Sea level rise is forcing cities around San Francisco Bay to weigh demand for new housing against the need to protect communities from flooding. Builders say they can solve this dilemma with cutting-edge civil engineering. But no one knows whether their ambitious efforts will be enough to keep newly built waterfront real estate safe in coming decades.

Meanwhile, developers are busy building — and telling the public that they can mitigate this one effect of climate change, despite mounting evidence that it could be a bigger problem than previously believed.

On Treasure Island, a flat tract of 20th-century landfill with epic bay vistas, workers have poured the foundation for a 22-story tower, the first of six planned high-rise buildings, and broken ground on an affordable housing complex. Another, for families and unhoused veterans, is nearly complete. Townhomes, retail space and a waterfront transit hub are also in the pipeline. All told, the $6 billion development would be home to 20,000 people or more.

Engineers for the public-private consortium transforming the island, Treasure Island Community Development, say they are pursuing aggressive sea rise adaptation strategies. Improvements include raising some of the land by several feet, preparing a buffer zone for future levees and pumps, and setting aside low-lying open space that could convert to floodable marshland as higher bay waters spill onshore.

This is not a cheap endeavor. The development group’s director, Bob Beck, did not return multiple emails and phone calls regarding costs for this work. A 2011 report by the city of San Francisco, which includes Treasure Island, estimated that “geotechnical stabilization” measures would cost $137 million. Storm drains, soil grading and landscape and open-space improvements would add about $120 million.

Dilip Trivedi, the site’s project manager with international engineering firm Moffatt and Nichol, has been touting the consortium’s efforts for more than a decade. He said in a recent interview that the most built-up parts of the island should be safe from sea rise through at least 2070. Fifty years or so is a reasonable planning horizon for new developments, he added, and additional phased seawall construction can help future generations stay a step ahead of ever-higher tides.

“When you put together significant infrastructure, you don’t want to have to maintain it for about that time,” Trivedi said. “It is what we call project life.”

Climate scientists, however, commonly try to predict sea rise out at least to the year 2100, a time when some current schoolchildren could be octogenarian residents of the island.

Every contemporary climate model predicts that, even with deep carbon reductions starting this decade, several feet of sea rise are locked in. The debates for climate adaptation strategy are how many feet and how far down the road we should consider.

With ever more sophisticated climate predictions, the outlook for sea level rise has continued to darken, indicating that current trends will likely accelerate through the end of the century. In one pessimistic scenario — which researchers say is among the possibilities in a “business as usual” global greenhouse gas emissions future — much of the island could find itself underwater frequently, and some of the most developed areas could occasionally be threatened with flooding.

To home in on Treasure Island’s future, the San Francisco Public Press asked researchers at the United States Geological Survey’s Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center, based in Santa Cruz, to provide an analysis of storm conditions under various climate scenarios using sea rise projections by the Ocean Protection Council. They found that bay waters could surge higher than the developers have long been saying publicly.

In that analysis, by 2100 there is a small but not insignificant chance of 4 feet, 11 inches of sea level rise — slightly more than what the island’s engineers have accounted for. Adding in the effects of tides, weather and other transient events, such as in the kind of extreme storm seen once in a century, that total could be 2 feet, 11 inches higher.

The resulting surge would, at least temporarily, send waves 1 foot, 2 inches higher than the lowest ground floors of some planned housing complexes.

While the project’s engineers never address this possibility in their public narratives, documents they have prepared show they have known about similar scenarios for years.

Their own maps, which superimpose flood conditions on existing land elevations, line up fairly closely to the Geological Survey’s map data. Yet the engineers have chosen to downplay the likelihood of these outcomes as they pursued permits to build, arguing that novel construction technologies could make the development invulnerable to flooding under any reasonable course of events.

In a 2016 sea rise adaptation filing with a regional watershed agency, Moffatt and Nichol included six maps showing potential flood conditions in each construction phase, side by side with maps showing how the planned short- and long-term sea level rise protections would prevent inundation. 

One map shows 4 feet of sea rise. Before any land improvements, nearly the entire island would have been inundated — up to 8 feet in places — during flooding calculated by FEMA to have a 1% chance of occurring per year. Another part of that document showed a graph that indicated a 4-foot rise was possible by around 2093. The Geological Survey’s analysis of the Ocean Protection Council extreme scenario for 2100 puts sea rise closer to 5 feet.

