Livable City executive director Tom Radulovich has asked the city Elections Department to remove the controversial pro-car measure Prop. H from the fall ballot after discovering a fairly significant misstatement of city law in the ballot summary that its downtown advocates circulated to get on the ballot. The measure, funded by Republican Don Fisher and condo developer WebCor, invalidates most city parking policies and drastically expands people’s rights to build parking spots.
The summary, prepared by the City Attorney’s Office, said current law allows at least one parking spot for every four housing units in the downtown districts and up to one spot for every three units. But as Radulovich’s letter (which follows) indicates, city law actually allows up to one parking spot per unit in downtown residential zones and two spots for every three units in the commercial C-3 zone downtown.
Guardian phone calls to the City Attorney Office, Elections Department, and Prop. H advocate Jim Maxwell have not yet been returned.
Political consultant Jim Stearns, who is running the campaign against Prop. H, told us state law requires the city to remove the measure. He cited the precedent of City Attorney Dennis Herrera last year invalidating a successful referendum drive challenging the creation of the Bayview Hunters Point Redevelopment area because those circulating petition didn’t carry with them the complete plan, only the ordinance that approved it. If the city doesn’t remove the measure, Stearns said opponents will seek a court injunction doing so.
redevelopment
Will the pro-parking Prop. H remain on the ballot?
Supes should run redevelopment
EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom, scrambling to blunt community criticism of the Redevelopment Agency’s activities in BayviewHunters Point, has appointed a new agency director, Fred Blackwell. But the problem was not with the top of the agency (the outgoing director, Marcia Rosen, was neither corrupt nor incompetent) but rather with the entire direction that redevelopment has taken in San Francisco under several generations of mayors. It’s time to take seriously the suggestion of Sup. Ross Mirkarimi that the agency be taken out of the mayor’s control and given to the district-elected supervisors.
Redevelopment is a powerful tool that has been terribly misused all over the nation, and the scars in San Francisco are real and lasting. A rapacious Redevelopment Agency determined to wipe out low-income housing devastated huge swaths of the Western Addition and South of Market in the 1960s, and the communities still haven’t fully recovered. Some people argue that the entire program should be abolished that redevelopment should be consigned to the dustbin of bad urban history.
But at a time when it’s terribly hard for cities like San Francisco to raise money for affordable housing, basic infrastructure (see accompanying editorial), and ambitious programs like public power, the legal advantages of redevelopment are too good to give up. A state-chartered redevelopment agency sells bonds and raises money with nothing to back up the bonds except the projected increase in property taxes expected from improving a blighted area. The city can’t do that on its own; if it could, then raising, say, a billion dollars for affordable housing would be relatively simple.
In theory, the redevelopment agency could also fund municipal wi-fi, public power, and all sorts of other major projects.
The problem, of course, is that a lot of people in low-income neighborhoods don’t trust redevelopment and given the history, it’s hard to blame them. But part of the essential problem with the Redevelopment Agency in past years has been its utter lack of accountability; the Western Addition and SoMa plans were drawn up in secret and executed with little regard for community input.
As long as San Francisco supervisors are elected by district, they will be, by definition, more accountable, closer to the neighborhoods, and less corrupted by money than any citywide elected official. Giving the board control over redevelopment is a far better model.
Plenty of cities allow their legislature to run redevelopment. The city councils of both Oakland and Berkeley also function as the directors of those cities’ redevelopment agencies. It’s time to move San Francisco into that column. *
Lennar, asbestos, ATSDR, El Dorado, BVHP
By Sarah Phelan
ATSDR’s Region 9 office covers a lot of ground, including San Francisco’s Hunters Point Shipyard.
Susan Muza works at the Region 9 office of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. That’s the agency that agreed on July 17 to do a public health assessment of Lennar’s development at Parcel A of the Hunters Point Shipyard where fear runs high that the community may have been exposed to toxic asbestos dust.
Community members voiced those fears during a July 31 Board hearing, but the Board voted 6-5 against urging the SF Department of Health to temporarily shutting down Lennar’s construction site, until health concerns had been addressed.
As it happens, ATSDR has experience with such assessments in California, thanks to Oak Ridge High School in El Dorado County, where naturally occurring asbestos was identified in surrounding rocks and where a vein of asbestos was disturbed during construction of a soccer field at the school.
Muza told me that at Oak Ridge High, ATSDR sampled and tested soil from baseball and soccer fields, parking lots, as well as dust collected from a school classroom that had potentially been affected by a leaf blower.
