Let’s run through the specs.  Cool, modern, glassy Saitowitz design in Hayes Valley? Check. (More or less: Curbed has been tracking this issue here and here.)  Replace underutilized space, including 70 surface parking spots, with higher density uses? Check.  A decent mix of units? Check. (There would be 32 studio + 48 one-bedroom + 45 two-bedroom = 136 total units, with 16 units [12%] affordable.)  Mixed-use project, with ground floor retail to activate the street environment?  Check.  Planned supermarket space to increase neighborhood livability, walkability, and self-sufficiency?  Check.  102 residential parking spots, plus two car-share spots and 91 spots for the grocery store — summing to a grand total of 195 new parking spots?

Rendering of 555 Fulton Street, courtesy of Stanley Saitowitz.

195 parking spots.  That can’t be all that “transit-first” — can it?  In the Hayes-Gough NCT, no off-street residential parking is required whatsoever, and a ratio of 0.5 parking spots per residential unit is allowed by-right.  No more than 0.75 spots per unit may be built, and then only with a conditional use authorization.  For a 136-unit development, the 0.75 ratio yields exactly 102 parking spots.  555 Fulton, then, is applying for the maximum amount of residential parking permissible under the code.  Moreover, that parking would be provided in a full two-level below-grade garage.  While it is preferable to have the parking located below-grade, the project sponsor has not proposed to use mechanical stackers for any of the parking, including the 34 residential spaces provided above and beyond the 0.5 threshold.

555 Fulton is an upcoming example of an emerging trend.  On the one hand, Planning acknowledges the need to integrate good parking policy into the process of approving new developments.  Indeed, San Francisco’s General Plan demands it:

Transportation Element, Policy 34.1: Regulate off-street parking in new housing so as to guarantee needed spaces without requiring excesses and to encourage low auto ownership in neighborhoods that are well served by transit and are convenient to neighborhood shopping.

Transportation Element, Policy 34.3: Permit minimal or reduced off-street parking supply for new buildings in residential and commercial areas adjacent to transit centers and along transit preferential streets. (*)

On the other hand, this principle is sometimes given lip service and then essentially discarded in practice.  There have been, for example, increases in parking approved by the Planning Commission and provided as part of larger residential projects located South of Market.  Another project of interest last year was 299 Valencia, whose conditional use was appealed to, but not overturned by, the Board of Supervisors.  The outcome of that case raised the question of whether a precedent — not a legally binding precedent, but a de facto precedent, nonetheless — had been set, in which the 0.5 NCT parking ratio limit had been replaced, practically speaking, by a 0.75 ratio.  But 299 Valencia is just a single project, and 555 Fulton will add a new data point.  Yet another data point is 200 Dolores, which may cut the opposite direction.  In that case, the Planning Commission has initially denied a conditional use to construct thirteen parking spaces (for thirteen units, a 1:1 ratio).  But the item was continued, and even that motion passed narrowly (4-3), with Commissioners Antonini, Lee, and Miguel dissenting.

In concept, the 555 Fulton project deserves support.  Well-designed, elegantly dense urban infill projects that add homes and neighborhood-serving retail near transit and employment is the exact flavor of development that we should be building everywhere that is appropriate, including throughout San Francisco.  But as more and more project sponsors are authorized to build more parking than the amount permitted by-right, a nagging concern is what the cumulative effect on air quality, neighborhood livability, street safety, and transit performance will be over time.

Some San Francisco neighborhoods are comprised primarily of older, relatively large apartment buildings that provide little to no parking.  And yet, these buildings still have no difficulty attracting residents.  In fact, they teach us a valuable lesson about parking: If you don’t build it, they still come, but most will come without cars.

Suppose that the Planning Commission decides to sign off on many future conditional use authorizations begging for more parking, but without sufficiently scrutinizing them — perhaps justifying them on the speculative ground that the parking allowed by-right is insufficient to encourage families to live in San Francisco.  Suppose also that on appeal, the Board of Supervisors either agrees with the Planning Commission, or fails to collect the votes needed to overturn the Planning Commission.  If that is the pattern for how things play out, then at what point can the General Plan’s good parking policy — even if genuinely applied to projects by Planning staff — enter this deliberative process successfully, with sufficient force to persuade decision-makers?

More generally, why did we bother spending the better part of a decade crafting the Market-Octavia Plan, only to ultimately betray the spirit of that planning effort on a case-by-case basis?  We hope that the Planning Commission will take these considerations to heart when it considers 555 Fulton and all future projects in the pipeline.

