Archive for the ‘Project Proposals’ Category
In Uptown Grows … A Parking Lot?
When Westfield Centre opened in Downtown San Francisco in September 2006, no new parking structure was built to accommodate the approximately 25 million people that were expected to visit the mall each year. Instead, the basement level food court was physically connected to the concourse mezzanine of Powell Street Station, to emphasize that transit was the most natural travel mode to access the mall; and nearby parking garages, such as Fifth and Mission, have proven sufficient to absorb additional motorists. Oakland’s Uptown District boasts a similarly extensive list of transit options that reach both locally and regionally. So why does the Revelopment Agency, along with Oakland City Councilmembers Brunner, Kernighan, and Reid, support, of all things, a new surface parking lot next to the recently-opened Fox Theater? Especially when there is already ample (in fact, probably excessive) parking in the surrounding area, and when the proposed parking lot will not even prove lucrative during the span of time it takes for Forest City to ready itself for construction of the mixed-use development that will eventually occupy this vacant parcel? Given plans to develop the site in the year 2011 with about 220 housing units and 20,000 square feet of retail, it does not really make sense to spend money to construct and maintain a use that will only have to be dismantled in a couple years, especially if people grow attached to that particular use. The provision of any additional open space ought to be coordinated in conjunction with the planned development, and there is open space nearby in any case, built as a component of the first phase of Forest City’s Uptown project. But that does not justify resorting to a parking lot — even one billed as “temporary” — whose presence will disrupt the pedestrian experience and damage an urban fabric that is in the process of being made whole. Uptown has become increasingly vibrant in recent months, so perhaps the City Council has already forgotten the blighting effect of the vacant lots that existed in years prior. Our humble advice to planners, councilmembers, supervisors, and the like? When in doubt, turn to Ms. Jacobs. She remarked: ” … parking lots … are powerful and insistent instruments of city destruction.” Any Oaklanders reading this post who happen to feel perturbed by this flash of 1950s-era suburban planning transported to the East Bay’s urban core are encouraged to write to their Councilmember, or to speak against the parking lot proposal at this week’s City Council meeting.
Board of Supervisors Hears Appeal of 299 Valencia
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| 299 Valencia, present and future; courtesy of www.299valenciastreet.com. |
San Francisco is a transit-first city — officially, at least, according to its Charter — which means that actions taken by the city government, where they are related to transportation issues at all, should promote and prioritize public transit above driving. Given this background assumption, one might think that the Planning Commission would be disinclined to approve the inclusion of extra parking (beyond the stipulated limits) in development projects that it reviews. But the opposite is often the case, which forces citizens to step up to the plate and speak to the benefits of structuring planning decisions around people rather than automobiles. This particular defect of the Planning Commission is one that we have discussed here before, in the context of Folsom Street. The latest episode in the parking battle saga was fought yesterday over seven parking spaces at 299 Valencia, a 36-unit mixed use project slated for a surface parking lot at 14th and Valencia Streets. The five-story project provides four BMR units and about 5,000 square feet of ground-floor retail. The project is located on the very edge of the Market/Octavia Plan area, on land zoned NCT-3, and the site carries a maximum parking ratio of 0.5, or one parking stall per two units. 18 residential parking stalls would be allowed as of right, but the proposal contained 27 residential parking stalls so that the units would be more marketable to high-end buyers. The additional parking requires a conditional use (CU) authorization. In November 2008, the Planning Commission did unanimously grant a CU, on the condition that two of the 27 stalls be changed to car share spots, leaving 25 residential stalls. This falls within the 0.75 ratio permitted under the CU scenario. The Hayes Valley Neighborhood Association (HVNA), which was a key player during Market/Octavia planning, has been a voice for limiting parking and promoting walkable neighborhoods. HVNA filed an appeal (joined by a number of individuals and local organizations, including the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition and Livable City) shortly after the CU was granted, and the appeal was finally heard by the new Board of Supervisors and its new President, David Chiu. In the end, the Board failed to collect the eight votes necessary to disapprove the Planning Commission’s conditional use (the vote was 7-4, with Supervisor Maxwell aligning with the six members of the progressive alliance).
