Saving city land

SAN FRANCISCO IS always desperately short of space. The third-densest metropolitan area in the nation, the city lacks room for parks, for affordable housing, for artist studios, for parking, for light industry, and for a whole lot of other things. And yet, city agencies are free to declare land "surplus" – and sell it off or lease it to developers.

As Cassi Feldman reports on page 17, the city owns hundreds of parcels – acres of land, worth hundreds of millions of dollars – that may not be in use. There are empty buildings and empty lots all over town – and nobody knows exactly how many. The problem: every city department currently has the right to decide how to use its property, when to declare it surplus, and what to do with it at that point. Muni, for example, has leased out a prime parcel to a private developer – a hotel is slated to go up at Steuart and Mission Streets on Muni land. The Police Department has at least one old station that's sitting empty. The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission owns land all over northern California, some of which is leased out to a mining firm for a quarry. The school district has large holdings that it isn't using, including at least one large building that's been abandoned since the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.

Many departments (like Muni) make money by selling or leasing their land, so department managers have an incentive to look for ways to get the most possible cash out of a deal – even if that conflicts with the city's overall needs and land-use policies.

That's a really bad way to manage such an immensely valuable resource. Housing activists complain that buildings sit empty while thousands sleep on the streets. Environmentalists and planning activists wonder if high-rise hotels and strip mines are the best use of city property.

Now Sup. Chris Daly has proposed a welcome solution that makes tremendous sense – and while it might need some tinkering, the board ought to move forward with it quickly.

Daly's legislation would create a nine-person appointed panel to oversee surplus city property. The panel would create a citywide inventory of unused and underused land – and would have the authority to overrule department decisions on how to use it. The first priority for any surplus land would be affordable housing.

The bill mandates that property found unsuitable for affordable housing be auctioned off and the proceeds be put into a special housing fund. That's better than what happens now (when any department that can sell its land can put the money into its own budget), but it's hard to see why a city as land-strapped as San Francisco should ever sell any property. There are all sorts of other possible uses for surplus land: open space, recreation and child care centers, community gardens, nonprofit offices, and artist studios come quickly to mind. Daly should consider amending his bill to discourage any sales and to give the panel the authority to look at a range of uses that would make sense in a crowded city with no room to spare.