(*) Strictly speaking, Policy 34.3 does not apply to 555 Fulton, because the relevant segment of Fulton Street is not a TPS, nor is the project site directly adjacent to a designated transit center. However, both provisions summarize the City’s stance on developing new residential parking. Also, even Policy 34.1 taken by itself supports the notion that additional parking merits additional scrutiny.

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).

We should first observe that 299 Valencia satisfies rudimentary urban design principles and is designed to mitigate the negative effects of the parking included in the project. The scale of the building is compatible with the neighborhood context, the parking is contained in an underground garage accessed via the side street Stevenson, and the ground floor of the building includes retail that would activate and visually enhance the neighborhood, particularly as compared to the surface parking lot that is there now. But the dispute is not about the project as a whole, which the pro-infill appellants actually support. Rather, the controversy concerns the seven additional parking spaces that trigger the conditional use. The project sponsor claimed that due to the expense of building an underground garage, reducing the parking to the 0.5 as-of-right maximum would necessitate an altered design without an underground garage, stripping away all but a fraction of the retail square footage. The argument revolves around two sections of the Planning Code:

• Section 151.1(f), which applies to NCT zones, requires that cars interacting with the project “not unduly impact pedestrian spaces or movement, transit service, bicycle movement, or the overall traffic movement.” The Planning Department believes this condition is satisfied by locating the underground garage access to Stevenson Street, which is the least trafficked of the three streets onto which the project fronts. The appeal, however, correctly pointed out that although egress and ingress is concentrated on Stevenson, those cars will still have to drive on 14th and Valencia. This could negatively impact bicyclists, in particular, because the project is located at the intersection of two major bicycle routes.
• Section 303(c)(1), which is a subjective provision that discusses CU approval, requires such approval if it is the case that “the proposed use or feature, at the size and intensity contemplated and at the proposed location, will provide a development that is necessary or desirable for, and compatible with, the neighborhood or the community.” The appeal emphasized the fact that many buildings in the immediate vicinity comply with the 0.5 ratio, and that 73% of nearby households are carfree, implying that the particular feature of the additional parking would be incompatible with the neighborhood. In addition, the appeal asserts that extra parking is neither necessary for marketability of the units, nor desirable in light of the city’s transit-first policy — and that the CU would fly in the face of several years worth of planning and discussion that went into crafting the Market/Octavia Plan. The Planning Department, on the other hand, emphasized that the extra parking itself need not be necessary or desirable, but rather, that the project as a whole be necessary or desirable — and it concludes that this mixed-use project, which would activate the street and add housing units (including four BMR units), is certainly desirable, and that its scale is compatible with the neighborhood.

We could spend more time spinning our wheels about ambiguities in the code language — about whether or not a project satisfies the subjective requriement of “desirable,” or whether or not its excessive parking outweighs its other desirable features. Even though the conditional use inquiry focuses on a particular project, it is worthwhile for us to consider the greater ramifications. In this sense, we may understandably be concerned about the precedent that the Planning Commission’s CU might set, particularly because the Market/Octavia Plan will guide the development of thousands of new units in its coverage area. The precedent might not be a literally binding one, but it may turn out to be an effective pattern that emerges; the adoption of the Market/Octavia Plan is still too recent yet for us to say. The Planning Department’s argument in favor of the CU authorization for 299 Valencia could apply to many other projects in which neighborhood-compatible mixed-use buildings are proposed for surface parking lots or otherwise vacant/underutilized property, unless other special circumstances detract from the desirability of those projects. Given that developers will often pursue the maximum allowable parking, the success of a parking CU at 299 Valencia could incentivize many other Market/Octavia project sponsors to request a CU for their projects, which could well be deemed just as desirable as 299 Valencia. If the Planning Commission were to grant a CU authorization for those projects, as it did for 299 Valencia, the cumulative result could be that areas zoned “NCT” run the danger of amassing new parking above the 0.5 maximum that the Market/Octavia Plan deemed to be the most appropriate target for NCT neighborhoods — and this undermines the spirit of livability that is central to the Market/Octavia Plan.

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.

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.

Courtesy City of Union City.

