Edge City

by Joel Garreau

  “Would you want to live here?” I ask him.

  No, he haltingly concedes. No.

  “Would your wife want to live out here?”

  “Well, again, that presumes that the … We are city people. Both my wife and I prefer to be closer to those cultural attractions of San Francisco,” Mehran admits.

  This is no small issue. Here is a worldly man who believes in the benefits of civilization as it is enshrined in San Francisco, which prides itself on being the most civilized city in America. Here is a man with education, taste, money, and know-how. If anybody should be able to build civilization into our Edge Cities, it is he.

  But what he is building is Bishop Ranch. That, according to the Urban Land Institute, is as good as it gets in America. Yet it is a place so devoid of what Mehran values personally as to be unrecognizable as a center for the soul.

  This is the paradox of Edge City. Will it ever have civilization? Will it ever have life? Or will it be a vampire, without a spirit of its own?

  And if you can’t build a civilized Edge City in the San Francisco area, where can you build it?

  San Francisco worships the notion of urbanity. It revels in comparisons to cosmopolitan European climes. The weather is Mediterranean, rarely burning or freezing, and so are the views. San Francisco, like Rome, is built on seven hills, and the vistas from their garden-cascaded spines are of the sailboat-dotted, ever-changing Bay.

  Preservation and renewal of pre-automobile downtowns—not only San Francisco’s, but even Oakland’s—are unquestioned issues of civic patriotism. The Old World charms of residential neighborhoods, from the intricately painted Victorians of Russian Hill to the donkey-climb roads of the Berkeley Hills, are cherished. San Francisco is so dedicated to “quality of life” that this town, which rose on the muscular commercial shoulders of gold miners, China traders, financiers, and stevedores, now finds its number one industry to be tourism.

  Yet in the San Francisco Bay Area the majority of new jobs and wealth are being created in Edge Cities that have been pushed as far as physically possible from the undeniable charms of the old urban core. Half a dozen logical, closer-in Edge City locations have been leapfrogged.

  This conflict between life and growth is crucial. To understand it requires some grasp of San Francisco’s enduring schizophrenia.

  At the same time that it trumpets its worldliness, San Francisco is a relentlessly introspective, parochial, and not very large place. Fewer than 750,000 people actually live in that political jurisdiction, out of a Bay Area population of six million. More people live in San Jose, to the south, and far more live in Alameda County, on the East Bay, than live in San Francisco. The docks have moved to Oakland. The melting pot to Los Angeles. The financial muscle to Tokyo. And new wealth and jobs to the Edge Cities of the Santa Clara (Silicon) and San Ramon valleys. The financial district of San Francisco, of postcard skyline fame, has only a third of the Bay Area’s white-collar jobs.

  Nonetheless, the San Francisco Examiner delights in referring to San Francisco as, capitalized, The City. There is something about old downtowns on small areas of land almost surrounded by water that fosters an islandlike mentality. (Downtown Boston is the same way.) San Franciscans are convinced there is little save barely explored unpleasantness beyond the Tiburon Ferry. Silicon Valley is regarded as a weird, separate, sprawling world. It is as though, inexplicably, a chunk of Los Angeles has floated up into the back yard. It is viewed as certainly alien and probably evil. Similarly, the wine country of Sonoma and Napa, an hour to the north, is distinct. These valleys may be great places to eat, drink, and show visitors, but with inland afternoons a panting 20 degrees hotter than Nob Hill, they certainly are not part of the Bay. Oakland’s existence is grudgingly acknowledged only because the A’s are such a vastly superior baseball team to the Giants.

  At least San Franciscans concede these places exist. That is not true for the land beyond the Berkeley and Oakland Hills. Abandon hope, all ye who venture beyond San Pablo Ridge. At the other end of the Caldecott Tunnel the world ends. That is the edge of urbanity, of hope for one’s esthetic soul. “No one” lives beyond Tilden Park. To move beyond the sight of the TransAmerica Tower is to renounce civilization. One restaurant critic who did so—for the sensible reason that he could no longer afford the prices of the Bay—felt compelled to justify his defection by insisting, desperately, that he could “still get the New York Times delivered daily” to his Contra Costa address.

