A deep breath for city planning

EDITORIAL

It was, as housing activist Calvin Welch explained to the Planning Commission March 16, the "canary in the coal mine." A decision by the Board of Supervisors demanding further environmental review of new market-rate housing projects has thrown the future of development on the eastern side of the city into doubt — and that's a good thing. The Planning Department now has time to work with the neighborhoods and come to terms with the real — and difficult — issue of how to accommodate growth in the eastern neighborhoods without destroying blue-collar jobs, gentrifying working-class areas, and making a calamitous mess of a part of town that's poorly served by transit and has little public infrastructure or open space.

As G.W. Schulz reports on page 18, the supervisors ruled back in January that a 68-unit condo development at 2660 Harrison St. could not proceed without a full environmental review that took into account the cumulative impact that some 50 new housing projects will have on the eastern neighborhoods. That, city planning staffers told the commission last week, effectively puts the brakes on nearly all new housing development in the area.

The developers are already squirming about the concept of a "moratorium" on market-rate housing, and even some planning commissioners are asking if the supervisors could pass some legislation to modify or limit the impact of the decision. That shouldn't even be on the table, and the supervisors should make it clear they have no intention of backing down. This isn't a total ban on all new housing forever — it's a reasonable, rational, and badly needed move to ensure that the city doesn't let developers build tens of thousands of new dwelling units in an area that's utterly unprepared to handle the influx until planners have had a chance to analyze the long-term impact and figure out how to deal with it.

Frankly, this discussion should have taken place 10 years ago, when the dot-com boom and the explosion of loft housing started to transform the Mission and SoMa neighborhoods. But the Planning Commission did what it has traditionally done: It ignored the obvious, gigantic issues and cut deals left and right to let project after project get built with no coherent zoning or rationale.

So now the pressure should be off for a while. And if the Planning Commission takes this responsibility seriously, it will reject all new market-rate developments, including the next test case, a project at 25 Lusk St.

At the commission meeting, lawyers for developers begged the Planning Department to quickly complete a comprehensive environmental impact report for the eastern neighborhoods. But that's premature: There isn't a solid plan to study. The Planning Department needs to take a deep breath, start talking to the neighborhoods affected, and ask the big questions: Who's going to live in the area from SoMa to Bayview–Hunters Point in the next 5, 10, or 20 years? Who is going to work there? How will people get around? Where will their kids go to school? The city's master plan says that about two-thirds of the new housing in San Francisco needs to be affordable; how is that housing going to get built, and who's going to pay for it?

We're talking, literally, about the future of San Francisco. Making a few developers wait a little while so the people who live here can figure it out doesn't seem like a terrible imposition. *