Why Downtown San Francisco Is Struggling

Downtown San Francisco is struggling, not because of WFH (work from home), COVID, or even the tech industry’s great abdication. It’s in trouble because it was made to struggle, by force and design. The city’s upper-right quadrant, where it first emerged from the water like some Silurian hexapod, has undergone several evolutions. However, no transformation was so consequential as the fast-tracked reconstruction of the city post-1906. Big decisions made over a century ago continue to shape San Francisco’s present. In fact, one can trace the crisis plaguing downtown today to the 1906 earthquake and fire. 

Grounds for disaster

Images of pre-1906 San Francisco reveal a dramatically different city. The Victorian architecture and closely-spaced buildings, the latter contributing to the fire’s devastating reach, endowed SF its European style. Specifically, you’d see a city center of intermixed use—part commercial, part residential, frilled with wharves, warehouses, and immigrant neighborhoods. As the city outgrew itself many times over, more crowded, ornate buildings sprang up from the Bay on “made land.” 

We know the drill: bayfill, or “reclaimed land,” builds new real estate, then an earthquake comes along and demolishes it. The city was born from the shallows of Yerba Buena Cove, which once frustrated sailors unable to anchor in mud. Montgomery Street marks the former shoreline. Until California joined the Union in 1850, land west of modern Van Ness Avenue was under Mexican control. With marshes and the Bay in all other directions, San Francisco had only so much room to grow. The solution? Make land where there previously was none. 

I’m picturing 555 California standing in murky, reedy water a few feet deep, lobby flooding twice daily with the tide. 

Early San Franciscans leveled the sand dunes and blasted rock from the side of Telegraph Hill and shoveled it into the coves, marshes and lagoons, expanding the city onto the Bay. But the sand and rock did not replace the water. Rather, it simply settled around it. Intrinsic instability is the curse of made land. The ground in SoMa, the Financial District, North Beach (and later, the Marina) is essentially a waterlogged sponge. 

For many, downtown San Francisco was their permanent home.

In tight quarters with both pockets packed with gold, Victorian San Francisco spent its money on itself. Engineers built mansions, banks, hotels, and highrises with expensive marble and granite, and priceless old-growth redwood from up north. The rich lived in close proximity to the poor, up Nob Hill from Chinatown and the grimy Barbary Coast. Class divides, while still obvious and part of the social hierarchy, were thinner lines simply because space was limited. 

Did you know South of Market used to be mainly residential? It was dense with tenements and apartment buildings, boarding houses and fleabag hotels. Irish, German, Italian, and Japanese immigrants built the neighborhood as well as the abutting factories they ran. Mission Street was originally a plank road because the marsh was too soft for a traditional street. From Mission St. to the Bay, (except for Rincon Hill), South of Market rests atop a 30- to 80-foot-deep lagoon. 

By 1906, thousands of residents called downtown San Francisco home. “Outside Lands” like the Sunset District were still mostly wild shifting dunes, and yet the population was roughly 410,000. SF reigned as the American West Coast’s largest, wealthiest city, with seemingly nowhere to go but up. But April 18, 1906 changed it all. 

The shockwaves hit

At the ungodly hour of 5:12 AM, the San Andreas Fault delivered the most powerful earthquake in Northern California’s brief recorded history. Survivors remembered being violently woken by a tremendous, grinding roar before getting thrown to the other side of their bedrooms. For at least forty-five seconds, the Earth seemed to focus all its anger on the city. Then, silence. Among the screams and groans of hurt and trapped survivors, the crackle of flames began and grew louder. 

The earthquake and fire destroyed 80% of San Francisco. While structures on bedrock survived with little damage, the devastation on made land cannot be understated. Since humanity hadn’t yet erupted in all-out world war, witnesses used words like “flattened” or “ravaged” to convey the scale. Swaths of densely layered, culturally diverse, lavishly built homes and businesses—prime downtown real estate—were gone, and suddenly available. 

RELATED: Why Aren’t Earthquakes More Common?

City officials and business owners, desperate to tamponade the city’s hemorrhaging wealth, saw an incredible, money-making opportunity. As laborers cleared the rubble (indeed, dumping much of it into the marsh that would support the Marina District), city planners set to rezoning the area for primarily commercial use. The more businesses you packed in, the more revenue they could generate for the city and their powerful landowners. 

“The fire created economic opportunities in new areas, resulting in clusters of business activity that emerged only in the wake of the disaster.” (James Siodla, “Clean slate: Land-use changes in San Francisco after the 1906 disaster”) “Overall, relative to unburned blocks, residential land shares on burned blocks fell while nonresidential land shares rose by 1931…what held the city back from making these changes before 1906: the presence of old residential buildings.” 

Aftershocks still felt 118 years later

With precious little pre-1906 architecture, downtown looks completely different than it did at the turn of the twentieth century. The commerce-focused reconstruction of San Francisco dictated its future far in advance. It resulted in an urban core that became a ghost town after rush hour, one that only appeared busy when you gazed at its lights from afar. Its economy depended on a population that evacuated the district after 5PM. Save for a condominium tower here and there, downtown’s population resided outside the Financial District rather than among the highrises. 

SF might never be Manhattan, whose residents keep the skyscraper-studded powerhouse New York City going 24/7. That’s not to say downtown San Francisco can’t house its own permanent population. If downtown did have permanent residents, chances are SF wouldn’t be the slowest city in America to recover post-COVID. Like tree roots holding back a landslide, downtown SF’s pre-1906 commercial-residential formula kept a runaway chain of events from happening. About 118 years after the deadliest earthquake in US history, we’re still feeling its effects. 

Downtown San Francisco could have survived COVID and more with the health of permanent residents calling it home. Were downtown not so aggressively rezoned for commerce, it wouldn’t have been so vulnerable to economic crisis. And yet San Francisco’s status as a bastion of financial capital is what lands it a seat at the table, for better or worse. Now Mayor Daniel Lurie has ordered the return of 34,000 city workers to their offices. I wonder if that merely adds up to putting downtown on life support. Wouldn’t it make more sense to give it a new heart? 

Sources and further reading:
Lucy Jones, The Big Ones: How Natural Disasters Have Shapes Us (and What We Can Do About Them)
Philip L. Fradkin, Magnitude 8: Earthquakes and Life Along the San Andreas Fault
Stephen Tobriner, Bracing For Disaster: Earthquake-resistant Architecture and Engineering in San Francisco, 1838–1933
David L. Ulin, The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Line Between Reason and Faith