Efforts have been made all around the Bay Area, with varying degrees of success, to transform rail-accessible downtowns into greater and denser places, including at BART’s Richmond, El Cerrito del Norte, Hayward, and South San Francisco stations. A 450-unit TOD with retail just broke ground today at Pleasant Hill BART, and still another phase of the project will add about 300,000 square feet of office and conference space. Meanwhile, one station south of Pleasant Hill, a transit village at Walnut Creek BART proposed by BRE Properties would include a mixed use development featuring about 600 residential units, office and retail space, fourteen bays for County Connection buses, and the implementation of market-rate pricing in the BART parking garage; the project, which the City Council has greeted with some skepticism, is up for environmental review. San Leandro has compiled a strategy for transit-oriented development, and one of the largest transit village plans — including about 75,000 square feet of retail and commercial space and close to 2000 units of housing — will crown a confluence of BART, commuter rail lines, and bus routes at an intermodal Union City Station, a rendering of which is pictured directly above. On the Peninsula, Redwood City has grand plans of downtown renewal centered on its Caltrain station, but despite plans to add about 2500 homes, residential development has been somewhat slow to trickle in. Further east, along the congested Interstate 580 corridor, a few projects in the pipeline will add hotel rooms, retail space, and close to 900 rental and condo units near the infill West Dublin/Pleasanton BART station currently under construction.

Transit villages have also been planned at Oakland BART stations, but here I am more critical — in part because the potential is greater, but also because when discussing these developments in Oakland, the conversation is at least as much about urban revitalization as it is about TOD. At the 19th Street Station in downtown Oakland, a couple thousand new homes (provided through several projects discussed on this blog in the past) will help breathe new life into the neighboring Uptown and Valdez downtown subdistricts — but such a transit-rich downtown location would ideally support much denser housing than the collection of Forest City low- to mid-rises currently under construction. Meanwhile, at the Fruitvale BART station, plans to build retail and over a thousand combined units at Fruitvale Gateway and Phase II of the transit village project — both of which would supply some of the new residents and additional vitality needed to fulfill the historical prophecy of the Fruitvale District as Oakland’s second downtown — have not moved forward, leaving just the 47 residential units and a substantial amount of commercial space included in Phase I of the transit village. At MacArthur Station, plans have long been in the works to build densely over BART’s surface parking lots, but they have morphed from the originally envisioned 800 units, including a 20-story tower and a 22-story tower — to 675 units in four- to six-story buildings, joined by retail and a seven-story parking garage. Here is a rendering of that project:

Courtesy MacArthur Transit Community Partners.

In the past couple of years, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission has done a better job of encouraging cities to pursue dense growth near transit nodes — although these plans, as the above discussion indicates, have not nearly risen to the level of my personal dream of miniature skylines dotting the Bay Area, linked by high-quality, frequent rail transit service. But there has been some progress, and some mixed results as well. Increasing density within walking distance of BART and Caltrain stations will make central downtown districts more walkable, successful public spaces, and ultimately, we should go further than we have to date toward maximizing the potential of these rail connections. This whole discussion began with the announcement that San Francisco proper is America’s most walkable city. We certainly can and should celebrate this fact, but let us not stop there. Regional problems have regional solutions — and we cannot overlook the importance of reproducing San Francisco’s success, to the extent that we can, in cities across the Bay Area.

The proposed buildings are both located in an area currently zoned RSD (South of Market mixed-use district), and it carries a minimum of one parking spot for every four dwelling units. That there is such a large disconnect between the minimum requirement and the proposed parking is in itself a strong argument for eliminating parking minimums citywide and replacing them with maximums. This much-needed change would be partially implemented under the Eastern Neighborhoods Plan, which would rezone the 900 Folsom and 260 Fifth parcels from RSD to MUR (Mixed-Use Residential), since both parcels lie within the East SoMa portion of the plan area. Off-street residential parking provisions for land zoned MUR would be similar to the more recently adopted downtown controls — no minimum, up to a 0.25 ratio permitted by right, and up to 0.75 with a conditional use. (A draft table of the new Eastern Neighborhoods controls can be found here.) The Eastern Neighborhoods Plan, which is currently being presented at both the Land Use Committee and at the Planning Commission, has not yet been adopted and is still subject to changes from the Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors. So it does not yet govern at the time of this posting, but, looking ahead to the near future, provision of 1:1 parking clearly flies in the face of the City’s increasing desire to eliminate parking minimums and replace them with maximums that are less than 1:1. And for the interim period until the new controls are approved, the proposed off-street parking at 900 Folsom and 260 Fifth would still require a conditional use authorization. Since the goal is to create a lively, walkable neighborhood out of section of South of Market that is dominated by automobiles and is rather unfriendly to pedestrians, the prudent course of action would be to limit parking at 900 Folsom and 260 Fifth to a ratio more consistent with the Eastern Neighborhoods Plan.

