[Carfreeliving] Vancouverize me -- Transbay / SOMA in NYT

[A P Thornley]

A (realtor's-eye) look at SF's Transbay Terminal and the 
Vancouverization of SOMA from yesterday's NY Times:

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Trying to Build the Grand Central of the West

   http://nytimes.com/2005/12/28/realestate/28transbay.html

By Lisa Chamberlain
New York Times, December 28, 2005


SAN FRANCISCO - The Transbay Terminal is sometimes referred to by 
planners and developers here as the missing tooth in a smile. 
Situated in the rapidly growing South of Market neighborhood, the 
once-busy rail hub has slowly deteriorated into an underused bus 
station even as surrounding areas have been transformed by office and 
residential towers; SBC Park, where the Giants play baseball; and 
cultural institutions like the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The first plan to redevelop the Transbay Terminal into the "Grand 
Central Terminal of the West" was released in 1967 and many plans 
since have collected dust. But the formation of the Transbay Joint 
Powers Authority in 2001 to push the project has begun to produce 
some notable results.

The authority announced this month an international competition to 
select an architect and developer to design and build not only the 
five-level, 600,000 square-foot terminal but an adjacent 850-foot 
tower that is expected to be as symbolic for South of Market as the 
Transamerica Pyramid is to the central business district, which is 
north of Market Street.

The competition, guided by conceptual designs unveiled on Dec. 19, is 
a result of two advances: the settlement of a major lawsuit over a 
land dispute that had the potential to delay the Transbay plan for 
years, and the adoption of a high-density master plan, devised by 
Skidmore Owings & Merrill, to redevelop the surrounding 40 acres and 
provide much of the financing for the terminal and tower.

"Having worked on this for 10 years, once you start unveiling 
conceptual designs, you really start to see the value and the impact 
this project will have on the entire region," said Maria Ayerdi, the 
executive director of the Transbay Joint Powers Authority. "But it 
took time to get here. Some of the transit groups I work with have 
been working on this since before I was born. The reason the project 
had languished is because there are so many stakeholders that need to 
talk to each other and agree."

The Transbay Terminal - expected to be complete by 2013, three years 
sooner than previous projections - will serve nine Northern 
California counties and various transit agencies both public and 
private, including trains, subways, buses and ultimately, it is 
hoped, high-speed rail to Los Angeles. The surrounding 40-acre area, 
much of it opened up after highways damaged in the 1989 earthquake 
were demolished, is to become San Francisco's most densely populated 
neighborhood, based on a planning model known as Vancouverism.

Named after the city in British Columbia, Vancouverism is 
characterized by tall, but widely separated, slender towers 
interspersed with low-rise buildings, public spaces, small parks and 
pedestrian-friendly streetscapes and facades to minimize the impact 
of a high-density population. The Transbay neighborhood would have an 
estimated 350 people an acre, whereas the typical residential 
neighborhood with four-story flats has about 60 people an acre.

"In San Francisco, there's been a concern about high density and its 
impact on the historic character of the city," said John Kriken, who 
developed the Transbay master plan at Skidmore Owings & Merrill.

"One of the keys to the plan's acceptance," he said, "was that we 
added parks, little narrow-lane streets, and instead of allowing tall 
buildings to block sun and views, we proposed very slender and widely 
spaced towers so the views could continue to the bay."

The entire project - the terminal, adjacent tower and the 
accompanying infrastructure - is projected to cost $4.35 billion, 
with roughly half of the financing coming from private development in 
the Transbay master plan area and the rest from local, state, and 
federal governments and from user fees.

While the Transbay plan has dragged on and even seemed to teeter on 
the edge of extinction, development South of Market has marched 
forward. With long-planned projects finally coming to fruition, 
coupled with the more recent hot development market, the distinction 
between north and south of Market Street has blurred considerably. 
Once considered a less-expensive alternative for low-profile 
companies and high-tech start-ups, South of Market has recently 
welcomed notable corporations like Deloitte & Touche, J. P. Morgan 
Chase and KPMG, who all moved south into new and redeveloped towers.

"It was a daring move for a law firm," said Joseph Malkin, a partner 
at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, which moved from the central 
business district to a 10-story Class A space South of Market in 
2004. "The location is nontraditional and the building itself is 
quite a departure from the firm's old offices."

According to Newmark Pacific, San Francisco's largest commercial real 
estate brokerage firm, 23 of its major financial, legal and brokerage 
clients have relocated from the central business district to South of 
Market in the last five years, absorbing more than three million 
square feet of Class A office space. While there is still a 
difference of about $10 a square foot in annual rent between Class A 
space in the traditional central business district and South of 
Market, real estate developers expect that gap to close as the 
Transbay Terminal area fills in.

"If we start seeing brand-new high-rise buildings being built only 
South of Market, rents could surpass downtown," said David Wall, 
president of Fremont Properties, part of the Freemont Group, which 
has developed an estimated four million square feet of commercial 
space South of Market since the 1960's. In fact, the last suitable 
parcel for a high-rise office tower in downtown San Francisco is 
under development, rendering South of Market not just an alternative 
but the only alternative for new development.

Entirely new neighborhoods South of Market are, meanwhile, 
progressing rapidly. Mission Bay, for example, is preparing for 6,000 
new residential units, over 50 acres of parks, six million square 
feet of commercial space, and a 43-acre medical campus for the 
University of California, San Francisco. Nearly 2,100 units of 
owner-occupied, rental, low- and moderate-income and student housing 
are already done or under construction, and more than a million 
square feet of commercial and academic space is in motion as well, 
according to a report issued by the San Francisco Planning and Urban 
Research Association, a 50-year-old nonprofit planning group.

Last May, the city adopted a plan for Rincon Hill, just south of the 
Transbay Terminal area. The plan calls for 2,200 new housing units in 
addition to the approximately 1,500 already approved or built. "The 
most dynamic area right now is Rincon Hill," said Jeffrey Heller, 
principal of Heller Manus, an architecture and development firm based 
in San Francisco. "We have three major residential projects in Rincon 
Hill, one under construction. South of Market is finally blossoming 
as the urban center it should be."

The other major site of redevelopment just west of Transbay, which 
was 30 years in the making, is Yerba Buena, and its final piece has 
just been finished with the December opening of the St. Regis Hotel. 
Yerba Buena, a huge redevelopment area, includes the Moscone 
Convention Center, the museum of modern art and the Yerba Buena 
Center for the Arts.

"The naysayers said Yerba Buena would never get done," said Monica 
Finnegan, managing principal of Newmark Pacific. "The same is true 
with Mission Bay, which was just a plan on a roll of paper 15 years 
ago. It will be rewarding to prove the naysayers of the Transbay 
Terminal wrong, too."