a car and which gives them piles of money. It's simply too profitable to own land for small businesses to survive without being priced out or, if they're outright owners, bought out.

The fix doesn't lie in San Francisco, I think, but rather in encouraging other cities in the bay area to implement those solutions: walkable, dense cores where you can live and commute without a car. In summary, this guy should have come back from Tokyo ranting about how we need a good solid dose of that kind of thing in Sunnyvale instead.

Frank Hecker @hecker7/23/2023, 1:06 PM

I was going to write a comment, but you've done so much more eloquently than I ever could. "It's not just cost per square footage, it's also a scarcity of small units." That was my thought as well. A naïve analysis would be, "if all this space keeps going vacant, won't renting it be affordable at some point?", but as you note it's difficult to impossible to take these large commercial spaces and revert them back to a Tokyo-style streetscape.

"this guy should have come back from Tokyo ranting about how we need a good solid dose of that kind of thing in Sunnyvale instead." Agreed. A complementary point is that lots of suburbs do have vibrant small-scale commercial environments, but they're in strip shopping centers isolated from each other and from their surroundings. Up the road from me there's a 40-year-old 2-story commercial building that hosts a couple dozen small retail shops, restaurants, and other businesses (most run by Korean-Americans). But it's only reachable by car.

chaos gf @zip7/23/2023, 2:07 PM

Seattle has the University Village, which is a shopping mall apes a small downtown kind of area. Rather like the similar one in Emeryville, it’s completely hostile to reach without a car, embedded within a sea of parking on the intersection of major roads.

None of the businesses are what you’d call a small, local business and certainly none of the businesses are designed to cater to someone who lives a 5 to 10 minute walk away, and so of course it feels off. Like you’re a fly that’s just landed on a carnivorous plant. It’s not a place you live in synergy with, not somewhere you walk through on your way to anywhere or everywhere, not a place that people live in but rather the shuffling corpse of the kind of town centre that it paved over in the first place. There’s only places for people who have gone out for dinner or have Gone Shopping: nothing shaped like a corner shop or a small business or a tattoo parlor or a hardware store or a post office or a nail salon.

I lived a 20 minute walk away from the U Village for several years. I never walked there once, and if I did wind up there it was because someone picked me up in their car on the way to get food together. And I wasn’t a stranger to 20 minute walks: I’d walk that far to and from the station every day. It was simply a hostile place to get to and an unappealing place to be.

I’m not really sure what my point here is. It’s like we’ve forgotten how to build a place because we’ve been too busy refining how to build destinations, but it’s more than that because the reality is that we’ve made it impossible to build anything else and now there’s entire generations who haven’t known different and all I can really think of is that we ought to send every 18-year-old on a birthright trip to a major european city for six months so that they can come back understanding on a fundamental level why the vibes are bad.

A cat, a cat, and a cat @chiaki7477/24/2023, 9:01 PM

So one of the things I cut from this entire tirade, and yes, I actually did some light editing and read overs despite saying I rambled for 3 hours in a boiling room, is that diversity in retail creates destinations, but modern commercial district planning tries to create destination like they're squeezing blood from stone. That is, commercial districts are planned with the assumption people will want to shop there, not because people have congregated and needed services.

Hayes Valley is one such example of a neighborhood commercial corridor where local flavor and merchants have grown around needs. Yes, people wanted to shop for groceries, get their laundry done and so on so forth, but the neighborhood's character comes from the fancy underwear shop there or local favorite cafe. Locals will shop at the markets and dry cleaners, but people won't commute in to shop for apple in Hayes Valley. The development of local retail to expand beyond basic needs, however, does create unique shopping environments and makes that corridor a destination.

So I'm not commuting into shop at Hayes Market, but pretzel shop Suppenkuche is something that's unique and worth traveling out to.

Part of San Francisco's allergy to formula retail (chain stores) stems from this concern that all commercial districts end up looking the same because modern development practices rely on forcing anchors to drive traffic.

"You WANT Starbucks in this area so people will come there"

It's the reliance on brand power to get everyone to come out to shop at your "hip new commercial district" but it ends up looking like every other commercial corridor because it has a Starbucks, an AMC theater, a Hallmark, Chipotle and a Game Stop." It gets people to come out when they live in a retail desert, but it also divests from local alternatives that could have made a name for itself otherwise: the local coffee shop, the handmade card store, the scrappy taqueria, an indie comic book shop.

As for giant retail spaces, people are sizing down spaces now, but it's been tough. Things are just so expensive and tedious (it takes a year to open anything due to permitting nightmares) I don't think anyone wants to even move in to San Francisco when a smaller space pops up. You're sinking hundreds of thousands into a business venture you might not be even be able to open, after all.

chaos gf @zip7/25/2023, 7:26 AM

It gets people to come out when they live in a retail desert

I think that might be the crux: it's likely that most everyone with experience building this shit did it in the unusual and broken context of car-dependent suburbia and they're probably still thinking in those terms even in cities that would have enough footfall to support small businesses.

