In This Issue

IN 1973 A shadowy Thailand liquor baron named Supasit Mahaguna, working through a U.S. front company called Four Seas Investment, bought the International Hotel on Kearny Street, then the center of the Filipino community in San Francisco. Mahaguna, it turned out, had plenty of reasons to try to get his money out of Thailand, and the I-Hotel purchase may have been largely a scheme to move cash to the United States (see "The Thai 'Godfather' Behind the I-Hotel," 5/19/77).

But Four Seas – using some high-priced San Francisco legal talent – told city officials that it wanted to tear down the residential hotel and build something else on the site. Although the developer never put forth any concrete plans, the city allowed Mahaguna to evict all of the tenants (mostly elderly Filipinos) in 1977 and demolish the structure two years later.

Then, for more than 20 years, nothing happened. The I-Hotel became a hole in the ground, a scar on the edge of Chinatown, and a symbol of the failures of city planning.

There was a major flaw in the logic of city officials who allowed the eviction and demolition. The idea that a developer had some kind of sacred right to a "higher and better use" – that is, something more lucrative – for a building that served a valuable community function was wrong from the start. These days residential hotels have a certain degree of protection – San Francisco learned some lessons from the I-Hotel fiasco. But there are lots of other buildings (artist studios, for example, and low-cost office space used by small nonprofits) that have no protection at all.

And to make things worse, when the city planners approved the demolition, they had no good reason to believe Mahaguna really intended to build anything at all on the site.

As David Moisl reports on page 18, that same mentality took hold during the dot-com boom in San Francisco. At 20th and Bryant Streets, for example, a developer friendly to Mayor Willie Brown demolished a building that housed some 50 artist studios, providing cheap work space (and a sense of community) for sculptors, painters, and photographers. The plan was to build an office building for tech firms (which wasn't an appropriate use for the site anyway). Then the market changed – and now, it's just a hole in the ground. No artists; no tech jobs. Everyone's a loser.

Thanks, Mr. Mayor. Maybe we'll learn this time.