This website unpacks the urban fantasy map 49 Or So Ideas for Saving San Francisco—an unfiltered brainstorm on saving the city through growth, tourism, and integrated development. Apologies for any ideas that I should have filtered out as too crazy. In the present circumstances, I felt it was important to think as creatively as possible without any inhibitions.
Use the top menu to explore ideas by category. For a one-page list, click here. This page introduces the Seven Goals and Seven Guiding Principles of which the 49 Or So Ideas are the product.
Click here to skip the Preface and go to straight to the ideas >
MIRACLE: Seven Goals
- Mobilizing: Improving mobility, especially mobility via mass transit and bicycle/scooter.
- Increasing: Increasing economic activity to support businesses and the public treasury.
- Restoring: Restoring the city’s civic and natural environment.
- Accommodating: Dramatically increasing housing supply.
- Charming: Making the city a more attractive place to live, visit, and explore.
- Learning: Enhancing opportunities for learning and personal growth.
- Exercising: Improving residents’ access to physical exercise and recreation.
The goals’ sequence does not reflect their relative weight—only the desire to spell “MIRACLE”. Acronyms aside, the core aim was to think of ways to fortify the public treasury by increasing population, tourism, economic activity, property valuations, and public transit revenue.
The goal of ensuring public security is absent, but only because it cannot be addressed by a map. As noted below, none of the MIRACLE goals stands a chance without it.
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BAYSIDE: Seven Guiding Principles
1. Basics: Until basic needs are met, higher aspirations cannot flower.
Realizing our highest aspirations for society depends on a foundation of education, which in turn depends on economic prosperity, which itself rests on a still more basic foundation of public security and the rule of law. Nothing else is possible without safeguarding people and their property. The sanctity of property extends to public property (i.e., the city must not allow any person, poor or rich, to appropriate public property for their private use) and to the rightful belongings of unhoused persons (which they should be allowed to take with them when forced to move).
The 49 Or So Ideas map expresses the principle of Basics through its focuses on housing, mobility, business profitability, transit system solvency, and strengthening of the public fisc.
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2. Abundance: Solve problems through growth.
The way to solve the city’s fiscal crisis is not to keep raising taxes, but to increase population, tourism, economic activity, knowledge production, transit revenues, and above all, property valuations. Similarly, the way to solve the city’s housing affordability crisis is not to tax businesses, impose rent controls, or subsidize rent, but to dramatically increase the supply of housing.
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3. Yimbyism: Yes, In My Backyard.
Achieving this growth requires zoning changes. But with strategic planning, it is possible to concentrate most growth in mid-rise and high-rise buildings along key corridors that feed transit while having minimal external shadow impacts. Areas with poor transit access can be spared from unsuitable growth if transit corridors are built high enough. This will require eminent-domaining certain low-built neighborhoods along these corridors (though we should give domained residents first choice of units in the new towers).
In addition to housing growth, the map calls for residents to welcome universities, research centers, philanthropic projects, and tourist-oriented developments such as skyways (gondola lifts), resorts, and hilltop observation towers.
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4. Specialization: Protect and augment that which distinguishes San Francisco from other cities.
The 49 Or So Ideas map seeks to dramatically increase tourist revenue, but in a way that preserves San Francisco’s distinctive niche as the West’s city of culture and sophistication. For example, it isolates the proposed theme parks—with their artificial attractions—out on Treasure Island (itself man-made).
The map does propose a couple of touristy animal parks for the mainland, but in the far southwestern corner of the city, adjacent to the zoo. Like the zoo, these parks would possess value as natural sanctuaries and as sites for teaching science and environmental awareness.
The map also proposes a touristy Boardwalk amusement park, but puts it on the Ocean Beach side of Golden Gate Park, away from city neighborhoods. While not exactly cultural, this type of park does have a historic lineage in the neighborhood, and could be built in an old-fashioned style that would contribute to the city’s turn-of-the-century character.
The 49 Or So Ideas further express the principle of Specialization in proposals to build specialized recreational facilities, create several museums connected with San Francisco’s unique history, rename neighborhoods and streets to feature the city’s distinct history and charms, and double down on the city’s Victorian character (with a “Victorian Village”, several Victorian-era conveyances, and two Treasure Island theme parks set in that era).
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5. Integration: Every project should make sense within an integrated long-term vision.
The city spends too much time thinking about what to do with this or that individual site, and too little time envisioning a holistic reorganization that can enhance the value of *all* sites. If officials learned to see each potential development site within the context of an integrated long-term vision, they would better understand its true best use, and avoid approving projects that waste precious opportunities—or worse yet, block future ones.
For example, had 2000’s planners possessed the foresight to envision a future Crossbay Tunnel for HSR and Caltrain, they would never have built the so-called “Transbay Terminal” at a site from which connecting to such a tunnel is extremely difficult or perhaps even impossible.