The thing about malls is they don't just have a barrier to entry in the form of a big wide parking lot, but also (even in San Francisco) they're turned entirely inwards. You must first enter the mall in order to access the shops inside: it assumes you went there on purpose and so it is, as you say, an environment designed to have some kind of "anchor" to get you to go there and then to stick around for a while since you already made the effort.

With that in mind, and for the first time, I've come to appreciate the newly developed St James Quarter in Edinburgh. Sure enough there's no small shops but it comes off the main retail street where there's no small shops either. It takes an unusual form for a mall: it's like one long, curved street. It's semi-open: the entrance is uninterrupted by doors so it feels like a covered shopping street. You can cut through it to get somewhere. Some of this is modern mallcraft, such as not giving customers long sight lines to the other end and making the space feel open, but you have to give them credit that it's somewhere you might impulsively wander into or through. In a sense it's a modernized version of the victorian shopping arcade.

I'm not surprised that SF malls are struggling, with all that in mind. They're built like car destinations, but who's gonna drive to a mall in downtown San Francisco with its congested roads, pricey parking and (and this especially matters to suburbanites) homeless population, when you might as well drive to a different (but not that different) mall in another city? They've built a place that, on foot, doesn't seem to want you, and by car I expect that you have to pay to be at.

I hope Japantown is at least doing better. That was always a place that felt worth going to, because it had stuff you couldn't visit anywhere else in the bay.

A cat, a cat, and a cat @chiaki7477/25/2023, 8:22 AM

Japantown survived the pandemic. It's got one of the best vacancy rates in the city.

Downtown you've lost everything. Even the Walgreens are closing (because of "shoplifting") and there is literally no reason for me to go downtown these days whereas before I might go shop for some clothes or get some eyewear at Jins, or grab a drink before dinner at a bar I like. All that's gone now.

Japantown? There are a few key vacancies, but there's nothing that would lead you to call the place blighted. The manju shop closed (which is the saddest thing) but that's the owners retiring.

The good Korean fusion restaurant is gone, but that was gone since before the pandemic and its replacement has been taking forever because of permit hell (and also some kind of VC funded marijuana spa wanted to move in and everyone raised hell to say no to them for about a year, now they're building out a gastropub!).

But, during the pandemic, the key thing that happened was, folks stepped up. I think about half a million was raised to provide financial assistance even before PPP loans were going out, and local orgs worked to keep the businesses going. The community center organized outdoor eating areas so that people could order takeout from the restaurants in the malls and essentially ran a huge food court. Only about three restaurants permanently closed due to the pandemic in the neighborhood.

Also, a pedestrian mall on Buchanan turned out to be a major boon since outdoor seating was a no-brainer for those folks along that street, so business boomed comparatively.

Since Japantown is near residential areas, people who used to go downtown for a night on the town are finding places to go closer to home now. Why travel downtown to buy things you can find online during a pandemic? But if you can pop down the street to eat dinner in the outdoor seating area and "support local businesses" all around good feels! And it's safer!

Combine that with having businesses that are somewhat unique to the neighborhood and they're now one of the most vibrant districts in the city. It's a destination for people both local and regional, as well as tourists.

I was talking to one of the hotel managers a few months back, and I'm told hotel rooms were generally dictated by downtown hotels in the past, but downtown's current state has turned the tables and smaller neighborhood hotels in vibrant commercial corridors now dictate the going rate for S.F. tourists.

A cat, a cat, and a cat @chiaki7477/23/2023, 9:34 PM

In a sense that's true. People in America really do no know how much divestment in public infrastructure there just really is, at the same time, Tokyo really isn't all that car free. It's a pretty car-intensive city, all things considered, albeit there are far more people who take public transit (and most Americans don't end up visiting any place that isn't a big city because why would you be a tourist in rural Nagano? But outside the big city centers, Japan's infrastructure is somewhat similar to the suburban U.S.).

On tech squeezing out San Francisco's economy, honestly you're right. I had reasons to go downtown before it became a tech play ground. The 10 story office complex I frequented had 3 floors of private offices catering jewelers alone, wholesalers and custom artisans catering to other small businesses in the region, and I would visit them to source stones, gold chains, ring settings and all manner of things. Downstairs, the Japanese nationals' language school administrative offices operated out of a unit. Along with them were lawyers, antique books sellers and all manner of services that, if I ever had a reason to visit and work with for whatever reason, I could just give a phone call and set up an appointment and walk in.

That entire building got cleared out for a financial service tech company, and intuit bought them out and, at this point, I think they laid off half the staff.

And because tech is so high tech and secretive, because god forbid random people just wander into a campus full of SECRET PROJECTS all these companies seem to take such proprietary pride in, there's literally no reason for someone not in tech to ever go downtown now. Before I'd at least swing by and drop in to a friend's workplace and bother them, but now I need to literally sign an NDA just to walk into some of these buildings, and so I, a non-uber-riding plebian, just inform all those tech worker friends I have to come out of their gilded cages and ride an uber to me, because I sure as hell don't want to actually be downtown for any reason.

Anyway, Mahmood doesn't care about Sunnyvale because he was running for assembly in San Francisco. Dude just wants his name out there as the principled upstart challenger for the city to oust whoever (I think Matt Haney?) from office. Good fucking luck boyo.

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