But Trivedi said that the raising of the land under many of the buildings, plus additional shoreline improvements, would protect key infrastructure. Beside that map, the engineers showed how the existing 3.5-mile perimeter wall could be raised by 1 to 3 feet, depending on location, which they said would keep much of the island dry, although a note appended to the diagram said: “Does not show intentional flooding from managed retreat on northern and eastern shorelines — TBD.”

Within the last year, regulators have started questioning whether the steps developers are taking are sufficient to guarantee that the island remains dry in the long term.

“This is a community that will be around a while,” said Ethan Lavine, chief of permits for shoreline development for the Bay Conservation and Development Commission. “At a certain point in time, they will need levee protection.” Lavine’s office is pressing Trivedi and his colleagues to use a more cautious view of climate change when assessing whether Treasure Island’s flood prevention techniques can handle what nature might throw at them. 

When evaluating permit applications, government agencies require developers to reference the “best available science” to assess threats from climate change. In October 2021, the engineers issued an update to the 2016 filing. In it, Trivedi compared his firm’s sea level rise expectations against studies by several scientific bodies, including California’s Ocean Protection Council and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. His preferred predictions minimized the effect of the worst-case scenarios. The only needed change, he argued, would be to move up the time frame for planning adaptations by as much as five years. 

Yet climate policy experts point out that with significant scientific papers being released each year, guidance for builders has become a moving target. Because they admit a great deal of uncertainty in their predictions, scientists always publish their results in charts that consider an array of environmental assumptions.

That gives developers leeway to choose which predictions to focus on when describing the risks to their capital investments. Treasure Island could be the most expensive local project in the region’s history to take advantage of this ambiguity.

Projecting Optimism

All of Trivedi’s recent public statements conclude that the likelihood of the gloomiest climate scenarios is remote, and that the level of risk to property and lives is insignificant given the proposed engineering fixes. But a close examination of the 2021 adaptation plan offers a few reasons for concern:

• It dismisses high-end forecasts, in which global warming accelerates due to uncontrolled carbon emissions.
• It selectively cites climate models that make planned infrastructure appear sufficient to virtually eliminate future flood risk.
• It focuses on relatively short time frames, such as 20 or 50 years, while offering little specificity about expected conditions at the end of the century, which falls within the lifetimes of some children alive today.

Trivedi said in an interview that for planning purposes, he is focused on one recent predicted milestone: 3 feet of sea rise by 2080. In that circumstance, the ground floors of most buildings, to be built upon a now-elevated development pad, would still have a buffer of nearly 4 feet above the average highest tide of today.

He also asserted that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a scientific committee organized by the United Nations, recently reported sea rise could be less severe than previously forecasted, based on the track record of recent years. “What has been observed is that sea level rise is not tracking” to the most pessimistic scenarios, he said. But there are reasons to question his conclusion.

The localized scenario for 2100 examined by the Geological Survey — the one resulting in water levels 1 foot, 2 inches above some developed areas — relies on a climate change prediction assessed to have a probability of 5%, that is, a 1-in-20 statistical chance of occurring. That prediction was published by the California Ocean Protection Council, a body of experts organized by the state government, in recent guidelines for community planning.

Trivedi said the international group’s current report indicates there’s “low confidence in that scenario happening.” When asked for a citation to back up this claim, Trivedi referenced a “localized model” of the findings from NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and five other federal agencies.

A report these agencies jointly issued in February 2022 in fact gave a more nuanced view. In a section titled “Future Mean Sea Level,” the authors did exclude one scenario used by the Ocean Protection Council that had been labeled “extreme” and not given a numerical probability. But that is not the scenario Trivedi said the group ruled out. This same report indicates that the West Coast is likely to see 4 to 8 inches of rise over 30 years, accelerating later in the century.

Regardless of the pace of the increase, Treasure Island developers say they have contingency plans relying on future residents or taxpayers to fund the construction of progressively higher walls around the urban zone — several feet every few decades. In its latest update, Moffatt and Nichol said sea level rise of 1 foot by 2043 would trigger the plan to elevate the perimeter.

