San Francisco Transformation – Urban Projectization

San Francisco’s average rent climbed 25% from 2007 to 2017.

In 2007, the city’s average gross rent (which includes taxes, insurance, and utilities) was less than $1,500 per month.

Ten years later, that rent had climbed to nearly $1,900 per month.

Much of the spike took place in the last five years.

In the last 10 years, the city’s homeless population has risen by about 50%.

San Francisco had around 6,500 homeless residents in 2009.

Today, it has nearly 10,000 homeless residents. Around 42% of the city’s current homeless population struggles with drug or alcohol abuse.

The crisis has led to mounting tensions. In September, residents of Clinton Park, an area close to the Mission District, raised money through a Facebook group to erect two dozen giant boulders along the sidewalk to bar homeless individuals from setting up tents there.

The action incited a tug-of-war: Activists tried to clear the sidewalk by pushing the rocks onto the street, but the city’s public-works department lifted the boulders back onto the sidewalk via crane. The department eventually removed the rocks because Clinton Park residents were reportedly getting harassed in person and online.

Parts of downtown San Francisco are now littered with used needles, trash, and human poop.

On a recent visit to San Francisco, President Donald Trump said the city was in “total violation” of environmental regulations because of its homelessness crisis, which has left some blocks littered with feces and discarded needles.

The Tenderloin neighborhood has long been considered the heart of the crisis. Last year, the city’s Public Health Department and Public Works Department collected hundreds of thousands of needles in the area.

Overall, San Francisco spent $54 million on street cleaning in 2018. The city even has a “poop patrol” — a group of five employees who earn more than $184,000 per year to clean up feces. In 2018, residents called the city more than 28,000 times to complain about feces on their streets — a 35% increase in complaints compared to the year prior.

The city has witnessed a boom of skyscrapers and high-rise buildings.

San Francisco has more than 90 finished skyscrapers. Seventeen of those were built in the last decade and three more are under construction. The city’s tallest building, the Salesforce Tower, was completed in 2018.

High-rise developments (buildings between 115 and 330 feet tall) have also sprung up in the city’s downtown core. According to Curbed, 14 new high-rise construction projects have recently broken ground in San Francisco.

One luxury tower has started to sink and tilt. Cracks also proved to be a problem at the city’s new transit center.

The 58-story Millennium Tower opened in April 2009. Since then, the building has sunk 17 inches and tilted another 14 inches to the northwest. Residents have also complained of mysterious odors, bubbling floors, cracked walls, and one giant fissure in a window on the 36th floor.

The tower’s developers blame the sinking on nearby construction of the Salesforce Transit Center. The center opened to the public in August 2018 but closed a month later due to a cracked beam on the third-floor deck. It remained shuttered for 10 months.

In March, authorities also discovered two cracked windows at the Salesforce Tower. The skyscraper is located by the Millennium Tower and the Salesforce Transit Center.