Category: Land Use

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The only community garden in Daly City could become market-rate housing

By Emily Margaretten : 48hills – excerpt

Mist swirls through soaring Monterey pine trees, threatening to envelop the gated enclosure below. A steep embankment protects a community garden from the wind and fog, offering sanctuary to hundreds of species of plants that have pushed roots and shoots past crumbling concrete to reclaim a small parcel of land in one of the most densely populated cities in the country.

Erick Campbell, caretaker of the garden, smiled impishly and attacked a slab of concrete with a pickax. Beads of sweat dotted his forehead. “Daly City,” he said between swings, “is the worst. There’s no urban canopy, something like 3.9 percent.”

An urban tree canopy is the layer of leaves, stems, and branches that cover the ground. It averages around 27 percent for US cities. Daly City is an extreme outlier. It’s “an impervious concrete jungle,” as Project Green Space puts it.

Campbell pointed to the ground, where the rich sediment, a combination of 20 years of decaying vegetation and protective mulch, has created a thriving habitat for seedlings and saplings to grow.

“It’s made its transition from concrete back to earth,” Campbell observed. “Kind of silly to think they just want to put it back to concrete, you know?”…(more)

What is another garden covered by luxury housing in a state that has removed single family zoning in favor of by right and no rights for residents and voters to determine how we want to live. You may drop those illusions at the border.

The state that claims to be following the “new green policy“ slate that is leading the country down the road to environmental excellence has started us down the road of destroying our natural environment by cutting  trees, plowing over gardens, limiting lawns, and withholding water from farms and fish to plant more housing. This is a small list of actions the state is taken to sell our land and resources to the highest bidders and wall street investors. There are no-bid options for all cash deals all around.

Your state representatives were sold to you by global investors pushing us into the 2022 gold rush. They are up-zoning and gentrifying the state, leading the way to the highest levels of inflation that will ripple across the country and food prices escalate and the parties quibble over social matters and the media keeps us entertained.

Everything you thought you loved about the state will be short-lived unless we pass the ballot initiative to stop the land grab in the anti-garden state. Rather than compromise or give the voters a chance to suggest other ways to solve the problems, Sacramento politicians have hidden their intentions and ignored the voices of opposition.

Ourneighobrhoodvoices.com is the place to go to find out how you can join the efforts to stop this outrage that starts with the takeover of our backyards and rolls across our cities building “housing for everyone.”

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What the de Young Museum needs to recover from the COVID pandemic

By Thomas P. Campbell : via email (ran in the SFChronicle 11/22/2021)

Photo by Zrants

On Oct. 17, 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake hit the Bay Area with a magnitude of 6.9. At the de Young Museum, the shock waves inflicted grave damage, leaving the building with a “high potential for partial collapse.” As a result, the de Young

needed to be rebuilt, and despite having a history in Golden Gate Park going back as far as 1894, serious consideration was given to moving the museum downtown. San Francisco residents, however, overwhelmingly supported keeping the museum in its original location. And so it was rebuilt inside the park, where it remains.

Before COVID struck, the de Young drew as many as 1 million visitors per year to Golden Gate Park, including 50,000 San Francisco Unified School District students. We welcomed and continue to welcome low-income visitors and people with disabilities at low or no cost. Every Saturday we offer free admission for San Francisco and the entire Bay Area.

Running a museum in the middle of the city’s largest park, however, while ensuring equitable access to residents in the Bay Area and beyond, is not without its challenges…

Continue reading “What the de Young Museum needs to recover from the COVID pandemic”

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San Francisco’s clampdown on parklets fuels turmoil

By Carly Graf : sfexaminer – excerpt

Restaurants and shopowners hit with hefty new fees and fines.

When the pandemic hit, droves of people who found themselves stuck inside rushed out to get puppies.

That’s when Lynnet Spiegel knew she needed to figure out how to bring her pet store outdoors.