  And in fact, over that ridge—the Contra Costa County line—and through that tunnel, one does enter into the economy and mindset of a different world. If, as the political demographer Michael Barone notes, the coasts of California belong to liberal Democrats, and the inland ground to conservative Republicans, San Pablo Ridge is the cultural divide. Contra Costa’s Walnut Creek is not merely twenty minutes from Berkeley. It is separated by world views and values and assumptions about humanity.

  Right there, inland, paralleling those north-south hills, is the valley-floor artery of Contra Costa, Interstate 680. That is exactly where four of the Bay Area’s most voluptuous Edge Cities bloomed in the 1980s: around Concord, Walnut Creek, Bishop Ranch, and the Hacienda Business Center near Pleasanton. And that is where some people think the center of gravity of wealth and jobs in the Bay Area may someday be.

  There are seven Edge Cities in the Bay Area with more than five million square feet of office space, not counting downtown San Francisco or Oakland. The four mentioned above are east; two are south in Silicon Valley—the area around Sunnyvale and the one around San Jose; and one is on the Peninsula, surrounding the airport.

  Depending on whose growth estimates you believe, between two and five more Edge Cities are surfacing. One more is out on that Contra Costa strip, around the Pleasant Hill Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) station. Two more may clot in San Mateo County on the Pacific Coast Peninsula, of which San Francisco is at the tip. One would be to the north, in the Daly City area near the San Francisco line, the other to the south, in the Redwood City area near Palo Alto and Stanford University. One may conceivably mature someday in Marin County, around San Rafael. And there’s always the unlikely possibility that the Berkeley-Emeryville area may grow up.

  But this distribution of wealth and jobs is not the way anybody really wanted it or planned it, neither the developers nor the preservationists. It is a function of the Law of Unintended Consequences.

  Given the patterns in other regions of the country, in principle the most likely places for Edge Cities to arise in the Bay Area would have been around the intersections of whatever road functioned as a beltway and the spoke roads that radiated from downtown. Especially favored would be the areas of Nice, where chief executive officers would want to live.

  Near San Francisco, most of those options were blocked. That is what made Contra Costa inevitable.

  The San Francisco area is surrounded by wall-to-wall Insurmountability. Most of the 88 percent of the land in the Bay Area that is undeveloped is undevelopable, according to Richard LeGates of the Public Research Institute of San Francisco State University. Everywhere you look, there are wetlands, or flood-plains, or mountains, or ridges, or seismic or geologic problems, or dedicated permanent open space, or land that is verboten for reasons of public safety or the protection of natural resources. Even after a third of the Bay was covered with landfill—which now, in an earthquake, shakes like an overweight jogger—there remained a very limited amount of firm, flat land on which to build cities.

  To that has been added a great deal of political Insurmountability. Petaluma, a small town north of San Francisco in the Sonoma Valley, became nationally famous when, in 1972, it radically departed from traditional community planning by shutting growth down to five hundred building permits per year. Until then, communities in the United States had viewed growth as desirable or at least inevitable, and focused on means to accommodate it in an orderly fashion, even to court it.

  Given that the opposition to growth it
pioneered is now ubiquitous, it’s hard to believe that it was only twenty years ago that Petaluma’s call for a stop was new. But in the late 1960s, the quality-of-life and environmental movements were young, and in Petaluma, the widening of a freeway attracted hordes of commuters seeking inexpensive housing, large lots, and good schools. This, of course, led to congestion, strain on city services, heedless exploitation of beautiful and sensitive portions of the environment, skyrocketing taxes, and long-time residents vilifying newcomers for destroying Petaluma’s small-town character.

  The result was the sparking of the American limits-to-growth movement. Petaluma’s stance has been copied, with results both good and ill, in hundreds of communities. In few places, however, were the lessons heeded so thoroughly as in the areas near San Francisco.