What ATSDR found, says Muza, was that “sports coaches, outdoor maintenance staff and student athletes had the potential to be exposed at levels higher than previously thought.”
In the case of Lennar’s Parcel A development, the classrooms and basketball courts of the Muhammed University of Islam sit on the other side of a chain link fence, where massive amounts of asbestos-laden rock were moved in the last year, but where air monitors weren’t operating for three months, and watering was inadequate for six months.
“At Oak Ridge High, we recommended that people try to limit any further exposure and that those most highly exposed inform their physicians that they had potentially been exposed to asbestos, that they should monitor for signs of disease, related to that exposure, and that they should participate in very good preventative care, such as flu shots, to make sure their respiratory health stays healthy,” Muza said.
ATSDR is also monitoring cancer registers in the EL Dorado area.
As Muza notes, “one big problem with asbestos is it has a long lag time. The period between exposure happening and disease manifesting can be 10-40 years.”
Although the San Francisco Department of Public Health has claimed that workers were wearing CAL OSHA authorized asbestos monitors at the Hunters Point shipyard site and that CAL OSHA did not report any exposure exceedances, Muza told me that ATSDR does not support using worker asbestos limits in evaluating community members’ exposures, other than as a reference point.
As ATSDR’s website explains, “worker limits are based on risk levels that would be considered unacceptable in nonworker populations.”
The reasoning behind disqualifying worker limits as a valid assessment tool is that community members may be children who are lower to ground, more active and have higher metabolisms. Or they may be seniors, or residents who live near the site, 24/7.
“No exposure to asbestos is good,” says Muza. “We are all exposed to it, thanks to brake linings, amongst other things, but we want to keep our exposure as minimal as we can.”
In the case of Oak Ridge High, ATSDR recommended some removal activities, because material from the vein of asbestos that got broken when the soccer field was built, got spread around the school.
“And we recommended paving and landscaping activities to reduce people’s ability to being exposed,” adds Muza, noting that ATSDR did not recommend that Oak Ridge High be closed or relocated.
In San Francisco, ATSDR plans to evaluate the asbestos dust mitigation plan that Lennar agreed to when it got the green light to begin development on Parcel A in 2005. ATSDR will also evaluate how Lennar actually implemented that plan, along with results from air monitors, and any other data that they can ascertain will be helpful.
“We also plan to gather community concerns, be very transparent and talk to everyone,” says Muza who has sent out a letter to stakeholders, including the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, the Bayview Hunters Point Project Area Committee, the Hunters Point Shipyard Citizens Advisory Committee, The San Francisco Chapter of the NAACP, the San Francisco Department of Public Health, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, and, of course, the Muhammed University of Islam.
Says Muza, “We will summarize the concerns we hear, sort out what we can address from what we can’t and come to the community with a plan.”
Dust devils
› sarah@sfbg.com
A year has passed since Lennar Corp. officials admitted that subcontractor CH2M Hill failed to install batteries in dust-monitoring equipment at Parcel A, a construction site in Hunters Point Shipyard where an asbestos-laden hilltop was graded to build 1,600 condominiums (see "The Corporation That Ate San Francisco," 3/14/07).
The admission sparked a steadily growing political firestorm in BayviewHunters Point, further fueled by evidence that Gordon Ball, another Lennar subcontractor, for six months failed to adequately water the site to control dust and by a racially charged lawsuit in which three African American employees of Lennar allege they were subjected to discrimination and retaliation after they refused to remain silent about the dust issue. The lawsuit, set for a case management hearing Aug. 17, also claims that Ball committed fraud involving the Redevelopment Agency’s minority-hiring requirements.
BayviewHunters Point residents angry about the situation have found an ally in Sup. Chris Daly, who has called for a halt to construction at the site until an independent health assessment is conducted to the satisfaction of the community, including the Muhammad University of Islam School, which is adjacent to the Parcel A site and has been exposed to dust. The Board of Supervisors was scheduled to consider Daly’s resolution Jul. 31, after the Guardian‘s press time.
"This issue is of such a high level of importance," Daly told us. "There’s now a mandate for progressives in San Francisco to talk about environmental justice and to take action."
Sup. Sophie Maxwell, whose district includes the shipyard, told us that she understands the concerns of Daly and the community. "But when you get down it … the dust is inconvenient, but it is not harmful in the long term," she said.
