2 concepts for shaping region’s future shoreline

During the past week, I’ve encountered two emphatically different visions for how our metropolitan region’s shoreline can evolve. Funny thing is, they don’t contradict each other at all.

In one, a levee was breached along San Pablo Bay to let saltwater flood a former ranch and begin to turn it back into a tidal marsh. The other imagines the Richmond shoreline with a naturalistic delta on the north and an urbanized lattice of piers on the south.

One is futuristic design, the other resets the clock. And as sea level changes reshape the bay in coming generations, the San Francisco Bay Area will need to draw on each approach to endure and thrive.

“This looks like a plan, but it’s not. It’s intended as a provocation,” said Tom Leader, a landscape architect who grew up in Richmond and still lives there, though his studio is in Berkeley. “This is an opportunity to work with topography, rather than against it.”

Leader is one of the region’s more imaginative designers, with a local portfolio that includes the spaces around new buildings at Stanford University. He also operates in a more speculative realm, and this year he led his interns in tackling how his hometown might recalibrate itself given scientific forecasts that the bay’s average tide could rise at least 3 feet by 2100.

Assuming that organizations like the National Academy of Sciences know their stuff, the prognosis for Richmond is as bleak as the likelihood that the 49ers will watch Super Bowl 50 from the sideline.

By 2100, the currently accepted upper range projection has the bay’s daily tides nearly 6 feet higher than they are today. Under that scenario — and if no defensive measures are taken — the city’s west edge, including Point Richmond, would be separated from the mainland by marshes, much as it was before dikes created land for Interstate 580, railroad yards and portions of the Chevron refinery.

Uh-oh.

New attractions

Leader’s “Richmond Bayway” takes this as a given and uses the altered shoreline to strengthen existing neighborhoods and add new attractions to a city better known for past crime rates than such current attractions as the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front national park.

On the northern shoreline, the dikes would be removed. The constrained paths of Wildcat and San Pablo creeks would be opened and dotted with shell mound-like forms to let water spread out and (re)naturalize the area. Landscaped berms made from compacted soil would lift the Richmond Parkway, a key roadway for the city.

Since all these changes cost money — and it isn’t good politics to flood much of your tax base — an updated industrial zone is concentrated near the south shore close to Marina Bay. Leader conceives this area as a modernistic portal, an outward symbol for the renewed city that also includes housing for people who’ll use the San Francisco-bound ferry that is set to launch in a few years.

All this is speculative, of course. But when Leader showed his concepts last week to Meeting of the Minds, a conference on urban innovation held in Richmond, it struck a chord. If a city wants to be “smart,” a theme of the conference, why stop with turning recycled water into beer?

“Cities do an excellent job at dealing with imminent issues,” Leader said. “Where do you find the resources, inclination or time to think about 2100?”

The same question can be applied to an apparently simpler task, the reclamation of former tidal marshes so that — among other environmental benefits — they can serve as a buffer zone that absorbs the rising bay levels ahead.

Back to marshland

One such reclamation began Sunday, when an excavation machine scraped back part of a levee holding back San Pablo Bay from a former marsh south of Highway 37 near the Petaluma River. Since the late 1800s, the 1,000 acres behind the levee had been Sears Point Ranch, but the Sonoma Land Trust spent the past decade planning and then prepping it to be part of the bay once again.

This was a feel-good event, and no wonder: The bay needs at least 100,000 acres of tidal marshlands to survive as a healthy ecosystem, according to a 1999 report sponsored by the federal Environmental Protection Agency and state Water Resources Control Board. Since then, the amount of bay marshland has climbed by 18,000 acres to 58,000 acres, with an additional 14,000 acres purchased for restoration.

The basin near Sears Point will need at least 20 years to evolve into a functioning marsh that can be resilient amid rising sea levels. According to a detailed update of the 1999 study released last week by the state’s Coastal Conservancy, any marshes that aren’t fully established by 2050 or so might not be able to withstand the projected changes.

There’s talk of a regional tax measure in 2016 to raise $500 million over the next 20 years, roughly one-third the estimated price tag for reaching the 100,000-acre goal. But even if it passes, there are large urbanized stretches along the bay that line deep water. You’ll never see marshes rustling San Francisco’s Embarcadero, for instance.

In the decades ahead, the Bay Area needs to accelerate marsh restoration efforts wherever it can. It also needs to be open-minded about initiatives that change how cities meet their shorelines. Sometimes, protection and provocation aren’t all that far apart.