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The effort to preserve the beloved landmark from sea-level rise epitomizes an existential struggle for historic waterfronts
When San Francisco’s Ferry Plaza Farmers Market is in full Saturday swing, one way to dodge the determined foodies and casual browsers is to retreat to the plaza just 30 steps south of the Ferry Building. It sits atop three tiers of dark-veined granite, accessible by two flights of nine stairs or a ramp that ascends along the water to a trio of ferry gates that, like the plaza, were completed in 2021.
The chosen height hints at what someday might be the norm — the elevation where San Francisco’s constructed shoreline will need to be to serve as a protective buffer between the natural bay and the developed city. Here, more than any place on today’s Embarcadero, you confront the existential predicament facing the Ferry Building, nearby piers, and resurrected waterfronts in other coastal American cities: sea level rise.
According to projections that were modeled by climate scientists in 2018, San Francisco Bay faces a 66% likelihood that average daily tides will rise 40 inches by 2100, with roughly half of the increase during the next 50 years and the pace accelerating after that. The same report includes an extreme but peer-reviewed scenario where the projected increase soars to 93 inches during that same period — making grim numbers profoundly worse.
So-called king tides already arrive monthly during the winter, a natural occurrence related to the moon’s gravitational pull that can send waves washing past Pier 14 into the Embarcadero’s protected bike lane. Behind Pier 5, water swells up and over the edge of the public walkway. For now, that occasional splash of excitement is less fearsome than fun — but if current forecasts are anywhere near accurate, future generations will face a double bind.
The threat isn’t just that tides might creep upward as temperatures increase. It’s that the extreme rainfall patterns we already experience will grow more intense, those destructive storms that in recent years have introduced terms like atmospheric rivers and bomb cyclones into conversations about the weather. For instance, if daily tides are a foot higher in 2050 than they are now — the “likely” projection — a major storm could surge 36 inches beyond where it would register today.
In the case of the Embarcadero, the hypothetical one-foot rise coupled with an “intense storm” — the sort that in the past might occur every five years — would send bay waters rushing toward the roadway in a dozen locations if the storm hit when winds were brisk and the tide was high. Kick the downpour’s fervor to the scale of the bomb cyclone that hit the Bay Area in October 2021 — a day-long deluge that was the equivalent of what scientists call a 25-year storm — and the Embarcadero could be closed for nearly a mile between Folsom Street and Pier 9. Water spilling across the roadway could flow down into the BART and Muni subway beneath Market Street, potentially paralyzing both systems.
The new plaza and the elevated ferry gates might rebuke the surging tides to come, but the landmark next door would be more vulnerable than ever. The Ferry Building has ridden out many perils since opening day in 1898, from earthquakes and the onslaught of automobiles to political tumult, misguided renovations, and the wear and tear of urban life. Now it faces the implacable though seemingly far-off threat of rising waters, as if nature was determined to restore the marshes and tidal flats that long-dead San Franciscans covered and forgot.
The addition of the granite plaza is an indicator of the danger facing the icon to its north. And it’s not as if our hefty landmark with that vaulted concrete foundation can be jacked up out of harm’s way.
Or can it?
An aerial view of San Francisco’s Ferry Building and the Embarcadero.Michael Lee/Getty Images
Steven Reel headed west from Philadelphia in 1992 to earn a structural engineering degree at Stanford University because, he says now, “structural engineering means ‘earthquakes’ at Stanford, and earthquakes make structural engineering a lot more interesting.” The Bay Area was a good place to live, and local governments were investing heavily in seismic upgrades after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. In 2010, Reel successfully applied for a job at the Port of San Francisco and, to his surprise, grew intrigued by the historic aspects of making an urban shoreline function in the here and now.
“I’d start studying old engineering drawings for projects and then go down the rabbit hole,” recalls Reel, an easygoing bureaucrat with a beard that approached Rasputin-like proportions during the pandemic (he since has trimmed it back). He also began to notice regional planners stressing sea level rise in meetings.
