Eight Years, Four Neighborhoods

Courtesy of SF Planning Dept.

I have mentioned the ongoing rezoning plan of San Francisco’s Eastern Neighborhoods a number of times here before, although somewhat tangentially. Eastern Neighborhoods amends the General Plan to include four new neighborhood plans that refresh outdated zoning in the Mission District, East South of Market, Showplace Square/Potrero Hill, and the Central Waterfront. The Eastern Neighborhoods Plan is chock-full of discussion over exactions, affordable housing, transit-oriented development, and industrial land use. Some heights are increased while others are decreased, but at the end of the day, the plan strikes a precarious balance between increasing housing supply and creating dense, urban mixed use neighborhoods, while minimizing displacement and preserving space to support production, distribution, and repair (PDR) jobs. My intention, for literally months now, was to do more indepth posting on Eastern Neighborhoods, but the upshot is that I delayed posting too long, for at yesterday’s December 9 meeting, the Board of Supervisors — after a last-ditch squabble, and with a couple issues pending further discussion — gave the Eastern Neighborhoods its final 10-0 blessing. So how is it that the Supes managed to finally pass this thing before we got around to giving it the air time it deserves? I can only say, somewhat sheepishly, that while time available for blogging is in short supply, the topics to blog about are not; I do hope to get into more details about the implications of the plan later, post-hiatus, probably in smaller chunks or in the context of specific projects. The Eastern Neighborhoods Plan has formally been the subject of planning and community discussion for eight years, culminating in months worth of hearings at the Planning Commission and at the Board of Supervisors. While it may not be perfect — and no plan will ever satisfy everyone, no matter how thorough a review process it gets — we can, at least, finally say that it is done. With four neighborhood plans in place, previously stalled projects may finally come to fruition; and we can redirect our attention towards the transformation of the Plan area over the next couple of decades, to ensure that the zoning controls translate into neighborhoods that are at once dense and livable.