Happier Days for the City by the Bay

SAN FRANCISCO — Every day, as she watches thousands of drivers nose their cars up the freeway onramp that curves just a few feet beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows of her downtown loft, Toni Lee counts herself lucky to be in San Francisco.

“I love it,” Lee, a graphic artist, says of living and working alongside the noisy, crowded sweep of concrete. “It is an urban forest. It captures the energy of this city.”

Energy. The word most commonly used these days when San Franciscans describe their city.

After years of struggling through the devastation brought by AIDS, the state’s long recession, the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and poisonous political divisions, San Franciscans are reveling in a cultural and economic renaissance.

The waning of the recession, a business boom in the Silicon Valley and the election in December of charismatic Mayor Willie Brown have helped to erase a sense of inferiority that took hold in the late 1980s, when many began to fret that their city was being outpaced culturally and economically by archrival Los Angeles.

AIDS has not yet been conquered, and at least 6,000 homeless people walk the streets. The public school system still is decrepit enough to prompt middle-class families to place their children in private schools, and housing prices are out of reach for many.

In fact, “if there is a soft underbelly for the whole thing, the optimism” now permeating the atmosphere, “it is those who are disenfranchised economically across the board,” said Tom Nolan, executive director of Project Helping Hand, a San Francisco nonprofit organization that feeds AIDS patients.

“The concern I would have is that this rising tide won’t lift all the boats and that some boats will be driven out altogether.” He says nonprofit groups serving the less fortunate “always seem to get left out” when the business community and City Hall divide the financial pie and plan development.

But he and others say even with those nagging concerns, the city’s problems somehow seem less daunting than they did just a few years ago, when many feared that the decay of their city was irreversible.

Today, San Francisco is in the midst of a massive public building boom fueled largely by state and federal money available after the Loma Prieta quake.

Its civic center and cultural landmarks are coming back to life, spurring private development in neighborhoods throughout the city. Its lively ethnic mix, its sizzling night life and its broad menu of cultural attractions have made it the place to be for young, well-off professionals.

And for the first time in years, City Hall has been actively courting the business community, a turnaround from the days when city officials and business people alike said the approach was almost hostile.

All this has San Franciscans feeling cocky again, a spirit evident on June 14 when a beaming Brown presided over a party honoring veteran San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen. More than 75,000 people danced to free rock music and cruised restaurants that sold drinks at 1940s prices. The city renamed the Embarcadero’s pedestrian walkway Herb Caen Way.

Caen, who recently had revealed to his readers that he was suffering from inoperable lung cancer, joked that day that a San Franciscan who dies and goes to heaven can only conclude: “It’s nice, but it isn’t San Francisco.”

Just four years ago, the columnist had offered a far gloomier view of the city he has observed for six decades. San Francisco “has grown old disgracefully, from raving beauty to crone,” Caen griped in 1992. “Los Angeles is so far ahead of us, it’s outta sight.”

At the time, he seemed only to be stating the obvious.

Between 1989 and 1993, San Francisco, population 759,000, lost 37,000 jobs to downsizing or relocation--7% of the city’s work force. Tourism, its biggest industry, had yet to rebound from the ’89 quake.

During that time, Fortune magazine ranked it second-to-last in business attitudes among the nation’s 50 largest cities. Forbes magazine savaged San Francisco for business policies it described as “self-destructive lunacy,” based in part on the slow pace in processing permits, a voter-approved initiative that sharply limited commercial development downtown each year and laws that included a city government boycott of Chevron--one of its largest employers--for doing business in South Africa.

Now, some of those critics are singing the city’s praises--despite lingering bureaucratic problems and growth limits.

In November in its annual survey of chief executive officers, Fortune ranked San Francisco as the best U.S. city for conducting business: “Yes, it’s expensive. But you get what you pay for, and in downtown San Francisco, that’s a compact few dozen blocks crammed with banks, law firms, port facilities, a stock exchange, and a panoply of cultural institutions.”

