G&G Project Makes Curbed List of 10 Most Important Buildings in San Francisco

Excerpt taken from Curbed San Francisco. See the full article here.

Ten years is a fair length of time to witness a landscape evolve, and here in the Bay Area, land of innovation and limited space, that transformation comes with no small amount of friction. Growing pains, citified.

With tech really coming into its own over the last decade, we’ve seen the industry forge a new Dickensian existence for the region: The decade has been the best and worst of times. A company’s horizon-defining skyscraper ascend into the stratosphere over San Francisco, and residential high-rises sprout up to solve the need for more (luxury) housing amid maxed-out urban density. We’ve observed artists fleeing the city limits unable to afford the lavish cost of living, at the same time the arts have been strongly advocated for with edgy new structures. Down in the Silicon Valley, tech campuses have become more extravagant in direct proportion to their steady slip from Bay Area reality, the heaviest constant of which is the homeless epidemic. Good thing there’s been a game-changing solution for that, too, NIMBYs be damned.

Without further ado, may we present the Bay Area’s design of a decade…

10. Embarcadero Navigation Center

While the goal is to place residents in permanent housing within 90 days, there is no formal limit on their stay, which might be the program’s most humane ground rule of all—knowing that timelines are nothing if not individual, action is required, but rushing is not.

When the Embarcadero Navigation Center opens, it will be the seventh in operation in the city. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that 57 percent of the approximately 3,000 homeless that have come through the program have found housing elsewhere. (Success rates and types of housing vary, according to Mission Local’s Joe Eskenazi.) In a city where approximately 4,300 people (or more) sleep on the streets nightly, this program is a significant stride in the right direction. And if proposed legislation to build a Navigation Center in every single district in the city passes, be sure to check Next Door for details on the inevitable formation of NIMBY Neighborhood Watch groups, meeting soon at a poolside near you.

Photo by Brock Keeling