I might not have bothered to write a post only about this yet because there is still quite a ways to go in the process (notice for preparation of the EIR was issued last month). But this gravitation toward slightly more than 1:1 parking at 5th and Folsom resonates with another parking snafu from a Planning Commission meeting about a month ago that I never got to write about at the time. At that meeting, the Commissioners discussed the 631 Folsom (a.k.a. BLŪ) condominium project (pictured at right), a narrow 21-story tower that is currently being constructed on the western edge of Rincon Hill, just a few blocks from these other two proposed projects at 5th and Folsom. The Commissioners approved increasing the building’s parking allotment from 64 to 116 (still within the same physical constraints), 108 of which would be accessed by mechanical stackers. The parking is not to be bundled with the units, but that is still 116 parking spaces for a building with 114 units — once again, slightly higher than a 1:1 ratio.

Policy 30.1 from the General Plan’s Transportation Element stipulates that the following criteria (among others) be met before approving a new or enlarged parking facility:

• Generation of traffic from additional parking will not create a substantial adverse effect on the surrounding city streets;
• Additional parking will not discourage the possible diversion of current automobile users to transit;
• “Demonstrated demand” for additional parking in the surrounding area in relation to supply provided in the development; and
• The need for the additional parking must be “clearly established and not presumed.” (emphasis mine)

The Planning Department actually recommended disapproval of the additional parking, because the 631 Folsom site (along with Rincon Hill, in general) is transit-rich and already has many amenities within walking distance, with even more coming in the future as the new neighborhood takes form. This recommendation to disapprove is wholly consistent with Policy 34.1 of the Transportation Element, which states, in part:

Regulate off-street parking in new housing so as to guarantee needed spaces without requiring excesses and to encourage low auto ownership in neighborhoods that are well served by transit and are convenient to neighborhood shopping.

Despite the recommendation to disapprove, the Planning Commission unanimously approved the additional parking at 631 Folsom. The justification for the approval was the need to provide 1:1 parking so that families would not be discouraged from moving into this building, which consists of two- and three-bedroom units larger than 1000 square feet in area. Commissioner Antonini supplied a statistic that suggested that the number of children under the age of 14 decreased by about 1000 citywide between 2000 and 2007, but actually increased by about 400 in zip codes 94105 and 94107. This figure is potentially very misleading, because most of the buildings located in those zip codes are not newly constructed condominiums, which is the relevant subset of housing stock. The City has not formally tracked how many families are actually moving into the new South of Market condos, and we cannot assume that every multi-bedroom condo being constructed will house a family with children — so an assertion one way or the other is necessarily speculative. Therefore, a mere desire to encourage families to live in the new buildings falls short of “clearly establishing” a need for the additional parking. Upon realizing that it had no hard data to indicate whether the new larger units were actually attracting families, the Commission also required the compilation of a database that would track this information, with the recommendation that the database eventually be made available to other City departments. Project sponsors will be required to submit a report two years after the initial occupancy date, and every two years thereafter, indicating the number of children living in each household, any vehicles owned, and other information. This data will be valuable in studying the demographic trends of the new neighborhoods emerging South of Market — neighborhoods that have been planned on the premise that residents will walk and use transit rather than drive.

If such data were available prior to the approval of the additional parking for 631 Folsom, then it would obviously be crucial in evaluating the strength of any argument that alleges a “clearly established” need for more parking. But without the data, this need has been only nebulously established, at best — and therefore is inconsistent with the Transportation Element. We need not fault the Commission for its desire to make more informed decisions, but given that we cannot force a new influx of families into South of Market high-rises who may not even want to live there, how about we deny requests for additional parking until data exists showing that there is a clearly established need for more? Or, what if we try this one on for size: the families who decide to live in these mid- and high-rise buildings actually manage to adapt their lifestyle to the city, instead of simply transplanting a suburban auto-oriented lifestyle into a dense urban setting? Although there are already some residential towers in the Bay Area, the whole notion of “high-rise living” and of a true high-rise neighborhood is a recent development, and it may just trigger unforeseen lifestyle changes. In fact, that is exactly what we have to hope will happen.

Commissioner Antonini, et al may be worried that parking limitations will discourage families from occupying the new units, but it would also behoove the Commission to be worried about the cumulative environmental impacts (and associated CEQA implications) of providing generous parking for new units constructed in a neighborhood that when all is said, done, and built, will have a population density akin to parts of Manhattan — and this in a neighborhood that is already disproportionately burdened by high traffic volumes and street gridlock associated with the nearby freeway. The large industrial blocks and wide one-way streets in South of Market, combined with the intrusive presence of a freeway slicing through the middle of neighborhoods, make this a difficult section of the city to plan well. But given South of Market’s proximity to downtown, dense development is not a question of “if,” but “when” — so any planning in this area of the City deserves all the effort and careful thought we can give. Being lenient with parking restrictions makes an already monumental task even more difficult. A strong commitment to limited parking is necessary if we want to encourage transit use and create truly successful, livable neighborhoods.