A strategy reliant on levees might seem risky in light of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when faulty engineering of levees led to catastrophic flooding of parts of New Orleans that sit below the level of the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. In light of this recent history, Bay Area regulators are starting to ask whether the Treasure Island plan is entirely watertight.

A March 2022 letter from the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, the agency that issued the island’s 2016 permit for waterfront areas, called the update too optimistic and tolerant of long-term flooding potential.

“Public access along a shoreline and a big mixed-use development require using a medium-to-high-risk projection for sea level rise,” said the commission’s planning manager, Erik Buehmann.

Re-engineering Shaky Ground

On an island built by the government generations ago out of rocks, soil and dredged sand, preparing high-and-dry land would be difficult even if it were not in an earthquake and tsunami zone.

In numerous reports and public presentations, Trivedi has said construction workers have elevated land on the 100-acre development pad to 3 feet, 6 inches above the “base flood elevation” — a height calculated by Federal Emergency Management Agency representing a 1% chance of flooding each year. The homes, hotels and businesses there will be set back from the shoreline by 200 to 300 feet on most sides and as much as 1,000 feet from the northern shore because that area is more prone to flooding. Building is planned to roll out in phases through 2035.

Workers have spent years using cranes to repeatedly drop heavy weights to compact the soil. They have driven vibrating probes into the earth, filling the holes with concrete for stabilization. They then piled 1 million cubic yards of soil atop the compacted layer. These measures are intended to prevent the kind of ground liquefaction seen in the Marina District and elsewhere during the devastating 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Other geological improvements include inserting vertical wick drains, akin to long drinking straws, to help remove water from the soil as it compresses. These techniques have been used by civil engineers around the world for more than 30 years to develop areas without easy access to bedrock.

Trivedi said these measures, together with a jagged, rocky seawall raised to allow for just over 1 foot of sea rise, would help take energy out of large waves, and the setback would use the landscape to dissipate any possible overtopping before it reaches valuable structures.

At the same time, the engineers have recognized that much of the island — particularly the low-lying northern end — are indefensible. Areas that have flooded in the past will eventually be sacrificed to rising waters. That strategy has immediate, concrete consequences: Dozens of existing structures, including homes of about 3,000 people currently living there, are set to be demolished to create open space. Over time these areas could be turned into tidal marshland to protect the newly developed areas from storms.

Regulators Balk at a Sunny Assessment

The Bay Conservation and Development Commission, the agency most empowered to weigh in on new waterfront building, is hamstrung by a legal mandate to regulate only what happens 100 feet inland, regardless of elevation — an artifact of legislation dating from before climate change was a dominant concern.

The 2016 permit the agency issued for improvements on Treasure Island’s margins, including a ferry terminal, required adaptation updates every five years. Moffatt and Nichol’s 2021 update concluded that the original adaptation plans needed few changes, except for possibly needing to accelerate, by five years, the planning process for building higher perimeter levees.

Regulators balked at the assessment. In a March 2022 letter, the commission advised Moffatt and Nichol to plan more conservatively. The agency demanded consideration of a 1-in-200 chance sea rise scenario, in which seas rise 6 feet, 11 inches by 2100. Adding in a 100-year storm surge, waves could plausibly overtop portions of the sea wall along the southeastern side by about 1 to 2 feet, and along the northern end by about 1 foot. That is an even worse outcome than that predicted by Geological Survey’s localized flooding model.

The commission said Moffatt and Nichol seemed too dismissive of chances that things could go wrong.

“The permittees decided to design the project considering very low risk of sea level rise related impacts” the letter said, noting also that engineers seemed too focused on the short time horizon of 2080.

Trivedi counters that the Treasure Island development was never built upon projections of a certain sea level happening by a certain date, because seawalls can, for all practical purposes, be built arbitrarily high, on whatever schedule is needed.

“We adopted an approach where we decided on an allowance we are building into the project,” he said in the interview. “As future projections come out, we will adjust the date of the adaptation.”

