By Rachel Brahinsky

INTERIM PLANNING DIRECTOR Dean Macris has been on the job for barely two weeks but is already facing a major decision over runaway development on the northern side of Potrero Hill that will likely define the tenor of his term at the San Francisco Planning Department. The outcome will send an important message: if Macris continues with the policies of his predecessor, Gerald Green – and the Planning Commission allows it – the future of San Francisco neighborhoods will be in jeopardy.

Macris is faced with picking up the pieces of a shattered planning process covering a large, jagged span of mostly flat land at the bottom of the hill that city planners call Showplace Square. It's a debate that affects the entire city and is reminiscent of the land-use struggles of the dot-com era.

Back then, profitable live-work lofts swarmed into previously industrial-heavy zones, remaking SoMa and parts of the Mission District without any adherence to a larger vision. Now the live-works have been banned, and the dot-com economy that drove them has busted, but the essential question of how to best use the less dense parts of town remains – and the clock is ticking.

As planners have slowly drawn up designs for the north Potrero area, developers have pressed forward with their own plans to install thousands of densely packed housing units, which are now the single most profitable type of development project in town. With no mandate from the city, the development free-for-all is a go.

Developers hope to transform Showplace Square into a residential district with more than 6,000 new housing units, which could be completely incompatible with the light-industrial businesses that are currently located there. Each high-end housing project forces the cost of land in the area to go up, and existing businesses – many of which offer well-paying blue-collar jobs – are squeezed out.

That's part of why Potrero Gardens, the 20-year-old urban nursery that was located on 17th Street, closed its doors in July. "You have this speculative fervor where the value of the property for people who are going to put in dense housing makes it so much that you cannot have a business like mine," former owner Michael Sasso told the Bay Guardian. "It prices a business like mine out of the neighborhood."

Green attempts a coup

For six years the Planning Department has been working with the community to determine the future of Showplace Square, home to some of the last land in the city where certain types of businesses – including a flower wholesaler, furniture warehouses, garment manufacturing, and storage for heavy equipment – can still operate.

The community is remarkably unified on the issue. The vast majority say they want new housing, and they're willing to accept quite a bit of it. But they want the city to strike a balance, and they don't want the existing unique businesses to suffer.

In 2001 a Planning Commission study found that these sorts of businesses provided about 68,000 jobs citywide. In Showplace Square, 759 businesses provided 8,125 "light industrial" jobs.

But those businesses are under heavy and increasing pressure.

For example, Fritz Maytag, the owner of Anchor Brewing, has charged in several news reports that the encroachment of new housing (and the higher land costs it will bring) near his Mariposa Street building will limit his ability to expand. The fate of Anchor is symbolic of the larger problem: as blue-collar jobs are shipped out of the city, the future of working-class San Francisco hangs in the balance.

The contentious debate has been muddied by the chaos at the Planning Commission. Planners, commissioners, and Green were bitterly split over the future of the Potrero area – and as the department has slogged along somewhat schizophrenically, the developers, one by one, have been given the green light to build.

Sometime in mid-summer, according to planning sources, Green tried to upend the community planning process for Showplace Square. He quietly removed a team of veteran planners from the project and asked two staffers, Paul Lord and Dan Sider, to take over work on the area.

Critics charge that Green made the move to speed up approval of development and to quash the community-based planning process. Green didn't respond to a message left at his new job at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, but Lord insists Green simply asked him to get information to planning commissioners that had been delayed by other staffers.

Either way, community members involved in the process say they felt squeezed out.

The ultimate impact of Green's attempted coup is unclear. He was essentially forced out of his job at the end of October under pressure from Mayor Gavin Newsom, and Macris is apparently reviewing Green's policies. Lord told us that he hasn't been fully informed yet as to how Macris plans to proceed.

There's good reason to be nervous. Macris wouldn't call us back for this story, but when he served as planning director during the Feinstein administration, his tenure was marked by consistent pro-developer decisions.

Sup. Sophie Maxwell isn't waiting to see: last month she introduced interim development controls for Showplace Square, which is in her district. The measure would temporarily halt the flow of development, buying time to complete an environmental study that's needed to finish the neighborhood plan.

The community, meantime, is restless for a thoughtful solution. "We want fine-grain zoning rather than this kind of binge and purge that the city has had," says Tony Kelly, president of the Potrero Boosters Neighborhood Association. "These are good-paying jobs.... Why do they want to make this a bedroom community for downtown?"

Maxwell's legislation is scheduled for a hearing before the Board of Supervisors' Land Use Committee Nov. 22, 1 p.m., City Hall, Room 263, 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Pl., S.F. (415) 554-7723. Information on the Planning Department's work on Showplace Square is available at www.sfgov.org/site/planning_index.asp?id=25328.

E-mail Rachel Brahinsky at rachel@sfbg.com.