On Walkability, Density, and Transit Villages
It’s official: according to the WalkScore.com rankings, San Francisco has been determined to be America’s most walkable city, as reported by the Chronicle. Our fair city’s score of 86 out of 100 just edged out New York’s 83, Boston’s 79, Chicago’s 76, and Philadelphia’s 74. The WalkScore algorithm does have some shortcomings (which the site frankly admits) — pedestrian conditions on Stockton Street in SF’s Chinatown could be much better than they are now, but that did not stop Chinatown from receiving a top score of 99 out of 100, a score largely based on the high density of a large variety of shops and services in a very compact area. But for anyone who has strolled through San Francisco’s downtown or neighborhood commercial districts, this news does not really come as too much of a surprise. Check out the complete listing of neighborhood scores here.
But the most revealing part of the article was not the part glorifying San Francisco, but rather, the part indicating that the Bay Area, taken as a whole, could be much more walkable than it is now. The Bay Area region fell in third place, “well below the greater Washington, D.C., and Boston regions,” according to the Chron. This reflects the fact that while the Washington, D.C. area has allowed Metro to shape dense land use patterns near stations (even for stations outside of the central core), the Bay Area has been slower to allow BART to have the same effect. We should be careful about discussing density and walkability in the same breath, as they are not equivalent. An older suburban downtown whose buildings front directly onto the street is quite walkable, if not particularly dense, and on the flip side, high-rises alone cannot make a neighborhood truly walkable if the street level fails to provide safety and amenities for pedestrians. But well-planned density that is sensitive to the street provides the extra bodies that make a walkable district that much more bustling and successful.
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| Courtesy Beyond DC. |
Consider Bethesda, Maryland, pictured at right. Located on the D.C. Metro Red Line, Bethesda is a great example of how dense, walkable districts can bloom around rail nodes, even in an otherwise suburban setting. (Check out this Google satellite map of Bethesda. It shows how the densely urbanized streets that are within easy access of a Metro station are very clearly delineated from the suburban neighborhoods further from the line.) The Bay Area, by contrast, is adamantly low-rise, not just in the suburbs, but also in most neighborhoods in San Francisco and Oakland. In general, only the urban downtown districts make any attempt to reach for the sky — so we have not truly leveraged the potential inherent in most of the rail nodes scattered around the Bay Area. The idea of mid-rises or even shorter high-rises at places like San Leandro and Millbrae BART stations might seem unthinkable — but the Bay Area’s conception of cities, walking, and transit would be quite different if even suburban cities had permitted miniature skylines to sprout at their rail stations. It is also interesting to note that the different development patterns have given rise to contrasting effects on transit ridership. Both BART and Metro are slightly over 100 miles long, and the two systems are of comparable age (Metro is just a few years younger). And yet, while BART reported an average of 367,570 daily riders last quarter, Metrorail set a record last Friday, July 11 of 854,638 riders — a higher ridership than BART can even support as long as its service patterns require operation of four routes through a single transbay tube. What explains the pronounced difference? The fact that Metro has twice the number of stations as BART for approximately the same amount of track certainly goes a long way toward making the system accessible to more people. But another factor (though certainly not the only other factor) that explains the difference must be that Metro has helped give rise to dense, walkable cities, which feed the system with a natural ridership base that is largely missing from BART because the land use around BART stations (already too few to begin with) is often not that intense.
Excessive Parking Creeps Up Folsom Street
900 Folsom and 260 Fifth, two mixed-use projects that are currently up for consideration, would occupy adjacent parcels South of Market, at the corner of 5th and Folsom Streets, with the northern edge of the project just one-half block south of the new Intercontinental Hotel. Together, they promise 466 homes and 10,396 square feet of ground level retail, with spacious 19-foot ceilings for the retail storefronts. (I did not bother to add the renderings to this post, but if you are interested, you can check out this PDF, which has design details.) The two projects combined intend to pursue a LEED Gold rating, and the project website is eager to point out the many green benefits of the buildings. The graphics on the project website emphasize the plethora of nearby transit options, including pictures of a Breda LRV, a BART train, and an F-Market historic streetcar. There are also pictures of people looking quite happy while walking and biking. But let’s just cut to the chase. If this project is really so green and transit-friendly, why must the proposal include slightly more than 1:1 parking, with 470 parking spots for 466 units — encouraging future residents to drive and thus ignore all of the pictured transit options?
