The litigation challenging Pleasanton’s housing cap has been in the works since 2006 and was reinstated in 2008.  In 2009, Attorney General Jerry Brown saw this case as an opportunity to augment his ever-growing portfolio on climate change, which includes not just lawsuits, but also comment letters that inform local governments when their efforts at planning and environmental review inadequately document impacts related to greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.  Brown initially provided Pleasanton with such a comment letter (PDF), informing the City that its updated General Plan and corresponding EIR were inconsistent, and therefore inadequate, as long as Measure GG’s housing cap was retained.  The Pleasanton situation fits especially well into Brown’s climate change portfolio, because Measure GG, if allowed to continue into perpetuity, would ultimately result in a gross housing-jobs imbalance.  Although Pleasanton was projected to nearly double its workforce by 2025, its residential capacity would remain frozen in time.  That means the vast majority of that workforce would be required to commute long distances from the Bay Area and the Central Valley on Interstate 580 and other heavily congested freeways, thereby increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

Despite Brown’s commentary, the City stuck to its story, claiming that the housing cap was simply an example of a municipality legally bringing to bear its land use powers.  Brown then joined Urban Habitat’s litigation in 2009, which increased the publicity of the case while boosting Brown’s climate change credentials.  In August 2009, the court refused to dismiss the case, and now, in March 2010, the court has finally invalidated the housing cap.

Judge Roesch’s Decision

Last summer, I wrote a post that went into a fair amount of detail describing the General Plan, state housing requirements, Pleasanton’s growth projections, and the nexus to climate change.  I won’t repeat all of that information here, but if you are interested in more detail, or simply would like to refresh on the background, please check out that previous post.

The abridged version is that the state’s Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) is the result of a process that assigns to regions within California a certain number of housing units at all income levels.  The expectation is that regions will plan for the future, in order to accommodate California’s growing population.  The Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) then translates those projections to the level of local governments within the nine-county Bay Area, so that each jurisdiction absorbs its fair share of the region’s housing need.  Measure GG is clearly problematic, because over time, ABAG would continue to assign housing allocations to Pleasanton — but Measure GG’s constraints would preclude the City from planning and approving those future units.  From Judge Roesch’s decision (PDF):

It is self-evident that the City cannot comply with the State statue [sic] requiring the City to accommodate its RHNA when the city is not permitted by its local law, Measure GG, to allow the number of housing units to be built that would satisfy the RHNA.

Indeed, Pleasanton is unable to accommodate the 3,277 homes it is assigned for the 2007-2014 RHNA planning period, being only about two thousand units short of reaching the cap.  The City also failed to account for some housing units that it had been assigned in the previous planning period, which ended in 2007.

As of the time of this writing, the Pleasanton City Council has not yet spoken to this issue, nor is it clear whether the City will seek an appeal.  It would be preferable for the City to move on, accept this decision, and carry out the rezoning necessary to comply with the ruling.  The City’s basic premise — that a municipality’s land use powers reign supreme — can only go so far.  Although local governments in California have traditionally retained essentially complete authority over land use decisions, the State has a clear interest in ensuring that all its citizens are properly housed.  The RHNA is a vehicle, albeit a rather weak one, that provides the State with a measure of oversight to ensure that this important interest is fulfilled.  Where the State has provided such a framework to guide local action, State mandates necessarily preempt local regulations.  Again, from Roesch’s decision, quoting the state Supreme Court:

“The Legislature has specified certain minimum standards for local zoning regulations” … even though it “has carefully expressed its intent to retain the maximum degree of local control …” … “Local legislation in conflict with general law is void.”

The City must know it is caught in a tough spot, and its own actions within the past few months suggest that it anticipated an unfavorable ruling.  The City amended Municipal Code § 17.36.060 (limiting building permits for new residential units) so that it allowed an exception to the building permit cap, if necessary to comply with the RHNA.  Introducing this exception eliminated a conflict with state law, at least with respect to the annual building permit cap.

The City also passed an ordinance, which approved the rezoning of three parcels in Hacienda Business Park to permit mixed-use development.  But Section 5 of that same ordinance refused to approve any mixed-use or residential development plan proposed for those rezoned parcels, until “PUD Major Modification for the entire Hacienda Business Park” had been completed.  Judge Roesch did not buy it, observing that “could take up a period of time ranging from one year to forever.”

The Hacienda Business Park rezoning, Roesch noted, “may start a process to cure the City’s failure in this matter, but is wholly inadequate to be considered a cure.”

Roesch then ordered Pleasanton to implement “non-illusory zoning changes” necessary to cure its housing shortfall from the previous RHNA planning period, which ended in 2007.  He also ordered the City to strike Measure GG (and related Measures PP and QQ) from all planning documents, and to freeze construction and development permits until the City’s General Plan is fixed.

