San Francisco has been repeatedly tested—by earthquakes, by fires, and most recently by the Covid-19 pandemic. The 2025 Lewis Center Sustainability Forum, held during the ULI Fall Meeting in San Francisco, explored ways that local leaders in planning, policy, and development are advancing urban strength and adaptability amid increasing climate and social stresses.
The first panel covered Mission Rock, a 28 acre (11 ha) mixed-use waterfront development just south of Oracle Park. Created through a partnership among the San Francisco Giants, Tishman Speyer, and the Port of San Francisco, the development integrated climate adaptation from the ground up. Its first phase—two office buildings, two multifamily structures, and the five-acre (2 ha) China Basin Park that SCAPE Landscape Architecture designed—was completed in 2024.
Rising sea levels posed a big challenge. “It was very clear that there [would] have to be some significant amount of raising of the site, and this land was already questionable land to begin with,” said Jonathan Flaherty, managing director and global head of sustainability and building technologies at Tishman Speyer. “The site is all built on fill. It has settled over time in a number of ways that were challenging for development.”
The solution involved raising the entire site approximately five feet. “We deployed two types of fill: a lightweight glass aggregate fill, which can get wet, in order to create a dry surface for our next layer of fill, a lightweight concrete cellular product,” said Paul Rode, managing director and head of engineering and property operations at Tishman Speyer. “The idea was to build a resilient sea wall.” By the year 2100, a portion of the park will be submerged, by design.
The developers worked with Ever-Green Energy to incorporate a district energy system and an on-site blackwater treatment plant. “When you talk about district systems, the value is in the pipes, not the production,” said Michael Auger, senior vice president and chief business officer at Ever-Green Energy. “The pipes allow you to do different things over time, as technologies change and emerge.” Although the district energy system relies on traditional chillers and boilers now, it is designed to use a bay water geoexchange system for heating and cooling in the future.
The district energy system’s heat recovery chillers capture waste heat for heating. “Traditionally, in these systems, the most consumption comes through water . . . whereas the blackwater system is able to send that nonpotable water to the cooling tower,” said Noah Fennessy, general manager of California operations at Ever-Green Energy.
The Kelsey
A second panel profiled The Kelsey Civic Center, directly across from San Francisco City Hall. A winning project in C40’s global Reinventing Cities competition, which aims to speed development of decarbonized, resilient urban regeneration, the building’s 112 studio and two-bedroom apartments serve households earning 20–80 percent of the area median income.
“Twenty-five percent of the units are reserved for people with disabilities who use Home and Community-Based Services to live independently,” said Fiona Ruddy, senior project manager at Mercy Housing California, which developed the project in a joint venture with The Kelsey, a local nonprofit organization devoted to accelerating the creation of affordable, inclusive community housing.
The Kelsey opened in October and is 100 percent leased. The success of the collaboration between the two organizations depended on careful groundwork, Ruddy said: “We needed to set very clear goals that we could come back to as a project team as we were evaluating decisions along the way.”
Those goals—affordability, accessibility, inclusivity, and sustainability—were ranked in that order. “You can’t have four goals that are all equal, because then you’re at a standstill,” said Louisa Bukiet, senior manager of housing at The Kelsey. “There were hard decisions for us, and the hierarchy allowed us to understand how to make those decisions.”
For example, the team spent months evaluating cross-laminated timber (CLT) as a structural system but ultimately chose a low-carbon concrete instead. “We knew that it was going to be less risk for a project, from a financial standpoint, to go with the concrete building than it was to go with CLT,” Ruddy said.
Bukiet noted that sustainability and accessibility often reinforced each other. The transit-oriented location reduces vehicle miles traveled while supporting residents with disabilities who rely on public transportation, she said. Eliminating gas appliances in favor of an all-electric design cuts greenhouse gas emissions while improving indoor air quality for residents with chemical sensitivities or asthma.
“The central courtyard plays many different roles,” Bukiet said. “It serves as the lungs of the building, bringing in fresh air to everyone. It’s also a beautiful green space. The units open onto open-air walkways that [offer views] down into the courtyard. That means that residents are constantly interacting with each other across that space. It’s a way to create more connection.”
Laurie Johnson, principal, Laurie Johnson Consulting; Senator Scott Wiener, Senator of District 11, California State Senate; Colleen Graham, Senior Director, Tishman Speyer; and Tyrone Jue, director, San Francisco Environment Department, speaking at the 2025 ULI Sustainability Forum in San Francisco.
(ULI/Cheri Tran Snaps)
Building urban strength
In the third panel, which explored the topic of urban strength—defined as the social, economic, and institutional frameworks that allow communities to withstand and recover from shocks—Scott Wiener, senator of the California State Senate’s District 11, echoed the importance of strong bonds between residents as a key element of resilience. “To me, [urban strength] means having people who are connected to each other in a community and know their neighbors,” he said. “It helps in disasters, but also, so many of our modern afflictions have to do with increasing deterioration of community cohesion. The other [piece is] having the physical stuff—housing, infrastructure, parks, health care. When we talk about how we need to make it easier to get permits and build things, it’s not just about making things more affordable but also about being able to have all these essential elements.”
Laurie Johnson, principal of Laurie Johnson Consulting, emphasized that disasters create windows for transformative change and that successful leaders tend to be open and engaged after a crisis. “The more you can build a large tent, the more you bring people along in thinking about things that are hard to think about otherwise,” she said. “Look at Los Angeles right now. It is incredible, the amount of organizations that have come to help with the recovery—people at the neighborhood level, people innovating by 3-D–printing buildings.”
Kate Gordon, CEO of California Forward and panel moderator, highlighted a fundamental challenge in building urban resilience: “In a climate disaster, the developer is in for 18 months, and then they’re out, their risk is over,” she said. “The tenant is in for seven years, and then they’re out. The homeowner is in for a little longer, and the lender is in for a little longer. Government is always in on risk. Someone’s got to be making decisions that are for the health of the general fund, the taxpayers’ money, the long-term planning.”
Tyrone Jue, director of the San Francisco Environment Department, pointed to San Francisco’s history of reinvention following the 1906 and 1989 earthquakes as examples of disaster catalyzing long-term improvements. “The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake caused the city to reinvent itself, [with people] asking, ‘How do we treat these older buildings in terms of soft-story retrofits?’” The result was the creation of the Mandatory Soft Story Retrofit Ordinance. “Now, about 90 percent of our buildings are retrofitted to the standard,” he said.
After the panels, attendees took a walking tour of Mission Rock led by Tishman Speyer representatives Robert Edelenbos, regional director of engineering; Jonathan Flaherty; Colleen Graham, senior director; Paul Rode; and Kristian Weeks, senior director.
