The plan embodied the latest thinking in urban-planning circles: a transit hub that would replace a dilapidated Depression-era bus station and connect to commuter and high-speed rail, surrounded by a dense, mixed-use, mixed-income (35 percent of the planned 4,400 housing units are designated as affordable) development.

Back in 2005, city officials approved a plan to redevelop what they dubbed the Transbay District-a rundown 40-acre area to the south of the city’s financial center where a now-demolished freeway and ramps once cut through. But with some key functionality missing, it must wait to fulfill its larger mission.Ĭonceived as the “Grand Central Station of the West,” the nearly $2.3 billion project has been more than 10 years in the making, a saga of funding problems, budget overruns, political scuffles, and delays of the kind that seem to bedevil all large public infrastructure projects in the U.S. It also presents an alluring vision of a sustainable future. The 1.2 million-square-foot center, designed by Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects, helps to assert a new identity for the city, as a metropolis of distinctly contemporary density and form. A grand act of place making, San Francisco’s just-opened Salesforce Transit Center elevates an oft-mundane building type-a mass transit station-with a 5.4-acre public park, one of the largest accessible green roofs in the country.

Salesforce transit center park