How to Clean Up San Francisco’s Dirty Streets

24 08 2011

My previous blog post discussed Travel and Leisure’s recent list of America’s Dirtiest Cities.  As I stated at the beginning of that post, I have found San Francisco to be quite dirty with trash and litter in comparison with my previous hometown of Toronto.  While a lot of San Francisco is quite clean, there are definitely large sections that are downright filthy.  While I don’t want to complain about the city’s litter problems, I do want to offer a couple of ideas that I believe could greatly decrease the trash on San Francisco’s streets.  Below is a list of these ideas.  Some of them are more concrete, easy to execute ideas whereas other ones may require more thinking:

  • The public trash cans throughout San Francisco are far too open.  Homeless people can easily sift through the trash in these garbage cans and often end up throwing up a lot of the trash on the ground.  Additionally, if the trash can is full, the wind can easily blow the trash out of the can and into the street and side walk around the can.  The trash cans should be changed to a trash can that must be opened to deposit trash (similar to trash cans you would find at food courts).  In Toronto, for instance, many of the public trash cans would require you to step on a lever to open the top and deposit the trash.  Even when opened, it is difficult to reach into the trash, which would stop the problem of homeless people sifting through the trash and throwing the garbage on the streets.
  • Increase the fines on littering to something very high ($1000?).  This may sound extreme, but it will certainly make just about everyone to think twice about littering.
  • Incent those who pick up garbage on the street.  People get a small amount of change whenever they deposit an empty can or bottle.  Perhaps we could the same with garbage.  For instance, for each full bag of trash someone picks up and deposits to the San Francisco Garbage Collection Services, they would get $5.  While this would cost the city extra money, it could be offset by less need for street cleaners if it turned out to be a successful program.  The only potential issue is that people could abuse the system by simply taking trash from a garbage can to fill up a bag.
  • Give out fines for anyone who leaves out unsecured garbage or recycling to be picked up by garbage collection.  This garbage or recycling needs to either be in a closed bin or tied down so it will not blow away.

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Travel and Leisure Lists America’s Dirtiest Cities

9 08 2011

Having recently moved from Toronto to San Francisco, it wasn’t hard to miss the difference in trash and litter between the two cities.  I wouldn’t say Toronto is completely spotless, but it certainly is a heck of a lot cleaner than San Francisco which can be quite dingy in a lot of places.  Yet, according to Travel and Leisure’s recent list of America’s Dirtiest Cities, San Francisco only ranks as the 12th dirtiest.  The winner of this not so prestigious award: New Orleans (pictured above).  Yet, while this distinction is certainly not a favorable one, one look at the list reveals that the dirtiest cities also tend to be some of the most exciting cities as well.  So while Indianapolis, Indiana may not be on the top 20 list of dirtiest cities, it is very unlikely to make the top 20 for excitement or livability as well.  The top 5 dirtiest cities in America are listed below:

1) New Orleans

2) Philadelphia

3) Los Angeles

4) Memphis

5) New York City


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Want a Lifetime Pass on Public Transit? Just Give Up Your Car!

3 08 2011

The city of Murcia, Spain has recently started offering residents a lifetime pass on their newly built trolley system.  There is only one catch:  these same residents must trade in their cars in exchange.  This rather radical idea is only available for a limited time, but apparently has already picked up steam in the small city.  In addition to this promotion, the city of Murcia has also started posting humorous advertisements around the city depicting how troublesome it is to find a parking space for your car within the city challenging the notion of car ownership even further.  You can read more about this radical promotion here.


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More People Living Downtown = A Less Lively Downtown?

19 07 2011

A poster on the SkyscraperPage forum recently presented the idea that as more people move to the downtown of major cities, these downtown areas actually become less lively than before.  While this sounds completely illogical (you would assume that the more residents in an area, the more lively it would feel), he (and several other posters in the forum topic) do present some solid arguments.  Perhaps the number one argument to this idea is that residents require a quieter space to live.  While any major city downtown is not going to ever be the quietest place to live, residents of any area do demand (and to a degree, require) some sort of peace of quiet where they live.  What this means is that while a downtown area will never be void of livelihood, it is very likely that the noisier, more active areas of a downtown will become very disjointed from the quieter, more residential areas of the downtown.  And this, in the end, is actually a very rational argument.

You can see the full forum topic here


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Neighbourhood Revitilization: A Success Story or a Story of Displacement?

2 07 2011

First of all, let me start off by saying that anything here is strictly my opinion and nothing more.  But I do believe there is a lot of truth in what I have to say.

