Ofcourse planning in San Francisco is driven by private developers who else is going to fund it? And ofcourse they expect to recieve benefit from this investment.
But if it makes you feel better the bureaucracy that is set up in San Francisco does it's best to frustrate and delay progress.
I am afraid you are going to have to accept that San Francisco is continuously changing and IMHO this will always be a good thing.

Tim:

It seems unfair to put words in my mouth and then debate them.

In fact, the article calls for more public involvement not less. I care a lot about what "the community" thinks; I just call to open up the planning process to a broader community - on the internet, in other languages and venues, so that we can find out.

Your "translation" was really a re-writing of the piece to fit your thesis: developers bad, same old process and "community leaders" good. I think Bay Guardian readers are smart enough to read the piece on Beyond Chron and understand it without your "translation".

I had a chat with David last evening at the WSOMA meeting.

From what I gather, this article is somewhat of a political rhetorical device designed to create two false poles and argue for planning to happen behind closed doors because the two ideals are unattainable.

The fallacy here is that planning can or should happen expeditiously because it cannot and should not.

First, the vernacular of planning is highly specialized and complex. A relatively quick study, its taken me 3 years of serving on WSOMA to be able to construct my first coherent statements in planningese and to be able to figure out when I'm being bullshitted by someone more conversant than I. If it takes me 3 years, then then its going to take others at least that long to come up to speed. And given the division of power between those who can use the vernacular and those who cannot, there is always going to be a political filtering in explaining the rules and conditions on one hand, and taking public comments and translating them back into plannerese. City Planning has done this in private, keeping the politics of decision making at the headquarters out of sunshine. Although the decision makers are on the Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors, the incumbency of staff proposals carries an inertia that is very difficult for decision makers to chip away at; it is the incumbent default.

Second, there are no academically proven ideal planning outcomes. All planning involves trade offs. In a democratic society, we make those trade offs politically. This can happen either behind closed doors with staff making those calls, as is happening in Eastern Neighborhoods, or it can happen in public in a way that engages the public in understanding and determine where the trade offs are to be made. When I say politically, I don't mean 50%+1, nor do I mean 100% consensus which is another of Prowler's strawpeople. But it is possible, as we've seen in WSOMA, to get 2/3 of folks on the same page through negotiation and compromise.

David has expressed his concerns in public to the WSOMA Task Force on our lack of public outreach. WSOMA is clearly a work in progress, a first step in groping towards a meaningful public planning process which is rooted in the communities impacted. But when compared to other processes which Prowler has not criticized, Eastern Neighborhoods, Market Octavia, etc., we are simply light years ahead of Planning Staff in involving the public meaningfully in planning. Of course there is always room for improvement and we are always open to suggestions (and funding!) that can help us involve the whole community meaningfully in planning for the future.

Could Prowlers' two minds on two planning processes arise from the fact that WSOMA has adopted two growth management policies, one that caps housing at a rate that is the average of housing produced in the district over the past ten years and another that has planning keep tabs on the number of applications for uses in the district and identifies if any of them are spiking and calls a time out for evaluation. It is important to manage growth this way because we have a centuries long historical record of boom and bust cycles and would do well to learn from that, anticipate it and plan for it.

To recap, developers do not complain when planning processes cut a blank check for unmanaged growth and development, but do manage to complain when the first representative sample of community members put the stabilization of the community first when planning for the future.

Planning by the department has historically been a process of creating a buffet upon which developers like Prowler can feast. We are bound to see some resistance to that on the part of those whose livelihoods are threatened as we plan democratically for the interests instead of a community in which we live, work and play.

-marc

One further thought, comprehensive planning cannot happen quickly because there are so many moving parts involved that considering the interplay of them all takes time and requires an iterative, incremental process, regression tests if you would, to consider the interactions of new policies on the compiled list of policies.

This is exemplified by Eastern Neighborhoods where Planning is rezoning 1/4 of the City and even thought they've spend 7 years on this, Planning admits to have not given individual neighborhoods the attention to detail that they should. Having not do the ground work and having excluded neighbors from any meaningful role in the planning process, and offering up a sketchy plan that delivers a bounty to developers first and foremost while giving short shrift to transit, open space, community benefits and affordable housing, the refrain is "we've been working on this for [fill in the blank number of] years, so we've just got to pass it now." This was the argument that Steve Jones' buddy Jason Henderson made at Market Octavia, along with SPUR, to move the entitlement of 400' luxury condo towers at market and Van Ness.

Whenever I hear that argument, I reach for my political equivalent of a revolver, because invariably the "we've been doing this so long" argument is a cover for the fact that the plan is half baked and ill thought out.

-marc