The Measure GG housing cap placed the City of Pleasanton, as Judge Roesch aptly put it in his decision, “in clear violation” of state law.  Indeed, the notion of a strict numerical limit on housing units is fundamentally incompatible with the philosophy underpinning  California’s housing law — which both accepts population growth as a reality and at least attempts to hold local governments accountable, by requiring that they plan for future need rather than sticking their collective heads in the sand.  It would certainly not be fair for Pleasanton to readily accept job growth within its city limit but then refuse to absorb residential growth.  And yet, continued application of Measure GG would have produced precisely that perverse result.  Judge Roesch is to be commended for finally overturning Measure GG.

But one major exception to that general rule is housing. The State of California requires that General Plans contain a set of elements, which lay out a blueprint and policy direction to guide future development. Among those elements, the Housing Element is singled out as special, in that it must be updated every five years in accordance with the Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA). The state Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) and ABAG will project the number of housing units that the Bay Area will need to accommodate for the next several years, at four income levels (very low, low, moderate, and above moderate), and then will assign a housing share to governments throughout the Bay Area, ensuring that the region, as a whole, meets the required total. Each local government then updates its Housing Element every five years, specifying how it will accommodate its share of the regional housing need. Cities throughout the Bay Area have been engaged in this process this year.

This process ensures that local governments plan to accommodate housing units that are accessible to a range of income levels. Without such a procedure in place, it’s easy to imagine what could happen. Many cities — whose elected officials might simply translate the parochial demands of a local NIMBY group into something resembling legislation — would shirk on their obligation to ensure the production of housing units, particularly affordable units. They might, for instance, amend the zoning code to contain a set of requirements that are a proxy for wealth, ensuring that only affluent citizens can afford to live there. Other cities might freeze growth altogether, thinking only of what will happen within their city limits and ignoring what the effect would be outside. The point is that without a state mandate prohibiting that sort of behavior, it would be difficult or impossible for California to accommodate, in a just and equitable fashion, a population that is projected to increase to 60 million by the year 2050. The state has an enormous interest in ensuring that all of its citizens, of all income levels, are safely housed; but accomplishing this goal requires the cooperation of local governments, who, after all, are empowered to control land use through zoning.

The City of Pleasanton’s Faulty General Plan

So what happens when, despite the state’s requirement, a city tries to shrug off its obligation to accommodate its fair share of housing growth? Then, the State must step in — like it did yesterday, when Attorney General Jerry Brown finally took action against the City of Pleasanton’s housing cap. In 1996, Pleasanton adopted Measure GG, which instituted a housing cap — no more than 29,000 units could be built within the city. Since 2006, the City had already faced lawsuits because of this provision, and in January 2009, Jerry Brown submitted comments (PDF) on the Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) of Pleasanton’s General Plan update. In his comments, Brown indicated quite unambiguously that the housing cap was problematic. Now, in just a dozen pages (PDF), Brown clarifies how the Pleasanton cap violates state housing law. It basically comes down to the numbers. ABAG’s projections require that the City accommodate 3,277 housing units by the year 2014. But the City is only 2,007 units short of reaching the housing cap of 29,000 units. With the cap in place, not even those 3,277 units could not be built — to say nothing of the units that ABAG projections would call for after 2014. And, in fact, the City even still has to make up missing housing units from the last RHNA planning period, which ended in 2007.

The housing cap does not permit any exceptions — for instance, an exception that would allow the City to zone for the 1,270 additional units that would be needed to comply with the current RHNA. By not allowing such an exception, Pleasanton’s housing cap is in direct conflict with the state requirement. The housing cap could be struck down on that basis, but there is still another reason to strike it down. In order for a General Plan to be valid, it must be internally consistent. Pleasanton’s General Plan, however, contains a fatal flaw of inconsistency. The 29,000-unit housing cap is contained in the Land Use Element. The Housing Element, on the other hand, admits that the housing cap is an obstacle that prevents the City from meeting its housing allocation. The Housing Element, in accordance with the RHNA, encourages the production of moderate, low, and very-low income housing units to meet Pleasanton’s need. But that will be difficult to do, so long as the City enforces the 29,000-unit housing cap — particularly since the City is now only 2,007 units shy of maxing out. So the housing cap creates an internal inconsistency that renders the General Plan invalid. Removing the housing cap would, of course, remove the inconsistency, and would also remove the conflict with state law.

The Climate Change Connection

What continues to be interesting here is Jerry Brown’s consistent emphasis on climate change. In this case, Pleasanton’s General Plan just straight-up violates state housing requirements, and the City’s housing cap could be invalidated on that basis alone. Indeed, in his formal challenge of the housing cap, Brown focuses on the state’s Planning and Zoning Law to make the case. In supplementary materials, however, Brown has embraced a policy discussion that goes beyond simply pointing out the literal legal problem. In his January 2009 comments on the General Plan DEIR, he criticized the City for not adequately considering the climate change impacts of the Plan. (Amazingly, the City had claimed that a 46% increase in vehicle miles traveled was an insignificant impact!) This is an environmental issue, not a housing issue. More recently, Brown explicitly tied the housing cap to its effect on travel patterns and air quality — adding his voice to the chorus chanting about how focused growth and smart land use patterns are a critical component of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Interstate 580 through the Tri-Valley, one of the Bay Area’s most congested freeways, is surrounded by suburban sprawl. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Michael Patrick.

