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

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It’s not how San Franciscol anti-development activists work. On the their views don’t change to accommodate altered They remain transfixed on the battles of on a vision of San Franciscl that may never have existed outsidetheir mind’s eye. they — and the city — seem fated to wage the same fighte over andover again. These, in a nutshell, are the battlee lines that are being drawn over 555Washington St., the latesf front in the seemingly never-ending war over building heights.
Wavingy a copy of the city’s 1985 downtowmn plan, development opponents say thisaging document, rathee than contemporary reality, should dictate what gets where and how big it can be. We’ll happilyh concede that downtown plan was a fine blueprint for SanFranciscol — as looked at from 1985. But things have moved on somewha in the ensuingquarter century, and any intelligent decision needss to reflect these rather than attempting to ignore To start with, highriswe condominium development was something not reallh contemplated in 1985. The assumption was that tall buildingsx wouldbe offices.
Restrictions on highrisee development reflected that and attempted to segregates commercial highrises fromthe city’s living quarters. That’s not how things workedx out. Over the past decade or more, in the urba core of San Francisco and most othermajor cities, highrisr living has been ascendant. Going vertical has prove popularwith residents, planners and developere alike. The economics of building “up” rathef than “out” in land-constrained cities has become The wastefulnessof lowrise, suburban-style development in city centersx has become obvious. Indeed, in the marketplace of ideas, the fight over highrises is longsincew over.
The highrises won — here, and virtually everywherwe acrossthe world. Tryint to turn the clock back and claimthey haven’t is Indeed, at 555 Washington, there is a largr problem for height-obsessed activists. It sits next all 853 feet of it. It is, of the Transamerica Pyramid. The low stakes, that they are fighting for haven’t dawned on anti-developmen t types. At issue is whether the proposesd new building will be 600 feet lower than its loomintg iconicneighbor — or a mere 400 feet We understand that the anti-development crowd has never been enamoredx of the Pyramid.
But that battle, too, is over and has been for some 40 Topretend otherwise, to claim that a tower half the Pyramid’s size next door is somehow out of is absurd on its face. It’xs instructive that several groupas representing neighboring property owners andbusinesses are, in the backing the development proposal. Such neighborhood groups are often alliedagainst development. In this they recognize that introducing a residential element woule be a goodthing — not leasrt for nearby retailers — and that a buildingt half the size of its notable neighbor represents at most a minor tweaok of the local San Francisco’s changes since 1985 may be for good or for ill.
That’a a personal call. But insistinh that nothing’s really changed, that a long-in-the-tootb planning document should shape San Francisco for the 21stcentury That’s a public call, a badlh unrealistic one, and one that the city should reject out of