His first project at the port was Brannan Street Wharf, where two ramshackle piers midway between the Bay Bridge and the ballpark were torn out and replaced by a four-hundred-foot-long triangular green. The response to climate concerns involved a slight upward incline from the Embarcadero promenade and a concrete lip along the edge (the same move since used for the plaza near the Ferry Building).
There was another natural threat to consider — the possibility that a tremor on the scale of the Great 1906 San Francisco Earthquake could strike again. Would the Ferry Building and the seawall hold, as before? Or would the three-mile-long agglomeration of boulders and concrete give way after all this time? Reel found himself with a new job title — manager of the seawall program — and responsibilities that included a $450,000 study with consultants being told to diagnose the barrier’s health and prescribe possible remedies.
The findings, released in April 2016, answered some questions and posed a host of others.
The good news is that even with a cataclysmic earthquake, “complete failure of the seawall is unlikely.” The rocks and boulders that form a dike beneath the concrete wouldn’t scatter like marbles. The Financial District wouldn’t be sucked into the bay toward Oakland. But the combination of sandy fill atop soft mud, behind an aged barrier with thousands of potentially moving parts of varying size, is a dangerous combination. The fill was “subject to liquefaction,” the report confirmed, making it likely that the seawall could slump and lurch outward.
“A repeat of the 1906 earthquake is predicted to cause as much as $1b in damage and $1.3b in disruption costs,” the report declared. Better to strengthen the entire three-mile seawall before a disaster struck — though the cost estimates to do this were “on the order of $2 to $3 billion.” The consultants also emphasized that even with an upgraded seawall, the slow-moving threat posed by sea level rise “will necessitate intervention ... over the next 100 years.” Figure that in, and the combined price tag approached $5 billion.
The city approached voters with a $425 million bond in 2018 to fund the first round of projects; smartly, the campaign emphasized seismic concerns, lightening the ominous message with such creative touches as a neighborhood brewpub’s limited-release sour beer dubbed “Seawall’s Sea Puppy.” The bond passed with 83% support. “The earthquake message resonates,” Reel says. “Without it, I don’t think all this would have moved forward as it did.”
It makes sense to tackle the easiest fixes early, given the seismic threats posed to the Bay Area by the San Andreas and other faults. Breaking a daunting future into manageable parts also allows the Port and City Hall to shift attention from the more eye-popping aspects of climate adaptation — such as how potions of the Embarcadero might need to be raised as much as seven feet to prepare for 2100’s more extreme projected water levels.
Which leads us back to the Ferry Building.
As so often has been the case during the landmark’s history, far more is at stake than one particular structure. If the Ferry Building in its heyday represented San Francisco’s prominence within the region and beyond, in the 21st century it embodies how urban waterfronts can be reinvented without sacrificing their past identities. At the same time, the building remains essentially the same as it was in 1898 — a heavy structure of concrete and steel that covers two acres and rises from a foundation atop bundled piles of tree trunks.
The assumption for the past 25 years has been that the landmark’s impressive performance in 1906 and 1989 should ensure similar resilience when the next big earthquake hits. But the most recent geotechnical exam revealed a weak link: the section of the seawall behind the Ferry Building rests in a trench filled with liquefiable sand rather than the rubble that underlies almost everything else. That detail places “the 125-year-old Ferry Building Seawall, building substructure, and surrounding piers at risk of damage in large earthquakes,” according to the most recent Port update.
This isn’t just a concern for architecture buffs. San Francisco’s disaster relief plans treat the outdoor spaces around the landmark as crucial spots for retreat and regrouping. In a worst-case scenario where the Bay Bridge is knocked out of commission, as was the case in 1989, reliable access to a functioning ferry system will be crucial for evacuating people from the downtown scene safely. The new plaza can also serve as a staging area for bringing medical aid and supplies into the city over the water. Regular people who need to connect with family and friends know there won’t be confusion if someone says “let’s find each other at the Ferry Building.”