Fortunately, it’s also when San Francisco officials created Shared Spaces, a program that allowed for parking spots, sidewalks and other public spaces to be used for commercial activity — commonly known as parklets…

Nearly 18 months since she built her parklet, Spiegel recently received multiple citations threatening fines if she doesn’t make structural changes, including lowering its side walls, moving plant potters from the sidewalk and trimming the roof…

“As we move into a permanent program, the quickly-built structures need to adjust for long-term use,” said Robin Abad, who oversees the parklet initiative. “We have turned a crisis response into an enduring opportunity to reimagine the use of our streets to benefit the people who live, work and visit here.”…(more)

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Two big Projects Recently Rejected by the Board of Supervisors

Two big projects in District 6 were rejected by the Supervisors. How bad must a project be to be rejected? Read the two Tim Redmond articles that ran in 48hills. Most local media covered this with differing opinions.

In dramatic move, supes block huge luxury housing project in Soma

Debate shows city planners’ utter failure to understand the role of market-rate housing in gentrification and displacement.

In a stunning victory for progressives, the Board of Supes voted 8-3 Tuesday to block a massive market-rate development that would have threatened one of the last affordable areas in Soma.

The vote to overturn the 469 Stevenson EIR doesn’t kill the project, but it’s a major setback and could help advocates who want to use the site for affordable housing…

The vote also showed a new political shift on the board, with Sup. Matt Haney, who represents Soma, joining his more conservative colleagues, Ahsha Safai and Catherine Stefani, in voting to support the project…

The politics of this are fascinating: Haney, who has long been part of the progressive majority on the board, is now running for state Assembly with the strong support of the building trades (and it appears, at least some of the Yimbys—he is featured, along with the mayor, at a VIP reception for a Yimby fundraiser)…

At one point, under questioning, an executive from the developer, Build Inc., acknowledged that there is currently no financing for the project and the company doesn’t even own the land. Founding Partner Lou Vasquez said that he couldn’t predict how much the new units would rent for because “we don’t own the site or have financing in place to build it.

The supes didn’t even know how to respond. “I think that silence is from shock,” Sup. Shamann Walton noted...(more)

In a direct assault on planning policy, supes reject Tenderloin tech dorms

Board makes clear, for perhaps the first time ever, that developer profits should not be a deciding factor in city housing decisions.

The Board of Supes rejected a plan for tech dorms in the Tenderloin yesterday, setting up a challenge for private housing developers who increasingly want to build what’s known as “group housing.”

That term is badly defined in the Planning Code, and potentially creates a massive loophole for market-rate short-term rentals to replace family housing units.

And the supes, by unanimously overruling the Planning Commission—a very rare move—made it clear that they don’t want to see projects get approved, and then substantially changed afterward.…(more)

It appears that someone filed an application to develop someone else’s property, and went through the process of procuring an entitlement, with the help of SF Planning Department staff without involving the property owner in the process. It took an appeal before the Board of Supervisors to discover that the developer does not own the property they are entitled to develop. They have on funding or construction cost analysis and have no idea what the rents may be. How many times has this happened without an appeal being filed and is this a good use of SF Planning staff time and taxpayer money?

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Rent Payments to SF Public Housing Agency Plunged in Last Two Years, Spurring Eviction Fears

By , and : sfpublicpress – excerpt

Rent collections by San Francisco’s public housing agency fell precipitously in late 2019 and have continued to decline to less than half of what is owed, according to a San Francisco Public Press analysis — but the agency can’t explain why.

Only 47% of rent paid directly to the Housing Authority was collected this July, the latest month for which data is available. The 974 households whose units are managed by the agency — the rest pay rent to private management companies ­— pay roughly 30% of their monthly income, or $489 on average. These residents owe at least $4.5 million in back rent to the city.

Officials at the Housing Authority said they could not provide an explanation for why the shortfalls in rent collections began increasing in September 2019. Nor could they say why San Francisco’s Housing Authority has a far higher rate of delinquencies than parallel agencies in other big cities, some of which are collecting as much as 98% of the rents due.