Maxwell believes the city’s Department of Public Health should have done more outreach and updates, "but it has brought the situation under control." That sentiment was echoed by the city’s environmental health director, Dr. Rajiv Bhatia, who told us, "This is the first time we have implemented dust control, and this is an industry that had never been regulated. And in the end, things got better. We did our job in pushing a regulated community that grudgingly complied with our regulations."
In June, after residents complained that the dust was causing nosebleeds, headaches, and asthma, the DPH released a fact sheet that stated, "You may have heard there are reasons to worry about your health because of the construction dust generated by the redevelopment of Parcel A of the Hunters Point Shipyard. That is not true."
A July 5 informational DPH memo claims that when workers tried to do dust training and outreach at the end of June, their efforts "were significantly hindered by representatives of the Muhammad University of Islam," who allegedly disrupted training sessions, followed DPH workers, and told residents not to listen to the DPH workers.
On July 9, DPH director Mitch Katz testified at a hearing of the supervisors’ Land Use Committee that the city had imposed the highest standards possible to control dust. Katz also claimed that exposure to the dust was not toxic and that there is no proof that health problems were caused by the dust.
But at the same hearing, Nation of Islam minister Christopher Muhammad demanded testing "by people the community can trust," and he accused the city of "environmental racism." Noting that asbestos-related diseases often don’t manifest themselves for at least 20 years, Muhammad claimed, "The problem that we’re seeing in BayviewHunters Point is dust related."
After the DPH abandoned plans to do door-to-door outreach in favor of a series of health fairs, a coalition of activists calling itself POWER (People Organized to Win Employment Rights), some wearing masks and hazmat suits, closed down a July 17 homeownership seminar at Lennar’s shipyard trailer.
"Some folks did a picket outside, while inside, folks who own homes or live in public housing in the area were asking a lot of questions," POWER’s Alicia Schwartz told us. "We are for development that prioritizes the needs of low-income communities of color who have long been absent from the decision-making process, not development that puts the health and safety of families and the elderly at risk."
Two days later Marcia Rosen resigned as executive director of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency. SFRA board member London Breed told us that the resignation was "a long time coming" and said she wished Rosen had taken a stronger stand on Lennar and Ball in the winter of 2006.
Breed says the agency "will always be a bad word to African Americans because of what happened in the Western Addition…. But we have a great opportunity in BayviewHunters Point to make it into something wonderful for the community."
Maxwell, whose grandson attended the Muhammad school’s Third Street campus, wonders why the minister refuses to move his students back to Third Street. "Lennar understands that this has become a PR nightmare and they are going to have to get contractors who are supportive of and understand the rules and regulations," said Maxwell, who is about to introduce legislation that she hopes will better control construction dust citywide.
Meanwhile, Dr. Arelious Walker of the True Hope Church of God in Christ told us that he and a group of like-minded pastors have formed the African American Revitalization Consortium, "a highly vocal and visible group in strong opposition to the shutting down of the shipyard without scientific proof."
"We support 100 percent the notion that the dust from Parcel A does not cause any long-term health risks. The project must continue because of its economic impacts. One little group does not speak for us all," said Walker, who met with Mayor Gavin Newsom, Maxwell, and Katz on July 23.
Acknowledging that the outcry over Parcel A has raised awareness of the dust issue, Walker said, "For years in the urban community, the environment was not the issue, but now we’ve woken up." Walker and his fellow ministers rallied about 200 people at City Hall on July 24 to express support for Lennar’s development and confidence in city officials.
Yet Daly said that faith may be misplaced: "It’s going to be a struggle to deal with the construction-related impacts of Lennar’s development at the shipyard, but the issue is much bigger, and it points to the need for an alliance between progressives, the African American community, and the southeast neighborhoods." *
No politics in the parks?
By Tim Redmond
This is a fascinating tale, from Fog City Journal. It sounds like the Redevelopment Agency (officially, anyway) wants to call this all a misunderstanding, but I can see it becoming a much bigger problem if Newsom succeeds in privatizing more city parks.
New redevelopment chief
By Tim Redmond
Lots of talk about who the new SF Redevelopment Agency chief will be after Marcia Rosen announced (in terse terms) her resignation, which sounds awfully suspect. (Whenever you hear “resigned to pursue new opportunities” think: Canned for political reasons.)
One persistent rumor is that Mayor Newsom wants an African American to head Redevelopment, at a time when the agency is under fire in Bayview- Hunters Point. Some folks on the Wall suggest Sophie Maxwell, but please: Running an agency isn’t her thing.