One solution could be to erect an entirely new seawall around the edge of the Ferry Building’s foundation, in essence creating a basement beneath it. And if you’re doing that, it’s only one more step — albeit sure to be costly and complex — to raise the entire building by several feet and resolve the challenge of sea level rise for another lifetime or two.
“With the Ferry Building, the one thing I know about it is that it has to be saved … it has such a strong identification with the city,” Elaine Forbes, the executive director for the Port, says. “So I talked myself into okaying this big expenditure.”
The Ferry Building, pictured in 1906 after the San Francisco earthquake and fire.Library of Congress
Realistically, adaptation planning in San Francisco and other waterfront cities will involve a variety of responses at a variety of scales. But the situation facing the Ferry Building, as at so many times in its history, is unique unto itself. This time around, the task is to remake a bustling civic icon so that life seemingly goes on as before. If anyone has challenged the need to invest what likely will be hundreds of millions of dollars to save a 125-year-old structure, the argument has gained no traction.
“The price would have to be really, really high before anything would think twice” about whether the Ferry Building’s salvation is more trouble than it’s worth, Reel says. He describes how during the public discussions on what to do about the Embarcadero, attendees would be asked to list priorities. What are you concerned about? What do you love?
In the latter category, Reel recalls, “the Ferry Building kept getting named. People want to see it forever.”
This still leaves an array of unanswered questions. How to decide how big of an engineering gamble to take. Whether to raise the structure, as implausible as that sounds, or build a new seawall to the east that would destroy the immediacy of the connection to the water. And what becomes of the tenants inside the building, especially the locally based merchants, if the building once again becomes a construction zone.
In a much different context, one San Franciscan offered a fatalistic take on what the future might hold: Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Four years before his death in 2021, still living in North Beach, Ferlinghetti sat down in a neighborhood café to talk with a Washington Post writer about the beat era, the 97-year-old poet’s life, and his enduring love for the city that he embraced long ago. At one point, the writer asked Ferlinghetti about what might happen after he was gone.
“It’s all going to be underwater in 100 years or maybe even 50,” Ferlinghetti said with a half-smiled shrug. “The Embarcadero is one of the greatest esplanades in the world. On the weekends, thousands of people strut up and down like it’s the Ramblas in Barcelona. But it’ll all be underwater.”
This article was excerpted and condensed from John King’s book Portal: San Francisco’s Ferry Building and the Reinvention of American Cities, available on Nov. 7 from W. W. Norton & Company ©2023.
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Trump called himself “king” and tried to kill the program, but it might not be so simple.
The Trump administration will try to kill congestion pricing, the first-in-the-nation program that charged cars and trucks up to $9 to enter Manhattan’s traffic-clogged downtown core.
In an exclusive story given to the New York Post, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said that he would rescind the U.S. Transportation Department’s approval of the pricing regime.
“The toll program leaves drivers without any free highway alternative, and instead, takes more money from working people to pay for a transit system and not highways,” Duffy told the Post.
He did not specify an end date for the program, but said that he would work with New York to achieve an “orderly termination” of the tolls. But it’s not clear that he can unilaterally end congestion pricing — and in any case, New York is not eager to work with him to do so.
The attempted cancellation adds another chapter to the decades-long saga over whether to implement road pricing in downtown New York. And it represents another front in the Trump administration’s war on virtually any policy that reduces fossil fuel use and cuts pollution from the transportation sector, the most carbon-intensive sector in the U.S. economy.
“CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED,” Trump posted on Truth Social, the social network that he owns. “LONG LIVE THE KING!”
The Metropolitan Transit Authority, the state agency that oversees New York’s tolling and transit system, has filed to block the cancellation in court. In a statement, New York Governor Kathy Hochul said that Trump didn’t have the authority to kill the tolling program.
“We are a nation of laws, not ruled by a king,” Hochul said. “We’ll see you in court.”
Since it started on January 5, congestion pricing has charged drivers up to $9 to drive into Manhattan south of 60th Street. With its launch, New York joined a small set of world capitals — including London, Singapore, and Stockholm — to use road pricing in its central business district.
