By Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt
Debate shows city planners’ utter failure to understand the role of market-rate housing in gentrification and displacement.
In a stunning victory for progressives, the Board of Supes voted 8-3 Tuesday to block a massive market-rate development that would have threatened one of the last affordable areas in Soma.
The vote to overturn the 469 Stevenson EIR doesn’t kill the project, but it’s a major setback and could help advocates who want to use the site for affordable housing…(more)
RELATED:
‘Absurdity’: San Francisco leaders stall SOMA housing project to preserve parking lot
By Gil Duran : sfexaminer – excerpt
In a shocking and possibly illegal act of public absurdity, eight members of the Board of Supervisors voted to stall the construction of 495 new housing units on the site of a parking lot in the South of Market neighborhood. They did this by supporting an appeal of the project’s environmental impact report, or EIR, last Tuesday…(more)
FOLLOW UP:
When the 48hils story was followed by a torrent of anti-supervisor articles in other publications and a threat from the state to investigate the case I had to go to the source to investigate by watching the hearing. You may do so also. https://sanfrancisco.granicus.com/player/clip/39719?view_id=10&redirect=true (starts around here: 2:17:46)
I appreciate it when the supervisors ask the questions I would like to ask, and one of those was posed by Supervisor Peskin (about here 4:31:19) quoted here:
“ In so far as this is a state bonus density project, doesn’t the Planning Department require the project sponsor to submit documentation as to why they need wavers from local code provisions to create more affordability and access wavers or concessions or incentives or whatever all that stuff is called? I’m still getting my hands around it. What financial analysis did they provide the department and how is that analyzed?”… How did they justify their state density bonus?
And how did they get to 27 stories with that analysis?
John Elbering made a rather disturbing statement earlier in the meeting (around 2:28:07) that raised concerns about over looking geo technical issues that in the seismically challenged San Francisco neighborhoods, especially this one that is experiencing a number of sinking and tilting tower problems due to buildings constructed on “floating foundations’”. Some questions have been raised by some Planning Commissioners, but got through the entitlement process because nobody challenged them. Not this one. John is quoted here:
“We finally learned this morning that the building the developer does not intend to put piles under this building. Now you all know south of market soil is bad. You know there was an old marsh here. We know in experience in building 8 buildings in SOMA that the conditions underneath even under a single lot can change a lot from one end to another and the risk of that you can get differential settlement. That is exactly what happened to the Transbay Tower. The Millennium Tower and Transbay. Differential settlement that is still not discussed in the EIR. It was not even mentioned in this morning’s letter from their engineer. We finally learned that they are not going to put pilings under the building. If the EIR had evaluated the whole issue the Planning Commission could have required pilings as a mitigation. But because it was scoped out and never discussed that is not going to happen.”
This leads to another bigger question. How many of projects have gone through the entitlement process without seismic analysis since the anti-CEQA bills were passed to make the projects fly through the system under the pretense that CEQA and cities are to blame for the housing crisis?
Who gets blamed when the buildings fall, sink, tilt, or move away from the adjoining sidewalk and streets under this scenario? Who should the owners sue when damages are discovered years after mistakes and miscalculations result in another Millennium Tower or Transbay Terminal? Should they sue the state for removing important elements of the CEQA process and the role local communities and the public once played in protecting the environment and building reliable structures based on science, not profits? Are developers, land owners, engineers, financiers, lobbyists and state legislators liable for pushing through legislation that forces bad decisions on the public?
These are the questions we need to ask as we consider a new state ballot initiative that could reverse some of the anti-CEQA legislation Sacramento politicians have passed without public knowledge or consent. The issues raised by this project, and the state’s reaction to it, are proof that the public needs to take back the power to control our environment.
Follow the progress of the new state ballot initiative “Stop the California Land Grab” here: stopsacraento.org
Grassroots Actions 