We shall see.
Lennar’s Bad News Bears
Marc McGuire, a tile contractor from San Diego, and CALPASC’s Brad Diede on CNBC this spring to discuss accusations that Lennar has been extorting its contractors
A few months ago, we reported how Lennar had been giving contractors a choice between a rock or a hard place: reduce their unpaid invoices by up to 20 percent—or be excluded from bidding work for a minimum of six months.
Today comes word that the company, which is poised to build condos on most of San Francisco’s underdeveloped lands, including Bayview Hunter’s Point and the decommissioned Hunters Point Shipyard, has just posted a second quarter loss–and it is expecting more losses this year.
Blaming high inventories and dropping real estate prices, and with his company reporting losses of $1.55 per share, Lennar President and Chief Executive Stuart Miller announced, “As we look to our third quarter and the remainder of 2007, we continue to see weak, and perhaps deteriorating, market conditions.”
This time last year, the nation’s biggest home builder was posting a profit of $324.7 million, or $2 per share. But Lennar not alone in its real estate woes. As its quarterly revenue slips 37 percent to $2.88 billion (compared to $4.58 billion this time last year,) the National Association of Realtors reports that sales of existing homes fell for a third straight month in May, the median sales price declined for a record 10th consecutive month and the inventory of unsold homes reached its highest level in 15 years.
Or as Miller put it, ” The supply of new and existing homes has continued to increase resulting in declining home prices across our markets.”
And here comes the part that should really sound the alarms in San Francisco, where a large number of subcontractors look to Lennar for their daily bread. Asked what Lennar intends to do about its financial picture, Miller said his company is “focused on expenses, reducing construction costs and pushing sales to manage inventory.”
With Mayor Gavin Newsom having hastily amended the BVHP redevelopment plan so the Navy could hand the hazardous shipyard over to Lennar for clean up, (despite the company’s ongoing problems monitoring asbestos dust on an adjacent parcel of land), all so he can try and keep the 49ers in town, here’s hoping all the agencies that regulate and oversee Lennar, and not just the local impacted communities, will be watching this project like hawks.
Newsom’s huge housing failure
EDITORIAL The single biggest issue facing San Francisco today is affordable housing. Nothing else even comes close. Housing costs are displacing, at a rapid pace, the people who make San Francisco such a great city artists, writers, musicians, small-business owners and employees, families with kids, blue-collar workers, municipal workers, service-sector workers … basically, anyone who isn’t rich. And the vast majority of the new housing that’s getting built is selling at such high prices that it does nothing to help the situation.
That’s why it was crazy for Mayor Gavin Newsom to refuse to sign a modest $28 million affordable-housing allocation and why the supervisors need to pursue this, push back, demand that the money be spent, and make it clear that Newsom’s budget proposals will be in trouble if it isn’t.
And this veto ought to be a huge issue in the mayor’s race.
It’s also why progressives need to start thinking big about how to address the housing crisis.
Let’s start with a simple fact: Newsom has done next to nothing for affordable housing in this city. All the important initiatives have come out of the Board of Supervisors and the nonprofits. He’s been willing to let private for-profit developers get away with giving the city only a pittance of affordable units in exchange for immensely valuable project approvals; only because the supervisors forced the issue has the city increased the inclusionary housing requirement. And it’s still way too little.
In fact, linking all affordable-housing money to market-rate projects is a losing game for San Francisco. Even if the city forced developers to make half of their new units affordable, that wouldn’t meet the current need as laid out in the city’s own documents. San Francisco’s General Plan states that two-thirds of all new housing built in this town needs to be below market rate.
Every time the city approves a major new project that’s (at best) 20 percent affordable, that ratio gets worse. If city officials keep approving projects with small set-asides, the city will continue to get richer, whiter, and more boring; the end game a city population inching close to 80 percent millionaires isn’t something anyone should consider acceptable.
The allocation Sup. Chris Daly proposed wouldn’t put more than a dent in the problem. But it would be money coming from the city’s General Fund, not money tied to more luxury condos and that’s an important step. It reflects how the city needs to be thinking over the next few years.
Redevelopment money has funded affordable housing in the past, but much of that will run out soon. Finding other sources for the hundreds of millions of dollars San Francisco needs every year to even begin to keep pace with the need has to be a top priority and Newsom and his opponent (and we’re convinced there has to be and will be a serious opponent) need to tell us where that money’s going to come from.
