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by Sam Whiting : sfchronicle – excerpt

A summer of simmering San Francisco neighborhood resistance to a plan to build a new small boat harbor in front of the Marina Green boiled over into a protest outside a community meeting on Wednesday.

Members of the recently organized citizen group Keep the Waterfront Open gathered outside the meeting hosted by the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department at Moscone Rec Center.

The plan was to carry signs, march and chant at the entrance to the meeting in the old gymnasium on Chestnut Street. Around 75-100 energized people showed up, some with signs in hand — though they forwent the march, and the chanting was done mainly by two 8-year-old girls, Siobhan Butler and Carolyn Wong, president and vice president of the Earth Club at their school.

“Save the cove!” they chanted loudly, alternating with, “Clean the cove!”…

Some of the more adamant protesters are still fighting a $190 million settlement reached in 2021 between the city attorney and PG&E to pay for the cleanup. Homeowners along Marina Boulevard claim that the cleanup plan is insufficient for remediating both the boat harbor and the property beneath their homes…(more)

by Garrett Leahy :sfstandard – excerpt

A feud between a property developer and a city official may squash housing plans for a dilapidated old San Francisco movie theater.

The conflict centers on a local supervisor’s plan to designate the Alexandria Theater as a historic landmark, which the property owner says will cause development costs to skyrocket, making it impossible to complete the project—and leaving the theater in its blighted condition.

Development plans for the theater have fallen through before. Now the city and restoration advocates are seething at the thought of the failure of another project that could transform the theater into much-needed San Francisco housing if completed…

Woody LaBounty, head of San Francisco Heritage, a nonprofit that seeks to preserve San Francisco’s unique architecture, said his organization has pushed for the theater’s redevelopment for at least 15 years. The local historian said he’s tired of seeing the Alexandria Theater in a state of disrepair and wants to see it redeveloped.

“The whole idea was housing in the back, and swim center in the front,” LaBounty said. “At what point are we supposed to believe that the owners don’t have the money to build it because it’s a historic landmark? The owners have had two approved projects, and they haven’t done anything.”…(more)

By Megan Fan Munce : sfchronicle – excerpt

The developers behind a controversial project to build a 50-story condo building in San Francisco’s Sunset District have sued the city, claiming that officials misinterpreted and violated a state law meant to incentivize affordable housing.

California’s Density Bonus Law (DBL) is designed to incentivize the construction of low to moderate income housing by allowing developers to build more housing units in a project than local regulations normally allow if they agree to make a larger percentage of those units affordable housing.

In a lawsuit filed Tuesday in the San Francisco Superior Court, the developers, 2700 Sloat Holding, which owns the site, argues that the city is misinterpreting the requirements of the law and also violating it by requiring developers to pay certain fees…

San Francisco Planning Director Rich Hillis said he had not reviewed the exact details of the complaint, but said he believes the developers of the project have misinterpreted how far beyond local regulation the density bonus law allows developers to build.

“It kind of defies logic that you could take a site that has a 100-foot height limit, apply a 50% bonus to it and somehow get a 560-foot tower,” Hilles said. “We think they’re wrong in their interpretation of what’s allowed under the zoning.”…(more)

By Tim Redmond : 498hills – excerpt

Rafael Mandelman and Joel Engardio have been among the most outspoken foes of a federal court injunction prohibiting the city from criminalizing unhoused people…(more)
And

Why We’re Suing the City: An open letter to Sups. Dorsey, Engardio, and Mandelman
By Jennifer Friedenbach…(more)

By Timothy Karoff : sfgate – excerpt

A beloved farmers market’s tenure in U.N. Plaza is nearing an end.

City officials have elected to move the Heart of the City Farmers’ Market, a staple of Civic Center for 42 years, to the nearby Fulton Street parking lot, making room for a skate area, chess boards, pingpong tables and Teqball (a sport similar to table tennis) tables, according to a press release from the farmers market.

The market will move one street over to Fulton Street between Larkin and Hyde on Sept. 3, and construction of the recreation area is set to wrap up in November. The decision is an attempt at revitalization, with hopes that a vibrant hub of activity will make the area safer, as U.N. Plaza is known as a site for the sale and purchasing of drugs…

“Nobody has a food access program as large as ours,” Steve Pulliam, the market’s executive director, told SFGATE. “Certainly not in California. We have the numbers to prove that.”

