Ecotopia mini-city to be built on toxic waste and landfill (Treasure Island, SF)

[Liberal_in_LA]

Treasure Island eco-dream is bad choice for funds
Phil Bronstein

Treasure Island has always seemed like a mystical place, a onetime secretive Navy base filled with deer, political patronage and who knows what buried in the ground.

Well, we do know some of the things that leached into the soil from weaponry or other deadly items: radium and PCBs 100,000 times the acceptable levels.

Now the island has been invaded by some contemporary development pirates, like billionaire Ron Burkle and the Lennar Corp. This year, they're scheduled to break ground on a huge multibillion-dollar public-private ecotopia mini-city built upon toxic waste and landfill.

This glorious contradiction might become a triumph of super-green living and high-end dreams. But it also represents something else: bad choices about how to spend public money in ever tighter times.

There was a brief panicky hiccup last week when San Francisco supervisors took up the issue of whether a Japan-style quake and tsunami could leave the future shining urban flower ruined and sunk into a poisonous stew.



Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/04/10/EDIC1ISUN6.DTL#ixzz1JFIOlqbx

[Demeter]

1. Are they crazy, or just psychopaths?

[RaleighNCDUer]

2. Yes.

[Liberal_in_LA]

3. LOL. Condos on the waste site will sell for 700K (1 bedrooms) I bet

[girl gone mad]

4. At some point, California has to run out of suckers.

[MadHound]

5. This is going to end badly,

Residents coming down with nasty diseases and conditions, and then when the next big earthquake hits, poof, those condos are gone.

[txlibdem]

6. I'd rather live in a floating city - just need to turn against the wall of water.

Floating Ecopolis for Climate Refugees
http://freshome.com/2008/06/11/future-architecture-floating-ecopolis-for-climate-refugees/

[Shagbark Hickory]

7. So really not unlike their regular subdivisions... built on buried trash.

[Bravo Zulu]

8. I did some SERE training on Treasure Island,

back in the day!