The speed with which the ballpark was developed had a lot to do with the fact that it was on the ballot and that it received a two-thirds vote. Had we not gone through the ballot and instead had gone through the normal approval process that a developer would go through, I don’t think we would have ever built it. So my point is that, on the one hand, the process that exists in San Francisco, while ferreting out bad projects, has ferreted out a tremendous number of good projects because people look at how much money you have to spend and how much effort it takes, particularly on the waterfront. In fact, we felt that if we won with only 51 or 52% of the vote that we didn’t necessarily think we could get through the process and finance-able and build-able at the end of the process.

If you are a project in San Francisco that has a determined even though small group that is dead set against you, it is very, very, very difficult to succeed. So the ballpark was in a lot of ways an aberration in that it was not like any other development project that’s going in down at the waterfront. But I do think the success of the ballpark and the roadway and many of the other things that have happened is making it easier for other developments because people can see the fruits of it. They can look at the drawings with what the ferry building might look like, what the cruise ship terminal might look like and they can say, "Hey, that’s nice. I think I might like that." And so people’s eyes are a little more open to it now but there is no way we could have built the ballpark going through the traditional process.

Process Until it Hurts

Richard Springwater: There’s a way we do things here in San Francisco, which is a very messy, very political, very ideological. And it might take place under the auspices of BCDC hearing or waterfront design hearing or port commission hearing and any number of other groups but it’s the same process having to do with the fact that the waterfront is a public trust. It’s a valuable resource and before you do anything, you need to think very carefully and it’s going to take a long time and you have to be cautious and everybody’s not going to get everything that they want. The best decision was for the Giants to say, "40,000 seats is okay. We can pencil a ballpark at 40,000 seats." Believe me, there are a lot of baseball owners that would say, "I can’t do it." But the Giants were brave. There are those kinds of decisions where the economics and the public interest come together quickly. Developers who want to succeed on the waterfront meet the community where the community wants to be. One must understand that it’s not an adversarial process but instead trying to get to reasoned judgment, not necessarily that of the fringe, but to the reasoned judgment of the entire community, you’ll get a lot of support.

Diane Oshima: We have found that when you create an opportunity for an honest exchange of views that people want to try to actually work together toward positive change on the waterfront. Compromises and trade-offs are more easily rendered in the process if people see that something’s real. The waterfront plan created a venue for the community to express all of its different views. We have found that when you create an opportunity for an honest exchange of views that people want to try to actually work together toward positive change on the waterfront. Compromises and trade-offs are more easily rendered in the process if people see that something’s real. I really give a lot of credit to the Giants because they didn’t have any of the process infrastructure. They had to invent it for themselves and in fact now the Port’s trying, with these advisory committee processes that you’ve all been involved in, to stimulate this involvement for every major project so that from the community’s standpoint they understand what the tradeoffs are but from the developer’s standpoint, they understand how touchy an issue can be before they go investing themselves in a multi-year entitlement process.

Will Travis: One of the reasons I’m excited about the ferry system on the Bay is with exceptions like San Francisco and Jack London Square and a few other places like that, we don’t have really rich waterfronts around the Bay. In most places, the shoreline of the Bay is simply where the filling stopped in 1965 when BCDC was created. Having a ferry system and using those sites as potential for mixed-use development, I think really provides us with a fantastic opportunity to, not revitalize, but vitalize portions of the waterfront where there really is nothing now. In a lot of the places that have been spotted and sited as good locations for ferry terminals, you don’t have existing single-family houses nearby so I think as design professionals and planners we have wonderful opportunities to really have a renaissance on the waterfront of San Francisco Bay in places like Oyster Point Marina, that nobody ever though of, or San Leandro, as great places for wonderful vibrant urban waterfronts.

Jim Haas: That, of course, is the focus of, Bay Crossings. I think the expanded ferry service and the Ferry Building itself will play an important role unifying the Bay. We need more ferry stops around the Bay.

Jim Chappell: We still seem to regard the Bay as negative space when in fact it could and should be the positive space. When more of us use the Bay to commute on ferries there will be a different view of all of our communities around the Bay.

Peter Victor: When the Embarcadero Freeway came down the downtown community lost significant access. Granted, it was not pretty, but it was functional. Right now, it is a nightmare getting out of downtown San Francisco to the Bay Bridge on the surface streets. We should do everything we can to encourage the ferry usage.

Jack Bair: I had ferry statistics pulled and Golden Gate Transit service from Larkspur is reaching record numbers, of which about 10% are people going to the ballpark, which is pretty amazing. We’re getting up to 40% of the people coming from Marin to take the ferry.

Will Travis: Especially bay-front properties with views of San Francisco.

Boris Dramov: The more the Bay gets unified as transformations occur in all these different places - Vallejo, Oakland, Alameda and so on, the Bay becomes really that unique element in enhancing the potential of what’s there.

Richard Springwater: Opening up the waterfront at potential ferry terminals down in the South Bay and East Bay is a great idea and obviously it calls for a large scale planning process that would overcome some of the hurdles that anyone interested in a private development of those sites would want to see cleared before they’d invest.