The San Francisco Downtown Plan: A Tale of Two Cities

Abstract

On February 27, 1913, The Board of Estimate and Apportionment authorized the nomination of a “Heights of Buildings Committee” on the grounds that the“time has come when effort should be made to regulate the height, size, and arrangement of buildings erected within the limits of the city of New York, in order to arrest the seriously increasing evil of the shutting off of light and air from other buildings and from the public streets, to prevent unwholesome and dangerous congestion both in living conditions and in street and transit traffic and to reduce the hazards of fire and peril to life.” (Mujica, 1929)