Category: Land Use

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Ballot Battles and Campus Claims: The History of the Balboa Reservoir 1983-1991

Posted on by Sunnyside History

One of a series of articles on the history of the Balboa Reservoir.

As San Francisco city government currently works through the planning process for a housing project on the last remaining seventeen acres of the original Balboa Reservoir land, a review of the dramatic fate of the first housing plan for that land is in order…

This opposition to housing on the reservoir was largely fueled by support from advocates for City College’s future use of the land, who came from both inside and outside of the institution. The ballot referendums framed the issue as City College-versus-housing. In a show of support for the storied and esteemed college, the electorate picked the former; the City College coalition won. That victory ultimately led to an important result for the college’s future: in 1991 Mayor Art Agnos gave half of the reservoir property to the institution…

The empty basins

After evicting City College from the numerous WWII Navy-built structures on the 28-acre Balboa Reservoir site in December 1955–after ten years of college use–the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) demolished the buildings and had it excavated and paved as a two-basin reservoir in the late 1950s.[1]…(more)

 A very long read of a very long history of a very controversial property.

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Good News for SF’s Homeless

by  : beyondchron – excerpt

City Adopts New Strategy, Leadership

Last week brought some very welcome news to San Francisco’s roughly 6000 unhoused people living in tents, shelters and on the street.

First, a new referral strategy for filling vacancies in the city’s master leased SRO hotels has finally begun. Nonprofits began raising alarms about excessive vacancies and inadequate referrals in fall 2019. I described this as part of San Francisco’s “failed homeless strategy;” yet until very recently HSH made no material changes to the process.

The new referral process has already increased the number of unhoused who the city is allowing to move into permanent housing…

Starting April 1 a block rental system will sharply increase placements. Sending groups a large block of unhoused applicants as opposed to a few at a time is not rocket science; it gives the nonprofit provider the chance to offer options to potential tenants and ensures units do not sit vacant due to declines.

Hundreds of vacancies in city-funded, nonprofit master leased hotels will soon be filled. The new referral program will not end homelessness in San Francisco  but it will maximize the use of city funds for reducing the numbers…

It takes time for the city to purchase hotels as many agencies are involved…(more)
“It takes time for the city to purchase hotels as many agencies are involved…” This is a problem that needs streamlining. Which agencies can be cut out of the process? There is no end to streamlining for developers. Let’s see some of the focus shift from building new expensive “affordable” housing to purchasing existing affordable housing and keeping it permanently affordable. One might even consider offering permanently affordable units as rent-to-own to help the tenants move into the middle class rather than remain on the public dole. That would allow the city to purchase more permanently affordable housing and extend the offer to more families of a secure future.
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More parks privatization: The horses of Golden Gate Park

By Steven Hill : 48hills – excerpt

The Ferris Wheel is not the only example of the SF Recreation and Parks Department privatizing Golden Gate Park — and establishing structures without a two-thirds vote of the Board of Supervisors.

Nearly 18 months ago, a private vendor moved into the western end of the park next to Bercut Equitation Ring and built 20 or so stables to house as many horses. Chaparral Ranch Horse Program offers riding lessons and trail rides through the park for $80 an hour. It was supposed to [be] a six-month pilot program.

Also, in a public park that routinely rousts out the homeless from living in the park, the vendor installed two large RV trailers, where an unknown number of vendor staff are living full-time.

These sure look like “structures” to me. And they have not been authorized by the Board of Supervisors…

Is it just a coincidence that the Parks Alliance, the off-the-books friend of Rec-Park that served as a slush fund for nearly $1 million in Mohammad Nuru’s Recology kickback money, just threatened to pull funds from a park in Supervisor Connie Chan’s district if she didn’t back off her criticism of the organization?

So many questions, and so few answers. Meanwhile, the privatization of San Francisco’s public park jewel proceeds apace…(more)

New Policy and Priority at Golden Gate Park. No more natural habitats and no more public access where we can make a buck.
Let’s keep the public out of OUR public parks so we can cash in on it to feed out growing park budget cause our main cash cow got caught out cleaning funds. And let’s make sure the public is not snooping round to see what we are doing and file and complaint. Let’s keep them busy fighting over the street access for as long as we can. No cars. No free access and no camping unless we set up a camp site that we can benefit from.

