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One subject that won’t be back on the agenda here in SoMa anytime soon is the AF Evans proposal to build low income family housing at 570 Townsend Street. The project displaces what was until recently a viable digital media use. Located in the heart of the Service and Light Industrial zone (SLI), housing is incompatible with the surrounding commercial activities. Current Planning Commission policy is to discourage housing of any kind in that area and the underlying zoning explicitly disallows almost all housing because of the impact it has on land values. Yet the Mayor’s Office of Housing (MOH) continues to aggressively promote this project.
The site currently includes 24,000 square feet of commercial space. In the first round of talks with the community, we asked for one-to-one replacement of that space. They came back with an offer of 18,000 square feet and a large residential project. We suggested they put all the commercial space into the Townsend Street frontage. They put five floors of housing overlooking the rail yards. We suggested that the housing be made compatible with the small residential cluster behind the project on Gilbert and Lucerne Alleys. They reduced the commercial component to 6,000 square feet.
I was told I should try to meet them half way. I have. But then they moved the goal posts. And I tried again. And they move them again. This is going nowhere. Back to square one.
If we are to preserve good paying working class jobs anywhere in the city, land must be set aside where the noise and nuisance of commercial activities don’t come into conflict with residential uses. 570 Townsend is in an industrial protection zone. There’s an electrical supply operation to the east and a furniture warehouse to the west. Large trucks begin making deliveries early every morning. The rail yards are across the street. There are no sidewalks.
* Housing doesn’t belong there. This is an industrial protection zone.
* There are delivery trucks coming and going at all hours of the night.
* The trains make an awful racket.
* The community planning goal has been to create more job opportunities in the area
* That translates into more incompatible activities.
* Nighttime entertainment uses will probably be encouraged to gravitate to the area.
* Biotech startups are considered a possible permitted use for the area.
* Given the freeways and rail yards, this is an unhealthy place for anyone to live.
* The major thoroughfares are dangerous and unfriendly to pedestrians.
* There are no sidewalks.
* The area lacks most essential services.
* Accessing most family needs would require owning a car.
* Low income projects like this provide practically no parking.
* There are few neighbors.
* There are no schools.
* There are no playground facilities anywhere around for the kids.
* It’s a flat, windy, mosquito-infested, godforsaken backwater.
Increase the residential population of this area and the first thing they’ll do is try to wipe away everything that makes it amenable to the service and light industries that currently thrive down there.
SoMa has never shied away from providing its share of affordable housing. Yerba Buena, 6th Street and the Mid-Market Redevelopment area plans all include generous amounts of entry level, supportive, family and senior housing. Just look at the towers of housing surrounding Yerba Buena Gardens. Western SoMa is in the midst of an affordability renaissance, with five separate projects in the area around 8th and Howard Streets, new housing already completed at Folsom and Dore Alley and the Columbia Square Apartments adjacent to the new park and with entry-level SRO housing coming soon to 10th and Folsom Streets, family and senior housing projects getting underway at 10th and Mission and 9th and Jessie Streets and significant affordability under consideration for the St. Joseph’s Church site.
Since the Newsom administration asserted it’s control over the Eastern Neighborhoods process, Doug Shoemaker, deputy director of MOH, has brought the worst of the nonprofit housing mentality, that sense of entitlement, to the rezoning effort. He imagines that the competition is between jobs and housing … and guess where his allegiance lies? The north Mission was told to choose between housing its existing population or preserving their jobs. What nonsense! It’s immoral to build affordable housing without providing the opportunity to earn a living.
There’s more than enough land available in the Eastern Neighborhoods for both good jobs and affordable housing. The competition is really between affordable housing (of which there’s not nearly enough) and luxury housing (which we are awash in). Spare me the Economics 101 arguments: if we have to build 85% luxury housing to get 15% inclusionary housing (which isn’t even really low income housing, it’s basically lower middle class housing), this city will become the Vail, Colorado of the west coast and our working class will find itself relocated to the Central Valley. Hardly an environmentally sound solution, huh?
When I published a tepid tome about the lack of respect SoMa gets from outside interests a few months back (see “Disrespect,” August 10), Shoemaker flew into a rage. I’m told that I have lost access to MOH and that the second Newsom administration will allow the likes of SPUR to roll over this community’s desire for a sensible balance of affordable housing and good paying jobs. I can’t stop them if that’s their intention. This wouldn’t be the first time they’ve played politics with South of Market. But I don’t have to enable them either. 570 Townsend is a really bad project and it won’t be back on our agenda anytime soon.
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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.