SAN FRANCISCO _ On the ground once marked by devastation, a new city is rising.
The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake battered the gritty South of Market district, damaging the Embarcadero Freeway that walled off downtown San Francisco from the bay and left city leaders with a choice: Do they repair and retrofit it, or envision something bolder?
They chose to go in a new direction. And nearly three decades after the temblor, this civic bet is beginning to take shape. The most obvious example is San Francisco's new skyline, clustered in the South of Market area by design and now fueled by tech money.
The new $1 billion Salesforce Tower, which dwarfs any other skyscraper in the city, is getting the most attention. But it's only part of the story. There is also a grand bus station and rooftop park set to open this summer.
Planners hope the transit center will eventually connect to Caltrain service to Silicon Valley, making this new boomtown an essential hub for Bay Area commuters. Then there are a host of other commercial developments powered by Silicon Valley gold.
Together, they represent a building boom the city hasn't seen in decades as well as a significant shift toward denser, transit-oriented development.
"San Francisco has always been proud of its architecture, but it had fairly modest aspirations in terms of height or impacts," said Fred Clarke, architect and senior design principal for Salesforce Tower and Salesforce Transit Center. "This was the opportunity to change that."
By deciding to demolish the Embarcadero Freeway, San Francisco freed up the land necessary to build the new downtown. And by turning away from the car, the city made a bet on expanded mass transit as the future of San Francisco.
But there is worry about how successful it will be. The new transit center has space reserved for a train station _ but there are no train tracks leading into it. Built at a cost of $2.26 billion, the transit center didn't come with tunnels that connect it to the Caltrain system that terminates more than a mile away.
Without rail, San Francisco supervisor Aaron Peskin, chair of the county's Transportation Authority Board of Commissioners, said "it looks like the most expensive bus terminal in the history of humankind.
"And until or unless high-speed rail _ or at least a rail line from Silicon Valley _ comes to San Francisco, it will go down as political folly and one of the dumbest public works project since the pyramids," Peskin added. But if the money does come, "it will look like we made a brilliant decision for the future of Northern California."
The development is also causing growing pains. Many fear this new San Francisco is out of reach for all but the most wealthy. Amid the glittering new buildings in the South of Market area, the homeless are everywhere. And as San Francisco has attracted the newly moneyed tech elite, longtime residents are being pushed out.
Just blocks away from Salesforce Tower are rundown buildings that have provided low-cost housing _ offering single-room occupancy, or SRO, units with shared bathrooms down the hallway. Now, in a development that would've been unthinkable a decade ago, there are an increasing number of companies trying to buy them up and turn them into tech worker dorms, said Fernando Marti, co-director of the Council of Community Housing Organizations.
"We're losing that housing that had been housing for last resort for a lot of folks," Marti said. "When we see the visibility of homelessness, that's where a lot of that is coming from."
