When I moved to Potrero Hill in 2002, the entire block of 17th Street between Kansas and Rhode Island was a pit, 40 feet deep at one end and strewn with graffiti. The site was once a service center for S&C Ford. But for a few years, the block had been a void — an open wound in the neighborhood, ripe for some sort of plan or development, waiting for someone to do something.

That pit was a metaphor for the neighborhood at the time. Twenty-five years ago, Potrero Hill was an overlooked district, isolated from the rest of the city by Interstate 101 on the west, 280 on the east, and the Caltrain yard to the north. Vestiges of its industrial, working-class past were scant and fading: the Basic Brown Bear factory sewed teddy bears (alas, gone today), the Wo Chong Company produced tofu (and still does), and Anchor brewed beer (and might again, someday). But the paint factories and sugar refineries and shipyards were long gone, leaving fading memories and empty lots. Potrero was sleepy, sunny, and, compared with other parts of the city, relatively cheap. That’s why we liked it.

But change was on the horizon. In 2001, the city had begun a process of formulating the Eastern Neighborhoods Plans (opens in new tab), an effort to rezone industrial portions of Potrero, Dogpatch, Showplace Square, southern SoMa, the Central Waterfront, and parts of the Mission for development. 

That plan was the sequel to the massive transformation of Mission Bay, Potrero Hill’s northern neighbor, whose own master plan was approved in 1998. Where once there were railyards, warehouses, and a driving range, Mission Bay stands as a new neighborhood, anchored by the Giants’ Oracle Park and Mission Rock development to the north and Crane Cove Park to the south. The area draws millions of people every year for its sports, hospitals, hotels, parks, and thousands of apartments and condominiums. It is the most radical renewal the city has seen since the boom after the 1906 earthquake. 

The spillover into Potrero and other eastern neighborhoods has been dramatic. Which brings me back to The Pit. In 2007, that unsightly void on 17th Street was at last developed, with 165 apartments above and the city’s largest (at the time) Whole Foods below. And in 2009, the Eastern Neighborhoods Plans were approved, kicking off a building boom that would create a surge of commercial and residential growth on the east side of San Francisco. 

In the intervening years, my neighborhood has been transformed. Once-clear views have been obscured by high-rise apartments. Once-cozy diners and dive bars have disappeared, replaced by bopping joints full of folks from other parts of the city. Once-abandoned streets teem with people commuting to UCSF Mission Bay or searching for free parking for a Warriors game. It is not the same place I moved to.

And I love it. It is glorious. The streets are lively, the shops are fun, and the schools are better. Living in a vibrant, bustling, growing part of the city is a marvelous thing. 

Though largely forgotten, there was plenty of resistance to east-side development. In 2000, the Bay Guardian (opens in new tab) chastised the rezoning as Mayor Willie Brown’s plan “to bulldoze neighborhoods” in what it dubbed “the battle for San Francisco.” Nothing less than the future of the city was “on the line.”

A quarter-century later, the future is far from perfect but still pretty lovely. My family strolls to Warriors games and walks the dogs on greenways from Crane Cove up to the Embarcadero. The Mason on Mariposa apartment complex down the hill brought our new favorite burger joint, Louie’s Original. And when possible, we get our medical care at UCSF’s Mission Bay campus. In just the last year, Breadbelly, Arsicault Bakery, and Standard Deviant brewery opened locations nearby. 

We track new projects with eager anticipation of what they will bring: Potrero Power Station is taking shape, and Pier 70 has been a boon (hopefully it’ll get to Phase Two (opens in new tab) soon). While Potrero can still be sleepy, Dogpatch just down the hill is full of families and pedestrians.  There is action! There is life! There are what Jane Jacobs called “eyes on the street (opens in new tab).”

Yes, much of this has been in former industrial or light industrial lots that were easy pickings for development. But not everything has been a blank slate. New townhouses gleam where busted-up cars used to spill out of repair shops. On my block, several single-family homes have been replaced with tasteful, three-story duplexes. Perhaps there’s something the rest of the city might learn from — and even enjoy.

And so to my neighbors on the west side of town, where development has been resisted and fought and obstructed for decades, I am here to say: It’s time to embrace the new. Growth can be good for you.

The changes to the city’s east side have been dramatic and purposeful. Over the past 20 years, housing in the SoMa planning district (opens in new tab) — which includes Mission Bay, Potrero Hill, and Dogpatch — has doubled (opens in new tab); in the rest of the city, it has increased by just 7%. This growth has been necessary but hardly sufficient to meet housing needs. According to a state mandate, San Francisco has until 2031 to build 82,000 units; at the current rate of less than 2,500 a year, we are almost certain to miss that target. To get close, each neighborhood must contribute to the effort.

That will require some change — to attitudes as much as to plans. Of the 58,000 net units built in San Francisco since 2004, the Eastern neighborhoods have developed more than half — just over 30,000, according to SF Planning. (opens in new tab) (Add the Financial District and South Beach, and the number grows to 40,000, about 70% of the total.) Meanwhile, the western neighborhoods — from the Richmond in the north, through the Sunset to West Portal, Parkside, Lakeshore, and Ingleside to the south — have added a measly 3,000 homes, just 5% of the city’s new units. 