Meanwhile, San Francisco activists need to start looking at long-term planning priorities for housing that include some tight limits on how many new market-rate units can be built. Combining a cap on luxury condos and a new source of affordable-housing money can change the entire development equation in San Francisco.
And if Newsom won’t go along, then the supervisors need to make very clear that his budget is dead on arrival. *
BVHP referendum remains in legal limbo
By Sarah Phelan
This map shows just how huge the redevelopment project ( the yellow area) in Bayview Hunters Point has grown.
San Francisco Superior Court Judge Patrick Mahoney heard arguments in the Bayview Hunters Point redevelopment referendum case—then told both sides to file briefs more focused on the narrower question: namely, which documents should signature gatherers have attached to their petitions last summer, as they tried to put the Redevelopment Agency’s plan for Bayview Hunters Point to a public vote?
Last summer, petitioners—carrying a copy of a newly passed ordinance in which the Board of Supervisors authorized the redevelopment of 14,000 acres in BVHP—gathered more than 30,000 signatures—and therefore believed that they had succeeded in their quest to put the project to a vote on the November 2006 ballot.
Artists put down paint brushes and pin Lennar down
By Sarah Phelan
Shipyard artist Lynn Rubenzer in her studio
So, the artists at Hunters Point Shipyard succeeded in getting their concerns mentioned in the “Conceptual Framework” for the Bayview Hunters Point redevelopment project, which is more than they had a week ago.
States the new improved draft, “The Project shall provide at affordable rates new or renovated permanent space at the Shipyard sufficient to accommodate the existing artists. The construction of the Project must be phased to ensure that the existing artists have the right to move to the new or renovated permanent space, without being displaced from the Shipyard. To achieve these objectives, the City, the Agency and the Primary Developer will work in consultation with the artists to create the plan for the permanent affordable facilities, including any relocation plan.”
Now, objectives aren’t quite the same as the end product. Experience suggests that the artists are gonna have to focus on a whole bunch of meetings if they’re going to have a prayer of keeping Building 101 and getting a Shipyard Center for the Arts, as they apparently would like.
Especially, if the 49ers dump San Francisco for Santa Clara as planned.
sure, Lennar’s conceptual framework also aims to “ensure the revitalization of the Project Site, comprised of Candlestick Point and Phase 2 of the Shipyard, and the generation of public benefits to the community and the City from development, even if the 49ers do not build a new stadium at the site.” But that doesn’t mean anyone, least of the artists, should take their eyes of the ball just yet, especially as the debate about an early transfer of the shipyard’s Parcel B, C, D, E and F is far from over. Stay tuned.
Artists to Newsom-Lennar: Get specific
By Sarah Jane Phelan
Estrelle Akamine, shipyard artist and Spring Open Studio coordinator, at work in her Hunters Point Shipyard studio.
As the 49ers roll out the financial details behind their plan to relocate to Santa Clara, the artists at Hunters Point Shipyard are trying to work out what Mayor Gavin Newsom’s “with or without the 49ers” redevelopment proposal means for their artist colony, which has been at the shipyard for 30 years.
The artists aren’t the only ones.
At last night’s meeting at the Southeast Community Facility, the audience weren’t the only ones unable to get their hands on a hard copy of the latest version of proposal, whose wording keeps changing faster than you can say, “bait and switch.” As a result, members of the Mayor’s Hunters Point Shipyard Citizens Advisory Committee and the Bayview Hunters Point Project Area Committee ended up voting to integrate the shipyard and Candlestick Point into one big old redevelopment project—WITHOUT HAVING A COPY OF the mayor’s most recent proposal in their hands.
SFBG to Lennar: Show us the “errors,” please
By Sarah Phelan
Earlier today, I got a call from San Francisco Chronicle reporter Rob Selna alerting me that Lennar’s Kofi Bonner has submitted a letter to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, alleging that recent stories in the Chronicle and the Bay Guardian concerning Lennar, “contain a number of errors, inaccuracies and misinformation.”
View the letter here (PDF file)
That’s funny, because the Bay Guardian hasn’t received any communications from Lennar or Bonner concerning our coverage of Lennar’s failures to monitor and control asbestos dust at the Hunters Point Shipyard, which we documented in our cover story, last week. Nor have we received letters regarding SFBG’s coverage of the lawsuit that three Lennar employees have brought against the mega developer.
In that suit, the trio allege that Lennar retaliated against them for questioning construction dust, imposed a code of silence and targeted them and other African Americans in the workplace with racial discrimination and harassment.
