Op-Ed: San Francisco’s Downtown Plan Nothing Revelatory

Writing in Mission Local, Joe Eskenazi critiques the city of San Francisco’s new “Roadmap for Downtown San Francisco’s Future,” a plan aimed at revitalizing the city’s faltering downtown and reorienting it to a post-Covid future.

In Eskenazi’s view, “The Roadmap is a set of goals, and a spiffy website. But the new plan is neither new, nor a plan.” Three of Mayor London Breed’s most well-publicized proposals—“simplifying and speeding up permitting; allowing developers to defer paying impact fees; and expediting the transformation of office buildings into residential”—are nothing new, Eskenazi writes, but draw on similar proposals from a report assembled in 2020.

Unlike other cities, San Francisco didn’t actively work to attract its top new industry, tech. Thanks to a combination of factors, the industry grew up in the Bay Area, claiming many of San Francisco’s downtown office buildings. “So it remains to be seen if San Francisco’s government can artificially re-create the success it didn’t initially create,” Eskenazi believes, despite Mayor Breed’s attempt to position AI and biotech as the future of the city—prospects Eskenazi finds unlikely. Eskenazi points to poverty and crime, as well as the “devastation” of the city’s transit services, as major contributors to the central city’s decline. The article quotes David Prowler, former Director of the Mayor’s Office of Economic Development: “Keeping the streets clean and safe ‘is the normal job of government. That should not be triggered by a crisis,’” Prowler said. “These are the things government should be able to do.”