D.O.P.-T.

[weofodthignen]

Four oranges. And another two in the afternoon. I'd better check under the tree with a torch before I go to bed.

There used to be a post office, on the edge of downtown. The brass plaque in the lobby dated it to the Carter administration. And that lobby handled the tax day queue quite well, would have been great for keeping 6 ft apart.



(By the time of that photo, 2020, it had already lost its parking lot to the apartment building visible behind it.)

The building also included a space that when I first moved to the area, was rented to a jazzercise studio that played jolly music, so I called it the Bollywood dance studio. They lost their lease and the space was used by some company doing something with computers. The dancers moved to the park; for a couple of years we passed them regularly on walkies. Then as you walked along the short block there were a couple of little shops, including a mailboxes place that sold stamps and advertised aggressively in the post office lobby about its longer hours, and a memorabilia store with a couple of two-wheel vehicle spaces in front, and a sign posted reading "Parking for Harleys only". On the corner was the office for the apartment building above the stores:



(Taken later in 2020 and previously posted here; by then they were a small archipelago of moderately priced apartments at one corner of acre after acre of tall blocks of small "market-rate" apartments, and faced even taller swanky office buildings across both streets.) The bushes at the base of that corner office were planted in a very narrow bed quite far below the sidewalk, and somebody kept leaving food and water for a stray cat there. The manager posted furious signs about it and would run out red in the face if he noticed the cat. I hope the cat fed on the rats everywhere except around his office.

Whoever owned the block sold it. (The housemate suggested to me that the post office building had been built for the USPS and then sold and leased back to inflate some manager's performance figures. The post office eventually managed to rent cramped premises in a strip mall a couple of miles down El Camino.)


It was quite jarring to see the new skeleton if you knew what had been there before. Apartment building end, June 2022:



Post office end, September 2022:




And it is a behemoth even now that the narrow street below has reopened (the egg-shaped thing in the second pic is a sculpture of an apricot, part of a group of fruit sculptures scattered around the Plaza del Sol, to which that patch of grass belongs):






But they've tried to make it nice, and not entirely failed. The main facade has interesting detail; I think it's going to show up the offices component of the huge development a couple of blocks away, where Macy's was, which may have been the point. (June 2023 photo)




And now that the finishing is almost finished, it turns out to have living walls not only in the lobby but on the exterior pillars (credited to David Brenner, Habitat Horticulture, SF):






(That's an older office building across the street reflected in the first picture; currently home to Uber.) Street-side, not only drought-tolerant plants but little trees. And the promotional website says there's a roof garden.

Comments

[cowboy_r]

Is more office space actually needed there? I've been seeing a groundswell of opinion pieces about converting unused office space into apartments.

[weofodthignen]

Nope. Especially not with the last bit of the huge neighboring development set to include offices: the Murky News being boosterish while paying lip service to the soft office market. The post office building is on the "swanky new offices" side of downtown, while the big development has up to now been almost entirely apartments with retail under them; the Whole Foods mentioned in that news article is under the movie theater. (And both were much needed; there was no movie theatre in the city for decades, the tiny one downtown is a nightclub, and the closest supermarket was over a mile away.) That development replaces two malls that covered the site of all but one block of downtown in the 1970s. Macy's was one of the two anchor stores of the enclosed mall; originally it hung on, and there was an idea it would be converted to offices if the store closed. Instead they decided to add a huge office component and a "gateway". The post office lot are seeking to trample on them and have the most prestigious office property. But all of this started construction in the pandemic. Both sets of developers must be aware that the other modern office buildings that are neighbors to the one on the post office site—five of them—are only patchily rented. Heck, IIRC four of the five are now owned by the developers of the mall sites.

It's generally agreed that we need more housing in Silicon Valley. There are more jobs than places to live. But after that it gets more complicated. Everywhere needs moderate and low-income housing, and it just isn't getting built; in fact most of the housing development is destroying existing moderate and low-income housing (remember the mobile home park I posted about a few days ago). San Francisco (which is not in Silicon Valley, but drives a lot of news coverage of these issues) is squashed onto a ridiculously small area (which keeps its population well under a million), but until the pandemic almost everybody wanted to live there, squeezing out the poorer residents and especially the blacks. The city has made it worse by trying to lure tech companies to SF rather than Silicon Valley, because of civic pride and because they hate the thought of becoming a bedroom community for Silicon Valley. But the pandemic wrecked the restaurants and the arts, and SF doesn't have many one-family houses with yards where you can work from home and then hang out in the backyard, so lockdown there was horrid, so now swathes of the city are a hellscape of deserted office buildings and rampant street crime. That's the city that should convert office buildings to apartments, but developers are finding it hard to get loans to do so, and the demand for living there among those who can afford it may not be there any more. Tech workers mostly want to work from home now; those who have the money have moved far away, those who don't have so much continue to stream to new single-family developments in the direction of Sacramento.

