With Supervisor Kim casting the sole dissenting vote in the Budget and Finance Sub-Committee, on Tuesday San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors will review the Finding of Fiscal Feasibility for the Port’s Cruise Terminal Project at Pier 27 (click images to enlarge).
The estimated project cost for the terminal is $90,308,846 with the Port having identified $78,393,200 in “various potential funding sources, leaving a shortfall of $11,915,646.” The potential funding sources include $15,500,000 in Port Revenue Bonds, $9,122,943 in General Obligation Bonds, and a $6,500,000 contribution from the City’s General Fund.
As proposed the Pier 27 Cruise Ship Terminal Project would be constructed in two phases to accommodate the use of Pier 27 for the 34th America’s Cup from January 2013 to April 2014. The new cruise terminal would open November 2014.
∙ Finding of Fiscal Feasibility: Cruise Terminal Project at Pier 27 [sfbos.org]
∙ James R. Herman Cruise Terminal Project at Pier 27 [sfport.com]
∙ San Francisco’s New Cruise Ship Terminal Gets A $3.5M Kick Start [SocketSite]
∙ The Scope Of Development For San Francisco’s First America’s Cup [SocketSite]
Why on earth should SF issue bonds to build this? Cut some of the half billion a year SF gives the homeless instead, those are the sort of “tourists” SF should be courting, not bums.
I guess Larry is tapped out from the whole, you know, race…thing.
Can we do better than this San Francisco???
We need an architecturally more compelling design for our waterfront!
-See Vancouver!, Amsterdam!, and other major cities around the world which have done projects like that.
This is going to be the gateway like our airport is!
H.
THD would never allow a Vancouver waterfront.
Is that really a supersized lava lamp? That would be the coolest ironic statement….
That’s it???
Wow. And the soccer pitch has to go away because, WHY?
Dammit. Lame. That little soccer pitch is a wonderful, well used resource. You’re replacing it with precisely nothing for an acute net loss. Terrible, San Francisco. Terrible.
Reboot SF, at least these tourists will spend money and improve the community. last thing we need are more programs catering to the homeless.
Oscar: exactly what I was saying! Instead of spending $500 million a year to court bums, we need to be courting tourists with those funds, not issuing bonds to build the stuff for tourists.
Put the $500 million a year spend on bums out for a bond vote and see if the taxpayers support them being fleeced just to fund Homeless Inc. and all the BUMS we court from coast to coast.
San Francisco has become America’s one way Grayhound ticket destination for all other cities’ bums, we shouldn’t allow ourselves to get punked like this, leaivng us in no position but to have to issue bonds to build services to court tourists.
Boy this “RebootSF” commenter is just something else, no? First on climate change and now this. Must be somebody new to the area or someone under the age of twenty-five with a lot of time on their hands or a wealthy retiree with a lot of time on their hands. Except now they have a keyboard.
First, in 2010, The City spent $150 million total on health care and social services for its estimated 13,500 homeless on the street or in city-funded housing (I’d link to the budget directly, but that’s not really easily readable unless you’re an accountant, IMO). So the $500 million a year figure “Reboot SF” throws out is completely bogus, even if you count federal funds spent by The City on the homeless. I believe the fiscal year 2011 figure will be lower. Also, the biennial homeless count shows an approx. net 20 percent drop in homelessness in the city since 2004.
Second, the city spends a significant amount on bus tickets to get homeless people who don’t have ongoing ties to The City back to places where they do have family, etc., this was an ongoing inside joke during the Newsom administration:
Also, the city doesn’t “court bums”, the people you seeing pushing a shopping cart and mumbling to themselves are mostly mentally ill and don’t have anywhere to go. For that, blame lies with your hero Ronald Reagan when he was Governor of this state and the infamous Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, which forced all these untreated schizophrenics, alcoholics and drug addicts onto the streets.
Third, The City has in fact reduced handouts to the homeless and instead offers more in the way of services. That’s what Care Not Cash was all about (although it wasn’t fully implemented).
Last but not least, if you read the surveys of tourists that visit The City, the number one complaint that they have is the general dirtyness of the streets and the number two complaint is the number of homeless people on the streets and the level of panhanding they have to deal with because of those homeless people. It doesn’t take a social scientist to see that these two issues are related.
I don’t have any problem in principle to reducing spending on the homeless and instead spending it on making the visitor experience nicer, but the plain fact is that if we did reduce spending, without doing something about reducing the number of people on the streets, all that would do is increase the amount of chaos, crime and general mayhem that tourists and residents both encounter on the streets due to homeless people, which would in turn reduce tourism as the negative word got out.
It sounds easy to “just” reduce the amount we spend on the homeless and instead spend it on tourism, but it won’t work in practice and in the past has proven to be pretty foolhardy.
It looks like the North Beach Library has made a return!
Seriously, no real architects in this city, guys?
Does anyone else here, besides me, really understand modern architecture? It’s about spare lean, clean lines, no decoration, functional clarity, honest expression of materials and wisely using dollars to develop the building.
This tall slender columns and thin roof edge remind me of the Academy of Sciences in GG Park, designed by The Renzo Piano Building Workshop, an outstanding example of pure modernism.
Realizing these are only digital renderings, this project does seem to be on the right track. I support this one.
Let’s let it evolve thru the design process before making completely off the cuff, wild judgements.
This building can only add benefits to our waterfront and improve amenities for everyone.
“wisely using dollars”= C H E A P
developers’ shill you are
meh. a pox on your clean lines
The site that diemos pointed to made me laugh out loud.
I don’t think that the terminal rendered above is anywhere near as pathetic as the new Clinton Middle School shown at that link, but the point about the fetishization of “clean lines” was well made. I’m sure that the architect that came up with that building responded to his critics that “they just don’t understand Modernism.”
Yes, I “understand Modernism” very well, and even after reaching that understanding realize that to many people, examples can seem Teutonic, cold and downright ugly.
I do like the supersized lava lamp for the required public art piece.
I find it pretty underwhelming.
I mean, it’s actually in the plans to haul out hurricane fences every time a ship docks, for security!
There seems to be a huge amount of open space with little purpose. As someone else put it, plazas and parks are most popular when they’re scarce. On the embarcadero, where there’s plenty of room to stroll around, what’s the sense of adding so much more flat, boring space? Half of it seems to be used for parking–why? Are the tourists going to bring their cars on the cruise ships? Are we going to encourage people to drive here and leave their cars while they take a weeklong cruise? Put in a taxi stand, some shuttle and rental car/carshare spots, and call it a day.
On the whole, it’s totally uninspiring.
Perfect spot for a Target with plenty of parking.
I think the reason the parking lot needs to be so big is so that it could accomodate lots of tour buses.
They should put a living roof on that building.