Commission staff met with planners from Moffatt and Nichol last summer to work out the requested additions to the 2021 adaptation strategy. Buehmann, who worked on the original permit, said follow-up discussions were to be expected because the Treasure Island permit was the first since the commission began requiring builders to submit sea rise assessments. “We didn’t expect it to be perfect the first time,” he said.

Whatever comes of this process  which Trivedi referred to as merely “an internal thing” that was required for the filing — the adaptation plan is unlikely to change significantly, because the development pad is already in place and huge construction cranes are sprouting up on Treasure Island’s skyline. What is left in the playbook is raising future seawalls, ceding the northern open space and the installation of pumps.

Government officials have long acknowledged the inevitability of Treasure Island’s relying on artificial barriers. In 2015, Brad McCrea, regulatory program director at the commission, told the Public Press: “At the end of the day, this will be a levee-protected community — there’s no getting around that.” Since then, agency staff have not changed their view.

Rapidly Outdated Climate Science

To determine how high to raise the building pad, Treasure Island builders consulted several climate studies published as early as 1987 and as recently as 2007. At that point, scientists were predicting that by 2100, oceans could rise as much as 4 feet, 7 inches.

This forecast was echoed by a state panel of scientists and policy experts in 2009, when then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger visited Treasure Island to announce its findings and call for better sea level rise mitigation.

Moffatt and Nichol then relied on these studies to anticipate that the oceans would rise 3 feet by 2075. So the company proposed raising the development pad to 3 feet, 6 inches above the predicted levels for a once-in-a-hundred-year flood.

Moffatt and Nichol did not spell out a rationale for setting the height of the development pad, as the Public Press reported in 2010. The firm did argue that raising it higher could create other problems, such as jeopardizing the island’s stability under the weight of packed soil and adding expense. “At some point it doesn’t become cost-effective — it’s a matter of acceptable levels of risk over your planning horizon,” Trivedi said in an interview then.

To be sure, when Treasure Island plans were drawn up, scientific modeling showed wide uncertainty about how much global temperatures could increase. In 2009, scientists around the world were saying that oceans could rise anywhere from a minimum of 3 feet, 3 inches to a maximum of 4 feet, 11 inches by 2100. At that time, the effects of ice melt from land via glaciers, snowpacks and ice caps were little understood.

Today, European and U.S. scientists using satellite imagery to measure the shape of Greenland’s ice sheets say melting is outstripping gains from snowfall. In a paper published last August, they found that no matter how much countries curb emissions, seas will rise by a minimum of 11 inches from this effect alone.  

Focusing Locally

The U.S. Geological Survey developed the Coastal Storm Modeling System to help protect waterfront communities. It simulates the forces behind wave and wind data and translates them into local flood projections that include tides, storm surges, waves and seasonal events such as El Niño.

The Public Press requested that the agency simulate a small section of San Francisco Bay, in the vicinity of Treasure Island, relying on probability scenarios for global sea levels in 2100 developed by the California Ocean Protection Council in a 2018 guidance paper. This report offered up sea rise projections of likelihoods as high as 50% and as low as 0.5%. 

The Ocean Protection Council’s examination of a wide array of probabilities heavily influenced the Bay Conservation and Development Commission’s critique of the Treasure Island adaptation update. The commission’s biggest concern was that change might happen faster than the engineers were anticipating.

[Explore sea level rise scenarios using Climate Central’s interactive tool. Here we show floodwaters at 7.8 feet above the present-day high tide line. ]

But Trivedi said the Ocean Protection Council’s past predictions had already failed. “If you look at the year 2022 projections, follow the OPC formulas,” Trivedi said. “We should have seen about 8 inches of sea level rise since 2000. In reality, it has been about 2 inches or less.”

Most forecasts predict increased global temperatures due to persistent carbon pollution. But the emissions projections are still hotly contested.

The Ocean Protection Council examined two emissions scenarios. One assumed that carbon dioxide output doubles through 2050. The other imagined more aggressive greenhouse gas reductions — 70% by 2050 and “net zero” emissions by 2080.

For the purposes of seeing how bad things could plausibly get, the U.S. Geological Survey used a midlevel emissions scenario. This decision was based on detailed simulations into the next century of swell and waves along the Pacific Ocean. What the researchers found was that paradoxically, milder greenhouse gas levels generated worse storms for California’s coast than do extreme ones. 

