Where do Macromedia’s 600 employees work?  Not in a suburban office park coupled with traffic congesstion.  Not in an economically struggling city downtown.  They happen to work in what is the fastest growing, increasingly popular area (Mission Bay) of one of the most desired cities in the country, San Francisco.

Granted, word is that the transformed warehouse could have been a lot cooler rather than its cubicle-driven layout… and there could be more nearby dining options than are currently

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There is no other San Francisco, and that in itself is the secret to its success.  No other city has such steep hills, the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, etc., but to a resident, those icons become invisible after a while - they’re not representative of the uniqueness that makes it one of the most desired cities in the world.

A place like El Balazo, in the Upper Haight (my old neighborhood), San Francisco, is.  Now it’s a crime to single out any one venue in the city, but the thing is, while

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For those who like to cook and commute by transit, it doesn’t get much better than this, that is, if you can afford to live here in Mission Bay, San Francisco.  At least 28% of the housing in this progressive new neighborhood is supposed to be below market, though in this particular development, a good portion of it is above market (pun intended).

Thanks to Portland’s innovative urban planning heritage, which hosted the first Safeway with housing above, more and more of us won’t have to lug

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Disneyfication - the term given to developments that look a bit sterile because it was built by one developer, in one style, all at once (ie non-organically.)

So far one of the most noticeable and admirable traits about the first signs of construction in Mission Bay is that it doesn’t look like it was built by one developer, which is so often the case (like many of the new developments recently reviewed here.)  Part of the reason is that it’s such a large urban site (303 acres) and investment

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With 303 acres in what is already one of the most desired cities in the country, Mission Bay is one of the most significant urban redevelopment projects ever.  Its key features include:

Moderately affordable housing:  Of the 6000 housing units, 1700 (28%) will be affordable to moderate, low, and very low-income households
High-tech focus: 6 million sq. ft. of office/life science/technology commercial space
A university: A new UCSF research campus containing 2.65M s.f. of building space on 43

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Of course, the more expensive/unaffordable a place becomes, the less of a destination it becomes for more people as well.

Bay Meadows in San Mateo, CA is lauded by nonprofits (including the Sierra Club) for its smart growth principles of compact, pedestrian-oriented, mixed-use planning with public spaces, and rightfully so.  However, like at Santana Row a little south of it, the average homebuyer will need to be making well above $100,000 to live in one of its 734 homes.  Nearly all the

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Continuing our cooltown audit of developments across the San Francisco Bay Area, our next stop is in San Mateo, north of San Jose (and Santana Row, as reviewed just previously.)

The historic main street downtown is coming around with new, independent restaurants and stores, though it’s still missing some sense of identity that an active, grand pedestrian-oriented public place would provide.  They were very close with the plaza fronting the Century Theaters (pictured), but weren’t able to

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Yesterday I made a comment about the plaza in Santana Row, that with a bit of imagination you could feel like sitting in a piazza in Italy.  Maybe not so much based on the bird’s eye photo yesterday, but more so from the perspective in this image (minus the palm trees.)  While the average person can’t afford to shop or live here, there’s a lot of positives in seeing more of these truly pedestrian-oriented, ‘Europeanesque’ piazzas built that are free to the public.  As I mentioned yesterday,

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Santana Row in San Jose, CA does not have any housing that can be afforded by a majority of the creative class, nor does it sport independent businesses, favoring upscale chains instead.  For those two reasons alone, it’s nowhere close to being a ‘cooltown’.  However, it does have some of the best new placemaking and urban design anywhere in the entire San Francisco Bay Area, and for that it deserves merit.  In other words, just imagine how amazing it’d be if 87% of its retail were

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While the Fruitvale Village development profiled yesterday is indeed a success story in that a visionary developer transformed it from a parking garage proposal into a beautiful, walkable community of residences, offices, and shops, it hasn’t quite succeeded on the retail just yet.

Businesses like a florist, take-out restaurant, and chiropractor are struggling, wondering why all that pedestrian traffic from the busy transit station commute doesn’t translate into commerce.  A couple of

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