Are we all fighting about a Warrior’s Arena that will never be built? I’ve always wondered if the money was going to pencil out on this thing, and now the team says the cost of rebuilding the piers underneath the giant saucer has soared to $180 million. And that’s right now, with today’s prices for labor and materials. By the time they actually break ground (or break water), it’s going to be much higher.
The voters (today) like the idea of an arena on the waterfront, but they don’t like the idea of commercial office, hotel, and residential space nearby. (We’ve never, as a city, decided that the waterfront should be turned into something like Miami Beach.) And without the big profits from the rest of the project, the Arena clearly doesn’t pencil out.
If this project gets too far along, and the team is seeing nothing but red ink, the question of a public subsidy (a direct subsidy, more than what they’re already getting in land value) will come up – and that’s a non-starter in SF. Maybe Oakland can still make a case.
It’s no secret that the tech buses are having an impact on San Francisco real estate, but there’s a great set of maps here that show it in detail. You can check out how the Google Bus routes correspond to areas where property values have gone up more than 70 percent.
During the last dot-come boom, we saw the commute shift directions – for the first time ever, more people were living in SF and driving to the Peninsula than living on the Peninsula and driving to SF. Now the buses have made the commute that much easier, and the move to turn SF into a bedroom community for Silicon Valley is in full swing.
And it’s funny: While Plan Bay Area is all about putting people close to where they work (hence the demands for more density in San Francisco) there’s not a lot of pressure on Cupertino (Apple) Mountain View (Google) or Menlo Park (Facebook) to build dense housing near the corporate campuses.
In fact, those communities don’t ask big corporations to contribute much of anything for local housing.
At one of the tenant conventions, somebody (only partly) jokingly said that we should “make Silicon Valley more attractive to live in.” We should certainly make companies there do something about housing – and if they want to house their workers here, they should help pay for it.
Sheila Chung Hagen is my new hero for putting President Obama on the spot in an online chat and demanding (politely) to know why he won’t use his executive authority to stop deportations while Congress takes its sweet time with immigration reform.
It’s a simply and obvious question that the news media in Washington ought to be raising: If he’s going to be using his own power to do what Congress won’t in other areas, why not this one?
The prez, of course, ducked the question. He’s good at that. And the format didn’t allow time for a follow-up. But I hope this comes up at his next press conference.
