Moving In

Treasure Island, San Francisco

I first heard about the Treasure Island development during my undergrad at UC Berkeley. Somebody came to my class, or came to give an after-class lecture. Remembering who would have made for a stronger article, but it was 8 years ago.

One of my mentors described it as “the place to go if you wanna live in Utrecht but also kinda don’t wanna leave California”. Could be accurate.

The Logistics of Moving

Since I did have a car, I figured I might as well use it to move. That’s part of the reason I accepted the car, my mom’s 2009 Mazda CX-9, from my parents. The other part was wondering if it would fundamentally change my life in LA (not really, though it did come in handy sometimes). I found some new neighbors to gift my couch to and ditched my mattress + bed frame, the rest of my stuff fit pretty well in two trips up I-5.

Each time I did the drive it felt… really fast? It isn’t that fast, 6-7 hours or so, but it felt fast. Maybe because I was picking up my life and moving it to a new place. 6 or 7 hours, repeated three times, does seems fast to do that. Also because most of my trips up and down the Central Valley over the last few years have been on the San Joaquins, taking about 9 hours from Emeryville to LA.

Once I got there, I moved my own stuff in with dollies and hand trucks (nice to have an elevator!). It was still a lot of work, and days of unloading bulky IKEA boxes from my car sometimes coincided with high wind days, my boxed KLIPPAN sofa becoming a sail as I fought to wrangle it out of my car and into the building.

Fully moved and satisfied there would be no more big purchases, I promptly sold the car to a friend of a friend.

The Feeling of Moving

I haven’t moved all that often in my life. I stayed in the same home with my family until going off to college (a whole 40 miles away). In Berkeley I lived first in the dorms and then in “Bike House”, which was only a few blocks away and full of bikes, good company, and questionable cleanliness standards. I studied abroad for a few months in Japan, where my housing was far nicer and less expensive than one can find in Berkeley. And then I finished undergrad and moved to LA, mostly for a relationship but also for curiosity and new experiences. The relationship didn’t last, but my time in Los Angeles did – six or so years of exploring a vast city, making new friends, and finding my professional footing.

Each time I drove the 5 I passed by Tracy Hills: 5,980 units of single-family sprawl clamped onto I-580 like some sort of parasite. The homes kept coming up each time I passed by, and the completed examples have solar panels. Which is nice and all, but transportation is still about 40 percent of California’s GHG emissions and these folks will need an awful lot of transportation. I can’t be too hard on it though– million dollar homes on the outskirts of Tracy are a natual consequence of completely failing to accomodate new homes and neighbors inside our existing urban regions. I’m sure some people are really excited to be moving there.

I was really excited to be moving to Treasure Island, and having been here a few months I’m still excited about it. We just don’t build places like this, at this scale in California, so I figured I had to move to the one exception. I’ll go into the development, and perhaps report on the progress, more on other posts but for now I’ll just say it’s a shame it’s taken over a decade since the plans were finished to complete the first few buildings. Sharply different from the well-oiled suburban homebuilding machine. I’m partially here as a vote of confidence for the future, and besides it’s a nice place to live already.