Even in its first weeks in Gotham, congestion pricing had seemingly proven successful at its main goal: cutting down on traffic. Travel times to enter Manhattan have fallen and in some cases — such as driving into the Holland Tunnel from New Jersey — have been cut in half during rush hour, according to an online tracker built by economics researchers that uses Google Maps data.
Anecdotally, drivers have reported faster drive times within the city and much less honking overall. (I can affirm that downtown is much quieter now.) City buses zoomed through their routes, at times having to pause at certain stops in order to keep from running ahead of their schedules.
The program has been so successful that it had even begun to turn around in public polling. Although congestion pricing was incredibly unpopular during its long gestation, a majority of New Yorkers now support the program. In early February, six of 10 New Yorkers said that they thought Trump should keep the program and not kill it, according to a Morning Consult poll.
That matches a pattern seen in other cities that adopt congestion pricing, where most voters hate the program until they see that it successfully improves travel times and reduces traffic.
While Trump might now be claiming regal powers to block the program, the toll’s origin story has been democratic to a fault. Although congestion pricing has been proposed in New York for decades, the state’s legislature approved the program in 2019 as part of its long-running search for a permanent source of funding for the city’s trains and buses.
The federal government then studied the program for half a decade, first under Trump, then under Biden, generating thousands upon thousands of pages of environmental and legal review. At long last, the Biden administration granted final approval for the program last year.
But then congestion pricing had to clear another hurdle. In June, Hochul paused the program at the last moment, hoping to find another source of permanent funding for the city’s public transit system.
She didn’t. In November, she announced that the program would go into effect in the new year.
It’s not clear whether the Trump administration can actually kill congestion pricing. When the Biden administration approved the program, it did so essentially as a one-time finding. Duffy may not be able to revoke that finding — just like you can’t un-sign a contract that you’ve already agreed to.
In his letter to Hochul, Duffy argues that congestion pricing breaks a longstanding norm that federally funded highways should not be tolled. “The construction of federal-aid highways as a toll-free highway system has long been one of the most basic and fundamental tenets of the federal-aid Highway Program,” he says.
That argument is surprising because federal highways in Manhattan — such as the West Side Highway — are excluded from the toll by design. Drivers only incur the $9 charge when they leave highways and enter Manhattan’s street grid. And drivers can use the interstate highway system but avoid the congestion charge by entering uptown Manhattan through Interstate 95 and then parking north of 60th Street.
Duffy also argues that the tolling program is chiefly meant to raise revenue for the MTA, not reduce congestion. The federal government’s approval of pilot congestion pricing programs is aimed at cutting traffic, he says, not raising revenue for state agencies.
In its lawsuit, the MTA asserts that Duffy does not have the right to revoke the agreement. It also says that he must conduct the same degree of environmental review to kill the program that the first Trump administration required when the program was originally proposed.
“The status quo is that Congestion Pricing continues, and unless and until a court orders otherwise, plaintiffs will continue to operate the program as required by New York law,” the MTA’s brief says.
Whether they will or not depends on whether all politics really are local, anymore.
JD Vance had a message recently for Germans uneasy about the way Elon Musk has been promoting the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party ahead of their country’s upcoming elections: “If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk,” Vance said at the Munich Security Conference. It was supposed to be a joke, but apparently the vice president of the United States is still peeved at the fact that he had to see a Swedish teenager on his TV saying that we ought to do something about climate change.
Just a throwaway line meant to convey the Trump administration’s general belligerence and contempt for Europeans? Perhaps. But it also communicated that the administration has had it with scolding, not to mention any government actions meant to confront planetary warming; in its first month in power, it has moved swiftly and aggressively to suspend or roll back just about every climate-related policy it could find.
