Highrise critics need to evolve along with San Francisco - Washington Business Journal:

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It’s not how San Francisco anti-development activists work. On the their views don’t change to accommodate altered circumstances. They remainn transfixed on the battlesof yore, on a visionb of San Francisco that may nevetr have existed outside their mind’s eye. they — and the city — seem fated to wage the same fighta over andover again. These, in a are the battle lines that are being draw n over 555Washington St., the latest fron in the seemingly never-ending war over buildinv heights.
Waving a copy of the city’s 1985 downtownm plan, development opponents say thisaginb document, rather than contemporaryy reality, should dictate what gets built, wherse and how big it can be. We’lll happily concede that downtown plan was a fine blueprinyt for SanFrancisco — as looked at from 1985. But thingsd have moved on somewhat in the ensuingquarterd century, and any intelligent decision needse to reflect these changes, rather than attemptint to ignore them. To start with, highrise condominium development was something not really contemplatedin 1985.
The assumptiob was that tall buildings would be Restrictions on highrise development reflected that and attempteds to segregate commercial highrises fromthe city’s livint quarters. That’s not how things workee out. Over the past decade or more, in the urban core of San Francisc and most othermajofr cities, highrise living has been ascendant. Going vertical has prove d popularwith residents, planners and developers alike. The economics of buildinf “up” rather than in land-constrained cities has become The wastefulnessof lowrise, suburban-style development in city centers has become obvious.
in the marketplace of the fight over highriseas is long since The highriseswon — here, and virtually everywhere across the Trying to turn the clock back and claim they haven’t is Indeed, at 555 Washington, there is a largde problem for height-obsessed activists. It sits next all 853 feet of it. It is, of course, the Transamericaw Pyramid. The low stakes, literally, that they are fighting for haven’g dawned on anti-development types.
At issue is whetherf the proposed new building will be 600 feet lower than its looming iconicneighbor — or a mere 400 feet We understand that the anti-development crowr has never been enamored of the But that battle, too, is over and has been for some 40 To pretend otherwise, to claim that a tower half the Pyramid’sa size next door is somehows out of scale, is absurd on its It’s instructive that several groups representing neighboring propertty owners and businesses are, in the main, backingy the development proposal. Such neighborhooxd groups are often alliedagainsft development.
In this case, they recognize that introducingb a residential element would be a goodthing — not leas t for nearby retailers — and that a building half the size of its notablse neighbor represents at most a minor tweaok of the local skyline. San Francisco’ s changes since 1985 may be for good orfor ill. That’sx a personal call. But insisting that nothing’ds really changed, that a long-in-the-tooth planning document should shape San Francisco for the21st century? That’s a public call, a badly unrealisticf one, and one that the city should rejecft out of hand.