Who do our public servants work for now? They are certainly not working for us.

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How Private Equity in the Rental Market Makes Housing Unaffordable, Unstable, and Unhealthy

By Alexander Ferrer, Research and Policy Analyst  : saje – excerpt (download pdf)

Beyond Wall Street Landlords

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Housing in the US has Experienced a Dramatic Corporate TakeoverSince 2000, the proportion of housing in corporate hands has increased dramatically. This trend started in the 1990s with the birth of the Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) and the Limited Liability Company (LLC) and accelerated dramatically because of the 2008 foreclosure crisis. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2000 individuals owned about 55% of the country’s rental stock, but by 2018 the share had fallen to just over 40%, and a plurality was owned by corporate vehicles for the first time in history. This consolidation of the rental housing stock into corporate hands affected all property types and threatens the stability of housing because integration into global financial circuits and the application of corporate management strategies and profit-making imperatives transform housing from home to investment. As this report demonstrates, this transformation is even more apparent in Los Angeles, where investment vehicles own 67% of rental housing…(more)

 

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Will SF Spend New Federal Homeless Dollars on Tents, Shelters or Homes?

By Randy Shaw : beyondchron – excerpt

City Faces Moment of Truth in Combating Homelessness

The Democrats’ American Rescue Plan provides $32 billion for addressing homelessness and low-income rental assistance. The National Low Income Housing Coalition website—which offers a great city and state breakdowns— has San Francisco slated to get nearly $19 million in new homeless action grant funds (the Plan also erased the city’s $650 million budget deficit).

The question then emerges: will San Francisco use these new funds to house the unhoused or only seek band aid solutions?…(more)

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Just Up-zoning the Suburbs Won’t Solve our Housing Problems

By Casey Maddren : citywatchla – excerpt

NEED MORE THAN SUBURBS–Anybody who pays attention to the news knows that there’s a heated, ongoing debate in LA, and across California, about how to solve our housing problems.

There are lots of different proposals floating around, but the message we hear most often from elected officials and the development community is that we have to up-zone to allow a whole lot more density. The argument goes that it’s just a matter of supply and demand. If we up-zone our cities and up-zone our suburbs, that will unleash the power of the free market and we’ll have plenty of cheap housing for everybody.

One idea that’s especially hot right now is the proposal to up-zone areas dominated by single-family homes (SFH). Some State legislators have embraced this approach, resulting in bills like SB 1120.

The City of LA hasn’t yet made a move to up-zone SFH areas, but the concept is popular among local progressives who believe we just need to build more housing. Heated debates have erupted over the topic on social media. At a recent hearing on the Hollywood Community Plan Update (HCPU) some members of the public expressed enthusiastic support for ending SFH zoning…

If the key issue is the lack of affordable housing, up-zoning by itself does nothing to solve the problem. As Patrick Condon points out in his book Sick City, when a city just increases allowable density, it’s really increasing the cost of the land, and that additional cost is ultimately paid by the household that’s renting or buying. The benefit goes to the landowner, not the renter or buyer. For a solution, Condon holds up Cambridge, Massachusetts, where city officials adopted an ordinance that allows increased density but only for the construction of permanently affordable units…

Casey Maddren is President of United Neighborhoods for Los Angeles (UN4LA [www.un4la.com]), a community group focused on better planning and better governance, and a CityWatch contributor.) Image: Curbed. Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abram…(more)

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Cities Are Sinking Under the Weight of Urban Development

By Linda Poon : bloomberg – excerpt

A new study quantifies what big buildings are doing to the ground beneath San Francisco and other cities, as sea levels rise.

