Organized Labor

There is a joy in building tall buildings.

For Operating Engineers and Iron Workers at the growing tip of structural steel jobs, and for Carpenters, Laborers, and other trades also at that of poured-in-place buildings, this joy can hold poetry. We have watched the sunrise while perched beside red-tail hawks, or seen peregrine falcons stoop to hunt from close by.

We have sweated in the sun while fog clings to the streets. We have heard a box column on a derrick’s hook bump newly hung iron and ring out, a great untuned bell pulled first from the stuff of Earth’s core and then hundreds of feet into the air.

And for all trades on a tall building, even those working far below the top, there is the joy of being part of a complex human endeavor functioning well, as floor after floor, tier after tier climb and are clad and filled with the means of their future use. We walk away at day’s end, we look back over our shoulders, and we smile.

Not everyone shares our joy in tall buildings.

The recent floating of a ballot measure that would have hardened restrictions on shadowing of downtown parks from more than twenty years ago and extended the restrictions to additional parks shows that opponents of tall buildings are renewing their efforts. The attempt some months ago to rewrite Articles 10 and 11 of the Planning Code, which we opposed with street protests, can in some part be considered a backlash against tall buildings as out of character with San Francisco’s historic form.

The actual shadowing by proposed or approved new tall buildings on parks protected in the old ordinance is entirely insignificant. And as John King of the Chronicle noted (15 February 2010): “There are good reasons for San Francisco to grow. They range from the quest for regional sustainability to the vibrancy of districts like Yerba Buena that concentrate culture and life in tall buildings around well-maintained plazas and parks.”

This is a city that has gone skyward in several periods of its history. The detail of the terra cotta and stone ornament high in older tall buildings, almost invisible from the street but easily appreciated from adjacent heights, suggests that their architects and owners even a century ago expected they would have company – that they expected a San Francisco of tall buildings. The tall building is as much a part of our tradition as the Victorian and the Doelger.

Some opponents of tall buildings object to them on aesthetic grounds. Some speak of the “human scale,” the “fine grain” of the City. But most of our neighborhoods of buildings limited in height by the capacity of wood framing or masonry are not genuinely under threat from tall buildings. Many received protection in the recent “Eastern Neighborhoods” plan. While some may fear that such protections may mean nothing without eternal opposition to tall buildings, it is the buildings themselves, and not their effect on neighborhoods, to which others object.

We will never overcome the aesthetic predilections of the latter.

But we – and our eternal call for jobs – are a source of fear for the former. We may seem to them at times a creature all mouth and stomach, never to be satisfied. That our hunger now is all the more real and urgent may simply increase their fear. They may also fear the growing advocacy of “New Urbanists” for more density in this already densely built city in the name of environmental responsibility, and they may fear a long-term demographic shift to a population that is less discomfited by – if not in fact more favorable to – tall buildings.

This is quite a tangle of fears to unknot, but we may be able to undo a few strands. Civic conversations among some parties have been suggested that may arrive at understandings on development that can then be proposed to the wider City. One such conversation will be on the subject of shadowing. In a city where planning and development decisions seem often to result from exhaustion after long combat, anyone is entitled to doubt the possibilities of success of calm conversations.

At worst, they do no harm. At best, we may get work, and some San Franciscans may view our work with less fear.

The economics of tall buildings raise other questions and other opposition, which I’ll discuss next month.