CarFree City USA
Pitches Carfree Alternative to Big Developer
CarFree City, USA has prepared a plan
to redevelop Treasure Island as a 12,000-person carfree neighborhood
of San Francisco. Its location and size make Treasure Island one of
the best carfree development opportunities in the United States. We
presented our proposal to the Board of Supervisors (no response yet)
and to the developer, who agreed to meet with us to discuss the idea.
Read on to see what they said…..
Treasure Island is an artificial island
in San Francisco Bay, located halfway across the Bay Bridge just 2
miles (3.8 km) from downtown San Francisco. The 400-acre (165-ha)
island is flat and served as a military base until the mid-1990s.
Redevelopment of the island for urban and recreational use has been
in the planning stages for 10 years. This effort is led by Treasure
Island Community Development (TICD), a consortium of real estate
development companies including Kenwood Investments, Wilson Meany &
Sullivan, and Lennar Homes.
The transportation element of TICD’s
current development plan is extraordinary by mainstream standards:
parking is unbundled from housing (that is, purchased or leased
separately) and concentrated in parking structures. A new ferry
service will provide frequent service to downtown San Francisco.
There will be a free on-island shuttle bus with several loop routes,
as well as new commuter buses to San Francisco and Oakland. There
will be a bike rental business for visitors. Driving will be
discouraged by imposing access tolls at the Bay Bridge on-ramp during
peak traffic hours. The development plan emphasizes “walkability”.
Details of TICD’s proposal are on the web at
http://sfgov.org/site/treasureisland_index.asp
Our “Carfree Treasure Island”
proposal is summarized in several attractive flyers that you can dowload at the bottom of this page.
Anticipating that the developer would
be focused on the bottom line, we prepared a set of handouts that
showed:
The increased ability of carfree
households to pay for public transportation
The land savings (and increased
buildable area) that result from narrower streets and less parking
The construction cost savings of
eliminating two-thirds of the parking structures
The existence of a market for
carfree living as demonstrated by the sizable percentage of San
Francisco households that are already carfree
The opportunity to increase
off-peak ferry ridership by enhancing the tourist appeal of the
project
You can download our handouts for the
meeting in pdf format at the bottom of the page.
We met with a senior executive of
Wilson Meany & Sullivan in early February 2007. The WMS offices
are on the 33rd floor of the Embarcadero One Building in
San Francisco. The receptionist’s foyer is larger than the
footprint of my house and features a 40-foot-long floor-to-ceiling
window commanding a view of the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz Island,
the Ferry Building, and Treasure Island. Marble floors, original art
on the walls, large arrangement of fresh flowers… we knew we were
in the right place!
Our meeting was a productive hour-long
discussion. The executive we met with was quite open-minded and
carefully absorbed the information we presented. He asked a number of
questions and went through a number of reasons why TICD would not
want to convert to a carfree design. A one-page summary of those
points can be download at the bottom of this page. Ultimately, the key stumbling
block was his sense that America’s love affair with the car is very
much alive and well among the affluent population they are targeting
for the market-rate housing (incomes of $150,000 and up for homes
costing $800,000 plus). Although we demonstrated that many existing
carfree households in San Francisco are carfree by choice, he simply
did not believe he could sell an expensive home without a parking
space and vehicle access.
He acknowledged that decreased use of
automobiles is needed and it’s the way things are headed, “but
the market isn’t there yet”. As a pat on the back, he commended
us for being “cutting edge environmental thinkers” – a group he
finds it very useful and interesting to be in touch with.
The meeting was an important milestone
in the advancement of carfree consciousness in the United States. It
was CFCUSA’s first meeting with a large development corporation
regarding a major, current project. We engaged in an intelligent
two-way discussion in which the notion of carfree development was
never dismissed as ridiculous or just plain impossible (as it would
have been 10 years ago). We made a strong case for the benefits and
feasibility of carfree development. The quality of our materials and
manner made a good impression. So if nothing else, we succesfully
planted the carfree idea in the mind of an individual who has
considerable influence over the direction of real estate development
in the United States.