“Prior to the onset of the pandemic, the authority robustly embraced local efforts to keep people housed and worked with households to enter them into payment programs if they were struggling to keep up with their overall expenses,” Rose Dennis, a Housing Authority spokeswoman, said in an email. “This may have impacted pre-COVID rent collection.”…(more)

 

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SB 10 Should Be Vetoed – PCL’s View Explained

Letter from the Planning and Conservation League and request for actions to encouarging the Governor Newosm to veto SB10.

PCL appreciates the continued efforts of Senator Wiener, and this bill’s multiple co-authors, to address California’s affordable housing crisis, but SB 10 misses the mark Amongst other concerns with the bill, our primary objection lies with the provision that would allow cities and counties to override local voter-approved initiatives in the enactment of SB 10’s provisions.

We sympathize with the need to revisit outdated voter-approved land use ordinances that inhibit inclusionary densification, but giving unilateral authority to jurisdictions to over-ride the constitutionally-defined power of the people is the wrong approach. Amendments made to limit this provision do not go far enough to address the sweeping implications this could have on all types of constructive voter-approved land use actions–including urban growth boundaries, inclusionary housing ordinances, and rent-control ordinances. SB 10 will undermine the voter-initiative power of the public, a fundamental tenet of a functioning democracy.

Judicial remedies already exist to invalidate outdated initiatives. The legislature has the power to preempt what the public can or cannot vote on by statute, but the legislature does not have the authority to alter the constitutionally defined power itself by statute. We believe SB 10 would be unconstitutional if enacted, and for this reason, we urge the Governor to veto this bill.

If this concerns you as well, please send a note to the Governor here:
https://govapps.gov.ca.gov/gov40mail/

Formal letters can also be submitted to this address:
leg.unit@gov.ca.gov

Please feel free to use the wording above as a template for your comments

If you want PCL’s view on the rest of SB 10, read on:

Continue reading “SB 10 Should Be Vetoed – PCL’s View Explained”

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Colorado River, Lifeline Of The West, Sees Historic Water Shortage Declaration

by Kirk Siegler : npr – (excerpt) includes audio track and transcript

The first-ever shortage declaration on the Colorado River forces arid Western states to re-examine their relationship with resources many take for granted, drinking water and cheap hydroelectricity.

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:  For the first time ever, the U.S. government declared a shortage on the Colorado River last week. That means states like Arizona that rely on the river for their water supply are seeing big cutbacks as a punishing drought continues in the west. The Colorado River and its tributaries are a lifeline to some 40 million people in multiple states, including in California, who rely on it for drinking water. The river also irrigates countless farms and generates lots of cheap hydropower. So a shortage on the Colorado is a big deal, and we wanted to hear more about that. We asked NPR’s Kirk Siegler to talk us through it. He covers the West and has been reporting on the Colorado River for years…(more)

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The Seas Are Rising. Could Oysters Help?

By Eric Klinenberg : newyorker – excerpt (includes audio track)

In New York, Kate Orff will use oyster reefs to mitigate storm surges.

n a windy afternoon in April, the landscape architect Kate Orff stood on the open walkway of a container crane, some eighty feet above the Red Hook Terminal, in Brooklyn, and the Buttermilk Channel, a tidal strait on the southeast side of Governors Island. Most places in New York City make it easy to avoid thinking about the rivers, canals, and ocean waters that form an aquatic thoroughfare for the global economy and surround the industrial corridors, office towers, and densely populated neighborhoods where millions of people have settled. This place is not one of them…