Pulliam cited a host of issues with the new location. Compared to the U.N. Plaza location, Fulton Street’s space is limited. He pointed out that in the new location, vendors won’t be able to park their vehicles behind their stalls, leaving them exposed to smashed windows and break-ins. This also puts merchandise at risk, since some vendors use their vehicles to store extra produce…(more)

Why not just have the market extended to more days of the week? Or do some activities that don’t disrupt it on the off-days. Does anyone really think this is going to stop the activities around the BART station?

By John King : sfchronicle – excerpt

The need to build new housing in cities tends to be discussed in simplistic terms — for or against, tall or short, market rate or affordable.

Three recently completed complexes in San Francisco illuminate the core issue that too often gets lost: Such housing should be measured by its capacity to improve people’s lives.

The three buildings do this despite very different settings: Treasure Island, Mission Bay and near ever-troubled Sixth Street. They succeed by providing shelter and services for people who were living on city streets and by enhancing their neighborhoods.

They nurture community, inside and out.

“The idea is not just to house people, but for people to thrive,” said Vanna Whitney of Leddy Maytum Stacy, the architect for the four-story, 140-unit HomeRise at Mission Bay. “We want something that feels like a home and not an institution.”…

The same goal anchors Maceo May Apartments, 104 units of supportive housing on Treasure Island that opened officially in May. Architectural firm Mithun designed it for Swords to Plowshares, and all residents are military veterans who were living on the streets…

The largest and most ambitious of the three newcomers is at 1064 Mission St. between Sixth and Seventh streets, one of the most troubled stretches of San Francisco’s downtown area…

They’re islands of stability and economic diversity in a city where neither is abundant. They’re also models of thoughtful design at both the human and urban scale — a trait that should be encouraged, whoever the residents might be…(more)

By J.K. Dineen : sfchronicle – excerpt

The developer of a $1.2 billion mixed-use project at the corner of Market Street and Van Ness Avenue has suspended construction, the latest blow in a cascade of bad news that has hit the greater Civic Center and Mid-Market neighborhoods in recent years.

Branded as Hayes Point, the 540-foot tower at 30 Van Ness Ave. had been a rare bright spot in a district that has lost high-profile office tenants like Uber, Reddit and Block, as well as the city’s largest Whole Foods, which shut down a year after opening.

Hayes Point was one of the few major construction projects underway in San Francisco at the moment.

City officials have been pushing legislation to revive downtown and Civic Center. Recent moves include cutting some fees and the amount of inclusionary housing in some market-rate projects with the hope of jump-starting construction. Legislation to smooth office-to-residential conversions is also moving ahead…

Hayes Point is a rarity in San Francisco because it is a true mixed-use project, with 333 for-sale condos on top of 290,000 square feet of office space, with arts space and retail on the ground floor.

In a statement, Lendlease Executive General Manager Arden Hearing said his group would be “pausing construction on Hayes Point until markets normalize and we’re able to bring in early tenancy commitments, or a capital partner, or both.”…(more)

RELATED:

S.F. must create 82,000 new homes in 8 years. The city is already behind

By Joe DiMento : sfchronicle – excerpt

Much ink has been spilled in San Francisco about a proposed development at 2700 Sloat Blvd. that would create a 50-story condo in the Outer Sunset, a neighborhood with no buildings over six stories tall. The development likely received its death blow when the Board of Appeals voted down the appeal of the Planning Commission’s rejection of the project.

But even if the Sunset tower never becomes more than an artist’s rendering that proliferated across media outlets, it has already achieved something important — moved our “Housing Overton Window” closer to where it needs to be to alleviate our housing crisis.

In political science, the “Overton window” is the term for the spectrum of acceptable political beliefs in a given system. For decades, it has been perfectly acceptable for neighborhoods like the Outer Sunset to oppose nearly all new multiunit developments. This has created a catastrophic housing shortage to the tune of 3.5 million units statewide — manifesting in astronomical rents and home prices in California and fully one-half of the entire country’s unsheltered homeless population…(more)