  Marin County is marked by mammillary hills, magnificent beaches, coastal wetlands, baylands with spectacular views, rural pastures, and narrow wooded valleys between untouched ridge-lines. The range of breathtaking juxtapositions may be unmatched in such small compass anywhere in the United States. Add the easy commute to San Francisco, and you get an extremely desirable jurisdiction that is the most rabid in the Bay Area about retaining open space and protecting the environment. Not surprisingly, the limits to growth have driven up housing prices. The people who live there are well-off, educated, and environmentally aware. Forget about an Edge City achieving escape velocity there anytime soon. San Rafael would have to more than double in size.

  The other direction from downtown San Francisco, south, has similar constraints. The Peninsula is marked by places like elegant, manicured Hillsborough and Atherton. They sport stone-wall-lined lanes and the highest median home prices in the Bay market, a market that is hyperventilated by the standards of New York or Los Angeles. The old-money, “right” families made it to the Peninsula long before the Golden Gate made Marin accessible in 1938. This still counts in San Francisco.

  Downtown San Francisco itself has put unprecedented limits on high-rise office growth, fearing the growth that has occurred already threatens the human scale of the place. In essence, only two new buildings, totaling a million square feet, may be built per year.

  Due east is the town still referred to, by both its admirers and detractors, as the People’s Republic of Berkeley. It was recently looking to put rent control on commercial space, to protect marginal home-grown retailers from the threats of more popular and profitable chains. Capitalism, most especially as it is practiced by real estate developers, is a whole lot less than welcome in Berkeley, practically and philosophically. Berkeley, like Palo Alto, has residents and shops that are impeccably urbane, but both places are accurately referred to as college towns, not large cities.

  Thus, within the bowl defined by sharp edges of land sloping down to the Bay’s flat bottom, there is not much left on which to build Edge Cities save the flatlands of the East and South Bay. Logically, the freeways around the Bay shore should have func tioned as a beltway, with Route 101 on the west mirrored by Routes 80 and 880 on the east. Given the constraints to the west, it would not have been a surprise if an Edge City had grown up at every eastern point where this circulating highway was intersected by a Bay bridge—one to the north at the end of the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, one to the south at the end of the San Mateo Bridge, and one in the center, at the end of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.

  That didn’t happen, either. When Edge Cities began to take off in the 1970s, those flats either were covered with seriously unattractive industry, such as oil refineries, shipyards, warehouses, and containerized freight docks, or were packed with the homes of people who were blue collar to lower class to underclass. Many were black. A large number were unionized. This labor force did not have the education, skills, or attitudes that Edge City developers had in mind. These places represented too many headaches even to bulldoze.

  It was at this point that developers took a deep breath and started casting covetous glances beyond the hills, away from the Bay, toward the far suburbs that had once been the arid farm country of central Contra Costa County. Walnut Creek was the emotional center of this area. It had been the market and financial center of the region from the 1920s, when it was, in fact, the walnut-growing capital of America. By the late 1970s, central Contra Costa was marked by big homes in bosky glens. These homes would have been viewed as breathtakingly expensive in most markets, but they were reasonable by the standards of the Bay. More important, they were physically and psychologically far enough from San Francisco that people already were beginning to look less and less toward the old city for their needs. When Edge Cities began to erupt in the early 1980s, then, all the ingredients were in place: an educated, affluent, underemployed work force of women; a great deal of relatively cheap land for expansion; high-end housing for executives; and business-oriented governments that saw in growth increased opportunities for tax money.