In late 2020, engineers began working on a $100 million project to stop San Francisco’s Millennium Tower from tilting and sinking further into the ground. Tenants of the beleaguered luxury condo had learned four years earlier that the 58-story high-rise had sunk some 16 inches in over a decade. But the tower’s predicament is only part of a larger problem, and not just for the Bay Area: Cities around the world are sinking under the weight of their own urban development — at the same time that sea levels are rising.

A new study seeks to quantify how much the sheer weight of the built environment contributes to the sinking of cities, a geological phenomenon known as land subsidence. While urbanization is just one small cause of this phenomenon among several, the paper in the journal AGU Advances estimates that its impact is only likely to grow as people move to cities in greater numbers. As a result, densely packed cities are likely to sink faster than less developed areas.

Study author Tom Parsons, an earthquake seismologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, looked at the San Francisco Bay Area as a case study of this impact. He estimates that the collective weight of all of the San Francisco region’s buildings is roughly 1.6 trillion kilograms, or 3.5 trillion pounds. That alone may have caused the land to sink by as much as 80 millimeters, or more than three inches, over time as the city grew. …(more)

 

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UCSF’s Neighbors File CEQA Lawsuit

by Doug Comstock : westsideobserver – excerpt

Local residents oppose UCSF Parnassus expansion that would tower over the neighborhood and Golden Gate Park 

Neighborhood groups filed a Petition February 19th in Alameda County Superior Court challenging UC’s Environmental Impact Report for the massive UCSF Parnassus expansion proposal.

UC proposes a project that would add over 2 million square feet to the currently over-built campus — the equivalent of a Sales Force Tower and the TransAmerica Pyramid combined. The oversized project would be thrust between two mature neighborhoods – contrary to a 40-year commitment by the university to strictly adhere to the current envelope of the Parnassus complex. Neighborhood organizations and the San Francisco Bay Chapter of the Sierra Club as well as the Affordable Housing Alliance have concerns about the project’s effects on housing, transit, Golden Gate Park, and wildlife, as well as the failure to keep promises to the community it “serves.”…(more)

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Building Department director tasked with reforming antiquated permitting process quits abruptly

By Joe Eskenazi : 48hills – excerpt

In a blow for those hoping to streamline, modernize and cleanse the Department of Building Inspection’s byzantine and hidebound permitting process, the director hired to oversee this move has abruptly resigned after just 2.5 months on the job.

Issam Shahrouri was hired in late 2020 from Oakland, where he was deputy director of its building department. His status as an outsider in a department renowned for its insularity was a source of pride and hope for reformers, who looked to move the Department of Building Inspection past its reputation for scleroticism and corruption. Shahrouri also came to San Francisco in good estimation, and was accredited as a “Certified Building Official” — purportedly making him the only “CBO” in the department after the hasty March 2020 departure of former director Tom Hui in the wake of a corruption investigation.

But department employees were on Tuesday stunned to receive a brief email from interim director Patrick O’Riordan announcing Shahrouri’s sudden departure…(more)

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Supes call for investigation of Ferris Wheel money

By Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt

Revenue goes not to the city, but to a private entity that’s part of an FBI corruption probe…

The reason the Recreation and Parks Department wants to extend the run of the Ferris Wheel – according to Rec-Park documents – is that the St. Louis-based vendor that built it, SkyStar Partners, needs about 500,000 rides to make the roughly $9 million it was counting on.

And the private San Francisco Parks Alliance, which is a part of the FBI corruption investigation in SF, was counting on taking its share of about $500,000.

You can read the contract here. Not a penny of the revenue from this carnival ride will go to the city. It’s split between SkyStar and the Parks Alliance, which is supposed to use it to finance celebrations of the 150th anniversary of Golden Gate Park…(more)

Nobody likes to pay for parties more than Rec and Park and the Parks Alliance according to FBI investigations, and the City Attorney.

We were objecting to the fumes and noise from the generator that does not follow the logic for a city that is making ordinary citizens give up their gas generated heating systems and cooks give up their gas stoves. But, if there is also a question of funds and who gets them, it should be up to the Board of Supervisors to determine whether or not to sign the contract. That is, unless the Rec and Park Department have full authority to override City Hall on the matter.