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In this Issue
in this issue I SAW THE face of greed last week. Real, ugly, unadulterated greed. A guy named Jack Myers came by the Bay Guardian office to talk to us about his condo project at 80 Natoma St. That's the one right near the site of the new Transbay Terminal, the one that has Mayor Gavin Newsom dancing around and around, blaming everyone in sight for a problem he hasn't been able to solve. In essence, as we note on page 11, Myers claims to have a valid permit to build a 51-story high-rise on a site that's in the path of the train tracks that would be used to bring high-speed rail into downtown San Francisco. Almost everyone with any sense agrees that a high-speed rail connection to Los Angeles is a crucial part of the state's transportation future, and that the only way it's going to work is if it connects to downtown stations in both cities. The new Transbay Terminal is the perfect, logical spot: it will have connections to almost every other major transit system in the region, and it's a short walk from the Financial District. But Myers won't give the Transbay Joint Powers Board, which is building the new Transbay Terminal, the rights to tunnel under his (unbuilt) tower – and he won't sell the land to the agency at anything resembling a reasonable price. I suggested, for example, that maybe he should offer to give up the parcel if the TJPB can come up with the money to pay for the land, reimburse him for all his out-of-pocket expenses so far, and give him a reasonable profit, maybe a few million dollars or so. (He says he's put two years of planning into this; even by developer standards, a couple million a year doesn't sound too shoddy.) In response, he looked at his public relations consultant, Alex Clemens, and said, "What was the profit figure we were talking about here? $100 million?" That's right: Myers is planning to make $100 million profit on a $300 million project, most of it financed with someone else's money. And to get that obscene, outrageous, ought-to-be-illegal profit, he's blocking a project that would transform public transportation in the state, benefit millions of people, reduce air pollution and petroleum use, possibly eliminate any need for new runways in the bay at San Francisco International Airport and bring huge economic benefits to the South of Market neighborhood. It's all about him. All about his $100 million profit. All about greed.
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