A Prayer For Too Tall Buildings In San Francisco

The Transbay Authority is about to adopt the recommendation of it's advisory jury and allow the building of a 1200 foot tower high-rise at First and Mission Streets. The objective of the new Transbay Terminal and office complex is primarily to accomodate and in fact nurture an increaase of traffic through the downtown area of the city. You know, "If we build it they will come". So there will be more cars, mores buses, more trains, more people, more noise, more pollution.

Eight hundred of the 1200 foot tower will be new office space. So that will add to the demand of our incresingly limited water supplies and sewage treatment facilities. The builders are throwing in a 5.4 acre elevated park as a chump change tip to the eco-crowd. Let's see, app. 250,000 sq.foot park subtracted from 1.8 million sq.foot project doesn't qualify the project as anything but a eco-disaster.

It will probably get built. But I predict one day it will fall because of the unstable land and the hubris of it's height irresistibly temtps nature. Hopefully the jerks that built it are in the building at the time.