Similarly, had 1920’s/1930’s planners considered Lincoln Way within a more holistic, city-wide vision, they would not have overlooked its unique potential for Central Park West-style high-rise apartments, being a street (a) from which high rises would look out over Golden Gate Park and the Golden Gate Bridge; (b) from which high rises would have negligible shadow externalities; and (c) on which buses can run with minimal stopping at streetlights. Squandering many opportunities like Lincoln Way has contributed to the city’s housing shortage and transit crisis.
To avoid such squandering, the city should never evaluate a proposed project except in the light of a long-term holistic vision. It should not simply ask, “Does this project seem worthwhile?” Rather, it should ask, “Would this project be the most effective use of this site toward an ideal long-term plan for our whole city? If we could substantially reorganize the city, what role would this site play? Will approving this project prevent a larger and more important one from being possible later? Are we missing an opportunity for a larger-scale transformation? Also, is this site the most appropriate one for this project? Or is there another site for it with lower opportunity cost?”
A vital component of integrated planning is transit-oriented development (TOD). Development without transit means more cars and parking lots. Conversely, transit without high-rise development leads to a transit doom cycle (inadequate ridership → few departures → few people use transit → transit system insolvency → still fewer departures, and so on). By building tall along key transit lines, the city can create a future with adequate housing and sustainable transport without having to remove beneficial zoning restrictions in other areas.
In addition to TOD and “rationalization” of railway routes, the map expresses the principle of Integration through its proposals to integrate development with preservation of neighborhoods and historic architecture, as well as its evaluation of project locations (such as the site for a potential soccer stadium) within the context of city-wide long-term planning.
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6. Depth: The city must make fuller use of the vertical dimension.
Other than on Treasure Island, the city has no more room to grow in two dimensions. To break through its bottlenecks, it must go up and down. The map’s proposals for going *up* include building skyways (gondola lifts), traffic flyovers, elevated bikeways, foot/bike bridges, high-rise housing developments, an SF Central Station over part of Van Ness, and a Beach Boardwalk over part of the Great Highway. The map’s proposals for going *down* include the Crossbay Tunnel for HSR & Caltrain, the mainland tunnels to connect expressways, and various subterranean carparks to allow ground-level parks and promenades.
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7. Enterprise: Leverage open markets, free enterprise, and private philanthropy.
By leveraging the resources, wisdom, and discipline of the private sector, the city can make investments that generate maximum long-term value for residents, whether directly or through increased revenue from sales and property taxes (at constant rates).
First, the city should capitalize on the resources and self-discipline of private enterprise. Market-driven investment can not only address the housing shortage, but also develop successful tourist attractions, create knowledge-production centers, and sustain public spaces through concession revenues. Subjecting the selection and design of projects to the discipline of private investment will tend to guide the city’s efforts in directions that generate the most long-term value.
Second, the city should subject public services to open competition. For example, there should be some private stake in transit lines, so that lines potentially serving some of the same customers—such as light-rail and skyway lines reaching the city’s southwest—will be accountable to consumer choice. To institutionalize initiative, free competition, customer focus, professionalism, and value creation at all levels, the city must empower consumers with options.
Finally, the city should leverage its unique beauty and setting to attract philanthropic legacy projects. Many of the 49 Or So Ideas (e.g., museums, rec facilities, parks, greenways, and hilltop observation towers) could be fully or partially paid for by donations that earn naming rights. The city should convene the Bay Area’s wealthiest citizens to brainstorm ideas for legacy projects, and collectively figure out what city-provided infrastructure, properties, or amenities would trigger such investment.
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A few general notes:
Severability
Notwithstanding the emphasis on integrated planning, the 49 Or So Ideas are not inseparable. Far from it. While they do interweave in various ways (such as certain housing growth areas presupposing the construction of gondola lifts, or the Tour de François cycling course following some proposed bikeways), they are not meant as one big plan to be adopted whole. On the contrary, they are offered as discrete ideas to be evaluated on their own merits, in the context of the broader collective discussion on revitalizing the city. Only the ideas that add something truly valuable to that discussion merit taking up for closer consideration.
Staging
Having a grand plan doesn’t mean building everything at once. Whatever long-term plan the city adopts, it should start with projects that (a) private investors deem most profitable, (b) are needed for other projects to be profitable, or (c) can be profitable independently of other projects. Where the map suggests large-scale housing developments, it assumes they would be built out gradually over many years, as market conditions warrant.
Borrowings
Four of the 49 numbered ideas are borrowed from proposals I have seen elsewhere, namely, up-zoning, the F Streetcar extension, the idea of inducing a university to set up shop downtown, and the idea of a multi-day hike encompassing every hill in the city. Many of the other ideas (such as the cable car extension and the 80-280 connector) have surely been floated many times before, just without my having heard about it. Indeed, the 49 Or So Ideas will no doubt reflect my ignorance about local discussions of urban planning issues, because until recently I had spent very little time in San Francisco since the days of the Embarcadero Freeway. On the other hand, this website will also reflect a fresh perspective from my having spent the intervening decades living in various cities around the world. Most of the ideas are in fact borrowed from what I have seen in other places.