EDITORIAL

During his 11 years as planning director, Macris helped change San Francisco's skyline from flat-top buildings to high rises with sharper edges. He has been criticized, however, for the department's bureaucratic maze filled with backlogs and projects that are slow to move through the system before they are approved.

"Macris Set to Become Planning Chief Again," San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 5, 2006

That's such an inaccurate description of the eras of Dean Macris that it can only be called bizarre.

The man who, according to the Chron, is in line to take up permanent residence in the director's office at the San Francisco Planning Department oversaw some of the greatest (and most destructive) changes to San Francisco's skyline, economy, and quality of life in modern history. His legacy has almost nothing to do with the shapes of the tops of a few buildings.

With Macris leading the way, the administrations of Mayors Alioto and Feinstein worked like gangbusters to fill the city with commercial office towers, displacing small businesses and demolishing big chunks of the city's architectural heritage along the way. In the 1980s, under Macris's tenure, gentrification drove rents through the roof, neighborhoods were ignored to please downtown developers, and the city's finances became a long-term disaster.

We were there. We watched it. Macris's city planning department operated with the basic premise that the future of San Francisco depended on building new commercial high-rises that would create thousands of new jobs and bring in new tax revenue. But the whole concept was utterly flawed: The jobs never materialized, the costs of serving the downtown district rose faster than the tax revenue, and only a citizen initiative, Proposition M, in 1986 – written in frustration over the disaster that was city planning policy – kept San Francisco from even more serious problems.

And now Mayor Gavin Newsom, who appointed Macris as an interim director while promising a national search for a top-flight candidate for the job, wants ol' Dean to stay. What a sad, sad statement.

Macris has no planning vision except to accommodate the private sector and seek to "mitigate" the results. At a time when the entire future of southeast San Francisco – and thus of the city's blue-collar workforce, affordable housing, and economic future – is on the line, Macris is a terrible choice for the job.

The Planning Commission needs to take a step back here, listen to some of the people who had to deal with Macris when he was running things in the 1980s, and tell the mayor that he can do much, much better.