Construction — Blog

A tall crane

My neighborhood is the residential type with homes no taller than three stories. The tallest thing nearby is San Francisco State University, of which the highest building on campus is nine stories. The university is in the middle of constructing a new science building. Consequently, a giant crane have been erected for that purpose. This thing absolutely dominates the skyline, and honestly, a bit of an eye sore.

I get it now: I can see why NIMBYs all over protest against tall, dense housing. It’s not very nice to have your horizon of pure sky suddenly get obstructed with some monstrosity. What NIMBYs have to do is admit that is the real reason for their opposition - in additional to lowering the values of their home, of course. They chose to buy in a suburban area, and indeed it would suck to have that changed from under them.

Saves us the "we don’t want luxury apartments and developers to get rich” bullshit.

Just because I understand NIMBYs, doesn’t mean I am with them. San Francisco need to build more housing, full stop. And it cannot all be concentrated in the north east part of the city. Our nearby Stonestown mall is planning to develop addition apartments and shop areas to surround the existing mall. It’ll be interesting to see if it gets approval, because the skyline of our neighborhood will be changing with it.

Who knows if I’ll even be around to see that come to fruition. Not because I’d be dead, but because I might have moved away. Major constructions in this country - unless it’s a stadium/arena for a sports team - takes a long time. That aforementioned science building at San Francisco State won’t be complete for another four years!

At least the roads will be nice

One of the silver linings I’m seeing with the whole State of California on lockdown is that the roads are getting some much-overdue maintenance work done to them. With an exponential decrease in the amount of cars on the road, what better time than now to fill in those potholes and repave a major thoroughfare. No need to worry about the coronavirus, because workers would be outdoors where the air naturally circulates and it’s very easy to socially distance.

A few weeks ago I was a part of a skeleton crew for my job that physically went to campus for work, and to my surprise, 19th Avenue was down to one lane from the normal four. Crews were taking the opportunity to repave the busy boulevard while traffic levels are historically low. Ironically closing it down to a single lane caused a traffic jam of its own with the few remaining cars: it took me a good 15 minutes just to get out of the area and on my way back home, which was slightly annoying because with shelter-in-place happening, I had expected to commute in record time (traveling at normal speeds, mind).

This Summer there was to be a planned shutdown of the super busy section Highway 101 at the Highway 280 interchange for three whole weeks. The need for seismic retrofit to the aging elevated structure is paramount, no matter the absolute traffic hell that is for sure to happen as a consequence of shutting down the freeway. I mean, it’s not like our region is famous for earthquakes or anything. Nonetheless, the fear of massive congestion during construction can now be allayed because the city have moved the project up by months; work actually starts this weekend.

I am greatly looking forward to some beautifully smooth roads once things return to normal.