New Plans for Senior Housing at St. Anthony
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| Courtesy Central City Extra. |
St. Anthony Foundation has been an institution in the Tenderloin for decades, providing shelter, daily meals, clothes, as well as medical and social services to San Francisco’s homeless since 1950. St. Anthony (headquartered on the southern side of Golden Gate Avenue, at Jones) will move many of its services into a new five-story building across the street (at 150 Golden Gate) that is set to be completed next month. The second phase of St. Anthony’s renewal aims to completely replace the current structure at 121 Golden Gate. The plan for the redone 121 Golden Gate originally included a new dining facility and just 17 permanent units of senior housing, along with 17 medical discharge units. But the latest proposal for 121 Golden Gate, to be carried out in conjunction with Mercy Housing, is a $66 million project that could include not only a more spacious dining facility, but is also planned to feature 90 studio and one-bedroom units in a 10-story building, with no parking. The building would rise to the full ten stories on the corner, stepping down to eight stories on the side to match the height of Boyd Hotel next door. The latest incarnation of 121 Golden Gate could join 990 Polk and 55 Laguna as another major project featuring construction of new housing units for seniors, and the project could be delivered as soon as 2011.
Gearing Up For Block 11
Because most of the general interest in the Transbay redevelopment process seems to focus, quite understandably, on the Pelli Transit Center and its signature tower, it is easy to forget how much planning is required to deal with the rest (really, most) of the redevelopment zone — now-vacant lots once occupied by the Embarcadero Freeway, mostly located north of Folsom, with a couple slivers to the south. To jumpstart the various threads of the greater development process, each of these former freeway parcels will be treated to a separate RFP. Building a neighborhood from scratch in modern times is no easy task, and even small, peripheral parcels should be lavished with as much care and attention as we can give. Currently up for consideration is Block 11, whose RFP is in the drafting stage. Hugging the eastern corner of Folsom and Essex, Block 11 (outlined in red in the Google satellite image at right) is a more peripheral site, in the sense that it is not slated for a tower or a particularly high density of new homes. But to current and future residents of the neighborhood, it could prove more controversial than new additions to the skyline.
A Fight Over the Secret Garden
The Oakland Tribune reports today about a public scoping meeting that will take place at Oakland City Hall, tonight at the 6:00 pm Planning Commission meeting. The goal of the meeting is to receive public commentary about a project in planning, a new tower at 222 19th Street known as Emerald Views. Soaring to 457 feet, this 42-story residential tower could become the new peak of the Oakland skyline, surpassing the 404-foot Ordway Building, currently the tallest tower in the Bay Area outside of San Francisco. The tower is very slender, with just about ten units per floor and a footprint of 12,200 square feet — quite small for a building of this height. It would add 370 residential units to a highly transit-oriented location just a few blocks from 19th Street BART and the comprehensive bus service on Broadway — and it would supply a new influx of people to the developing Uptown neighborhood, an area that is experiencing quite a bit of residential construction. Also, 993 square feet would be made available at the ground level for a cafe or restaurant.
Opponents have stipulated that the tower is out of place and does not fit its context. The Tribune article quotes James Vann from the Coalition of Advocates for Lake Merritt, who remarks:
“The proximity to the lake is one thing,” he said. “I’m more in favor of the bowl concept of development around the lake, where buildings closer to the lake are lower in stories and then you rise as you move away from the lake.”
Green Headquarters for the Public Utilities Commission
Last Friday, the Business Times reported that David Metcalf is putting the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission headquarters (140,000 square feet at 1155 Market Street) up for sale. In the meantime, the PUC plans to start constructing its replacement headquarters in March 2008. The new structure, at 525 Golden Gate Avenue (corner of Polk), will have 221,830 square feet in a 14-story structure. On the left below is a rendering of the replacement headquarters, and on the right is a picture of the building on the site that will be demolished to make room for the new construction:
Rendering courtesy Simon & Associates.
Notably, though, this ultra-green building was designed to earn the LEED Platinum rating. Simon & Associates describes this building’s green credentials:
The project’s design features include a highly efficient exterior building enclosure including exterior sun shades, natural ventilation with the use of operable windows, reduced lighting power densities through space planning, and solar and wind harvesting to meet a significant portion of the building’s energy demand. A photovoltaic system is integrated into the building design to provide power, reduce heat loads on the higher floors, and serve as a work of art. Solar panels will be embedded in portions of the façade, and solar greenhouses are included on every floor to represent San Francisco’s natural soil and vegetation conditions at the corresponding elevation. Wind turbines will be stacked behind glass along part of the façade and on the roof. Great emphasis was also placed on harnessing natural daylight, where appropriate, to reduce the electrical lighting load needed for the building. To maximize daylight from the perimeter glazing, light shelves were integrated into the window walls. In addition, waterless urinals, faucet sensors, and on-demand water heaters will be used so that each occupant’s water usage should only be five gallons per day; and wastewater will be recycled through basement filters, then put to use in toilets and the cooling system.