Just about any city has at least one neighbourhood revitilization success story in the last couple of decades.  We’ve all heard it before: a once downtrodden neighbourhood has been transformed into a lively an energetic and livable neighbourhood.  It certainly sounds like a great thing.  For instance, here in San Francisco, SOMA continues to becomes one of the most livable areas in all of the city as it’s gentrification continues to spread west throughout the neighbourhood.  Similarly, in my former city of Toronto, the King West corridor has become one of the most desirable areas to live.  Just 15 years ago, this was not the case at all.

I will certainly admit that both SOMA in San Francisco and the King West corridor in Toronto are far more pleasant, safe and exciting than they were in the past.  But there is a side effect from all this change: the residential and commercial prices move up (and generally at a rapid rate).  No doubt, it’s perfectly normal for a desirable neighbourhood to cost more to live in or to own a business in than one that’s not so desirable.  Yet, when a neighbourhood often gets ‘revitalized’, the dynamic in that neighbourhood changes.  In the end, the people that lived in the neighbourhood at the start of this revitalization are not same as the ones at the end.  It’s another story of the rich displacing the poor.

With an ever increasing gap between the rich and the poor in many developed countries, this appears to be yet another situation in which those that cannot keep up economically truly lose.  While one would want to believe that these types of changes in a neighbourhood would result in a place that is more livable for everyone, this is almost always not the case.  And while I’ve brought up displacement due to money, I haven’t even touched on the displacement that sometimes happens due to demolition and new construction (most recently, for ‘luxury’ townhomes or condominiums).  There are many ways in which these people are being ‘exiled’ from these neighbourhoods, not just one.

In the end, this problem is one that can often lead to more harm than good.  Recently, many of these gentrified neighbourhoods have been located within the inner area of a city.  This often provides it’s residents with more access to jobs or services they may need.  But frequently, they get displaced to somewhere much farther away without these same jobs or services.  And while this problem of displacement is certainly one that is not going to go away (especially as more and more people move into the city), it is one that doesn’t have to to exist.  And I truly believe we can have it both ways: safe, livable neighbourhoods that are open to everyone.


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Are Smaller Cities Our Future?

28 06 2011

James Howard Kunstler of Orion Magazine recently released an article titled ‘Back to the Future‘ which makes several predictions on how people will live in the future.  Perhaps most interesting is that Kunstler refutes the common belief that our society will continue to become more urban in the future:

I depart from a lot of current thinking on the subject. For instance, many people seem to think that there will be more of everything—more people, taller skyscrapers, greater suburbs, bigger airplanes, larger metro regions, or even super-gigantic slums. I don’t go along with this bundle of bull, except for the slums, which I think will be short-lived, contrary to the vision of popular author Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums. Of course, trends won’t proceed with the same timing everywhere in the world. But I think the general theme going forward, certainly in the U.S., will be the comprehensive contraction of just about everything.

Before you discredit his predictions fully, Kunstler does do a good job of explaining why he believes we will live in smaller urban areas rather than in a small number of large urban areas:

Food shortages will quickly bend the arc of world population growth downward from the poorer margins and inward to the “developed” center—with stark implications for politics and even civil order. The crisis of money is already hampering the operation of cities and will soon critically impede the repair of water systems, paved streets, electric service, and other vital infrastructure. We are heading into a major reset of daily life, a phase of history I call The Long Emergency. Tomorrow will be a lot more like a distant yesteryear in terms of reduced comforts, commerce, and the scale of things.

There is no question that we very likely are heading towards an energy and/or food shortage within the near future, but it’s interesting that Kuntsler also believes that we will have a monetary crisis as well.  And while I don’t fully buy into all of his arguments, he certainly is able to drive his point home well enough.  Perhaps our future really will look more similar to the past.


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Monaco Plans Expansion into the Sea?

18 06 2011

I was just browsing the internet and found this interesting forum post back from 2006 on SkyscraperCity: Monaco Plan Expansion into the Sea.  The topic poster doesn’t provide a news reference but there is a great deal more surrounding this news as you can follow along the forum thread.

I must say that i’m not completely surprised given the small country’s density.    As well, I would assume that a large enough expansion would actually the change the ranking of the country’s total size in relation to the other countries in the world (Monaco is currently the second smallest country in the world by area).

But I do have my concerns if such a plan comes to fruitation:

  • will this new land be strong enough to survive major earthquakes that are known to hit Monaco once in a while?
  • how will they protect the natural environment?
  • will this expansion only include new homes for the ultra-rich?

Anyways, expanding into the ocean is nothing new for a lot of cities and it will be interesting to see how this project progresses.


