These recent photos are phenomenal! I have renewed hope that South of South Beach can turn into a vibrant mixed use neighborhood! The more dense housing with quality retail, the better.
Not every local worker wants to commute to work and the convenience of good housing coupled with some quality K-12 schools should improve that area. I can imagine at least one new K-12 school will need to be built to accommodate the new population. I haven't read exactly where that school will be built or when. Hospital shouldn't be an issue finding access to and entertainment isn't very far either, there's baseball adjacent to Mission Bay and most downtown nightlife is a few Muni stops away or a short cab ride.
My main hope is that Mission Bay ultimately becomes at least a Hayes Valley in terms of pedestrian activity level and diversity of retail/restaurants/nightlife. I'm not expecting a Mission district vibe in Mission Bay, but there's no reason why Mission Bay can't become an energetic or vibrant area as parts of SOMA are.
Who will decide to become the neighborhood's retail tenants? Well, the obvious ones are Albertsons, Whole Foods, CVS, maybe a BevMo, Starbucks, Bank of America, Chase. But, only very basic needs will be met with these retail tenants. The diversity of the retail will have to be addressed and I don't know that that will be possible because the rents will be high and most of the residents Mission Bay will be targeting will be families and middle-aged professionals.
I don't know that Mission Bay will be able to turn into the kind of culturally vibrant neighborhood that I would want to visit; visit its cafes, its bookstores, its bars, its restaurants, its parks, its everything. I'm not sure this neighborhood will have the opportunity to grow a bit of flavor. It would be good to have some flavor. 100% corporate and stale isn't the ideal place to live for everybody. I don't see any commercial spaces being built in Mission Bay that would offer enough space to house a movie theatre, multiple screens. That is necessary and would be a great addition to the neighborhood!
For those of you who wonder where my frustration comes from when I can no longer accept that S.F. develops real estate at such a snails pace and on such a small scale compared to other major cosmopolitan cities, I ask that you please follow this link which leads to a large scale mixed-use development in the Toronto area that has left me with no doubt that this is precisely how major cities should approach development.
http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showthread.php?t=182236
And I absolutely don't doubt that Mission Bay could have been developed in this manner and especially on this scale. It is politics and a general small mindedness that the power brokers have when it comes to conceptualizing and defining land use laws for S.F. that enable this perpetuation of new neighborhoods that never resemble the mass, scale, density or diversity that a real city neighborhood with a real city feel should have.