It should be a nice addition to the Civic Center area. The building that it is replacing will not be missed, and the new headquarters will hopefully serve as a green model for future construction in the city.
Leaving the “Transit” Out of Transit-Oriented Development
An article in the Chronicle today discussed the possibility of building homes on 1,433 acres of Peninsula bayshore land. The land, located in Redwood City near the crossing of Highways 101 and 84, is currently used by Cargill Inc. for salt production that the company plans on phasing out. At this point, no official plans have been released, and no formal application will be filed with the city until next year — but environmentalists have already announced their intention to actively block this project. Will Travis, the head of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, does not necessarily oppose the general idea of development here, provided that the proposal is accompanied by a plan to restore at least half of the land to its natural state. In any case, there are still considerable hurdles to contend with, ranging from local (Redwood City zoning ordinances) to federal (the Clean Water Act).
Nancy Radcliffe, vice chairwoman of the Redwood City Planning Commission, supports the project. She cites the city’s strong need for additional housing, but she misses the point:
Redwood City is in desperate need of residences for people who work in the Peninsula city. Such housing would reduce the number of commuters on Bay Area roads, thereby reducing car emissions and helping the environment.
I cannot say that I agree with the latter half of this assessment. There is no particular reason to believe that this development, with its easy access to Highway 101, will house only people working in Redwood City. Meanwhile, the remote location, distant from the Caltrain corridor and core SamTrans bus routes, essentially ensures that none of its residents will ride transit. I appreciate the Redwood City Planning Commission’s desire to introduce additional housing into the city, but “transit-oriented development” that is nowhere near transit (or transit-friendly employment) is counterproductive.
The Peninsula corridor could certainly use more housing, but new development should be high-density and focused intensely along El Camino Real, with immediate access to Caltrain and SamTrans — not low-density homes sprawling across bayshore land parcels adjacent to the freeway. Too much bayshore land has already been eaten up by development that would be better placed in major urban centers and along transit corridors. We should protect what precious little bayshore land remains and restore it as open space. The Bay Area needs more housing, but the housing must be well-placed in order to be consistent with our long-term goals for smart growth.
3D Model Video of 181 Fremont and Transbay
UPDATE (September 7, 2007): For some reason, the YouTube clip mentioned in this post, and another similar clip by the same user, have both been removed from YouTube, just a short couple of days after they were first posted. It’s a shame they have been removed so soon, but I can only hope it is because a new video is in the works. In any case, I’ve removed the clip embedded in this post. I’ll certainly be on the lookout for a similar replacement clip, either by the same user or a different user. If you do find a good substitute clip, please post the URL in the comments so that I can add it to this post. For now, here’s just the text of this post, unfortunately less effective without the YouTube clip visual:
While aimlessly surfing the Internet, I ran into the following YouTube clip. It’s short, but it depicts a 3D model of downtown San Francisco, with several of the towers proposed for Transbay and Rincon Hill inserted into the correct locations:
[Video clip removed, hopefully a similar replacement clip will be posted soon.]
The height of the signature Transbay Tower has not yet been determined (proposals go as tall as 1,375 feet), but for the purposes of this clip, it was given a height of 1,200 feet. The 900 foot tower on the east side of the Transbay Transit Center and south of the Millennium Tower (currently under construction) is the newly proposed tower at 181 Fremont Street. An aside on the Millennium: when it was first proposed some five years ago, it was indeed quite an exciting project: one of the tallest new buildings for the city, and at over 600 feet tall, a beacon of the South of Market skyline. The Millennium will hopefully still be impressive in its own right, but fast forward a few years from when it was first proposed, and this video clip demonstrates how the Millennium will be dwarfed by the more recent buildings proposed for the Transbay district.
Meanwhile, the clip shows that if it were built to be at around 900 feet, 181 Fremont would still be a very noticeable addition to the skyline, but nonetheless appropriate in the context of the other towers nearby — assuming, of course, that the building is carefully designed so as to minimize shadow and wind impact. The boxes used in the video clip to represent the various proposed buildings are somewhat misleading in terms of assessing the effect the building mass will have on the skyline, but the clip offers a nice way to visualize how these buildings fit into the existing context, in a more interactive way than simply through renderings and sketches. Thanks to kimchalmers for the clip. For more fun animations depicting the future skyline, check out the websites of the three architects competing in the Transbay competition.
