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| Running in the woods |
Last year Lucy Frey exchanged the lush, rolling hills of Devon, south-west England, for California in order to join her new husband, Raman. The couple had met climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania and she had decided to move to San Francisco, where Raman owned an art gallery.
When she arrived, Lucy moved into her husband’s apartment in the Mission District, a gritty neighbourhood in the southern part of the city. The flat was across the street from a raucous bar and around the corner from a fire station. “It was loud, noisy, very grungy and very urban,” she remembers. “It’s not what I look for in a place to live.” The final offence came when a vagrant exposed himself to her through an apartment window.
So after 10 months in the Mission the couple began searching for a more peaceful place to live. While perusing Craigslist, Lucy found a listing for a rental unit in the Presidio, the verdant, 1,500-acre national park that occupies the north-west corner of San Francisco. In an instant she knew it would be their new home.
The couple, like most San Franciscans, were already familiar with the Presidio. They went running along Crissy Field, a former airstrip that is now a public park, and had passed through the area innumerable times as they headed to or away from the Golden Gate Bridge, which has its southern anchor at the northern tip of the park.
But they had never considered living there. While there are more than 1,000 apartments and houses for rent in the Presidio, occupancy rates remain high, and the waiting list can stretch to a year. To meet this demand, however, the Presidio is bringing several hundred new units to market.
Raman resisted the idea at first, preferring the nightlife of the Mission to the isolation of a park, but eventually he bent to his new wife’s will and soon the couple moved into a three-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bathroom 1960s house.
Their new home has a big kitchen and a living area that looks on to a large field. Its interior is unremarkable but the property includes a garden, a patio, and two parking spaces – true rarities in San Francisco. Because the unit was not renovated between tenants, unlike most in the area, the rent is only $2,300 a month – a paltry sum for such ample space in this market. “It’s in the city but it’s like living in the woods,” says Lucy. “It’s very quiet, there’s lots of nature around. It’s a refuge for me.”
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| Residential housing in the Presidio |
During the Gold Rush, soldiers constructed Fort Point, a hulking brick battery below what is now the south tower of the Golden Gate Bridge, to defend against potential aggressors. In 1915 the army opened up sections of the Presidio waterfront to host parts of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal. Soon after that, the military presence increased significantly as the US entered the first world war. The base remained heavily militarised throughout the second world war and the cold war but was gradually decommissioned in the latter decades of the 20th century.
In 1994 stewardship of the area passed from the military to the US National Park Service. It soon became clear, however, that the park service could not support its new charge. With a complex infrastructure and hundreds of ageing buildings, it costs more to maintain the former military base than it does to look after both Yellowstone and Yosemite, two of the US’s busiest parks.
Recognising as much, Congress, led by San Francisco representative Nancy Pelosi, acted to set up the Presidio Trust, a public-private partnership that would renovate and lease out the buildings to make the area financially self-sustaining. The trust hired a local developer, the John Stewart Company, to oversee the residential portion of the project and in 1998 the first tenants moved in.
Today the John Stewart Company delivers $37m a year to the trust, a sizeable chunk of the park’s operating budget. Demand for the 1,160 housing units, which rent at market rates, is high, with occupancy steady at about 95 per cent. Yet maintaining the balance between a high population of residents and the historic atmosphere of a mid-century base is a constant trial. “The challenge”, says Stewart, “is to preserve the Presidio while also making it commercially viable.”
The diversity of buildings that the army left behind resulted in an unusually varied mix of housing units. There are modern homes such as the Freys’; there are high-ceilinged barracks now converted into lofts; and there are some exquisite, singular properties, such as the General’s House. Built in 1915, the imposing seven-bedroom Georgian revival home sits alone on a hill, flanked by palm trees and topiary. It rents for $18,000 a month and is occupied.
While many of the historic living spaces have vintage charm, the floor plans are almost uniformly diced up. Residential architects in the early part of the last century were disinclined to the open spaces that are now in vogue, resulting in some uncomfortably small rooms. And because of the strict rules governing historical preservation in the National Park no walls can be knocked down. “It was a simpler time – people had less stuff,” says Dana Polk of the Presidio Trust. “Some people use the smaller rooms as walk-in closets.”
Because demand for housing is so high, the Presidio is set to add another 100 or so units next year. The Public Health Service Hospital, a stately structure built in the 1930s, is being retrofitted and turned into condominiums that conform to the highest standards set by Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, the US ranking system. Potential tenants can expect to pay from $2,000 a month for a one-bedroom to $8,000 a month for a penthouse.
And while the residential properties are “the engine”, as Stewart puts it, the Presidio has plenty of commercial tenants too. These include Industrial Light & Magic, the special effects studio founded by Star Wars director George Lucas, which employs more than 2,500 people; Sports Basement, a large athletic supplies store; and small businesses staffed by sole proprietors.
Yet, for all the thousands of residents and workers, the Presidio remains a remarkably tranquil neighbourhood. A key measure of this peacefulness is the ratio of housing units per acre: across San Francisco the average ratio is 30 units per acre. In the Presidio it is less than one unit per acre. This explains much of its appeal to Lucy Frey. “I just needed somewhere more peaceful and somewhere I could relax,” she says.
This peace and stability appeals to families. In the Presidio 30 per cent of households have children, compared with 17 per cent in San Francisco as a whole. Playgrounds are scattered throughout the park and a large community garden bears fruits and vegetables for many of the residents. “Families are here to be in the park,” says Polk. “They want big yards for the kids to play in and to teach them about coyotes and raccoons.”
While there is no big commercial centre, the Presidio Trust made room for the essentials. There are a few cafés, a post office, a bank and a drycleaners. Buses connect the area to the rest of the city.
The overwhelming impression is, however, one of relatively untrammelled nature. “I notice nature and wildlife and the smell of the trees,” says Lucy. “Because the back of the house is a field with lots of gophers, we get lots of birds of prey – blue herons, hawks, and owls.” At night, the Freys can hear the waves of the Pacific Ocean.
Though the Presidio is steeped in heritage, some incremental changes are allowed to proceed. A freeway on-ramp to the Golden Gate Bridge is being torn down and replaced with a tunnel. Over the tunnel will be a park that connects the residential areas directly to the bay. Though new buildings are frowned upon, exceptions are made. Industrial Light & Magic was permitted to build some new structures, though they mimicked the design of extant ones nearby. At the new Walt Disney Family Museum (a tribute to the man, not the company), a large glass enclosure was added to a historic barracks building.
These new flourishes, along with the immaculately maintained historic setting, make the Presidio a neighbourhood unlike any other in the US, and perhaps the world.
David Gelles is a reporter in the FT’s San Francisco bureau
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Estate agency
Presidio Trust, tel: +1 415561 5300, www.presidio.gov
Developer
The John Stewart Company, tel: +1 415345 4400, www.jsco.net