As author of both pieces in the Bay Guardian, I challenge Bonner to “delve” into my alleged errors, inaccuracies and misinformation, and explain exactly he is referring to, or write a retraction.
Meanwhile, members of the BVHP community are holding a press conference today at 5pm at Alex Pitcher Community Room, Southeast Community College, 1800 Oakdale Avenue. Stay tuned…
Legendary! Photos of Leola King’s Blue Mirror
Below are additional photos from the paper version of our story on 84-year-old Leola King who owned a string of popular businesses in the Fillmore District before they each succumbed to a nationwide urban redevelopment push that began in the 1940s. These images document King’s Blue Mirror club, which she opened in 1953 at 935 Fillmore St.
The next mad rush to the sky
EDITORIAL For much of the history of this newspaper, the battle to keep San Francisco from turning into another Manhattan was a defining element in local politics. It had all the makings of urban drama: shifty-eyed developers looking to make a fast buck, sleazy politicians willing to bend over in any direction for campaign cash, a corporate power structure devoted to greasing the path for unlimited growth, citizen activists revolting over the block-by-block destruction of their neighborhoods … all played out on the stage of one of the world’s greatest cities.
We watched while Joe Alioto moved forward with redevelopment south of Market and office buildings downtown in the early 1970s. We joined anti-high-rise activists twice in ballot measure campaigns to slow the building boom, without success. We saw Dianne Feinstein push through in just a few short years more new office space than in all of downtown Boston, an entire new city of glass and steel towers and we helped promote the campaign to slow down with Proposition M in 1986.
We exposed the fundamental lies behind the developers’ arguments by demonstrating that intensive office development cost the city more in services than it provided in revenue, reporting on how the boom would drive up rents, choke the streets with traffic, overwhelm Muni, and create ugly canyons where there were once human-scale business districts.
Then we showed that all those new buildings weren’t even creating jobs.
In the 1990s we spoke out against the economic cleansing that came with the dot-com boom.
But of late, the development battles have shifted a bit. Progressives, who were once united against downtown growth, are a bit more slippery around the latest construction boom, because this time the massive skyscrapers are set to be filled not with corporate offices but with housing. And in San Francisco today, it seems difficult for almost anyone to be against new housing.
But it’s time to take a hard look at the new rush to the sky.
When the folks at the Planning Department talk about the new urban area that’s being discussed for South of Market, they use words such as "slender, graceful towers." The idea: high-rises aren’t that bad if they’re less bulky; that way, they don’t interfere with view corridors and don’t block out the sun. In fact, the way some planners are talking about these new buildings is almost rapturous tall condo complexes, they say, will stop suburban sprawl, prevent global warming, create exciting new neighborhoods and public spaces, and give new definition to the city skyline.
But let’s look at what they’re really talking about here.
There are, at the moment, at least 11 new buildings either proposed, under construction, or in the planning pipeline in South of Market that would bust the city’s current height limits. (And those limits are hardly skimpy in most areas they range from about 350 to 500 feet.) And that’s just the start: the Planning Department is moving quietly to substantially raise height limits in a broad swath of San Francisco, making way for the biggest high-rise rush since the 1980s.
If the move succeeds, the skyline will develop what the Planning Department calls a new "mound" south of downtown, anchored by at least one building 1,000 feet high (almost a third taller than the Transamerica Pyramid). A single slender tower is one thing; when you put more than a dozen (and they aren’t all slender) in a cluster, you get a wall a wall that cuts the city off from the bay, shatters the natural topography of the area, and frankly, makes the city feel less like a community and more like a concrete jungle.
Just look at the picture on this page, part of a graphic presentation the city planning staff has put together. That hardly appears to be a few shapely structures. It’s a huge new conglomeration of New Yorkstyle high-rises, and they don’t fit in San Francisco.
And what’s the point of all this? The way the developers and their allies would have us think, this is all about solving the city’s housing crisis and creating vibrant new neighborhoods. But take a look at what sort of housing is being proposed here.
All the new high-rises the Planning Department is reviewing will contain what’s known as market-rate housing. That translates to condos selling for prices far beyond the reach of most San Franciscans. So far, not one developer has agreed to put a single unit of affordable housing in the new towers; all of them plan to meet the city’s demands for below-market units by building cheaper apartments somewhere else. The new neighborhoods are going to be nothing but very wealthy enclaves, the equivalent of vertical gated communities. Families who are being driven out of San Francisco by high housing costs won’t find refuge here; the housing is designed for singles, childless couples, retired people and world travelers who want a nice San Francisco pied-à-terre.
