Ten New US Cities: 3. Presidio
This is part 4 of the short series Where to Create Ten New Cities in the US.
The groundwork for this series came in these two articles:
The first three articles in this series are:
You don’t need to read them in order.
We have shackled ourselves.
The US is 250 years old. When it was young, everything was possible. Settlers built new cities from nothing, laid railroads everywhere, created the richest country the world has ever seen.
But they did it at a hefty cost. The environment, the slave trade, the genocide of natives… So the pendulum turned, and Americans started to fear progress instead of embracing it.
Nowhere is this as true as in San Francisco, the city where the future has been minted through the creation of the Internet and AI, but also the city where this happens:
San Francisco is a moribund city due to homelessness, drugs, violence, all adjacent to some of the most expensive real estate in the world.
San Francisco is a failed city because it managed itself to the ground.
We need a way to save it from itself.
And it has a secret asset to make that happen.
This is a map of San Francisco. Do you see Presidio?
Presidio is a cozy town in the middle of the most expensive real estate on Earth:
Why is San Francisco so expensive? Because it’s the world capital of technology, yet the local government is hellbound on keeping it poor by levying surreal taxes on businesses and making it virtually impossible to build there. I know, I lived there for over a decade.
But Presidio is not part of SF. It’s federal land!
It belongs to the National Park Service, but anybody who’s gone there knows that ain’t what a normal person thinks a National Park looks like. It’s just a completely underdeveloped rich suburb.
From Mark Lutter—from whom I got the idea for Presidio:
With Paris-level density—meaning six-story apartment buildings—a developed Presidio would add 120,000 residents, increasing San Francisco’s population by 15%.
No restrictions on building or ridiculous taxes could make this into the new tech boomtown of the world.
Why could this be one of the most impactful cities on Earth? Because San Francisco has been the epicenter of world technology for decades now. This is where all the VC, Internet, mobile, and AI industries have been born. This is where the most interesting intellectual movements are conceived. All this impetus has been thwarted by bureaucrats that have kept the city dirty, dangerous, and expensive.
If I were to create a city here, I would call it Liberty City or Future City, and I would put a few rules:
No limits to building height.
Fast track for development reviews, with the only requirement being one of safety—for earthquakes, fires, tsunamis…
No limits to technological exploration: Whether it’s gene editing, drug testing, drone flying, AI, you name it—many federal and state legislations would be suspended here.
No special taxes, like the one San Francisco has extended on business revenue.
Zero tolerance for crime.
Eminent domain to replace current buildings with more valuable ones. I would give part of the new buildings to existing tenants.
And if I had a hand in urban design, I would keep a few green spaces and mandate all ground floors of buildings to accommodate shops and other types of businesses. I would build plenty of underground parking on the city limits for outsiders to come, and make streets walkable, prioritizing pedestrians over cars.
A clean, safe San Francisco that looks into the future unshackled by special interests and established powers? That’s just what it needs to save it from itself.
That’s why Presidio is the 3rd city location I propose for a city.
What other cities could we have? The next few are tied to one of the scarcest resources in the US West: water.
The Presidio is also a beautiful oasis in San Francisco, so I think maintaining a decent amount green space would be key. Keeping the most rugged hiking parts with the oldest trees untouched might be nice. For the mixed-use parts of the little city I'd advocate for building it similar to how Ildefons Cerda originally imagined the Barcelona Eixample district, this would further integrate greenspace into each city block.
I dunno about this one. The other ones were fun, and largely "blue ocean" land. This feels like ripping a part of the soul out of SF.
You are mentioning Golden Gate Park across the bridge, but that isn't conveniently accessible to most residents during working hours.