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Mayor Gavin Newsom, who virtually ignored urban planning throughout most of his political career, is now being pushed by big-money backers down the same path that was Willie Brown’s undoing. Newsom’s recent vetoes of two condo-conversion measures and his opposition to caps on parking in new downtown residential projects have put him on the wrong side of the debate over the preservation of affordable housing and popular support for smart growth.
If Pat Murphy and Luke Thomas of the San Francisco Sentinel are to be believed — and that of course is a question fraught with nuance — senior staff in the Newsom’s office and the Planning Department conspired to author a letter over the signature of the Planning Director intimating that the Planning Department had changed its position with regard to residential parking limits in the downtown area.
However, just as sudden as the letter was sprung on the Board of Supervisors, the move began to unravel. It turns out that influential downtown interests, in a meeting with the Mayor, had leaned heavily on Newsom to offer watered down legislation.
Wade Crowfoot, Newsom’s liaison to the Board, stood like a deer caught in the headlights as Supervisor Chris Daly queried him about the composition of the group. As Daly read the list of names (obtained through a public-records request) Crowfoot fidgeted nervously while Zoning Administrator Larry Badiner sat looking like the cat who had swallowed the canary. When Badiner left the room, Amit Ghosh, head of the long range planning section of the Planning Department, was left to defend a shift in policy that ran counter to some of his most deeply held principles.
Planning Director Dean Macris returned to town soon afterward and declared that he had not authored the letter and disagreed with a good deal of it. According to the Sentinel report, the letter was actually written by Matt Franklin, head of the Mayor’s Office of Housing, and Badiner, with clerical help from planning wunderkind Marshall Foster, currently serving as Newsom’s “Green Czar.�?
Members of the Planning Commission fumed. Newsom began to look a lot like his predecessor and found himself on the defensive. Support for the watered-down alternative evaporated. The legislation, in all likelihood, will become law reasonably intact.
Amusing? It would be if these issues were not so serious. Unlike the symbolic social measures that have contributed to Newsom’s high popularity ratings, coming down on the wrong side of land use issues associates one with greed, ugliness and displacement.
Willie Brown mastered the technique of bait and switch when faced with popular progressive legislation by offering alternatives that maintained the subject matter but gutted the substance. Last week, Supervisor Michela Alioto-Pier filled that role for Newsom.
The Eastern Neighborhoods rezoning process was one of Brown’s bait and switches. Back in 2001 the newly elected District Supervisors allocated funding and demanded that some real community planning be done. Stalling until the dot com boom had faded and the Board had banned live/works, Brown finally gave them a bare bones rezoning process.
Under Ghosh the rezoning took on an ideological bent, casting housing vs. jobs and, under pressure from the development community, maps were generated that opened the door to expanded residential development while relegating what is called PDR (Production, Distribution and Repair) to a few preservation zones. Only now, as those maps are being presented as the culmination of the Eastern Neighborhoods process, are planners beginning to talk about writing neighborhood plans. They can’t be serious. You’re supposed to plan first and then rezone.
Nowhere is this truth more obvious than in the eastern portion of South of Market. While the land use planning currently in place was certainly exploited during the late ‘90s — developers found loopholes in the zoning big enough to drive a truck through — it is a gross misnomer to characterize the zoning of eastern SoMa as “antiquated.�?
The 1990 South of Market Plan created “Residential Enclaves�? (RED zones) to shield SoMa’s low income residents from the gentrification of the alleys. In the area surrounding the Sixth Street corridor, the RSD zoning offered a height bonus to developers who included more affordable housing than required. SSO zoning was meant to serve as a buffer zone to hold back downtown development. Only secondary office use (back office stuff) was permitted and residential uses only allowed after undergoing Conditional Use scrutiny.
The SLI (Service and Light Industrial) zoning was the boldest experiment. Market-rate residential construction was not allowed. If the space occupied by service and light industrial uses and the arts and crafts had been forced to compete with luxury housing developments, the land would ultimately transition to the “best and highest use” which of course is market-rate housing.
These well-intentioned zoning controls are not reflected in the Interim Controls or permanent rezoning proposed for the Eastern Neighborhoods. The greater height limits they have recommended for the alleys will open up them up to speculation. The height bonuses in the RSD are gone. Eastern SoMa stands to lose more than 1,000,000 square feet of PDR space.
