San Francisco Bay Guardian

The ghost of Hayes Valley

What will become of the valuable six-acre parcel the University of California has abandoned?

By G.W. Schulz

› gwschulz@sfbg.com

In the heart of a busy San Francisco neighborhood, there's an eerie silence.

Just northwest of Market Street and southeast of the Lower Haight, a six-acre plot of immensely valuable land is gathering weeds and dust. The University of California at Berkeley closed the doors on its Laguna extension campus in late 2003, and now the place is effectively sealed off, compound-style, windows and doors facing only the interior court area and little to connect its several buildings in any intimate way with the surrounding neighborhood.

After retiring in 1999, Warren Dewar moved into a house on nearby Buchanan Street with his wife. He said they'd hoped the land's decades of public-use zoning would remain intact and eventually the grounds would be further opened to community use. Since the early 20th century, the campus has been used primarily for educational purposes by a number of owners.

"When we moved here, we put our entire life savings into the house, plus a mortgage," Dewar said during a recent tour of the campus. "We were told this property would be kept for public use, and we thought, 'That's a plus.' "

Now there's finally a development plan: After months of negotiations with the university, private developers A.F. Evans and Mercy Housing California have proposed building 351 units of housing on the site. But that would, in large measure, take the property out of the public domain. So the neighborhood is up in arms, clamoring for an alternative — and so far, the only other prospective user is an educational institution that has shown no ability to raise the cash to lease and develop the place.

The university simply wants to maximize its cash flow — and in this red-hot housing market, building condos is the best way to guarantee profits. The people at Evans and Mercy are no fools; they preempted potential political resistance with a laundry list of progressive planning concepts: 83 market-rate apartments (out of 351) for independent seniors, with services targeting lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered tenants, 10 City CarShare pods, 67 low-income housing units, continued operation of an on-site UCSF dental care facility, a community garden, and the "adaptive reuse" of 75 percent of the existing buildings.

But despite those lefty amenities, the Hayes Valley Neighborhood Association (HVNA) voted overwhelmingly in late January to reject the plan, arguing that there's a tremendous need for public space in the area.

The Planning Department's Market and Octavia Neighborhood Plan predicts that some 4,500 to 5,300 new units of housing will be built in the neighborhood in the next 20 years. Depending on future zoning changes, the plan states, the area's physical capacity could expand anywhere from 7,500 to 11,000 new units.

"What people are going to be clamoring for is some kind of public use," Dewar said.

Enter New College of California, the Valencia Street educational institution that is looking for expansion space. The school has drafted an alternative plan that offers more green space and community-use facilities. But New College is hardly a wealthy operation, and right now it's far from clear whether it can find enough money to compete with the private developers.

New College's president, Martin Hamilton, said in an interview that administrators have had their eye on the extension campus since it closed. The school's plan includes new student and faculty housing, a child-care center, and room for its GLBT Historical Society Archives and "green businesses" at street level.

"We cannot compete with A.F. Evans and Mercy Housing's funding, but we could still pay UC Berkeley a substantial amount of money," he said.

But Jeff Bond, a senior planner for UC Berkeley, said the bottom line is simple: Evans has more money. New College, he said, couldn't offer "what Berkeley needs financially."

New College tentatively predicts construction costs of approximately $33.5 million, including the cost of seismic retrofitting for existing buildings, with $700,000 in annual ground lease payments to UC. The school could be eligible for a variety of different state loans, grants, and tax credits, Hamilton said. But New College has struggled in recent years to maintain good cash flow, and this would be a huge undertaking.

The HVNA hasn't exclusively endorsed New College's proposal, but it has expressed a strong desire to keep the campus's current public-use zoning, which puts them in New College's corner.

"I wouldn't have any objection to (New College's plan) at all," Dewar said. "It looks like the best plan that's been circulated so far."

But given UC's greed, the only way the New College plan — or any other community-based alternative — can compete is if the supervisors refuse to rezone the site for the housing density Evans and Mercy want.

In the meantime, UC's Laguna Extension remains a ghost town, best suited for graffiti and memorable teen experiences. *