Now congressional Republicans have to pass a budget, and in so doing decide what the law — and not just a bunch of executive orders — will do about all the existing programs to promote clean energy and reduce emissions. That means we’re headed for an intra-GOP conflict. On one side is ideology, in the form of a desire by the administration and many Republicans in Congress to eviscerate government spending in general and climate spending in particular. On the other side are the parochial interests of individual members, who want to make sure that their own constituents are protected even if it means their party doesn’t get everything it wants.
Climate hawks got optimistic last summer when 18 House Republicans sent a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson imploring him not to push for wholesale repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark 2022 climate law filled subsidies for clean energy, since their districts are benefiting from the boom in manufacturing the law helped spur. About 80% of the green energy funding from the IRA is going to Republican districts; in some places that means thousands of local jobs depend on the free flow of federal funds.
While some of the largest spending is concentrated in the South, especially the areas that have come to be known as the “Battery Belt,” there are hundreds of congressional districts around the country that benefit from IRA largesse. That’s an old best practice of policy design, one the defense industry has used to particularly good effect: The wider you spread the subcontracts or subsidies, the more members of Congress have jobs in their district that rely on the program and the safer it will be from future budget cuts.
The IRA could have some other allies in its corner; for instance, automakers that are struggling to bring the prices of their electric models to an affordable level will be lobbying to retain the tax subsidy that can reduce the sticker price of an electric vehicle by $7,500. There is already a backlash brewing to the administration’s freeze on climate-related programs in rural areas. Many farmers entered into contracts with the federal government in which they would be reimbursed for land conservation and renewable energy projects; after taking loans and laying out their own money believing the government would honor its part of the agreement, they’ve been left holding the bag.
So will Congress step in to ensure that some climate funding remains? This is the point in the story where we inevitably invoke former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill’s dictum that “All politics is local.” No matter what issue you’re working on, O’Neill insisted, what matters most is how it affects the folks back home, and the most successful politicians are those who know how to address their constituents’ most immediate problems.
Like many such aphorisms, it’s often true, but not always. While there are many members of Congress whose careers live or die on their ability to satisfy the particular needs of their districts, today national politics and party loyalty exert a stronger pull than ever. The correlation between presidential and House votes has grown stronger over time, meaning that voters overwhelmingly choose the same party for president and their own member of Congress. Even the most attentive pothole-filling representative won’t last long in a district that doesn’t lean toward their party.
Which is perfectly rational: Given the limited influence a single House member has, you might as well vote for the party you hope will control Washington rather than splitting your ticket, no matter who is on the ballot. That doesn’t mean members of Congress have stopped working to bring home the bacon, but it does mean that the pressure on them to deliver concrete benefits to the voters back home has lessened considerably. And when the congressional leadership says, “We really need your vote on this one,” members are more likely to go along.
There will be some horse-trading and pushback on the administration’s priorities as Congress writes its budget — for instance, farm state members are already angry about the destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which buys billions of dollars of agricultural products from American farmers to distribute overseas, and will press to get that funding restored. And with a razor-thin majority in the House, individual members could have more leverage to demand that the programs that benefit their districts be preserved.
On the other hand, this is not an administration of compromisers and legislative dealmakers. Trump and his officials see aggression and dominance as ends in and of themselves, apart from the substance of any policy at issue. Not only are they determined to slash government spending in ways never seen before, they seem indifferent to the consequences of the cuts. For their part, Republicans in Congress seem willing to abdicate to Trump their most important power, to determine federal spending. And if Trump succeeds in his goal of rewriting the Constitution to allow the president to simply refuse to spend what the law requires, Congress could preserve climate spending only to see it effectively cancelled by the White House.
Which he would probably do, given that it is almost impossible to overstate the hostility Trump himself and those around him have for climate-related programs, especially those signed into law by Joe Biden. That’s true even when those programs support goals Trump claims to hold, such as revitalizing American manufacturing.
What those around Trump certainly don’t want to hear is any “scolding” about the effects of climate change, and they’re only slightly more open to arguments about the parochial interests of members of Congress from their own party. As in almost every budget negotiation, we probably won’t know until the last minute which programs survive and which get the axe. But there are going to be casualties; the only question is how many.