It’s a classic example of what we observed in the beginning — a city, unless subject to an overarching regional or state mandate, will likely prioritize local parochial interests above the greater good. Pleasanton instituted a housing cap while thinking only about the perceived desirable effect it would have within the city limits — but it did not account for the effects of that cap on the greater region. Within about a decade, the number of jobs in Pleasanton almost doubled, reaching about 58,110 employees in 2005; that number has since grown to 61,100 jobs. But while Pleasanton has cleared space for this job growth, it has not kept up with making space for housing growth. As a result, ABAG found that in 2005, 79% of Pleasanton’s workforce lived outside the city limit, and a full 50% of the workforce endured long commutes from outside the Tri-Valley area. The City planned to continue allowing more office and commercial development, so that by 2025, Pleasanton was projected to nearly double its workforce once again, to 105,000 jobs. But all the while, the housing cap would be maintained, essentially freezing the population at about 78,200 residents for the rest of time. By not providing sufficient housing that would allow people who work in Pleasanton to also live there, the city is essentially forcing long, single-occupancy vehicle commutes — increasing emissions, adding more cars to extremely congested stretches of freeway, and pushing the region further into nonattainment. Pleasanton’s annual carbon dioxide output, which was 1.388 million tons in 2008, would increase to 1.940 million tons by 2025 if the housing cap were to be maintained. The housing cap would also prevent Pleasanton from developing vacant land near its BART station as densely as it should. Restricting growth near BART would diminish the value of this valuable asset, and it would prevent growth in the one place in Pleasanton where it makes the most sense. The housing cap, a purely local requirement, thus carries with it regionally detrimental externalities.

In this sense, Brown’s challenge — although grounded in housing requirements, rather than environmental requirements — may nonetheless be seen as the latest in a string of events that indicate Brown’s stance on the climate change crisis. AB 32 requires that emissions in California be reduced to 1990 levels by 2020; but in the absence of the anticipated panoply of regulations from the Air Resources Board, which will translate AB 32’s broad requirements into more focused action, cities and counties have been uncertain as to what their exact obligations are. Despite (or perhaps because of) that uncertainty, Brown has made it clear on numerous occasions that local and regional governments may not simply ignore the adverse impacts their actions could have on air quality — such as in 2007, when he scolded San Bernardino County, and also last year, when he scolded the Bay Area’s own MTC. And now, with this latest lawsuit against the City of Pleasanton, Brown reminds us of the spirit underlying SB 375, by putting on display the interplay between housing, transportation, and climate change. It is so refreshing to see that someone in our government gets it.

The last post discussed the SFCTA report on Geary BRT, so here is a roundup of other recent news:

SFMTA Budget is up for debate: To close a $128.9 million shortfall, the SFMTA Board adopted a budget that raised the adult and paratransit individual fares to $2 and adult fast passes to $60 on January 1, 2010. The budget also raises some parking fees, but it eliminates several lines altogether and institutes considerable service cuts on many other lines. As promised, Board President David Chiu will introduce a motion (PDF) at today’s Budget and Finance Committee meeting to veto the MTA-adopted budget. If you’d like to attend, the meeting is in the Board chamber, 2nd floor of SF City Hall, at 1:30 pm.
Update: At the Budget and Finance Committee, the vote was 4-1 (Carmen Chu dissenting) against the MTA’s budget, and Chiu has the seven votes needed to overturn the budget at the full Board.

New parking lot in Oakland defeated: Last night, I learned via Twitter that the Oakland City Council rejected the Redevelopment Agency’s proposal for a temporary surface parking lot on Telegraph Avenue in Downtown Oakland, next to the Fox Theater. The City Council requested that staff investigate the possibility of art installations instead, which would be a considerable improvement over a parking lot. Whatever use is ultimately installed will be temporary, to be dismantled in 2011 when construction will begin on the second phase of Forest City’s Uptown project.

Caltrain to declare a fiscal emergency: Despite ridership gains in 2008 and already having raised fares 25 cents on January 1, Caltrain is scrambling to close its budget shortfall, in light of the lost STA funds; it plans to declare a fiscal emergency in order to exempt service cuts from environmental review.

