More than 40 years ago, a citizens movement led the Legislature to establish the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC) to keep the Bay shoreline from being turned into new waterfront real estate. Now, ironically, accelerating sea-level rise poses a new challenge: How to keep important places along the Bay shore from being inundated.

Will Travis has been watching the Bay change since he went to work for BCDC in 1970, when the newly created regulatory agency was looking to hire its first permanent staff; he arrived with freshly completed bachelor of architecture and master of regional planning degrees from Pennsylvania State University. It’s been a solid and long-lasting match.

Coast & Ocean talked with Travis, executive director of BCDC, in his downtown San Francisco office, from which he overlooks the Ferry Building and Bay Bridge--and might someday look out over new buildings offshore, atop new levees installed to keep the sea out of the financial district.

--Rasa Gustaitis

C&O: So this is an odd predicament, isn’t it? You’ve worked for 44 years to keep landfill out of the Bay so it wouldn’t get smaller, but now we’re all worried because it’s getting bigger.

Will Travis: In 1965 the Bay was a third smaller than it was in 1850. A lot of it had been filled. Where we’re sitting right now, we’re on filled land. This was Yerba Buena Cove in the 1850s. This is where ships bringing miners to the Gold Country anchored.

So we’re probably sitting on top of some ships right here, they’re part of the fill.

Exactly, and around the Bay vast areas were diked off and filled. Then in 1959 the Army Corps of Engineers did a study of the plans to fill the Bay in the future, and they concluded that 60 percent of the remaining Bay was shallow enough to fill. Two-thirds of it was less than 12 feet deep.

In the study they had a map that showed the Bay where it was in 1849, in ‘59, and where it would likely be in 2020--that it would be reduced to little more than a wide river. When that map appeared in the newspapers it alarmed people, so they went to Sacramento and had this new agency created, the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, BCDC. Our charge is largely to keep the Bay from getting smaller by regulating landfill projects. And we’ve done a pretty good job of that. As a result, the Bay is 22 square miles larger now than it was in 1965.

That includes all the wetland restoration now happening?

I’m not counting that. When you take everything else into account it’s many square miles larger. And now we have data that as a result of global warming, the Bay waters have risen about seven inches since 1900. We know this because we have 155 years of data. The oldest continuously operating tide gauge is at the Golden Gate (see Coast & Ocean, Vol. 20, no. 4). And scientists tell us that in the next century, if we continue as usual, we will see the waters rise a meter to 1.4 meters, about 39 to 55 inches.

So here we have an agency that was created to deal with the Bay getting smaller and has the legal authority to deal with that problem. But the problem of the future is that the Bay is getting bigger, and BCDC had absolutely no responsibility or authority to deal with that. So we sponsored legislation that was passed last year to give BCDC the responsibility to address climate change and sea-level rise in our planning activities. It gives us no change in our regulatory authority. We have produced maps that show what the impact of a meter of sea-level rise would be. Downtown San Francisco, international airports at Oakland and San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and parts of the North Bay are all less than a meter [39.37 inches] above sea level.

Thanks to fill.

Thanks to the fact that we filled 240 square miles of the Bay--but only high enough to get it above sea level, and that’s fine as long as sea level stays where it’s supposed to be. So now we’re looking at how to deal with this new problem.

In 1965, when the Bay was getting smaller, the Legislature said, “Come up with a regional plan and bring it back to us.” We think that a very similar approach should work for sea-level rise: Study the whole region and come up with a regional plan.

There is adaptation planning going on, led by the Ocean Protection Council, an ocean and coastal adaptation effort, and we are part of that. But it’s interesting, the difference between the coast and the Bay in terms of approaches and problems. Because we have this low-lying fill area around the Bay, we’re going to have a lot of area inundated--area that’s covered with very expensive development. On the coast, you’re going to be hit with a lot more erosion; we don’t have that problem.

Also, the Bay is the most urbanized estuary in the United States, and we always like to say that the most important word in the name of the agency is “and”: we are both conservation and development. We measure our success, to a large degree, in the health of the estuarine system and the prosperity of the region around it. We are always trying to balance the two. So as we’re looking ahead and looking at a regional strategy, we will have to look at those areas that are simply so valuable that we will have to protect them from sea-level rise, no matter what: downtown San Francisco, the airports, Silicon Valley, other communities around the Bay.