A great deal of Orff’s work addresses the inescapable fact that the Atlantic Ocean is rising, and coming for the land. She’s the founder of the design firm SCAPE, the director of the Urban Design Program at Columbia University, and the first landscape architect to win a MacArthur “genius” grant. She’s also at the forefront of an emerging approach to climate resilience that argues we should be building with nature, not just in nature. Its guiding principle is that “gray infrastructure”—the dikes, dams, and seawalls that modern societies use to contain and control water—is often insufficient, and sometimes destructive. Green infrastructure, by contrast, involves strategically deploying wetlands, dunes, mangrove forests, and reefs to reduce threats of catastrophic flooding and coastal erosion, while also revitalizing the land. This carefully designed “second nature,” the thinking goes, could be our second chance…(more)

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Board OKs $14.3M Loan for 2550 Irving St. Project

By Thomas K. Pendergast : sfrichmondreview – excerpt

With a unanimous vote the San Francisco Board of Supervisors recently approved a $14.3 million loan agreement to help replace the Police Credit Union building on Irving Street between 26th and 27th avenues, with 100 units of “affordable” housing reserved primarily for previously homeless and low-income families in a seven-story building.

“This is a historic moment to be considering funding for site acquisition for the Sunset’s first 100% affordable housing development for low and moderate-income families,” District 4 Supervisor Gordon Mar told the Board at a meeting on July 27. “The need for affordable housing is so often overlooked and ignored in the Sunset and this development is one very important step to address the urgent needs of residents priced out of our neighborhood.”…

Mar acknowledged that the project is contentious…

“Imagine a day in the life of a hundred families and what their needs are and what they do every day,” said local architect Thomas Soper. “(Affordable housing for families) is by far the most activity-generating type of affordable housing that you can ever build…. Over-concentration is the word that professionals should be applying here but politicians don’t understand that. They have a mandate…

“The scale of the building is way out of line from where it should be,” said Robert Ho, who owns a four-unit building in the area. “The City is making a mistake getting back into the large-scale, low-income housing type of development that they’d gotten away from or stopped doing…. I think it’s a mistake to build such a large building on Irving Street.”

Ho said he grew up in Chinatown public housing.

“Where a person grows up, especially a young person, influences their self-esteem,” he said. “Living in such a large-scale building, it’s something that a young person is aware of very early, that this is not where we want to live. We’re living in this out of necessity, not because we want to. It’s a constant reminder for young people that ‘our family is poor.’”…(more)

 

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Facing ‘dire water shortages,’ California bans Delta pumping

By Rachel Becker, calmatters : sfexaminer – excerpt

In an aggressive move to address “immediate and dire water shortages,” California’s water board this week unanimously approved emergency regulations to temporarily stop thousands of farmers, landowners and others from diverting water from from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta watershed…

The new regulations — the first to take such widespread action for the massive Delta watershed stretching from Fresno to the border with Oregon — could lead to formal curtailment orders for about 5,700 water rights holders as soon as Aug. 16. The decision comes on the heels of curtailment orders issued to nearly 900 water users along the drought-stricken Russian River, with 222 more expected next week.

The five water board members, who were appointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom or former Gov Jerry Brown, approved the rule despite vehement opposition from representatives of Central Valley growers.

Sen. Shannon Grove, a Republican from Bakersfield, said the regulation would “disrupt the critical production of essential food…Instead, the state should focus on expanding water storage and upgrading its existing water infrastructure, not punish local water managers.”

Assemblymember Adam Gray, a Democrat from Merced, called the curtailment orders for senior water rights holders “one of the most destructive measures possible.”

“The Board’s legal authority is by no means certain,” Gray wrote to the board. “Growers will have to risk significant fines and penalties just to find out whether the Board actually has the authority it claims. Either way, they lose.”…

Dwindling flows risk salty backwash from the Pacific tainting supplies for drinking, farmers and fish…

It’s just too fast, you’ve got to listen to stakeholders in this process,” said Valerie Kincaid, a water law attorney who represents the San Joaquin Tributaries Authority, a coalition of irrigation districts and water agencies. “We now have a draft regulation that exceeds water board authority.”…(more)