High-Speed Rail: The controversy on the Peninsula over high-speed rail continues. Palo Alto has already demanded that trains run in a tunnel, and now Burlingame is following suit, though of course without offering suggestions as to how it plans to foot the bill. Palo Alto’s Vice Mayor Jack Morton is also calling for the High-Speed Rail Authority to be dissolved. But these Peninsula protests may be frustrated by Galgiani’s bill AB 289, which is making its way through the California legislature. AB 289 would exempt from CEQA review all grade separations carried out in connection with California High-Speed Rail. (Grade separations are of course what Palo Alto has already protested as being a divisive “Berlin Wall”, although it would increase safety to fully separate train traffic.) CEQA exemptions are often a thorny subject. CEQA, when placed into the hands of persistent NIMBYs, can be a powerful tool for indefinitely delaying projects, including very desirable projects like high-speed rail. But CEQA is, at its heart, about disclosure; so exempting any type of project from CEQA suggests that the lead agency will proceed without having as full knowledge of the situation as one presumably would have after preparing an EIR. It also sets a dubious precedent to establish CEQA exemptions on a project-by-project basis. In principle, it is preferable to exempt classes of projects, rather than individual projects, because individual exemptions that are not based on some sort of underlying rationale are a double-edged sword. Just one example of this: earlier this year, transit advocates were up in arms at the Governor’s budget proposal to exempt specific freeway projects from CEQA; but now, those same advocates may well relish the idea of fast-tracking high speed rail with a bypass of environmental review. It is indeed frustrating to watch CEQA — legislation whose purpose is to facilitate protection of the environment — be used in ways that delay or block environmentally-beneficial projects, like high-speed rail and the San Francisco Bicycle Plan. But simply exempting projects on an ad hoc, case-by-case basis does little to deepen our understanding of how to implement successful CEQA reform. That said, the AB 289 exemption is also not exactly ad hoc, because railroad grade separations are already exempt from CEQA; this bill explicitly extends that existing policy to construction undertaken by the CHSRA. Aside from the AB 289 CEQA bill, three other HSR-related bills are working their way through the state legislature: SB 783 (requires the CHSRA to prepare a business plan to receive bond funding), SB 451 (endows the CHSRA with certain eminent domain powers), and SB 409 (creates a Department of Railroads).

We have an election in two weeks: On May 19, Californians will vote on Propositions 1A-1F. Ideally, I would have a post for you on these propositions, but I’m not sure if I’ll get a chance to write it. To get up to speed, check out the running analysis at Calitics, the California Budget Project, and the Courage Campaign, among many other sources.

J-Get Me to the Church on Time? Not so fast: For those who ride the J-Church regularly (or who perhaps don’t ride it, instead hiking to BART because your J train never arrived), it may not be too surprising to learn that the J-Church is once again Muni’s worst performing line, with a 65% on-time rate. And yes, Supervisor Bevan Dufty is eyeing another pilot study of the line.

These are just some topics in the news recently. Posting will necessarily be sparse for the next couple of weeks, so please feel free to continue using this open thread as a forum to discuss these topics, or whatever else is on your mind.

The voter measure, as the Chron correctly noted, is quite embarrassing for a city that prides itself on its (increasingly dubious) claims of progressivism.

The Berkeley City Attorney, however, has not been so keen on the voter measure. Their report (link to PDF here) points out that the measure could contradict various provisions in the Transportation Element of Berkeley’s General Plan. Policy T-2, which “encourages regional and local efforts to maintain and enhance public transportation,” has a subsection that specifically references a BRT action:

Policy T-2(A)(3): Add transit-only or transit/HOV-only lanes where appropriate on any streets or portions of streets that are part of the city’s transit network.

Policy T-4 is an explicit transit-first policy provision that incorporates a transit network map; the map is listed separately under Policy T-55. The map identifies Telegraph, Shattuck, Bancroft, and Durant — the very streets outlining the probable BRT route through Berkeley — as “streets that are necessary for efficient and effective transit services,” and which are the “highest priority for transit improvements, such as bus shelters and planned improvements that may serve light rail or ferry services.” In other words, the proposed BRT project is essentially a direct implementation of Transportation Element policies. The pro-automobile, anti-transit voter initiative, on the other hand, would represent a new departure, possibly requiring a General Plan amendment to dilute the Transportation Element’s unequivocally transit-first language.

The Berkeley City Attorney also raised the possibility that the voter initiative violates California Vehicle Code § 21655.5(a), which endows the City Council with the authority to reserve HOV lanes for roadways in its jurisdiction, i.e. the city streets. This section states:

The Department of Transportation and local authorities, with respect to highways under their respective jurisdictions, may authorize or permit exclusive or preferential use of highway lanes for high-occupancy vehicles. Prior to establishing the lanes, competent engineering estimates shall be made of the effect of the lanes on safety, congestion, and highway capacity.

The City Council considered taking legal action in light of the City Attorney’s analysis, but at tonight’s closed session, decided to “honor the initiative process” and not take legal action after all, notwithstanding the initiative’s conflict with the several provisions enumerated above. So the march to November and the fight for better transit continues. The ever-committed Friends of BRT deserve a word of thanks for their tireless efforts, both in following the twists and turns of this saga, and in their attempts to imbue the citizens of Berkeley with at least a modicum of planning sense.

