my sense in eastern soma where it was not doing things 10 years ago is eastern soma has exploded so much that it's spaces for offices and my guess is that we have way out stripped or on the verge of out stripping the growth for eastern soma. it's the same in the areas, the western end of market street where there has been explosion of dot com. techies. we are losing non-office space. i have a hard time understanding it from what the department tracks. what i did manage to get out of dbi and i was shocked to see the projects contained $500. the transit plan was $57 million. that's supposed to be funding transit and they are deferring it. the second largest project was the rincon hill to the tower that is now under construction. it's next to the bay bridge and third was 45 lansing. when you add these together which is high end view condos, they took a feeder which is not acceptable. because rincon hill has horrible transit and it doesn't have any affordable housing. so what are we doing for affordable housing and transit in the most explosive areas. i think we need a little bit of context

soma, donald mcdonald takes us behind the curtain of his architectural lab. at the moment he's sketching the next stress ribbon bridge. you're probably familiar with some of his earlier work. like the easternghlight of my life basically. >> reporter: and clearly mcdonald is a patient man. >> supposed to get down in four or five years or something but, as you know, the politics got involved with jerry brown, our mayor, willie brown, and we had all kind of concessions they wanted in mitigation. >> reporter: not to mention governor sha wachwarzenegger scrapping design plans at one point. there were five cities involved and a price tag that ballooned to five times the original zime estimate. but the bridge got done. consider the troubles faced by the golden gate bridge which was close to never seeing the light of day. rod deeradon names a few obstacles like lawsuit and money. >> the golden gate bridge in 1930 had 2,300 lawsuits against it. 2 stsht 2,300 lawsuits against it. >> compared to fewer than a dozen for high speed rail. then there's the cost. >> the price tag had gone up dramatically. couple hundred million dollars. goodness, a couple hundred million dollars. 1935, that was a few bucks