Kent Sims, outgoing manager of the Redevelopment Agency’s economic development programs and once one of the city’s harshest critics, predicts that the “next five to 10 years will be nirvana for San Francisco.”

The once-derelict neighborhood where Toni Lee lives and works, south of the financial district’s Market Street, is the centerpiece of the revival. The impetus for its rebirth is the Yerba Buena Gardens redevelopment project.

First proposed 43 years ago but just now nearing completion, the 19-block project includes a new, architecturally acclaimed Museum of Modern Art and the Center for the Arts. It also is home to the grassy Yerba Buena Gardens esplanade, a luxury hotel and hundreds of low- and moderate-income apartments.

Beyond its boundaries, the project has encouraged the private development of smaller museums, galleries, boutiques and restaurants, transforming what a decade ago was a collection of pawnshops and abandoned warehouses.

South of Market’s renewal has brought dozens of cutting-edge software companies to the area. Today, they are known collectively as “multimedia gulch” and San Francisco is the center of the nation’s rapidly expanding multimedia industry.

One executive of Wired, which caters to cyberspace users, recalls how scary it was to “walk across the street” when the magazine opened its doors south of Market three years ago.

Now, the neighborhood “is teeming at lunchtime with an incredible atmosphere,” said Todd Sotkiewicz, Wired’s 34-year-old executive vice president, and “is almost like a campus for these [multimedia] companies.”

San Francisco’s neoclassical civic center, badly damaged in the quake, is being completely renovated. A new main library--a civic center anchor--opened last spring to acclaim for its architectural design and has struggled to handle massive crowds. An Asian art museum is scheduled to open by 2000 in the old main library.

City Hall is being redesigned, with the mayor’s offices being expanded and lavishly refurbished and courtrooms moved to make way for more city offices and a new child-care center. The Opera House is undergoing quake retrofitting with the help of public bond money and refurbishing with private money.

Plans are underway to redesign the central plaza that connects civic center buildings. Within the plaza--still a magnet for the homeless--families pick their way through knots of men sharing a bottle or stepping over discarded hypodermics as they head for the new library.

In the northwest corner, the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco’s museum of European and classical art, reopened last year after a multimillion-dollar quake retrofit, expansion and renovation. The once gloomy exhibition halls are lighted by huge skylights, and exhibit halls and a cafe have been added underground. Average daily attendance has doubled, said Steven Nash, associate director for the city’s fine arts museums. Fund-raising is underway for a redesign of the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in Golden Gate Park.

After defeating two ballot initiatives, San Franciscans last year passed a bond measure to build a new 42,000-seat baseball stadium in China Basin, southeast of Fisherman’s Wharf on the bay. Although they have yet to break ground, planners say they hope to open the stadium--designed to be a traditional, compact city ballpark--by 2000.

City planners are reviewing proposals for a civic plaza in front of the Ferry Building, an imposing Embarcadero landmark at the foot of Market Street. Architect Boris Dramov hopes to create open space where San Franciscans, who traditionally identify with neighborhoods that have strong, distinct personalities, can come together.

The three-mile Embarcadero--which stretches north and south of the Ferry Building between the Bay Bridge and Fisherman’s Wharf--is itself nearing the end of a multimillion-dollar face lift.

For decades, that stretch of waterfront was shut off from the rest of the city by the Embarcadero Freeway. But the ’89 quake so badly damaged the roadway that the city opted to tear it down, opening up a breathtaking view of the bay from downtown. The Embarcadero now boasts a landscaped pedestrian walkway and some of the city’s finest restaurants.

Military base closures have opened up possibilities as well. Once the headquarters of the 6th Army, the 1,480-acre Presidio is a national park. Plans are being drawn up to restore the Presidio’s shoreline, with panoramic views of the bay. Wetlands and dunes are scheduled for restoration, along with amenities for beach-goers, joggers and bicyclists. The main post and other buildings will be used for education centers, housing for the homeless, bed-and-breakfasts for overnight visitors and museums displaying the Presidio’s 220-year military history.

Proposals also are being debated to build a mix of homes, cultural institutions and retail and commercial buildings on Treasure Island, a former naval station in the bay.

