ALTHOUGH IT HASN'T been in the news much lately, a proposal to build a 135,000-square-foot Home Depot on Bayshore Boulevard is working its way through the city-planning process, despite severe environmental and neighborhood concerns city planners are so far largely dismissing.

The next step in the process is a July 28 hearing and vote on the project's environmental impact report, which is insulting in its dismissal of the dramatic problems this big-box store would create for Bernal Heights and, ultimately, for the southeast quadrant of the city. The planning commission should refuse to certify the final environmental impact review and force the planning department to deal honestly with the impact of this sort of development – and to look more seriously for better alternatives for the future development of the area.

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The proposed Home Depot is, by any analysis, a giant, car-dependent, suburban-style project. The box itself will be more than 800 feet long, with a 100,000-square-foot parking garage. There will be little in the way of storefront amenities or pedestrian space: The walls come right up to the edge of the sidewalk, and the entrances are clearly designed for vehicle access: The main route into the place would be through the garage.

Not surprisingly, the retail behemoth would attract a lot of new traffic to the area. The city's EIR says Cortland Street alone would see an additional 106 cars an hour during the week and 159 an hour on Saturday; neighborhood activists say that's a vast underestimate. Some say the accurate figure is more than 1,000 cars per hour. As Sue Hestor, attorney for Cole Hardware, points out, the traffic counts were taken during a recession, with many commercial spaces on Bayshore Boulevard vacant, and those conditions will almost certainly not continue. But even if the EIR is right, the impact will be significant. Cortland is already a busy street, and the streets right around it are so narrow that cars often have to back up or pull over to let drivers from the opposite direction pass by. Since Cortland is the only direct route to the Home Depot site from Noe Valley, the Outer Mission, Glen Park, and the surrounding areas, it would quickly become a traffic-choked nightmare. The neighborhood is full of pedestrians, many of them seniors or kids, and all the new cars on the streets could pose a real safety problem. The traffic would also significantly slow the 24 bus line, which travels along Cortland Street.

Community activists described these concerns to the planning department, which glosses them over in its formal the comments and responses section of the EIR. The city also dismisses the concerns of Dr. Gina Solomon, a professor of medicine at UCSF, who testified that the increased traffic would create additional air pollution, particularly from ozone, which has been linked to childhood asthma. The city planning department responded with an essay on the creation of ozone that, in essence, concluded that, since ozone pollution is a regional problem, there's no way to calculate how much worse these thousands of additional cars might make it. So it's not a quantifiable environmental impact – and the city intends to ignore it.

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The same attitude carries through in the discussion of how Home Depot would damage small neighborhood businesses (many of which encourage foot traffic, hire local residents, and contribute to the quality of life in the Mission and Bernal Heights). For starters, the city planners try to insist that the addition of a giant discount store like Home Depot won't harm local hardware and home-supply stores, despite the clear and consistent national evidence that big box stores destroy local retail business. Then they try to argue – in an a stunningly insulting and patronizing way – that small merchants will simply have to adapt: "Other businesses could specialize in certain types of products not carried by Home Depot; they could improve their customer service; they could enhance their marketing activities; and/or they could benefit from trends of rising demands for such products," the city study states.

Home Depot argues that the new store would create jobs (and supporters have used this argument to drive a wedge between Bernal Heights, a more upscale neighborhood, and Bayview-Hunters Point, where jobs are desperately needed). The company says the project would create 300 to 350 jobs, 200 of them new, and has promised a "good-faith effort" to hire half of the new employees from the Bayview-Hunters Point community. We're talking about a giant 8-acre project that will offer – at most – 100 jobs for the poverty-plagued neighborhood, many of them part-time and relatively low-paying. And if anyone really, truly believes Home Depot is going to hire 100 unemployed Hunters Point kids and give them decent jobs with good benefits, we've got a big-box retail outfit we'd like to sell you.

The larger issue here, of course, is how the city intends to develop the southeast corridor, what will drive that development – and who will benefit. This project had nothing to do with community-based planning or an assessment of community needs, and in many ways it's a case study in how not to do urban planning. Home Depot wanted a store in San Francisco, and hired lobbyist Jack Davis, who was close to Mayor Willie Brown, to seal the deal. But now that Brown is gone, the city planning commission should take a big step back and ask: Is suburban big box the way the city wants to go? Is this a precedent for how planning will be done in an area already under siege from high-end housing developers (see "The Eastern Front," 7/13/05)? Or would the city be better served by a planning process that starts with community needs and emphasizes locally owned businesses?

It's not too late to stop this disaster. The planning commission should let Home Depot know that it's not part of San Francisco's future, and start asking people in the southeast neighborhoods what they want to do with the future of their city.