Living in a national park, in San Francisco

While there are more than 1,000 apartments and houses for rent in the Presidio, occupancy rates remain high, and the waiting list can stretch to a year. To meet this demand, however, the Presidio is bringing several hundred new units to market.

The Presidio manages to be a refuge to its residents because it has been spared of any meaningful development. A wooded, hilly patchwork at the north-west tip of San Francisco, the site was originally occupied by a Spanish fort. It came under US military control in 1846 and would remain with the army for 150 years.

In 1994 stewardship of the area passed from the military to the US National Park Service. It soon became clear, however, that the park service could not support its new charge. With a complex infrastructure and hundreds of ageing buildings, it costs more to maintain the former military base than it does to look after both Yellowstone and Yosemite, two of the US’s busiest parks.

Recognising as much, Congress, led by San Francisco representative Nancy Pelosi, acted to set up the Presidio Trust, a public-private partnership that would renovate and lease out the buildings to make the area financially self-sustaining. The trust hired a local developer, the John Stewart Company, to oversee the residential portion of the project and in 1998 the first tenants moved in.

This peace and stability appeals to families. In the Presidio 30 per cent of households have children, compared with 17 per cent in San Francisco as a whole.

Though the Presidio is steeped in heritage, some incremental changes are allowed to proceed. A freeway on-ramp to the Golden Gate Bridge is being torn down and replaced with a tunnel. Over the tunnel will be a park that connects the residential areas directly to the bay. Though new buildings are frowned upon, exceptions are made. Industrial Light & Magic was permitted to build some new structures, though they mimicked the design of extant ones nearby. At the new Walt Disney Family Museum (a tribute to the man, not the company), a large glass enclosure was added to a historic barracks building.

These new flourishes, along with the immaculately maintained historic setting, make the Presidio a neighbourhood unlike any other in the US, and perhaps the world.

[Excerpted from  "Park life" by David Gelles. Published: October 24 2009 in The Financial Times http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/c8f16cc2-be9f-11de-b4ab-00144feab49a.html]