The Board of Supervisors Land Use Committee spent several hours yesterday hearing from city officials and members of the public on the hot-button issue of historic preservation. The informational hearing was called by Sup. Scott Wiener, who framed it as a discussion about “the impact of historic preservation policies on other major public policy goals and the need to adopt legislation to ensure that the policies are achieved” — a statement that raised alarm bells among historic preservationists and sent members of that community out in droves to defend preservationist efforts and to urge Wiener not to weaken any of the city’s existing policies.
Wiener raised concerns about the time and expense associated with environmental impact reviews (EIR) that could be triggered if a property falls within an historic district, saying, “there’s a sense that the cost is rather high, and the time it takes is rather high,” and added, “a lot of times we order an EIR, and that’s the end of the project.” He also raised questions about whether historic preservation efforts placed too many constraints on upgrading transit-oriented neighborhoods, parks, and libraries.
While Wiener had opened the debate in order to highlight problems associated with historic preservation policies, preservationists packed the room to defend their efforts. “I am dismayed that the importance of historic preservation is being challenged,” June Osterberg noted during public comment. She charged that San Francisco had gone from being “a paradise for residents to a developers’ paradise, to my despair. Please do not diminish the importance of what’s left in San Francisco.”
Arthur Levy noted, “If you go back to 1967 [when policies were first created] you will see that preservation has not thwarted or trumped development” in the decades since. “There’s nothing the matter systematically,” he added.
Wiener seemed surprised by some of the strong reactions. “They thought I was going to start knocking down the Golden Gate Bridge and the painted ladies,” he told the Guardian. He insisted that while he supported historic preservation, he wanted to have a conversation about balancing it with other policy goals, since “it’s an issue that has a lot of pent-up demand.”
The Historic Preservation Commission (HPC), created in 2008 with voter approval of Proposition J, has drawn criticism from members of the development community who’ve suggested that the panel would “shrink wrap” the city, stifling new building projects at a time when unemployment is particularly high in the construction sector. Yet Mike Buhler, executive director of San Francisco Architectural Heritage, noted that the city’s Historic Preservation Commission had given the green light to all but one project proposal that came before the it, suggesting that fears of the HPC freezing out potential development were unfounded.
Asked after the hearing how he reacted to those sending the message that everything was fine, Wiener noted, “In some respects, things are not fine,” citing the lengthy historic review process and lack of clarity on certain requirements.
Meanwhile, Sup. Malia Cohen took a different tack in her line of questioning on this issue. She wanted to know if teams of surveyors who conduct neighborhood assessments for designating historic districts reflected the ethnic diversity of the city, and whether historic context statements generated by those surveys took into account the myriad cultural and ethnic histories in a given neighborhood.
Planning officials assured Cohen that the surveyors were ethnically diverse, and community outreach was done in multiple languages. But one man who spoke during public comment charged that the planning department was “tone deaf” when it came to responding to concerns raised by the African American community, and that efforts to designate certain properties as historic, such as Sam Jordan’s Bar on Third Street in the Bayveiw, had “hit roadblocks.”
Speaking to the Guardian after the hearing, Cohen said she’d been hoping to highlight the omission of certain cultural perspectives when it came to decision-making about which properties are deemed historic. Cohen spoke about the contributions of Filipino, Chinese, Japanese, and African-American communities to the city’s historic landscape.
“And the Native Americans — they’re never included in the conversation,” she said, referencing a Shellmound on Bayview Hill leftover from an era when the Ohlone resided on the San Francisco peninsula. She said she was concerned that cultural contributions may not be reflected in the neighborhood surveys, or in which buildings are ultimately designated. “It’s systemic,” she noted.