Brown's craters

AT 21ST AND Bryant Streets, there used to be an artist community. Now there's an ugly, empty hole filling up with water.

At 17th and Rhode Island Streets, there used to be a car repair and parts place. Now there's a pile of dirt.

At 685 Brannan St., there used to be a pottery studio and showroom. Now there's a vacant lot.

As David Moisl reports on page 18, this is an ugly and very visible part of the legacy of Mayor Willie Brown's ruinous planning policies, of his willingness to sacrifice almost anything to the lure of the dot-com dollar, of the failure of the Brown administration to look beyond immediate campaign contributions and development fees and consider whether projects would still make sense a couple of years down the road.

But it's also a sign of a longtime flaw in the way the city thinks about real estate development. In a place as small and dense as San Francisco, it's hard to build much of anything without tearing something else down first – and the loss is rarely considered as important as the potential gain.

Historic buildings – very historic buildings – sometimes get protected from the wrecking ball. Low-cost housing and residential hotels have some statutory protection. In theory, it's city policy to protect what little is left of the manufacturing and light-industrial base, but that doesn't count for much when a developer with big money and high-priced lobbyists come along.

And developers are rarely asked to prove a difficult case: they're rarely asked to demonstrate that what they're proposing is actually going to happen – and that, in the long run and in more than just an economic sense, it's better than what's already there.

There's also an assumption that city planners have no business interfering with, or getting involved in, the marketplace of real estate finance. So developers can build housing or offices without any regard for what the actual demand for those facilities is likely to be when the project is finished.

The new community planning initiative, which came out of the mess that was the dot-come boom, is a good start. It rests on the assumption that the people who live and work in a neighborhood have as much right as an outside developer to decide what the future of the area will be. But the San Francisco Board of Supervisors can go further. There's already a precedent for barring developers from turning residential hotels into tourist hotels (or almost anything else), and if a residential hotel building is torn down, it has to be replaced with other low-cost housing. That same standard could easily be applied to, say, artist space: A developer who buys a building that's currently a dance studio couldn't turn it into anything other than another performing arts space. A warehouse or factory that employed 100 blue-collar workers could only be demolished to build another warehouse or factory employing a similar workforce. And those rules could be changed only as part of an overhaul of the city's General Plan, after a community-based discussion of what the city's real economic development needs are.

And if the supervisors combined that with legislation barring elected officials from accepting campaign contributions from anyone with any business before the city (including permit applications) and barring developers from giving campaign contributions until, say, 10 years after a project was completed, there might be a chance to restore some rationality to San Francisco city planning.