Local criticism notwithstanding, the building, while quite a bit larger than most in the area, is not necessarily inappropriate for the neighborhood. The height is certainly consistent with the surroundings. The building also visually clarifies subdivisions, giving the impression of multiple smaller storefronts, on a scale more in keeping with the narrow storefronts lining most of College Avenue between Broadway and Alcatraz — though this effect could be more pronounced than it is in the rendering. Yes, there will admittedly be a “huge corporate Safeway presence about it,” but that will be rather difficult to avoid as long as the site is occupied by, well … Safeway. The current site may not seem corporate simply because the offensive Safeway is behind the parking lot, set back from immediate view — but that hardly justifies maintaining a parking lot as the prominent feature of this intersection. It will be encouraging to see this site rebuilt in a way that activates the street and improves the pedestrian experience. We can only hope that the building that is ultimately constructed will not look quite as cookie-cutter suburban as that rendering.

UPDATE (15 June 2008): David, from the Brooklyn Avenue blog, has brought to our attention in the comments a critique of the Safeway. The critique alleges that this two-story structure will essentially destroy Rockridge as we know it:

It’s a parade of structures of varied heights, allowing Sun to reach the street and giving a small-town-in-Oakland feel.

But Safeway’s current proposal will destroy that feeling in my view. It calls for a building that does what’s not cool: hugs the street and looms over it. It would drastically alter Rockridge and make it seem more like a retail downtown suburb in Oakland with constant traffic problems.

Reading this, you might guess the building in question was twenty stories or more, and I’m not sure how “looming over the street” fits with “suburb,” since your average suburban building does the exact opposite. But please note that this observation is about a two-story building. Incredible.

And so it continues: the ever-committed opponents of Bus Rapid Transit in supposedly progressive Berkeley have hatched a plan to stop BRT in the East Bay — “Rapid Bus Plus,” a brainchild of the group Berkeleyans for Better Transportation Options (BBTOP). Under “Rapid Bus Plus,” the comfortable bus stops and dedicated bus lanes that distinguish BRT would be removed. BBTOP instead suggests that AC Transit obtain Orion VII low floor hybrids, like those that the SFMTA obtained. These vehicles have not quite proven to be an unqualified success in San Francisco, but even so, new vehicles and cleaner fuels are collateral to a primary objective of dedicated lanes — namely, system speed and reliability. BBTOP also suggests that the signal preemption and NextBus technology currently used for the 1R and 72R be expanded to the full system, and that Proof of Payment (to be used on the proposed BRT line) also be expanded to the full system. These latter ideas are fine — certainly, it would be nice to see signal preemption in more places, and NextBus can go a long way toward reducing rider stress — but neither is a substitute for separating transit vehicles from automotive traffic, particularly on a high ridership route that serves a great many of the East Bay’s activity centers.

“Rapid Bus Plus,” then, suggests that the mildest types of improvement typically associated with BRT be expanded, but it continues the pattern of forcing transit vehicles to fight cars in traffic — increasing travel times and hampering reliability. Bus-only lanes, in BBTOP’s view, are “invasive” — a “sclerosis” of East Bay streets. BBTOP proposes that bus-only lanes be deleted from the BRT plan in areas where the transitway is “redundant” to BART. Naturally, according to BBTOP, one redundant example is the Telegraph Avenue corridor. Really? So the three BART stations that are on the so-called “BART/Telegraph Avenue Corridor” — MacArthur, Ashby, and Downtown Berkeley, the latter two of which are both a several-block walk from the Avenue — provide complete and comprehensive coverage, even though each of these stations is 20-30 blocks distant from the adjacent station? BART coverage is so thorough that substantial improvement to bus service is unwarranted, even though it would improve ride quality for many low-income and minority riders who have been disenfranchised throughout the years by slashed bus service? BART coverage in this corridor is so thorough that no one must even be riding this highly redundant bus route — right? This route, which happens to be the East Bay’s busiest? BBTOP very sloppily combines BART and Telegraph Avenue as though it is one duplicative corridor. It is not: BART’s regional service and AC Transit’s local service are complementary, but they serve different purposes. The number of origins and destinations that are an easy walk from BART are outnumbered by the locations that are too far removed to make BART a convenient or practical option. And even when BART is convenient, the lack of a monthly BART pass forces riders to pay for each individual trip — an expensive burden that it is especially difficult for low-income and transit-dependent riders to bear. The theory that BRT is redundant to BART is old and tired, having been raised repeatedly by BRT opponents in Berkeley. You need only ask one of the roughly 25,000 daily riders who choose the 1 or the 1R over BART to learn why that theory is incorrect.

So as to not appear to be completely against transit, BBTOP suggests that AC Transit leave Telegraph Avenue and Berkeley in peace and instead study other potential BRT corridors that do not “duplicate” BART — for example, the Iron Horse Trail in Contra Costa County, which is not even in AC Transit’s service area. It also suggests investigating BRT on Oakland’s MacArthur Boulevard. This latter suggestion is part of AC Transit’s planning vision, and MacArthur Boulevard does deserve improved service. But the Boulevard’s awkward interactions with Interstate 580 result in some stretches of constricted street that would not support full BRT as robustly as Telegraph would. MacArthur also has less infill potential and fewer riders than the BRT route currently on the table, so it makes sense to prioritize projects to benefit the greatest number of riders.

