We can look out through your window and see--Treasure Island.

Treasure Island is 400 acres, created for the Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939-40 by building a big levee system and filling it with dredged material. Geologically it’s incredibly unstable; it’s terrible in an earthquake. So you look at it and say, we should abandon that. On the other hand, San Francisco and its development partners are coming up with a plan for Treasure Island which clusters the development around a ferry terminal, so you won’t have to rely on the automobile. In fact, it will be difficult to get on and off the island by automobile; you’ll have to pay a toll--but the ferry system will be going back and forth to SF. The lowest part of the built environment will be at least a meter above sea level, and the rest of the island will be low-lying farmland and restored wetlands.

Farmland?

Yes, farmland, wetlands. It’s designed as a sustainable community. So both approaches--walk away, or design it in a way that’s resilient--have validity. But if the sea levels rise higher than those elevations, then the areas behind them may flood. So it may make sense in some of those low-lying areas to design some development we call “no regrets planning”: we know the waters are coming up, we don’t know how fast and how far, but you design your project so it will accommodate whatever it is. And you design it in a way that would provide some protection to the areas behind it that would otherwise flood.

On stilts?

Perhaps on stilts, but also on massive flood-control levees. So it may be that a regional strategy for the Bay will involve some protection, some wide area of protected wetlands, and some kinds of resilient development. But as I say, those low-lying areas that are not yet developed, or worse yet, that are developed but with low-value structures, you look at those and say--from a cost-benefit analysis standpoint--you’ve got a bunch of homes here, but they are not of a high quality and they’re reaching the end of their design life and it will take a lot of money to protect them. They are the Bay Area equivalent of New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward.

But people are living in them.

That’s their community. So we’re going to have some very difficult choices as we develop a regional strategy, but we think it has to be done. We’ve got 54 local governments around the Bay. You need a regional approach with some overarching policy guidelines.

Sounds like urban renewal of a different kind.

Along the Mississippi River, after it flooded for the third or fourth time in the memory of people living there, the Corps of Engineers said, “We’ve been telling you not to rebuild, we’ve built the best levees we can, it continues to overtop them, how about this time we just buy you out and you move?” And most people accepted that. So you will face resistance, but at some point society will just say, “This doesn’t make sense anymore.”