“What’s really changed in the research community is that worst-case scenarios have become more common,” said Patrick Barnard, a research geologist with the agency. “The state is asking communities to prepare for these.”

This approach helps waterfront areas learn to be more risk-averse to protect property and lives.

Avoiding Mistakes of the Past

Foster City is paying a high price for waterfront sprawl. Like Treasure Island, the mid-Peninsula community 25 miles to the south was built entirely on landfill, not unusual in the Bay Area, where efforts to accommodate population growth stretching back to the Gold Rush consumed most of the wetlands and tidal marshes.

Foster City did have worries about flooding decades ago. It is shot through with artificial waterways, including two sloughs, several small canals and an artificial lagoon. Barely above sea level before being developed, it would not exist if not for its levees and seawalls. 

Yet, in 2014 FEMA informed Foster City officials that new studies showed the levee system was neither strong nor tall enough to withstand a major storm and the large waves that would result. Update the seawalls and levees, or the entire city would be designated a floodplain, the agency said. 

Sixty years ago, developers there hauled in tons of sand to raise the land several feet to construct thousands of homes in what became a 33,000-resident community. That was a time when climate change was not a part of city planning vernacular. Today workers are busy widening and raising levees and adding interlocking steel plates as a bulwark against the storms federal regulators warned of, as well as rising seas.

But Treasure Island, which is slated to add 8,000 units of housing to accommodate more than 20,000 residents, is still more than a decade away from build-out. What the engineers put in place there in the next few years could avoid Foster City’s mistakes — or compound them.

To be sure, some cities are starting to alter blueprints on pace with the evolving science. In October, the Port of San Francisco announced it was collaborating with the Army Corps of Engineers to study how to shore up the city’s seawall along its eastern waterfront, from Fisherman’s Wharf to the Hunters Point Shipyard, to combat both sea rise and earthquake risk. This area includes attractions like the Chase Center sports arena, a project green-lighted before a city-commissioned study surfaced that predicted flooding from sea level rise in the new Mission Bay neighborhood, as the Public Press reported in 2017.

Port officials now say they anticipate 7 feet of sea level rise by the end of the century. That is 2 feet, 5 inches higher than the level Treasure Island’s developers are planning for in their adaptation strategy.

The Port’s yearlong effort will consider elevating barriers along the Embarcadero, installing a system of locks at Mission Creek and buying back and cleaning up privately owned landfill areas around Islais Creek to return them to the tidal zone.

Not Easy to Abandon a Home

In the grips of a housing affordability crisis, San Francisco needs new construction. But is a flood zone the wisest place to build? That could depend on how long we expect buildings to last.

Barnard, of the U.S. Geological Survey, has traveled to many communities, including Okracoke Island, part of North Carolina’s Outer Banks, to assess how to protect people from storms. In September 2019, Hurricane Dorian shut the island down to visitors. For residents, it was hard to consider leaving a place they have inhabited for seven or eight generations. “You can’t detach people from their place, or their heart,” Barnard said. “They’ll stay until water is up to their nose.” 

Before the developers moved in, Treasure Island had roughly 3,000 residents, according to the 2020 Census, many living in homes built for the U.S. Navy in the mid-20th century when it was a military base. Nearly half have a household income less than $50,000, and many do not speak English. 

Now these residents are on tenterhooks. Under an agreement with the developer, people who lived on Treasure Island before 2011 are guaranteed new affordable and rent-controlled units. But the wait times and other inconveniences have been tough. Everyone is living in a construction site with an unreliable electrical grid that browns and blacks out frequently. 

The new units are supposed to be comparable to what they had, but longtime islander Christoph Opperman said they have been offered “interim” units that, for example, might not have enough space for a family, or lack laundry facilities.

“They’re picking us off one neighborhood at a time by making us do two moves,” Opperman said. “We’re not entitled to just anything on the island, but we are entitled to fair treatment.”

Treasure Island’s planners are essentially acknowledging that they must sacrifice part of the island to the bay, even while pursuing a more built-up urban environment just several hundred feet away. This combination of advance and retreat is all part of the plan, the engineers say.