Amazingly, BBTOP hails Muni’s “venerable N-Judah” as an exemplar of how successful “Rapid Bus Plus” would be if it were implemented, calling the N-Judah “Rapid Bus Plus on rails” because it uses Proof of Payment but does not have a dedicated right of way for its entire route. Apparently, the folks at BBTOP have not actually ridden the N-Judah much, because if they had, they would realize that the line is unreliable precisely because it shares road space with automobiles on the surface, delaying and ensnaring LRVs at congested choke points, like in the Inner Sunset District. Travel times would be even longer without POP, but that hardly implies that the N-Judah’s current configuration is ideal, let alone a model for new transit lines. Providing LRVs with a dedicated right of way for the whole length of the route would greatly improve the quality of N-Judah service, and the same is true of East Bay BRT. Conveniently, BBTOP fails to provide detail about any of the many BRT success stories — and it sees no irony in dismissing Curitiba, Brazil, as a third world city in the same document that it advocates for the East Bay to maintain a bus system inferior to Curitiba’s.

BBTOP’s report contains many misleading turns of phrase, as well as incorrect assumptions that run counter to professional transit planning. It will not really do much good to parse and correct each sentence here. When we come right down to it, all BBTOP’s plan (if the rambling five-page PDF can be called a “plan” at all) has really done is slap a new name onto the same old desire to dilute at least the Berkeley stretch of the BRT route. It retains a couple BRT-like characteristics to give the illusion of a compromise solution, but it discards BRT’s crucial dedicated right of way. Would “Rapid Bus Plus” be an improvement over current service? Yes, but it would not go far enough — and it would provide little to no opportunity to transform the way the East Bay views buses and transit in general.

While on the subject of Market & Octavia, an additional topic we cannot neglect is the 55 Laguna redevelopment of the UC Extension site (pictured in the above two images), which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In December 2003, the UC Berkeley extension relocated off the 55 Laguna site, which lies near the geographic heart of the Market & Octavia Plan area. The AF Evans 55 Laguna development has been the subject of separate but concurrent discussions at City Hall.

A controversial issue was the need to rezone the site from public to a designation appropriate for a mixed use neighborhood. The project was protested and appealed on several bases — including compliance with CEQA, the National Historic Preservation Act, and NEPA on the basis of potential HUD funds for the affordable housing component — expressing concern that the demolition would constitute a substantial adverse change that would cause the site to lose historical preservation tax credit and to be de-listed as historically significant resource. But while the appellants disapproved of the project’s current incarnation, their contentions did not unearth any true inadequacies in the EIR, and so the requisite zoning amendments eventually passed through committee and onto the full Board, where they were first passed last week — creating a special use district bounded by Laguna, Haight, Buchanan, and Hermann Streets to facilitate the 55 Laguna project. This replaces the site’s public zoning, but merely zoning a parcel as public is no guarantee that the land will actually enjoy vibrant public use, as this site clearly demonstrates. The UC Extension’s blank walls have had a deadening effect on the surrounding neighborhood, giving the institution the feel of a fortress.

Fortress or no fortress, total demolition of this historic resource would be a highly significant loss; but the project plan is a far cry from total demolition. Although the plan calls for the demolition of Richardson Hall Annex and Middle Hall Gymnasium (the oldest building on campus), 83% of the historically significant square footage — located in Richardson Hall, Woods Hall, and Woods Hall Annex — will be retained and reused in the complex, which will also include seven newly constructed buildings. Unique features like the WPA-era Reuben Kadish mural, which was added in 1936, will also be incorporated into the new plan site. Meanwhile, the deadening retaining wall would be opened up to provide a retail frontage onto the street. Perhaps best of all, surface parking and chain link fences will be replaced with public amenities and a major housing component that received a booster shot of affordability from Mirkarimi: over 400 new rental units, of which 36-37% are affordable at 50% of AMI, including the Openhouse project, an eight-story building with close to 90 affordable units welcoming to LGBTQ seniors. In terms of public amenities, there will be about 5,000 square feet of commercial space, a 12,000 square foot community center in Woods Annex, and 35,000 square feet of public open space that includes a garden and a park bridging the two halves of Waller Street. Although Mirkarimi has expressed a desire for it to relocate in the near future, the UCSF Dental Clinic and its associated parking will also remain on the site.

On balance, the 55 Laguna project — which will inject higher density, active street uses, and publicly accessible amenities within immediate reach of Market Street transit — harmonizes well with the spirit underlying the Market & Octavia Plan.

Renderings courtesy AF Evans.