  The result was office Platz up and down I-680. That road in effect became the outer, outer beltway of the San Francisco area. Where the spoke road from downtown and the Bay Bridge crossed I-680 at Walnut Creek, there grew the hottest job and retail center in the East Bay—larger than Oakland in white-collar jobs and more fashion-conscious than Berkeley. Concord, a few miles north, where the tracks for Bay Area Rapid Transit end, also boomed. Twenty miles south you got two more Edge Cities. That is where another spoke road crosses I-680—the road from the bridge crossing the Bay at San Mateo, leading to the international airport. One of these Edge Cities was centered on the Hacienda Business Park near Pleasanton, Livermore, and Dublin, almost forty miles southeast of downtown. Another was built in the vicinity of the Bishop Ranch near San Ramon, with the illustrious Chardonnay’s. These southern Edge Cities are oriented toward San Jose and the Silicon Valley as well as San Francisco and Walnut Creek.

  In fact, these last Edge Cities are sufficiently far from the old city of San Francisco that way on the other side of the Altamont Pass, smack in the middle of the San Joaquin Valley, the inland agricultural terminus of Stockton is now part of their commuter shed. Some people working in Silicon Valley endure sixty-five-mile commutes one way, starting at 4 A.M., in order to be financially eligible for a traditional suburban home and yard in such San Joaquin County towns as Tracy. No wonder the San Francisco metropolitan area now statistically includes Davis, eighty-five miles from downtown, almost halfway to Nevada.

  Yet here is the antagonism between life and growth.

  The preservation of nature, especially when it is as spectacular as that found in Northern California, is seen as a good. In fact, such nature is so valued that people will pay great amounts to live in its midst, as in Marin. But such homes are not seen as compatible with nature. They are said to “spoil” the serenity and peace and one-ness with the universe that people came to the area for in the first place. As does the traffic these homes bring.

  Meanwhile, the yeasty cosmopolitan flavor of a diverse and complex metropolis such as downtown San Francisco is seen as a good. The most romantic and expensive neighborhoods of the old metropolises are in the “old town” neighborhoods, like Telegraph Hill, that boast three- and four-story walk-ups and very high residential densities—as many as sixty families to an acre of land. These, in turn, support all manner of good things in places like North Beach—from sidewalk cafés, to bookstores, to imaginative and idiosyncratic shops.

  However, the most virulent and thankless zoning battles fought today are over any attempt to build new housing at such densities. Most people don’t think they will be charming. They think they will be concrete towers or ill-named cinder-block “garden” apartments. They hate the very idea of living packed together, cheek by jowl, in such constructions. They view them as antihuman and antihumane. They don’t even like the idea of living next to such structures. Under no circumstances is crowding like that associated with integration into nature. And yet without such densities, land-eating sprawl is a certainty.

  Still, the creation of new enterprises—increa
sing jobs and wealth—is viewed as a good. Such activities take place, by definition, in commercial buildings. And most people put a premium on living close to their jobs. But if a residential neighborhood does become established as having life and spirit and a center and a wholeness, its partisans view the building of a modern office center close by as the end of the world. And Heaven forfend somebody should suggest a mall.

  Thus, the contradictions between life and growth. Residential development is seen as incompatible with the preservation of nature; the residential neighborhoods that are associated in a magical way with the idea of civilization, like the Hyde Park-Kensington area of London or the Montmartre area of Paris, are seen as threatened by the twentieth-century structures that accommodate the creation of prosperity and abundance that pay for those homes. All this, while design professionals worship at the altar of mixed use, the notion that a “good” place is one that has jobs and homes and shops, as was common in Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia.

  This, in a nutshell, is the dilemma of the San Francisco Bay Area, the place that has always prided itself on livability and civilization. San Francisco has demonstrated that it has few if any acceptable mechanisms to bring new people and new jobs into its existing structure, other than by trying to crush the opposition. Instead, it forces growth out into the desert, into the area’s most nether regions. There, in what businessmen love to refer to as “the real world,” economic forces are more readily dealt with. But the price is high. Any sense of civilization or soul—the very commodity that distinguished San Francisco from old East Berlin—is scant.

  Is this any way to build cities? Are home and nature and work forever cloven in the late twentieth century? Are they antithetical, doomed to remain in conflict, as every zoning board hearing seems to suggest? Does it have to be this way?