November 13th, 2008 Giving Treasure Island a Green Facelift
Posted by
Bruce in
Ecoathlete This past weekend, I traveled to the Bay Area to participate in the San Francisco Triathlon at Treasure Island. After a long season, I was looking forward to finishing up the year with a solid race in one of my favorite cities. Turns out I finished first in the elite women’s race!
While I love the city of San Francisco, man-made Treasure Island, a former Naval base in the San Francisco Bay, is hardly the most appealing venue for a race. Since being decommissioned in 1997, maintenance on the island’s infrastructure has suffered and the roads are notoriously bad for riding — they are a veritable minefield of potholes and loose gravel. Athletes get flat tires on this course every year and I’m no exception having flatted a few years ago.
While Tri California does a great job running the race, and the venue is easily accessible from the Bay Bridge, the rundown nature of the venue is a deterrent for athletes. But the good news is that Treasure Island is about to receive a green facelift, making it a model in sustainability.
Starting in 2009, Treasure Island and neighboring Yerba Buena Island are scheduled to begin their transformations. The first step inthe process is to finish the massive clean-up project started by the Navy of removing the remaining petroleum, solvents, metals, and other toxic substances. An outside development firm will then tackle the extensive construction project, turning the island into a high-density residential area. Also proposed is a ferry terminal facing San Francisco, a wind farm, an organic farm, parkland and tidal marshes.
In all, 5,500 units of LEED-certified housing are proposed in the form of several low-rise and a few high-rise buildings. In all, the islands will house about 13,500 residents. And about 30% of the units are required to be affordable – meaning, they must be within reach of households making the median household income for San Francisco.
An impressive amount of attention is being placed on water quality for the island. The developers look to recycle water with a small-footprint, state-of-the-art treatment facility. And they are integrating artificial wetlands for storm water runoff treatment and are planning to build infiltration systems to minimize storm-water runoff including living roofs, storing roof runoff, and using porous road materials.
While the proposed building process may put a damper on the near-term future of the Treasure Island Triathlon, I look forward to the redevelopment of the island with great anticipation.
Our country tends to be shortsighted in our development of land, wastefully building further and further out from urban centers by creating sprawling energy-hungry suburbs and exburbs. This was a trend that was glaringly apparent when I raced in Dallas.
Treasure Island, on the other hand, offers a chance to redevelop existing urban property. Hopefully, it's a sign of a shift in our country to more sustainable building.
In regards to the triathlon, I can’t imagine a better place to race when Treasure Island's green facelift is complete. Athletes will be able to take a 10-minute ferry from downtown San Francisco and enjoy the island itself as much as the incredible views of the Bay that it already has. I’ll also bet that the road surfaces will be greatly improved!
For more information, check out these links:
http://www.sfgov.org/site/treasureisland_index.asp
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/12/15/DDG7DG7HVP1.DTL
http://gliving.tv/architecture-design/san-franciscos-green-treasure-island-development/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Island_development