For several years, the City of San Francisco has worked to develop the Market & Octavia Neighborhood Plan, studying neighborhoods centered on the pivotal intersection of Market and Octavia, bookended by Church Street on the west and Van Ness Avenue on the east. The plan was one part of the Better Neighborhoods 2002 effort — a sadly ironic name, because a mere 365 days is nowhere near sufficient to start and finish such a large-scale planning process, particularly in San Francisco. In some areas covered by the Market-Octavia plan, one has the impression of being in an unclassifiable neighborhood that is nonetheless quite close to favorite, well-established locales. The plan encompasses an area historically known as “the Hub”, so named for the Muni turnaround located there, and the neighborhoods contained within the plan area continue to evolve and come into their own, coining names like Deco Ghetto to reflect both an emerging identity and broader acknowledgment of that identity. Other parts of the plan area, including Hayes Valley, already enjoy established commercial districts but have been given a new chance to blossom since the retreat of the Central Freeway to the south side of Market Street.

It is also in this area that the slanted South of Market street grid curves and reorients into an arrangement that reflects the cardinal directions, adjusting to form the Mission/Castro grid. This is a departure from the pattern firmly established all the way from the Ferry Building, resulting in a suspension of the security resting in the predictable pattern of downtown streets. But some clever planning could take advantage of this insecurity and transform it into a distinctly urban sort of excitement, in which even the unsuspecting pedestrian would be smoothly guided by intuitively navigable streets designed for humans, rather than for the sole function of moving automobiles efficiently.

Market-Octavia is exactly the plan that aims to knit these disconnected neighborhoods together into a more unified and walkable set of districts that San Francisco could rightly be proud to call its own. The plan reflects thoughtful cooperation between community members and city planners. This vision was not forcefully hoisted upon neighborhood residents; rather, the goal was to achieve a consensus. It simultaneously blends a respect for the eminently livable residential scale of San Francisco’s most beloved neighborhoods, while advocating for a forward-thinking vision of elegant density graced by moving examples of contemporary design, like the Octavia Gateway pictured above — a building that provides a splendid answer to the problem posed by the narrow, awkward parcel of land on which it would sit, at the northeast corner of Market and Octavia.

As indicated in the above map, the plan appropriately focuses higher residential density on the neighborhood’s primary thoroughfare and transit corridor, calling for a streetwall 80-85 feet tall, with infill opportunities along and immediately off of Market Street itself — and milder heights of 30-45 feet deeper in the neighborhood. The plan concentrates the very highest densities in a Special Use District (SUD) centered at the intersection of Van Ness and Market, in which slender towers (up to 400 feet tall) placed directly on top of the Muni Metro Van Ness station would step down to about 120 feet within a couple blocks of the intersection. Such a plan could immeasurably improve the highly disappointing intersection of Van Ness and Market. By all rights, this intersection should be an energetic centerpiece of the city landscape — but it has little in the way of pedestrian amenities, and its low-rise frontages are a huge letdown:

Not only that, but it is scarred by that cardinal urban sin: underutilized space in the form of surface parking:

Hardly impressive for the meeting of two of the City’s greatest boulevards. Landmark towers alone would not transform this intersection into a real place, but they could be an important part of the formula. Streetscape improvements carried out as part of the Van Ness bus rapid transit project, including perhaps especially carefully designed stations at Market and Mission, are yet another component. The Market-Octavia plan also paves the way for the creation of a dense, mixed-use “SoMa West” neighborhood and new open space, centered on the area in which Mission Street splits into the one-way pair of Mission and Otis. To account for the increases in density and some 6000 additional housing units, the plan area is designed not only to discourage private auto use, but correspondingly to aid smoother passage of surface transit and to create a streetscape more attractive and friendly to both pedestrians and cyclists. The northeast end of the neighborhood would connect to the proposed bus rapid transit corridor along Van Ness Avenue, itself a corridor with some two thousand units of infill housing under construction and in the pipeline.

Years after the planning process was initiated, the version of the plan adopted last year continues to be subjected to further amendment that actually brings it closer to the admirable intent of the 2002 draft plan. Three contentious issues have dominated recent discussion at the Board of Supervisors: affordable housing, parking limits, and density caps — in particular, how those issues would interact with sub-districts contained within the plan area. In addition to the Market/Van Ness SUD, areas such Market Street west of Franklin are designated as Neighborhood Commercial Transit (NCT) to encourage active retail uses on the ground floor, an uninterrupted streetwall along Market, and any parking to be accessed from the rear. The last category, Residential Transit-Oriented (RTO), covers the more low-rise residential blocks tucked further in behind Market, including parts of Duboce Triangle and the Lower Haight.

First, the affordable housing fees. Supervisors Mirkarimi and McGoldrick had earlier agreed to implement an across the board $10/square foot impact fee on developers to be applied to affordable housing, which McGoldrick continues to support. Mirkarimi later suggested a tiered system to avoid punishing small developers who would be hit harder by a $10/square foot fee. Under this tiered proposal, developers would pay $8/square foot for projects located in the Market/Van Ness SUD, $4/square foot for NCT projects, and no fee for projects in the RTO area. In addition, Mirkarimi’s proposal suggests that in lieu of purchasing TDRs to exceed maximum allowable FAR in the Market/Van Ness Special Use District, developers could contribute $30/square foot to the city affordable housing fund. These fees would be imposed in addition to other fees raised for impacts related to parking and transit.