Asked whether he would move to Treasure Island, Trivedi did not hesitate to say yes, observing that no part of the Bay Area was completely free of danger.

“I don’t see why not,” he said. “I mean, should people be moving to San Francisco, because of the seismic risk? Buildings are being designed to codes. And flooding is the same way.”

A version of this story was republished in partnership with Inside Climate News.

This reporting is supported by grants from the Solutions Journalism Network’s Business and Sustainability Initiative and by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Correction 5/4/2023: An earlier version of this story misstated the process the U.S. Geological Survey used to report an extreme flood projection for Treasure Island. The model upon which it was based was produced not by the agency, but by the Ocean Protection Council. Also, the likelihood of that scenario is higher than originally given — 5%, not 0.5 %.

The post Promising to Prevent Floods at Treasure Island, Builders Downplay Risk of Sea Rise appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

“Places that people think are not going to flood because there’ll be a levee or a wall may actually flood as that groundwater comes right up through the surface of the soil.” — Kristina Hill

This story was produced in collaboration with Covering Climate Now. Covering Climate Now is a global journalism initiative committed to bringing more and better coverage to the defining story of our time.

The post Sea Level Rise in S.F. Will Affect More Than the Waterfront appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

As developers continue their scramble to build dozens of office complexes, housing developments and sports facilities bordering San Francisco Bay, a state-funded study recommends that local planners adopt a risk-averse approach to permitting developments such as hospitals and housing — facilities with low “adaptive capacity” — in areas that have even little chance of flooding in the coming decades.

The Ocean Protection Council, part of the California Natural Resources Agency, has published a draft guidance document for coastal cities, endorsing the emerging consensus among climate scientists that accelerated ice melt in Antarctic glaciers means the oceans could rise far more rapidly than studies indicated even a few years ago.

Previous studies found that comparatively conservative scenarios would have devastating effects, with the Pacific Institute estimating 4.6 feet of sea rise would cost the Bay Area $62 billion in property damage and endanger 270,000 people during floods. No one has begun to estimate the effects of much higher sea rise.

That recent science was interpreted last year by a high-level group of scientists convened by Gov. Jerry Brown. The team examined the direct impact to California, and the council folded the recommendations into the new draft policy, updating a previous guidance that relied on a 2012 study by the National Research Council.

Few other states have attempted to craft policy that incorporates the new data from Antarctica. The upper end of those projections suggests that sea levels could rise by more than 8 feet globally and as much as 10 feet in the Bay Area by 2100, not counting additional storm surge.

S.F. Officials Skeptical

Jenn Eckerle, deputy director of the Ocean Protection Council and lead author of the state guidance document, said California must guide cities toward precautionary thinking. “We’re actually taking the number that the scientists have provided, and saying, ‘Listen, these are the places that are at risk,’” she said. “These are the numbers that you should be focused on. We’re actually providing this extra layer and level of guidance that no other state has done before.”

San Francisco officials, while applauding the reference to cutting-edge science, expressed skepticism about the state’s readiness to help cities codify the predictions into local land-use policies.

Chief among the critics is David Behar, climate program director of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. Behar organized a working group to evaluate the new projections, issuing a statement that said state projections “do not provide sufficient guidance on how to use them in a planning, decision-making, or adaptation design context.”

Previously: Wild West on the Waterfront

Sea Level Rise Threatens Waterfront Development

The debate in setting effective sea level rise policies across dozens of jurisdictions focuses on how to be fair when telling developers what kinds of land uses will be permitted. The state’s new guidance outlines a complex formula that assigns a probability of occurrence to a range of elevations to which local water levels could rise and the rate at which that might happen. The likelihoods of these different outcomes are based on a range of global carbon emissions scenarios.

According to the guidance document, if emissions continue unabated, there is a 67 percent likelihood that bay waters will rise by at least 3.4 feet by 2100. Previous research had suggested 3 feet of sea level rise was most likely. Just a few inches of water can flood whole city blocks.

There is a 1-in-200 chance that with high emissions, sea levels could rise by 13 feet in 2150. An even more extreme projection places the worst-case scenario for 2150 at 22 feet, though scientists did not have enough confidence in that projection to assign a probability.

