Elevated suburbs

Who lives in these self-contained downtown worlds?

MICHAEL MACHADO IS dashing from condo to condo inside the Towers at Embarcadero South, a luxury housing complex near SBC Park. He's leading prospective home buyers on a tour of two-bedroom million-dollar suites. A moving crew has tied up the elevator, so Machado and his group take the stairs.

"We don't have any first-time home buyers down here," Machado says, rattling off a quick description of who's moving in. Most buyers are in their 40s. There's a couple from the East Bay and a "relo" (a real estate term for someone relocating) from London. One is a business owner in Petaluma who needs a crash pad closer to San Francisco International Airport.

"They all told me moving here opened up business opportunities in the peninsula," says Machado, whose business card IDs him as South Beach Agent of the Year.

Machado is promoting the sort of housing – in fact, the sort of neighborhood – that developers would like to build all the way down the Third Street light-rail line, reaching into Showplace Square, Dogpatch, the central waterfront, and Bayview-Hunters Point.

When we ask Machado what the Third Street corridor will look like 10 or 15 years from now, he gestures around South Beach and Mission Bay and says, "It's going to look like this."

What does that development model mean for the city? Who will be living in these new condo projects? What kind of businesses will occupy the commercial storefronts?

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We spent a few days in this downtown neighborhood of the future to look for some answers. On three separate occasions we rang doorbells, hung out in a fourth-floor open-sky dog park, buttonholed residents going in and out of the new buildings, and talked to some two dozen residents of the block of King Street sandwiched between SBC Park and the Fourth Street Caltrain station. Just about everyone was friendly and happy to talk.

It wasn't exactly a scientific survey, but it gave us some valuable insight.

We met a lot of young professionals, many of whom work outside San Francisco but found the suburbs too boring to make their homes there. We met some empty nesters, older people with plenty of income or equity moving from the suburbs back into San Francisco. We heard tales of real estate investors (a.k.a. speculators) who will never live in the condos but want to flip them for cash.

Almost everyone had moved into downtown from somewhere out of San Francisco. Some of them love the area; quite a few don't.

Abhijit Pal, who shares a two-bedroom apartment in the Avalon at Mission Bay, chose the neighborhood out of convenience. He works at eBay and needs easy access to Caltrain or the freeway.

"But I don't think it really has the feeling that San Francisco represents," he says. "It just feels like I'm living in Battery Park City [in Manhattan]."

The Avalon serves its residents wine and cheese every Thursday and Friday night in the lobby, where impressionist art hangs from the walls (you can buy it from the concierge). And when the next Avalon tower opens across Fourth Street – it's now under construction – it will have a three-story climbing wall and a sports court inside, plus about 7,000 square feet of retail space.

Here's who we didn't see in any of the spiffy new towers: families (only one person we talked to had kids, and the kids hated living downtown), teachers, firefighters, service workers, city employees, or anyone who could be remotely defined as the sort of "workforce" the mayor claims to want to build housing for. By and large, skin pigment was white, with a few Asians. We didn't meet a single African American resident.

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There's not much of a neighborhood presence out on the streets of Mission Bay, where the wind blows fiercely off the bay and traffic from 280 touches down right onto King Street.

Giant retail vendors dominate the ground-floor storefronts. You get your hair cut at SuperCuts and coffee at Starbucks. For books and music there's Borders and a gourmet Safeway for groceries.

There's nothing in this new neighborhood that's remotely like Gloria's Florist and Bayview Music and Gear, two unlikely retail outlets operating separately under the same roof on Third Street. The place held a grand opening Oct. 1; you can buy flowers, CDs, and flashy airbrushed T-shirts in the shop, which has a distinctly neighborhood feel.

For Gloria's owner Robert Pierce, known as "Brother Bob the Flower Man," sharing space with friend Ricky Bell, who owns Bayview Music and Gear, was something that may never have worked in another commercial district.

The partnership has also helped Pierce reclaim a stake in the neighborhood where he grew up. In 1977 Pierce operated To the Fullest, a sandwich shop in the same spot where he now runs Gloria's. "I used to sell newspapers as a kid over here on Third Street," Pierce tells us.

Pierce says he's skeptical about how the Third Street light rail will change things. Some even see it as a path fraught with promise and peril that may lead up or out of the neighborhood.

Ernestine Howard, co-owner of Wendy and Daughters, a longtime mainstay on Third Street that sells soul food and baked goods, tells us she hopes more business generated by the light rail will help her modernize her restaurant.

"People sitting outside with nobody bothering them, that's what I would like," Howard says.

But she's already feeling pressure brought on by the eastern neighborhoods development plans. She says the Mayor's Office of Community Development has been coming around encouraging business owners to take out loans for upgrading their property (See Neighborhood Business, page 33).

"The local businesses are going to be forced out," explains Clarence Williams, who owns the soon-to-reopen New Long Island Club bar. "They can't afford the renovations. They won't be able to compete with Starbucks."

TR and MH