-----Original Message----- From: Rosser Jr, John Barkley <rosserjb at jmu.edu> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
> I just read that San Francisco allows low income
>housing to be located in areas where businesses operate.
>Thus there are apartments over small groceries and video
>stores. Is this true? Is this what Brown wants to do?
This is hardly unusual. New York and many cities have such housing in commercial zones. San Francisco, however, has relatively little such housing in most of its downtown. Like most cities that experienced massive urban renewal and skyscraper building over the last few decades, most new buildings are purely commercial - in most cases having replaced vibrant mixed commercial-residential districts that were razed to the ground.
Oakland has an slightly different pattern. I am not familiar with its whole trajectory, but deindustrialization of its port and warehouse districts turned what was a relatively vibrant set of working class communities near the water into jobless, largely shopless zones of poverty, even as economic activity has largely shifted to white collar office work in office buildings built in what was a relatively small downtown a distance from those original manufacturing and residential zones. Unfortunately, most of those office buildings were built as purely commercial buildings. This left downtown Oakland almost empty of residential housing, save some in Chinatown and a few odd apartment complexes. The place is nearly a ghost town at night which retards any businesses growing other than those directly servicing white collar workers who work in the day downtown.
There has been a small success in an area a bit of a ways from the traditional downtown down by the water - a complex called Jack London Village. With a concentration of restaurants, a movie complex, a large Barnes & Noble and a number of other shops, Jack London has brought a bit more commercial life in Oakland, although it hasn't done much for the rest
of downtown.
There have been a number of "supply-side" attempts to lure business to downtown, including a mess of loans to failed enterprises like an ice rink. As an alternative, restoring a downtown residential concentration of people would be a much stronger "demand side" way to boost commercial activity. As a bonus, more people living downtown would make the whole area seem safer and attract other folks there as well.
--Nathan newman
Barkley Rosser On Sun, 14 Jun 1998 11:34:43 -0700 Nathan Newman <nnewman at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: C. Petersen <ottilie at u.washington.edu>
> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
>
>
> >I know a guy who works on housing in SF, and in his opinionm Jerry
Brown
> >is the anti-christ. he believes in new urbanism, where the city strives
> to
> >'repopulate' the city center after years of downward economic spiral,
> >but... isn't the city center already populated?
>
> In the case of Oakland (and most cities), the city center is not
> populated. In Oakland, you have lots of office buildings but few
> residential apartments, which means that while there is a lot of traffic
> and commerce during the day, the downtown essentially shuts down at
night.
> This also means that the subways system (BART) is underused since few
> people live close enough to it to use it as their primary transportation
> system.
>
> As a policy, increasing residential living in commercial zones tied to
> transit is both economically and environmentally a very good policy.
> Years of urban renewal have depopulated commercial zones in downtown
> areas, which shoved the poor AND middle class out, the poor to
peripheral
> urban areas, the middle class out to the suburbs. Repopulating the
> downtown areas is probably the best recipe for bringing both back to the
> core of city living.
>
> If you look at the Bay Area as a whole, you see massive housing
> construction in what was once the greenbelt of farm land, encouraging
> sprawl and highway gridlock. At the same time (and progressives bear
> partial responsibility for this), you have had very little new housing
> built in places like Berkeley and Oakland. The combination is lethal
for
> rational urban development.
>
> If Brown actually helps reverse this trend, he will have done a good
> thing.
>
> --Nathan newman
>
>
-- Rosser Jr, John Barkley rosserjb at jmu.edu