So you come up with these ideas, then look for an opportunity to put them to work?

We’re going to have an international design competition. We’ll say, here’s the problem, architects, planners, students, innovators, thinkers, people who grow bamboo, Dutch--how do you think we should deal with this? Hopefully we’ll get a lot of ideas, select the best, advance maybe five of those to greater detail. It’s not to come up with a conclusion--it’s to stimulate people to think about the problem differently. And what we think will emerge are some techniques that will probably be incorporated not only in what we’re doing around the Bay but in low-lying areas around the world.

And then we’ll have to change some rules--just as we changed the rules because the Bay was getting smaller. In 1965 the State of California said, “Each local government has up to now had control of the Bay, and each has been allowing the Bay to be filled.” Each would have been nuts to stop because they were getting rid of their garbage without hauling it long distances, they were creating areas for their communities to expand, areas where businesses and industries could locate--they were creating taxable real estate--but it was the classic tragedy of the commons: the regional resource was being destroyed. So the State said, “We’re changing the rules.”

And now it’s time for another round of rules?

It will be hard to change. BCDC was designed to stop the treatment of the Bay as ordinary real estate. Now, the financial district is subject to flooding. The financial district is ringed by a series of piers that were built to accommodate the shipping technology of the 19th century, the clipper ships. It’s a historic district, and we’re preserving it, finding different ways to use it. But how are we protected from sea-level rise?

Well, I guess we could build a sea wall between the piers and downtown. That would be as ugly as the Embarcadero Freeway that got torn town. So maybe the solution is to go outboard of the piers and build a system of levees and dikes out there, so that downtown would be protected and the piers would retain their historic and architectural appearance, but they would open to, in essence, a lagoon.

Well, that’s awful deep water out there. That would be expensive as a public works project. The Dutch turned to the private sector, said you can build it wide enough so you can have something on top. In essence you can have a one-street village. You put development on it. So in essence you’re creating real estate. But just maybe that would be one component in a regional strategy for San Francisco Bay. We would treat the Bay as ordinary real estate to be sold to the private sector who could fill it so they could build development on it that would be sufficient to build the public works structure we want. In other words, exactly the problem that BCDC was created to solve in the 20th century may be the solution for a different problem in the 21st century.

Let me be perfectly clear: that’s not what I’m proposing. But we’ve got to open our minds to considering every possible solution to this problem.

Whew! What would be a better solution?

Frankly, I haven’t come up with a good one. You either abandon San Francisco and the piers, you lose the piers and isolate them, you tear the piers down and build a levee system along there, or you go out into the Bay. I can’t come up with another solution.