A new Data for Progress poll provided exclusively to Heatmap shows steep declines in support for the CEO and his business.
Nearly half of likely U.S. voters say that Elon Musk’s behavior has made them less likely to buy or lease a Tesla, a much higher figure than similar polls have found in the past, according to a new Data for Progress poll provided exclusively to Heatmap.
The new poll, which surveyed a national sample of voters over the President’s Day weekend, shows a deteriorating public relations situation for Musk, who has become one of the most powerful individuals in President Donald Trump’s new administration.
Exactly half of likely voters now hold an unfavorable view of Musk, a significant increase since Trump’s election. Democrats and independents are particularly sour on the Tesla CEO, with 81% of Democrats and 51% of independents reporting unfavorable views.
By comparison, 42% of likely voters — and 71% of Republicans — report a favorable opinion of Musk. The billionaire is now eight points underwater with Americans, with 39% of likely voters reporting “very” unfavorable views. Musk is much more unpopular than President Donald Trump, who is only about 1.5 points underwater in FiveThirtyEight’s national polling average.
Perhaps more ominous for Musk is that many Americans seem to be turning away from Tesla, the EV manufacturer he leads. About 45% of likely U.S. voters say that they are less likely to buy or lease a Tesla because of Musk, according to the new poll.
That rejection is concentrated among Democrats and independents, who make up an overwhelming share of EV buyers in America. Two-thirds of Democrats now say that Musk has made them less likely to buy a Tesla, with the vast majority of that group saying they are “much less likely” to do so. Half of independents report that Musk has turned them off Teslas. Some 21% of Democrats and 38% of independents say that Musk hasn’t affected their Tesla buying decision one way or the other.
Republicans, who account for a much smaller share of the EV market, do not seem to be rushing in to fill the gap. More than half of Republicans, or 55%, say that Musk has had no impact on their decision to buy or lease a Tesla. While 23% of Republicans say that Musk has made them more likely to buy a Tesla, roughly the same share — 22% — say that he has made them less likely.
Tesla is the world’s most valuable automaker, worth more than the next dozen or so largest automakers combined. Musk’s stake in the company makes up more than a third of his wealth, according to Bloomberg.
Thanks in part to its aging vehicle line-up, Tesla’s total sales fell last year for the first time ever, although it reported record deliveries in the fourth quarter. The United States was Tesla’s largest market by revenue in 2024.
Musk hasn’t always been such a potential drag on Tesla’s reach. In February 2023, soon after Musk’s purchase of Twitter, Heatmap asked U.S. adults whether the billionaire had made them more or less likely to buy or lease a Tesla. Only about 29% of Americans reported that Musk had made them less likely, while 26% said that he made them more likely.
When Heatmap asked the question again in November 2023, the results did not change. The same 29% of U.S. adults said that Musk had made them less likely to buy a Tesla.
By comparison, 45% of likely U.S. voters now say that Musk makes them less likely to get a Tesla, and only 17% say that he has made them more likely to do so. (Note that this new result isn’t perfectly comparable with the old surveys, because while the new poll surveyed likely voters , the 2023 surveys asked all U.S. adults.)
Musk’s popularity has also tumbled in that time. As recently as September, Musk was eight points above water in Data for Progress’ polling of likely U.S. voters.
Since then, Musk has become a power player in Republican politics and been made de facto leader of the Department of Government Efficiency. He has overseen thousands of layoffs and sought to win access to computer networks at many federal agencies, including the Department of Energy, the Social Security Administration, and the IRS, leading some longtime officials to resign in protest.
Today, he is eight points underwater — a 16-point drop in five months.
“We definitely have seen a decline, which I think has mirrored other pollsters out there who have been asking this question, especially post-election,” Data for Progress spokesperson Abby Springs, told me.
The new Data for Progress poll surveyed more than 1,200 likely voters around the country on Friday, February 14, and Saturday, February 15. Its results were weighted by demographics, geography, and recalled presidential vote. The margin of error was 3 percentage points.