In fact, no efforts are being made to protect more than half of all the PDR in San Francisco because it’s not even located within the Eastern Neighborhoods
I mourn the loss of socially responsible planning. The rezoning of the Eastern Neighborhoods will contribute to the production of thousands of units of new luxury housing at the expense of social, cultural and economic diversity. Is it any wonder that all the interesting neighborhoods of San Francisco — North Beach, the Haight and Chinatown for example — developed without any assistance from the Planning Department?
The western half of SoMa opted out of the Eastern Neighborhoods process and instead formed a community-based group called the Western SoMa Citizens Planning Task Force. Enabled by legislation passed by the Board of Supervisors, its aim is to create a new neighborhood plan for western SoMa, based on common values shared by all the stakeholders represented on the task force, and to ultimately make recommendations to the Board and Planning Commission regarding changes to the existing zoning.
The following statement of Vision and Values has been approved:
“The Western SoMa Citizens Planning Task Force shall promote neighborhood qualities and scale that maintain and enhance, rather than destroy, today’s living, historic and sustainable neighborhood character of social, cultural and economic diversity while integrating appropriate land use, transportation and design opportunities into equitable, evolving and complete neighborhoods.�?
Western SoMa is hot. Target, the department store chain, is eyeing the bus parking lot at 8th and Harrison. The Tennis Club is under siege by monster builder Pulte Homes. A strip mall project has been proposed for the old Veterans Cab property. Market-rate developers have discovered SRO housing provisions can be used as a loophole to build luxury housing in the SLI. On top of that, loft type projects are threatening the very existence of the residential enclaves.
The Western SoMa Citizens Planning Task Force is about to consider moves to cool down the market until the neighborhood plan is completed. A discussion of Interim Controls begins next month.
Property owners understandably want to reap maximum profits when they entertain offers to sell. Developers who bid up those land values certainly want to develop in a way that maximizes the potential of the land. And those who pay those exorbitant prices nervously sweat out their return on investment. But when that development drives out significant parts of the existing population, sends the service and light industrial jobs out of town and renders what is left an upper middle class bedroom community, everyone loses.
Controls do not have to pit one constituency against another.
This week the task force has recommended legislation that would extend neighborhood notification to the SoMa community. Section 311 and 312 notification would alert neighbors to a pending change in the envelope of nearby buildings or a significant change of use. The task force is also looking at controls over formula retail (chain stores).
Before imposing significant changes on the area, there are other issues that need to be addressed:
The cumulative impact of the changes must be considered. The loss of one or two service and light industrial businesses, or a couple units of old housing, might not seem significant but when it’s repeated over and over again, eventually there is nothing left worth preserving.
Existing residential and commercial uses have to be taken into account. A preponderance of luxury housing drives up land values and leads to displacement. Planners should subscribe to the Hippocratic Oath: first, do no harm.
Infrastructure and transportation planning must proceed simultaneously with the land use planning.
A health impact analysis should be conducted. Current planning efforts propose placing housing where, in the opinion of public health experts, it is not healthy to live.
Lot mergers should be discouraged until it becomes clear how that increase in density affects the other goals of the neighborhood plan.
Design guidelines specific to the areas are essential.
What’s wrong with doing the rezoning first? As the Western SoMa task force observed, the purpose of community-based planning must be to integrate “appropriate land use, transportation and design opportunities into equitable, evolving and complete neighborhoods.�?
Equitable. Evolving. Complete. Those are not things that can be cobbled on at the last minute. They are values that must be present from the start of the process and standards by which the planners must be held accountable.
Willie Brown presided over the degradation of urban planning. Gaping holes were torn in the urban fabric. The same institutional interests currently offended by condo conversion reforms and caps on new downtown residential parking are the ones who drove Brown’s planning policies down to the level of “Let’s Make a Deal.�?
Speaking of the comedy of errors surrounding his office’s attempts to affect the downtown parking debate, Newsom told the Sentinel, “It was obviously a messy process but it has not affected the legislation in any way and it has not affected the cooperation between the Board and myself.�?
The Planning Department should not have been dragged into partisan politics. With all due respect, this city cannot afford the same kind of messy mistakes when it comes to rezoning the Eastern Neighborhoods.
Until Gavin Newsom can articulate a comprehensive vision of urban planning that builds and preserves complete neighborhoods, symbolic gestures like planting trees or advocating for edgier architecture will merely put lipstick on the pig.
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Jim Meko is a South of Market activist, currently serving as chair of both the SoMa Leadership Council and the Western SoMa Citizens Planning Task Force and is a member of San Francisco's Entertainment Commission. Here at the Bulldog, of course, he's expressing his own personal opinions. He can be reached at jim.meko@comcast.net.