They've failed before, but they're trying again— the city wants to save the 65 acres of Pier 70, once proud home of the city's "roaring iron foundries and steel mills," but now just a slowly rotting corpse of land. The parcel, just south of Mission Bay, is due for a $1.9 billion Ferry Building-style renewal, which would save historic buildings like the Union Iron Works machine shop, and create 3 million square feet of offices, restaurants, and shops. Oh, and clean up a bunch of pollution and crap— that is, if all the contaminants left behind don't foil the city's ambitions.
At the moment, old buildings are just about on the verge of falling apart, and the need to remove industrial contaminants looks like it'll be sending costs skyward. Enter public funding (yay!), which would provide about $600 million of the project's budget. But at $100 million shy of that bar, Pier 70 will need Prop D if it wants a new lease on life— the ballot proposal would take a percentage of new taxes, such as hotel room taxes, to pay off bonds that would help fund the renewal. Sound good so far? Maybe so— no one's filed opposition against Prop D yet. Yet.
· Prop. D could put life into historic Pier 70 [SF Gate]
· Piers Enter Rehab, Full Recovery Expected [Curbed SF]
[Pier -- not Pier 70, sorry -- via whatimseeing.com]