Indeed, San Francisco has become so vibrant that scores of young professionals who work in Silicon Valley to the south increasingly are willing to commute as far as 40 miles to live here. They are bringing a youthful vigor, creativity--and disposable income.

“There is just so much more to do in San Francisco,” said Gayle LeDoux, a 31-year-old publicist with Wilson McHenry, a public relations firm that specializes in high-tech companies. For four years, LeDoux has made a commute that lasts up to an hour each day, each way, from her Pacific Heights home in San Francisco south to her San Mateo office.

“There is definitely a sense of excitement in the city that you don’t find anywhere else. This is a young company, the average age is 27, and about half of us commute from San Francisco, because that is where everyone wants to live.”

With all the changes, city officials now speak freely of the early 1990s as a wake-up call, one they say San Francisco’s fractious interest groups have responded to by working together.

“The last five years were a rude shock,” said Amit Ghosh, head of the city’s planning department. “Our sense of well-being was disturbed. We had gotten very good at regulating change because growth, development and well-being were taken for granted.”

The city still has a core of far-left politicians and activists, “people who do not understand that a healthy business community means a city that can pay for social services,” said Sims, the outgoing redevelopment planner.

One activist Sims may have had in mind is attorney Sue Hestor, who keeps a list on her office wall of the 25 lawsuits she filed over the past two decades on behalf of community groups. Most sought to further slow commercial development or force the city to build more affordable housing.

Today, Hestor wonders what will happen to the new San Francisco spirit if federal and state governments continue to shift ever-greater social welfare burdens onto the city:

“We have such serious problems and we don’t have corporations stepping up to the plate yet to address them all. There is this humongous need for additional services, but the business community wants their taxes to go down.”

Whether lasting or not, the era of good feeling is symbolized by Mayor Willie Brown. He “exudes confidence and a sense of authority that is contagious,” said Noah Griffin, spokesman for Brown’s predecessor, Frank Jordan. “San Franciscans have caught it. The city is reflecting his brash style, his overweening confidence and his ability to confront any challenge.”

Brown has gone to great lengths to reassure the business community. In April, he held an economic summit at which 400 leaders of the business and nonprofit communities brainstormed about the future. Some longtime San Franciscans marveled that participants were able to spend three days discussing their differences with civility.

Brown is on the board of directors of the San Francisco Partnership, a pro-business lobbying group formed last year to woo new corporations.

One of its success stories is U.S. Behavioral Health, a rapidly expanding managed health care firm that is coming here from Emeryville in the East Bay. This month, the firm moved its 600 employees to Market Street.

CEO Saul Feldman said he initially had feared that many employees would quit to avoid the Bay Bridge commute. But when the first employees arrived in July, they found themselves “excited about being there,” he said.

In 1995, San Francisco’s work force expanded by 13,000 jobs, the first year it increased since 1989. Expectations for this year are at least that high.

Even some firms that headed elsewhere in less prosperous days are taking a second look at what they left behind.

“It really is an incredible city,” said Sandie Kardos, the administrative services manager for Matthew Bender, a lawbook publisher owned by Times Mirror Corp.

In 1985, Bender grew so disenchanted with San Francisco’s high commercial rental rates, Kardos said, that it moved its offices and 130 employees to Oakland, which had lower rents and no payroll tax. San Francisco’s 1.5% tax--one that few cities impose--long has infuriated corporations.

But Bender is moving back. The firm signed a long-term lease south of Market and will relocate by Christmas, Kardos said.

“We feel like San Francisco is the center of the legal community for Northern California and we should have a presence there. Our employees are excited about moving back,” Kardos said.

1995 also was a record year for tourism, with more than 16 million visitors. Hotels this year boast a 75% occupancy rate, and the newly expanded George Moscone Convention Center is booked through 2010.

“It is a very remarkable period in the history of San Francisco, or for any city,” said Nash, the curator. “We are a relatively small city. . . . But there is a tremendous can-do attitude . . . and it is creating a unique atmosphere here.”