I’m always intrigued when civic-improvement types talk about the problems with city planning in San Francisco — and harp on the fact that it takes too long to get anything done and that the same old naysayers are too powerful. The latest is a piece by David Prowler, former planning commissioner, that appeared on BeyondChron.
Among the Prowlerisms:
Forget about consensus. We’re not going to get it, and too often the planners or the Board of Supervisors delay decision-making while waiting for it. But it gets farther away. We need leadership, not consensus.
TRANSLATION: Who cares what the community thinks; leave the big decisions to elected officials who the developers can effectively lobby.
Let’s be frank and clear about what land-use planning can and cannot do. It doesn’t by itself create buildings or good jobs. The City is trying to preserve blue-collar jobs by zoning to prevent housing (It’s been characterized as “zoning for gold mines and expecting gold”). But how about linking zoning with a strategy to create these jobs?
THE PROBLEM: No, land-use planning can’t always create good things, but it can sure as hell destroy things, and has done so for decades in San Francisco. Redevelopment didn’t create much in the Western Addition, but it destroyed a community. No, good zoning won’t create blue-collar jobs — but bad zoning will destroy them.
Reconsider CEQA. We discuss projects and plans within the framework of the California Environmental Quality Act, best known by the acronym CEQA, which mandates addressing only how much damage can a proposal do to the environment, not how can it help the city meet goals or help the regional environment by concentrating growth where there’s infrastructure. Here in San Francisco, we hold up even small-scale projects, such as the 17 residences and retail uses proposed at the empty lot at 19th and Valencia streets by the longtime residents and owners of a popular Mexican restaurant. Really, in a built-up city, along a transit street where just about every other spot is housing over stores, how much environmental damage could a project like this do?
TRANSLATION: Get those pesky project foes out of the way and take away any tool they have to preserve their neighbhorhoods.
This kind of stuff infuriates me. The problem with city planning is very simple, and I can phrase it in one sentence: Planning in San Francisco is driven almost entirely by private developers and exists to serve their interests and needs.
And of course, although it doesn’t say so in his piece, David Prowler is a developer.