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.

And bound to get more controversial, courtesy of the C.W. Nevius column that appeared in the Chronicle this week. The column painted a grim picture of The Plaza, a housing-first building at Sixth and Howard Streets. While it included a fairly meek rebuttal from DPH, the article mostly cited anecdotes which indicated that rather than providing proactive services to adequately encourage its formerly homeless residents to conquer the substance abuse underlying their unfortunate life cycle, the supportive housing experiment has only succeeded in moving the harsh realities of the street indoors — putting aside for the moment any architectural achievements of The Plaza.

Pursuant to both the project redevelopment plan requiring 35% affordability and the Mayor’s Consolidated Plan, a permanently affordable supportive housing project with on-site services in the vein of The Plaza is slated to be built on the northern portion of Transbay’s Block 11, fronting onto Folsom; construction is targeted to start in roughly 2011. The building, which would likely be about 80-85 feet tall, will include 100-120 units, 90% of which would be 400 square foot studios, and 525 square foot one-bedroom apartments for the remaining 10%. In accordance with the plan to transform Folsom into a new two-way neighborhood main street for Transbay and Rincon Hill, neighborhood-serving retail is planned for the ground floor of the building at the corner of Folsom. The RFP for Block 11′s supportive housing component will be finalized in upcoming weeks. Proposals submitted in response to the RFP will be collected during the summer and evaluated by the Commission later this fall.

As for the rest of Block 11, fronting Essex Street: the slice of land adjacent to the supportive housing site would support no more than a couple dozen homes, of the 35-50 foot townhouse variety that will be peppered throughout the Transbay redevelopment zone to lend a comfortably human scale to the alleys and narrower streets in the neighborhood; it has not yet been officially determined whether or not these units will be applied to fulfill the affordable housing requirement. Moving a little further south along Essex, the remaining slivers of land will become new open space for the neighborhood. The tax increment funds needed to make this open space a reality are available to be applied, pending approval from the Board of Supervisors. The park would ideally be completed in advance of the new housing.

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.”

The idea of crafting this sort of shape to the skyline is not a bad one, but both Vann and the tower’s opponents have overlooked the fact that Oakland’s tallest structures — the Ordway, but also Kaiser Center (390 feet) and 1999 Harrison Street (371 feet) — are already located directly on Lake Merritt, so the tower would not really be out of place at all:

There is one point on which I agree with the tower’s opponents, namely that remaining vacant spots on and immediately around Broadway should ideally be filled to high density, so as to take full advantage of proximity to the BART line. However, the assertion that the Emerald Views tower does not fit the context seems entirely wrong, as I believe the above rendering demonstrates.

So, if the building is truly not out of context, then what is the problem? The tower would be erected on the historic Schilling Garden, once part of the estate of Alfred Schilling. However, this is not a story of a greedy developer stealing public open space for the sake of the bottom line. The Schilling Garden is already closed off to the public — in fact, before the Emerald Views controversy started, most Oaklanders probably did not even know that the park was there. The site is right next to Snow Park and Lake Merritt itself, both of which provide thoroughly public open space. In the aerial view pictured at the right, Lake Merritt is at the far right of the image, and the large green area on the left side of the image is Snow Park. The area outlined by the red box is the “secret garden” that would be the site of the proposed Emerald Views tower. The aerial shot makes clear that this tower leaves untouched most of the green space in this area, and since the Schilling Garden is private, no public open space would be removed.

In fact, the project would return the garden to the public. The site is 31,830 square feet; above, I remarked that the tower footprint was only 12,200 square feet, so more than half of the site would actually be returned to the public in the form of true open space, a 20,322 square foot park that incorporates trees, benches, and other elements from the current garden. In addition, the woefully underutilized Snow Park would be improved and redone into a destination spot for downtown residents and visitors. The new Snow Park could feature picnic areas, a putting green, and a children’s discovery garden.

All in all, this project strikes me as a good one. The project offers the opportunity to put high-density housing in a transit-oriented location that could benefit from additional residents and vitality, and it would give Oaklanders new and improved public open space to enjoy. I would encourage any and all Oakland urbanists reading this post to attend tonight’s public scoping meeting (or to send in written comments, by December 10, 2007) to emphasize the benefits that this project could bring to the city of Oakland.

Top image courtesy Oakland Tribune; middle image courtesy Novometro; bottom image courtesy Google Maps.

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.

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.