Is this really the kind of new neighborhood the city ought to be creating?
Then there are the economics of this madness. Providing the infrastructure for all these new residents (and we’re talking more than 10,000 new residents in this one part of town alone) will be expensive and if anyone really thinks that development fees will cover those costs, they haven’t paid attention to four decades of San Francisco budgets.
Environmentalists and urban planners these days love to talk about density, about building more residential spaces in urban cores. That’s the best alternative to suburban sprawl: Dense neighborhoods encourage transit use and walking. Housing near workplaces translates to less driving, less pollution, less congestion.
All of which is fine and actually makes sense. But density doesn’t have to mean 80-story buildings. North Beach, for example, is a very dense neighborhood, one of the densest urban areas in the United States. It’s also a wonderful neighborhood, with open space, friendly streets, and a human-scale feel.
And it’s a diverse neighborhood: everyone in North Beach isn’t young, single, and rich. There’s a mix of rental and owner-occupied housing and, despite years of brutal gentrification, still something of a demographic mix. It’s a place that feels like a neighborhood. This new conglomeration of high-rises won’t be.
If, indeed, San Francisco wants to add 10,000 or 20,000 or 30,000 new residents, they don’t have to live 1,000 feet above the ground. There are ways to do density on perhaps a slightly less massive scale that don’t impact on the views, skyline, and economics of the rest of the city.
But city officials need to ask some tough questions first. Why are we doing this? Are we rezoning South of Market to meet the needs of developers and high-profile architects, or is there a real urban plan here?
The answer seems alarmingly simple right now. Dean Macris, who led the Planning Department in those awful high-rise boom years under Feinstein, is at the helm again, and although he’s supposed to be an acting director, he shows no sign of leaving. The department is in full developer-support mode and that has to end. The Planning Commission needs to hire a new director soon, someone who understands what a neighborhood-based planning vision is about.
Meanwhile, most of this new rezoning will have to come before the supervisors, and they need to start holding hearings now. This is a transformation that will be felt for decades; it’s sliding forward way too fast, with way too little oversight. And it needs to stop. *
Advancing public power
EDITORIAL A few months ago Pacific Gas and Electric Co. spent more than $10 million trying to keep the public Sacramento Municipal Utility District from annexing a part of Yolo County, which would have cost PG&E 77,000 customers. It was a stunning amount of campaign cash and as is often the case, it worked: PG&E narrowly won the day, public power suffered a setback, and the people who wanted to get out from the private utility’s high rates and save big money by buying electricity from a public power agency had their hope shot down.
We’re used to this in San Francisco, where PG&E money and power have carried the day for more than 80 years and prevented the city from complying with the Raker Act, the federal law that requires public power. But the outcome of the Yolo County battle is a reminder of how high the stakes are for the beleaguered private utility and how creative public power advocates are going to have to be in PG&E’s hometown.
It’s likely that there will be another ballot measure in the next year or two to authorize the city to sell bonds and take over PG&E’s local distribution system. The evidence is clear: public power is cheaper, public power is more environmentally sound (remember for all its green hype, PG&E still runs a nuclear power plant), and public power is San Francisco’s legal mandate. Just about everyone in City Hall claims to be a public power supporter these days.
But in the meantime, the supervisors need to start looking at immediate alternatives that don’t involve an expensive ballot battle. There may well be ways to bring public power to San Francisco without having to confront a $10 million (or $20 million or $30 million) PG&E political blitzkrieg.
The most obvious approach is to continue the small steps the city is currently taking and leverage them into a much bigger program. There is, of course, community choice aggregation, which should continue to move forward. Beyond that, San Francisco just won the right to provide electricity at the Hunters Point Shipyard Redevelopment Project; the city is trying to do the same for Treasure Island. Why not start with the shipyard and build a public power system outward, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood?
PG&E has no legal right to be the exclusive provider of retail power in the city. There’s no legal reason why San Francisco can’t start running wires out of the shipyard underground, safely, with modern equipment buy up a bunch of meters, and start offering the residents of BayviewHunters Point cheap electricity. The revenue from the first, say, 50-square-block project could fund the next one. The seed money could come as a loan from the General Fund.
