As low-income residents relocate to wildfire territory outside the urban core, San Francisco's high-income residents have gravitated toward luxury waterfront developments.
For the last several years, developers have been building an $8 billion neighborhood at the city's Hunters Point Shipyard, located directly along the San Francisco Bay. Condos there were priced up to $1.5 million as of last year. Developers are also planning a $1.5 billion project to build 8,000 residential units on Treasure Island, an artificial land mass that sits squarely in the bay.
Both of these new developments are vulnerable to sea-level rise. A March 2018 study from the American Association for the Advancement of Science predicts that up to 166 square miles of the Bay Area could be underwater by 2100.
John-Baptiste said the city could instate zoning regulations that prohibit developers from building in areas that are at high risk of flooding. Another option would be to incentivize building away from the coast. Whatever the city decides, she added, it will have to act quickly.
"It is time for us to become far more ambitious in what we believe we can achieve," John-Baptiste said. "We're going to have to figure out ways to do the big fixes much faster than we've been able to in the past."