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San Francisco Big Winner in Commercial Vacancy Rates

14 06 2011

The National Association of Realtors has once again released it’s Commercial Real Estate Outlook Report.  The report includes the national United States vacancy rates for industrial real estate,office real estate, retail real estate and multi-family real estate and then proceeds to break down these rates among the various metropolitan areas within the U.S.  As of the 1st half of 2011, the vacancy rates for the United States stands as the following:

  • Industrial: 14.1%
  • Office: 16.4%
  • Retail: 13.1%
  • Multi-Family: 6.0%

When broken up by metropolitan areas, it becomes apparent who the real winners and losers are.  San Francisco may be the true winner as it is among the top ten in the lowest vacancy rates for all four categories:

  • Industrial: 10.9%
  • Office: 12.3%
  • Retail: 5.9%
  • Multi-Family: 4.0%

On the opposite side of the spectrum is Detroit, which once again has high numbers in all four categories:

  • Industrial: 19.4%
  • Office: 25.7%
  • Retail: 17.5%
  • Multi-Family: 9.2%

But perhaps, when comparing Detroit’s number to the national numbers, it becomes apparent that the real losers are many of those smaller cities not listed.

To check out the Commercial Real Estate Outlook Report, click the link below:

Commercial Real Estate Outlook Report


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The Complete Dominance of Amazon or an Opportunity for Independent Bookstores

17 05 2011

Having recently moved to San Francisco, I was absolutely appalled to find out that pretty much every single major bookstore in the city had closed within the last year or was in the process of closing.  Coming from downtown Toronto, which had a plethora of major book stores within the downtown alone, it was sad to come to a city that had been utterly massacred by online book chains and digital reading.  I am generally very pro-technology, but this is one consequence of digitizing everything.

Bookstores are so much more than stores.  More than almost any other place of retial, they have a real sense of community and allow you to truly escape.  They were also the only type of stores that I didn’t feel pressured to buy anything after spending more than 15 minutes inside.  Yet, with the digitization of books and Amazon continuing to expand, it seems to be a sad reality that what has happened in San Francisco could very well happen elsewhere.  There are a couple of things, however, that an online book retailer and the digitization of books can’t fully replace:

  • the communal aspect of bricks and mortar bookstores.
  • being able to discuss your favorite books and get recommendations from helpful staff face to face.
  • the ability to browse and read any part of a book without purchasing the book first.  Sorry Amazon, but allowing you to read one chapter before purchasing the book doesn’t cut it at all.
  • the fact that books aren’t easily breakable and typically more portable.  When you are out travelling and backpacking, can you honestly say it’s much easier to have your IPad or Kindle out with you or an easy to read travel guide.
  • the big coffee table books.  Unless the Kindle and IPad suddenly double or triple in size, they can never replace these oversized books.
  • the idea of curling up with a good book.

After doing some research, I found that there was a lot of other people who feel the same way about what has happened in San Francisco.  Ultimately, despite the hate some people may have had for Borders or Barnes and Noble for putting independent book stores out of business, having no book stores is far worse than only having the big chains.  Yet, I found an interesting post courtesy of Paul Carr at Tech Crunch entitled Books Without Borders: A Victory For Amazon, But Also For Independent Book Stores which suggests that the downsizing of both Borders and Barnes and Noble is actually a great opportunity for independent bookstores.  The post mentions the situation in San Francisco and discusses the idea that independent book stores can once again thrive by focusing on the shortcomings of online book retailers and digital books.  While the pessimistic side of me thinks the Paul may be a little to optimistic, it does make me to know that others believe there is hope.


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Highlight in Urban Planning: The High Line

5 05 2011

Back in September of 2010, I wrote a blog post titled ‘Top 20 Urban Successes‘ which discussed the Top 20 most successful urban developments originally posted here.  Perhaps the most recent of these successes was the opening of the High Line in New York City.  The first phase of this multi-phase project opened on June 9, 2009 and has been an incredible success ever since.

For those unaware of the project, the High Line has essentially taken the abandoned and unsed railway platform that was originally built a floor or two above street level in the 1930′s and has recreated it into a beautiful urban park.  When all the phases are complete, this ‘High Line’ park will essentially run for a mile and a half through several different neighbourhoods in western Manhattan.

So what makes this project such a success?  Well, first off, those who came up with the ‘High Line’ were clearly thinking outside of the box.  Secondly, the park provides beautiful public space away from traffic in a city that obviously lacks a lot of free space.   And finally, the ‘High Line’ takes advantage of existing unused structures that could be re-purposed.  And it is these very reasons that the High Line is an amazing highlight in urban planning.


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