The first thing the city’s Public Utilities Commission needs to do is conduct a study of the cost of implementing public power on a small scale in one part of town and the likely revenue it would bring in. A larger study should look at how the city could build its own distribution system (with state-of-the-art equipment) one step at a time over, say, five or 10 years.
At the same time, of course, while the city is running electric wires, it can run fiber-optic and (if necessary) coaxial lines, with the goal of creating a city-run broadband and cable TV service.
The ideal place to start discussing this is the Local Agency Formation Commission, which should hold hearings as soon as possible, prod the SFPUC to move and fund the study if nobody else will.
In the meantime, the City Attorney’s Office should look into another (admittedly slightly unconventional) idea: could the Redevelopment Agency, which already has the authority to issue bonds, simply seize all of PG&E’s wires, poles, and meters for a public power system?
We don’t trust the Redevelopment Agency, and it’s risky to even raise this idea. But there’s a larger issue here: in many cities and counties the council or board of supervisors runs the Redevelopment Agency. We’ve long thought that the district-elected board would be more accountable and better suited to handle the immense (and dangerous) power of this agency than a commission appointed by the mayor.
Think about it: The supervisors take over redevelopment. Redevelopment buys out PG&E’s system. A new city agency, under the supervisors, starts selling retail power at cheap rates citywide and builds new solar, wind, and tidal facilities to make San Francisco a true national model of environmentally sound energy policy.
If it’s legal and the city attorney needs to issue an opinion on that all it would take is political will. *
Some questions for the mayor
EDITORIAL Gavin Newsom doesn’t want to take direct questions from the supervisors. He rarely gets asked tough questions from the press and almost never from the public. Instead, as Steven T. Jones and Sarah Phelan report ("Mayor Chicken," page 13), all of his appearances are scripted, and he does a mighty job of ducking the hard questions.
But if he is indeed going to be holding a series of town hall meetings over the next few months, there’s a chance for the voters to pin him down. Here are a few things you might want to ask the mayor:
• Your own staff admits that the universal health care plan works only if employers are required to provide health benefits. Yet the Golden Gate Restaurant Association your political ally has sued to block this. Do you support the employer mandate? Will you call on the GGRA to drop the suit? Will you decline political contributions from the members of a group that is suing the city with the aim of destroying one of your key initiatives? Where will money come from if the suit succeeds?
• When you ignored the will of the voters and decided to hold these town hall meetings instead of appearing before the supervisors, you said the supes were invited to attend. But you knew it would be illegal for them to participate under the Brown Act without some expensive preparations. Why did you do that?
• Why isn’t your full appointments calendar posted on the Web? The only information the public gets is a listing of your public events. Where is the rest of the calendar?
• You say you support public power, but the city’s efforts are so far limited to Treasure Island and Hunters Point. If there were a ballot measure this fall calling for the city to buy out Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s system and set up a full-scale public power effort similar to Sup. Tom Ammiano’s measure in 2000 would you pledge to endorse it?
• The city’s general plan states that 64 percent of all new housing should be available for below-market rates. Sup. Sophie Maxwell has a proposal to make that city law. Do you support her legislation? If not, how will the city meet its affordable housing needs?
• The Planning Department acknowledges that the level of new market-rate housing being discussed for the eastern neighborhoods would inevitably destroy thousands of blue-collar jobs. Is that an acceptable trade-off?
• Broadband Internet service is arguably the most important public infrastructure American cities will build in the next 50 years. Why are you prepared to turn ours over to private industry? Would it not be worth $10 million the estimated cost put out by Google and EarthLink to build our own system?
• You asked for the City Attorney’s Office opinion that invalidated the successful referendum drive on the BayviewHunters Point Redevelopment Plan. Why aren’t you willing to submit this far-reaching plan to a vote? And if you believe in the plan’s community oversight provisions and deference to the Redevelopment Agency, why did you unilaterally offer the 49ers a new stadium at the old shipyard, which is within the plan’s area?
• Why haven’t you followed up on the promise you made a year ago, after expressing outrage over the racist and homophobic videos made by police officers, to form a commission charged with "changing the culture" of the Police Department? And after your office blocked a citizen-based community policing plan, why didn’t you offer some alternative? Are you content with the way the department is being run?
• Eight months ago, after vetoing a six-month trial period for closing JFK Drive to cars on Saturdays, you promised to study Sunday closures for six months and offer a compromise plan for Saturday closures. When can we expect that proposal, and will you now support Saturday closures?
Honestly: what’s so scary about answering questions from the supervisors?
We await his honor’s response. *