Why is it that some upzoning projects have Bay Area neighbors cheering?
While Silicon Valley neighborhoods squawk about increased density, a wealthy SF neighborhood actively embraces a huge new housing project. Perhaps we're seeing a model for addressing the region's chronic housing shortage. The exceptional Frisc reports.
The demolition of five buildings in the former California Pacific Medical Center to make way for housing has united Presidio Heights neighbors and SF Planning alike.
After nearly a decade, a crumbling old hospital — the California Pacific Medical Center campus on California Street — is scheduled for the wrecking ball in the next 18 months, removing five blighted buildings and sparing one for a top-to-bottom renovation.
It’s a massive project, with more than 450 new homes spread across three city blocks. There have been delays, and with SF’s housing and construction markets still in the dumps, more delay would not be surprising.
But here’s a more immediate surprise: the response to the plan was a lovefest. This, in a town where replacing a window can trigger contentious hearings, and in an exclusive neighborhood where the median home sells for $8.3 million and almost no new construction ever happens.
At the Planning Commission’s approval hearing in May, neighbors, YIMBYs, and the Planning Commission itself — which is usually good for at least a couple naysayer votes against new market-rate housing — all wished the project to get underway as fast as possible.
“It’s had its time,” Commissioner Derek Braun said of the crumbling facility, which reaches a top height of 80 feet and is currently fenced off and plastered with security warnings.
One neighbor who gave his blessing at the hearing says it’s part of a much bigger puzzle of tens of thousands of new homes San Francisco must make room for in coming years.
“We have effectively become a gated country club,” said Matt Regan, a Presidio Heights resident and senior vice president at the pro-housing business group Bay Area Council. He called the CPMC redevelopment “the beginnings of a solution.”
San Francisco is in the midst of its most consequential housing battle in more than 50 years. A sweeping redesign of about half the city, especially neighborhoods that rarely see new construction, is on the table. The Board of Supervisors must approve it by the end of January or the city could face harsh state penalties, like loss of transit funding.
The Family Zoning Plan, as officials have dubbed it, would make room for taller apartment buildings, more homes, and big neighborhood changes. A preliminary hearing on June 16 brought a couple hours of public comment, mostly in opposition.
This citywide reaction from a coalition of homeowners, tenant advocates, and preservationists therefore made the CPMC project approval and praise all the more remarkable.
“Dying malls and large shopping centers, old big box stores in residential districts — those are maybe where the future lies,” says Tom Radulovich, senior policy fellow at the urbanism nonprofit Livable City. He cautions that developers are unlikely to formulate plans for any of those locales until the city approves the housing expansion plan. (The deadline is the end of next January.)
The real trick is whether the lovefest attitude of the neighborhood in Presidio Heights can be reproduced at any of those other locations. In San Francisco, even projects that should be an easy lay-up for public support — such as, say, turning the parking lot at Balboa Reservoir into hundreds of new homes — can run into well-organized opposition.
New housing rules along major corridors in coming months will mean developers need fewer special permissions, fewer hearings, and fewer lucky breaks to make big new projects happen. At the same time, the city wants to offer builders incentives to stick by “culturally appropriate” design standards — in other words, to build taller and denser but hew to a neighborhood’s visual context.
It’s an as-yet-untested combination of sticks and carrots. But if they work, more of San Francisco could look like the CPMC site down the line.
Read the whole thing here.
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