Silicon Valley itself is a double string of small cities and towns and one city that's just fallen out of the top 10 for population, San Jose. San Jose is only exceeded for sprawl by the SoCal cities. It went on an extended spree of eating part or all of its neighbors, is run like a cow town, and while it has a lot of modern office towers, some with impressive names on them, and if you squint you can see how its downtown was once a shopping destination, it really is the bedroom community for Silicon Valley: despite the howls about rising rents and prices, it's historically the cheapest city in the valley. SF has resisted building highrise apartment buildings except in one formerly industrial area; in San Jose developers have been putting up lots of dense apartment buildings downtown, but because the airport and therefore its flight path is right there, until recently most were prison-like block fillers rather than tall towers. And every time there's a downturn, the office market in San Jose craters. The pandemic has just caused Google to walk away from its plan to build a big satellite campus near the train station, leaving the city with an already partially cleared area and lots of plans that won't work any more. (And downtown is even more of a mess than usual because stations for the BART underground train extension are going to require demolitions.)

The rest of the Silicon Valley cities ... vary. Cupertino is where the Apple folks wave their cash, but is NIMBY central, the voters insist their city council keep it single-family houses. I think they're still fighting over the site of their own failed enclosed mall. Part of the problem is Cupertino never had a downtown, it always was nothing but tract housing. Santa Clara is at the other extreme; they love developers and say yes to almost anything. They've been building apartment blocks and townhouses for a couple of decades, and now are at the point where they're tearing out retail to build still more housing (I guess the residents are supposed to use Amazon or drive to San Jose.) But because of steadily adding housing, they have a culture of lower middle-class pride; they really don't like the idea of low-income housing. So their workers come in from East San Jose just like those in Cupertino .... Meanwhile Google has historically bought every office building in sight. So Mountain View finds everything is Google—even when they made a city plan to cap the percentage of their office space that was Google, Google promptly started doing swaps with other companies to circumvent it. Apart from anything else, this means well-paid Googlers muscle out a lot of other petential residents, so although Mountain View always had a lot of apartments and has been allowing some big apartment developments (and agonizing over the resulting need for new school places, because they have an ongoing massive fight with a very well heeled charter school), it has some of the highest home prices in Silicon Valley. Then there's Palo Alto, about which dissertations have been written ...

All of which is in turmoil now because the tech companies are alternately trying to force their employees back to the office and laying them off by the thousands. So the office market is at best full of holes like Swiss cheese, and the new, poky, and extremely expensive market-rate apartments don't have as much pent-up demand as was expected. The people with the money are being choosy about both, and the number of people without the money is rising.

Also, it has to be said that the numbers of housing units each place is required to add, which is now increasingly being enforced by the state, always did seem inflated. There's always been a steady trickle of opinion articles saying just that. They appear to be based on some pretty hinky forecasting, and to have started out more aspirational—"If only a quarter of this number of units get built, it will still work to ease the pressure and we can hope the poor can move into vacated older units" sort of thing—and hardened into edicts. And nobody is taking into account the cheaper housing being lost in the churn, or even planning how much cheaper housing the state even needs. Fancy new apartments that glut the market will eventually be discounted enough to attract people who are comfortably off; maybe they won't even move to Greater Sacramento, and instead some of the new houses there will attract retirees from out of state, who knows. But meanwhile, what of the people who lived in that nice little apartment block, or in the half dozen mobile home parks this city used to have, and what of the kids graduating from the lousy schools in East San Jose, who aren't likely to go to college let alone work for Apple or Google?

Thank you for coming to my TED talk. Basically, you are correct: nobody needs new office buildings around here. And we don't really need the kind of housing that's being built, either. What we need is not being built, but ripped out.

[cowboy_r]

I saw an economist the other day saying that we're living in a reheated "Guilded Age," and that the solutions are the same: tax the rich, invest in low-income social services. But the rich have spent the last century making sure the political will to do so is not there.