There are other areas where, when you start to look at the costs of putting those protective devices in, you will find that they are so high and it’s so difficult to do that you will approach that technique somewhat hesitantly and reluctantly.

Such as?

The salt ponds of the South Bay and the North Bay, where you have an area that can accommodate sea-level rise and allow wetlands to migrate. But the challenge will be in areas that don’t easily fit into those two categories--low-lying areas that are not yet developed.

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.”

I heard you’ve invited the Dutch to come in as consultants. They certainly have experience with holding back the sea.

The Dutch have an initiative to climate-proof their country. In Holland that’s a national policy. We’re looking at a meter to a meter and a half of sea-level rise [39-55 inches], they’re looking so far into the future they’re talking about five to seven meters [16-23 feet].

They’re below sea level now.

So they’ve initiated a series of partnerships with deltas around the world--San Francisco Bay, Mississippi, Nile, Mekong, and Yangtze. They have expertise, engineering knowhow, and they want to export these. From our perspective, we want to capture that expertise, learn from them, and then export what we learn in the Bay Area to other parts of the world. We have developed a partnership with the Dutch. And we’re going to have a symposium in San Francisco this summer. The Dutch will bring their experts, we will bring some of the engineers and designers in the Bay Area, and we’ll talk about what we can learn from each other.

For example, they have a low-lying area that is already protected by a dike, and they wanted to build a community behind it. The dike is not high enough to deal with sea-level rise, so they could have put in a very expensive higher dike. Instead they decided to build a secondary levee at the back side of that dike, much as will be done at the South Bay salt ponds to protect Silicon Valley.

At the back?

Inland. So you have a vast low-lying area that is now below sea level but dry and will end up being below sea level and wet if they let the levee overtop. So they built a whole community back there but designed it so it floats, and then they partly breached the levee. They let the water in now and it doesn’t matter how high the water gets.

Fantastic!

I looked at it and said, this is just marvelous. And they said, “We got the idea from Sausalito.” That was never designed to be a houseboat community, it was designed as a series of marinas that were supposed to accommodate the boats anchored out in Richardson Bay. They were polluting the Bay, they were fire hazards. We thought we’d approve these marinas, and the live-aboard boats would move into them and we’d connect them to sewer and water and electricity.

Well, what happened was that the people in the boats didn’t move in, and a whole industry sprang up where they poured these huge concrete hulls--essentially concrete basements that float--and they put those in the marina berths and built suburban houses on them. BCDC approved marinas for hippies and ended up with marinas for yuppies! But the Dutch looked at it and said, “What a perfect solution for a low-lying area, let’s put in a community that floats.”

So we’re trying to stimulate people to be innovative, to deal with these low-lying areas. There are a whole lot of ways we can think about this.

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.

How much time is there? Climate change is moving faster than had been expected.

We already have winter storms that flood parts of the San Francisco waterfront; they’ve been doing that for years. And sea-level rise is not like a slowly filling bathtub, because another component of climate change is that we’ll have more severe storm surges.

I can’t imagine public support for an outer levee with development on top. But this is an interesting time to think about these things, with massive public works projects coming up.

I agree. And we’re working with our colleagues at the Metropolitan Transportation Commission because the Bay is ringed by roads, railroads, BART, airports. We’re doing an analysis of which of those are vulnerable to sea-level rise. How do you retrofit a freeway so that it protects itself? And how do you approve development outboard of the freeway so it too is resilient to sea-level rise and it too provides protection for the freeway? So you have new types of structures that are multipurpose. They are flood-protective, resilient, and they provide protection for other low-lying areas. And interestingly, wetlands are probably the best example of resilient structures because the wider the wetland, the lower the level has to be behind it because wetlands are like enormous sponges. And of course tidal wetlands are doubly beneficial because they sequester carbon.

This is major adaptive management you’re talking about.

Proactive management we like to call it. You put the conditions in place that you hope will bring the reaction you want when the changes that are inevitable come about.

What kind of response are you getting to these ideas?

A good response, because I think we have connected the dots. It’s not conservation and development anymore, it’s not protection and restoration; it’s thinking about this systematically in a new way. We are getting good receptivity because we are not saying we have the answers. We say, here are the questions.