The new San Francisco Planning CommissionBy Marc Salomon
Sweet turnabout at the Planning Commission last evening. Who of us on the east side can forget the heady days of the dot.com boom, when Willie Brown was running the City like a personal piggy bank for his developer cronies (instead of Newsom who gives it all away and gets nothing in return) which resulted in live work lofts sprouting like bulky tall mushrooms throughout the Mission, SOMA and the 3d street corridor?
The language used to justify these yuppie monstrosities was truly twisted, most of it mouthed by Willie Brown's short leashed then-Planning Commission president Anita Theoharis. The logic went as follows: we need more housing, so let's build live work lofts. We can build live work lofts in the districts zoned industrial, where housing is banned, because live work lofts are not housing. This reasoning enriched the builders while impoverishing the community as lofts were not charged for their impacts like housing because, silly, lofts are not housing.
But things have changed now.
The item heard yesterday was a plea by a neighborhood association in a Miraloma Park, a bedroom district located to the west of City College, that the Planning Commission take Discretionary Review, greater scrutiny to a proposed four foot addition to a single family home. Theoharis was working the operation on the floor of the hearing for the neighborhood association, which intoned that the character of their neighborhood would be irrevocably threatened, the dam would burst, if this four-foot addition were to be taken as precedent rather than ground to a NIMBY halt.
So here we had an individual who used her position of power to demolish neighborhood character by entitling 5000 units of ugly fake housing that were granted height and bulk bonuses and exempted from paying fees, insisting that the Commission stop the show on a 4' addition to one home.
The clincher was that the current Planning Commission President, Christina Olague, back in the day, was instrumental in organizing community resistance to the Live Work Loft scam which led to the election of a progressive, district elected Board of Supervisors and to her appointment to the Planning by Matt Gonzalez and reappointment by Aaron Peskin earlier this year. Christina carried herself with professionalism and dignity as the Commission did the right thing and declined to take another look.
We still have a long way to go on improving land use process and policy in San Francisco, but yesterday's hearing clearly showed how far we'd come under November 2001's Proposition D, which divided land use commission appointments between the Mayor and Board, where a former power player was reduced to pleading with an activist Commission President who offered more consideration than the petitioner ever offered up to the east side.
digg •
del.icio.us •
sphere •
google
•
