A modest proposal: It’s time for North Beach to secede from the city
It may seem like a radical solution, but without a conscious civic uncoupling, we’ll be stuck in the current dilemma for the rest of our lives (or at least until the AI kids bring on the End Times).
I came to this conclusion this week after the Board of Supervisors overrode Mayor London Breed’s veto of a bill that would downzone parts of the city in and around North Beach.
On the one side are elected officials like Supervisor Aaron Peskin, likely a candidate for mayor in the fall, who believe that new buildings will wreck the historical character of their perfectly constructed neighborhoods. Conversely, we have a state mandate to build 80,000 new homes by 2031. It seems impossible to do both.
We can preserve the panoramic bay views enjoyed by Peskin and his Telegraph Hill neighbors, while allowing new housing to be built.
With one stroke of a surveyor’s pen, we could simply saw off Peskin’s Northern Waterfront from the rest of San Francisco. The supervisor would get his low-density, high-property-value fiefdom atop Mordor Telegraph Hill. The rest of us could get on with building the city of the future, or at least attempt to adapt to the needs of the present.
