STARTING LATER THIS month, the Board of Supervisors will begin to grapple with the initial portion of a coming series of land-use changes that, collectively, will transform San Francisco's eastern neighborhoods from being the home of the city's light-industrial and production (including arts-production) businesses into a set of "new neighborhoods" featuring market-rate condos in the highest residential towers in city history.

Currently under planning review are nearly 2,800 acres in the South of Market, Mission, Central Waterfront, Potrero Hill, Showplace Square, Bayview-Hunters Point, and Vis Valley neighborhoods. It's the largest San Francisco land area ever to be considered for rezoning. These "eastern neighborhoods," as they are called, contain businesses that currently employ more than 40,000 people in light-industrial and production jobs. Some 35,000 or so new housing units – the overwhelming majority of them market rate – could be built, nearly doubling the number of homes now in these neighborhoods.

The Rincon Hill Plan, now before the Board of Supervisors, is the first of these neighborhood-transforming initiatives coming from the planning department. It calls for some 3,500 units of market-rate condos in a series of 550-foot towers just south of the current Transbay Terminal. These condos will hasten the gentrification of the South of Market area, pour thousands of car trips a day into an area poorly served by public transit, and instigate a transformation of the entire eastern portion of the city.

These and other impacts of the plan were brought to the attention of the planning commission by a hardy coalition of South of Market community groups drawn heavily from the social-service and immigrant-serving community-based nonprofit sector. The commission, responding to the demands for protection of existing lower-income residents, raised the proposed developer fees, called for more extensive affordable housing mitigation, and passed the matter on to the Board of Supervisors.

The Newsom administration wants the plan approved quickly, with few or no questions asked. But questions demand to be asked – not only about the Rincon Hill Plan but about the entire eastern neighborhoods transformation, especially when it's linked, as it is geographically, with the contemporary hype of the "bio-tech boom" new economy (which, if history is a guide, will be followed by a coming "bio-bust"). In the same eastern neighborhoods, hospital facilities are imploding with the announced closure of St. Luke's and the very real possibility of SF General moving to UCSF's new campus at Mission Bay.

Crucial issues – who will live here, who will work here, and who will get health care here – are all wrapped up in these decisions, and no one seems to be paying much attention to them. The future of the eastern neighborhoods – the home of the left-labor vote in San Francisco – is critical to our collective future. Left, labor, and progressive environmental, transit, and health advocates must join with affordable housing and social-service providers active in these neighborhoods and community and neighborhood organizations already struggling with complex urban planning processes.

To that end, a housing justice summit has been called for July 16 at St. Boniface church, in the Tenderloin, to bring tenant organizations, neighborhood-preservation and land-use organizers, and advocates for affordable housing and for the homeless into an initial dialogue about the need for a comprehensive agenda to be placed before the Board of Supervisors over the next two years, when these eastern neighborhood plans will come before them.

But that is only the beginning. We need organized labor, health and human service providers, and environmental and neighborhood activists from all over San Francisco to begin to take these plans seriously and devise new and better initiatives to meet the needs of existing residents.

It is only our future at stake here, folks.

Calvin Welch has been a housing and neighborhood activist for 35 years.