Drive or walk around the west side, and you’re looking largely at the same built environment that was there in the 1960s and ’70s. Never mind the aggressively landmarked northern neighborhoods of Telegraph Hill, Russian Hill, and North Beach. The Sunset and Richmond are the areas of San Francisco most frozen in mid- to late-20th century amber.

My intention is not to shame my western neighbors into doing their part or scold them into accepting change. Those residents aren’t wrong to love their neighborhoods as they first remember them. The low-slung, salt-aired, suburban hush of the west side is a huge part of the area’s charm. Instead, I would suggest that living in dynamic, thriving neighborhoods, with new families, new parks, and new places to shop and eat, is a blessing — if you can hang onto it. It is the best part of city life.

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This argument goes against 50 years of NIMBY dogma, when fears of “Manhattanization” led to a wave of down-zoning that ossified entire neighborhoods into stagnation — and laid the foundations for an intractable housing crisis. At the time, faced with the specter of runaway development, this seemed sensible. The prevailing argument was that the city’s first obligation is to current residents: “San Francisco ought to be developed to make life better for the people who live here, not to help outside financial interests make more money,” the Bay Guardian wrote in 2000.

But that argument turned out to be misguided twice over. First, commerce and civic life are not mutually exclusive; outside investment is part of what has made San Francisco a thriving metropolis from the very beginning. Second, it’s not necessarily true that limited development — or no development whatsoever, as has been the case in western SF — makes life better for residents. 

“There are so many more quotidian elements of living in a city that are beneficial,” said Benjamin Schneider, an urbanist (opens in new tab), native San Franciscan, and author of  “The Unfinished Metropolis: Igniting the City-Building Revolution.” “Having more people in a neighborhood creates demand for more businesses, more restaurants, more specialty stores. Densify those areas, and you’ll create a lot more diversity among the people who can live there — a lot more younger people, a lot more older people.”

And what to build? Schneider points to Portland, Oregon, which has revised its zoning rules to incentivize “missing middle” housing — units that are affordable to the middle class and young people and families.  These townhomes and ADU-style units blend into the city’s fabric while creating more housing per block. 

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San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie’s Family Zoning Plan, approved by the Board of Supervisors late last year, also has an eye toward the missing middle, but it will take years for those new rules to result in new homes. 

“It’s about financial viability,” said Sara C. Bronin, a law professor at George Washington University and author of “Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World (opens in new tab).” “Somebody has to be interested in doing the type of development allowed by the code, and it has to pencil out.”

And zoning is only part of it: San Francisco just has more rules around building than almost anywhere else. “Everybody has always had a sense that San Francisco is always highly regulated, but we were not able to prove it,” Bronin said. But her National Zoning Atlas project crunched the data and found that San Francisco (opens in new tab) has more than five times the number of pages of zoning regulations than the U.S. average and nearly 15 times the number of “zoning districts” — 17 districts is the national norm, but San Francisco has a staggering 250. All those pages of rules make it harder, slower, and more expensive to build or add an ADU.

Streamlining these rules isn’t the stuff that gets glowing press coverage, but it’s an essential follow-up to Lurie’s new zoning maps. Think this opens the door to gentrification? To the contrary: Bronin notes that nationwide, when communities thwart housing growth, it’s actually harder for people to remain in their homes because of larger economic pressures and demands on housing that accelerate displacement. 

“Diverse housing options allow people from a variety of economic backgrounds to live in a place and helps make that place work,” Bronin notes. “Every community relies on teachers in the schools, people who protect and serve, people who work in restaurants and service businesses and salons and banks. Communities need people from a variety of backgrounds to be able to live there.”

And so a different vision for equitable development across the city starts to emerge. Instead of nightmare scenarios of high-rise, Miami Beach-style apartment buildings lining the Great Highway, maybe we’ll see modern duplexes replacing aging single-family homes in the avenues, three- or four-story apartment buildings filling empty lots and one-story retail on Geary or California or Balboa or Judah. Maybe there are more affordable homes in Parkside and West Portal for kids who grew up in those communities and more places to go and things to do and neighbors to greet from across the city.

That vision is admittedly different from the vibe in many western neighborhoods today. Schneider said that when he walks across the west side, “I often have this feeling of being on a 1950s movie set. West Portal epitomizes this; it’s such a time capsule of half a century ago. And that’s like so many San Francisco neighborhoods.

“There’s a certain charm to that,” he acknowledged. “I understand why people are so attached to the way things are. I get that love that people feel and how the city works for them. But there’s a potential future where the new stuff doesn’t detract but makes a different experience that’s still a positive one. As people look beyond their immediate needs and consider their kids’ prospects or even living in the city longer term, as that starts to click, it gets harder to justify just leaving things the way they are.”

With the Family Zoning Plan now in effect, it’s reasonable for residents of long-quiet neighborhoods to be wary of the sound of jackhammers and nail guns. But consider the possibilities of positive change. As new building permits appear on your block and aging buildings are reimagined into new homes, maybe there’s something in it for you. A new family down the street. A new babysitter next door. Perhaps your backyard, too, is right for an ADU.

It’s OK for cities to change — and, indeed, it can be a blessing, part of our shared urban experience. As novelist Colson Whitehead once wrote (opens in new tab) about New York, another city that has seen its share of transitions, “Our streets are calendars containing who we were and who we will be next.”

It is time for our western neighbors to turn the page on the calendar.