The second source of dispute is the parking. Planning had relaxed the limits originally proposed in 2002, which elicited protest from neighborhood residents (notably the Hayes Valley Neighborhood Association) who were quite justifiably upset at the prospect of encouraging more auto use and degrading the livability of their streets. McGoldrick’s amendment on parking was geared to be attractive to families, pushing for one-to-one parking for family-designated housing (at a minimum of two bedrooms and 1000 square feet). Mirkarimi’s version, on the other hand, is comparable to the original recommendations from the 2002 draft plan; indeed, even slightly stricter, with a 0.25 parking ratio in the Market/Van Ness SUD and 0.5 for areas designated NCT and RTO (with up to 0.75 in the RTO under conditional use). There is now general agreement to adopt these stricter limits.

The third and last major source of dispute is the RTO density soft cap, which would require conditional use for projects building more than one unit for a 600 square foot area. Duboce Triangle neighbors pushed this cap for just their own corner of the plan area, and Mirkarimi’s proposal maintains the cap for Duboce Triangle but removes the cap for RTO blocks outside of Duboce Triangle. McGoldrick’s proposal, in accordance with the Planning Commission’s recommendation, would apply this cap for all units in the RTO zone (exempting permanently affordable units), to prevent unit subdivision from encroaching on the supply of family-sized housing.

Opponents would point to the removed density cap in Mirkarimi’s amendment as evidence that the Market-Octavia plan flies in the face of the historic architectural context that defines the neighborhood and introduces unsuitable and unmitigated levels of density, but practically, the density we would see built is limited not only by the plan-specified heights but also by emphasis on the creation of housing intended for families: a minimum of two bedrooms and 1000 square feet. Moreover, the assertion that the proposed heights would overwhelm the neighborhood and dwarf existing structures is absurd. Several older apartment buildings already exemplify what the maximum allowed height would be in the plan area, excluding the Market/Van Ness SUD, which is the plan’s sole provision for high-rise density. And in some cases, existing buildings already exceed the heights specified in the plan. Consider the following examples. What do you think: are these overwhelming? Do they tower offensively over the neighborhood?

Opponents also present Market-Octavia as though it is a drastic change that will irreparably scar the landscape; but in a very real sense, the plan simply formalizes what we have done all along when building city neighborhoods — or, more precisely, what we once did. Perhaps the major difference is that although our neighborhoods were first built in the era of the streetcar, we find ourselves now in the age of the private car. Modern reliance on the automobile handicaps our ability to manage density without simultaneously chipping away at that reliance — both negatively by limiting parking, and affirmatively by designing a streetscape that encourages walking. Market-Octavia is not about razing blocks of Victorians to the ground and erecting skyscrapers in their stead. With the exception of the Market/Van Ness SUD — just one small corner of the plan area — the plan is strictly low- to mid-rise, but more importantly, it provides a set of guidelines to govern infill opportunities, so that any infill developments are consistent with a general desire to promote livability by emphasizing the neighborhood’s transit orientation. Market-Octavia is not about creating a new neighborhood, but rather, about enhancing and providing cohesion to a collection of neighborhoods that in many ways are already quite successful, but that could be even better.

In some sense, it boils down to the following question: do we want to preserve this?

Or would we rather have more buildings like this?

Yes, the plan area is full of lovely, modestly-sized Victorians, but they are largely located in RTO blocks with the milder 35-40 foot height limit. Heights in those blocks were so specified in order to respect and preserve this comfortable, characteristically San Franciscan residential streetscape. And even if a three-story Victorian and an eight-story apartment building are juxtaposed (as occurs in one of the above images), is that really so bad? Is it not precisely this sort of architectural variety that adds a distinctly urban interest to the street environment? Did I miss an executive decision requiring that every building on a given block be of identical height and architectural style, and that every block in a given neighborhood look identical? Encouraging taller buildings to front onto Market Street and to be built to the property line will help to emphasize the angularity of Market Street intersections and heighten visual excitement on what, after all, is (or should be) San Francisco’s most impressive thoroughfare.

The Market-Octavia Plan is the product of extensive community involvement spanning the better part of a decade. That community input has been undeniably invaluable in terms of taking a great initial idea and developing the details. And yet, no plan, however sound, can ever be perfect to all people; drag our feet too long, and we risk losing sight of what makes the underlying spirit of the plan so special in the first place. And all the while, fences and remaining empty lots along Octavia are wounds in the urban fabric — to be sure, no longer shrouded in the darkness of a freeway, but nonetheless still not fully healed. So much unrealized potential: yet once the dust settles after almost a decade of discussions, neighborhood meetings, environmental review, negotiations, and squabbles, we may at last enjoy watching this keystone district in the heart of the City transform into a vibrant hub of neighborhoods.

Full size images are hosted on my Flickr account.