“While probabilistic projections are sought proactively by some, in many instances they are arriving on the desks of planners, engineers, and decision-makers who have little background in the methodologies used,” said the statement from Behar’s group, which was endorsed by the Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Global Change Research Program and several climate researchers.

They specifically critiqued the mathematical technique known as Bayesian statistics — relying on what is known today based on confirmed data to predict trends that are fundamentally uncertain. This approach “may lead decision-makers to be overconfident about their knowledge of the future,” the report said. “For example, lack of understanding of the true sensitivity of the numbers in the upper-half of the distribution to uncertainties and assumptions may lead to a failure to appropriately consider possible high-end futures,” especially extreme sea level rise after 2050.

In a joint comment logged with the draft guidance, the Public Utilities Commission and the Port of San Francisco said they agree with the spirit of the guidance update but said the Bayesian probabilities were presented without explanation and would be “opaque to the vast majority of decision-makers.”

$23 Billion in Projects Affected

The new guidance will affect billions of dollars of real estate development, including the Golden State Warriors’ basketball arena, Mission Rock and the historic Pier 70. Since 2015, Bay Area builders have invested more than $22.8 billion into waterfront projects at less than 8 feet above high tide, an elevation that could see flooding from rising sea levels and storms by the end of the century, the Public Press reported in a spring 2017 cover story.

Eckerle, of the Ocean Protection Council, said the state is already seeing the effects of sea level rise all along the coast. “Sea levels will continue to rise,” she said. “We’re trying to get people to think about planning for the future, and not just 30 years or 50 years, but way into the future.”

Kristina Dahl, a climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the state predictions are “in line with where the sea level rise scientific community has moved in the last few years.”

“This will affect people’s lives in a few different ways,” she said. “A policymaker or a developer will have an explicit guidance saying, ‘This is how much sea level rise is in your area.’ It will make it easier for people to make well-informed decisions and ideally translate into less risk for homeowners and business owners.”

Dahl said the new policy doesn’t go far enough in some areas. The guidance document does not mention the more frequent, if less severe, “sunshine flooding” — inundation from higher and more frequent tides — that the Bay Area could soon experience.

In July, her group released a report that said the Bay Area would face these kinds of sunny-day flooding events as early as 2035.

The Ocean Protection Council planned on adopting the guidance on Jan. 31, but after comments from San Francisco officials were received, adoption was pushed to March 14.

Strategies for Adaptation

The state’s new guidance includes a checklist cities can use to identify a range of sea level rise projections and evaluate risks of future flooding.

The guidance asks that cities and developers collaborate on regional solutions, such as building wetlands and natural infrastructure instead of concrete seawalls. It also recommends that cities consider allowing the most at-risk neighborhoods to be reclaimed by rising waters.

Policies outlining flooding adaptation and design specifications differ from city to city, and the development plans of some of the Bay Area’s largest projects are evidence of that lack of consensus around the science and how to regulate waterfront land use.

Some plans, like those detailed for the development of a 702-acre neighborhood around the massive Candlestick Point-Hunters Point Shipyard development zone, include surveys of years of scientific papers that describe future sea level rise ranging from half a foot to 4.6 feet by 2100 without detailing a long-term adaptation strategy.

In its final environmental impact report issued in November 2017, developer Lennar Corp. wrote that the estimates of sea level rise vary significantly, and the company outlined a plan to build up the land to protect against 1.3 feet of sea level rise with “a design that is adaptable to meet higher than anticipated values in the mid-term, as well as for the long-term.”

“What is clear is that the science of climate change and sea level rise is evolving, implying that it is prudent to develop community designs that can accommodate various levels of sea level rise over the planning horizon, rather than design to a specific report or estimate,” the document states. The new waterfront neighborhood could have up to 10,000 new homes.

The risk is not only to new construction. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists research, the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge from Oakland to Treasure Island was not designed to be resilient if the bay rose by several feet. The new span opened in 2013, with an estimated life of 150 years. In a white paper, the researchers wrote that 3 feet of rise “will permanently flood the bridge’s eastern ramp” bayward from the toll booths.

Working With Nature

In addition to presenting a synthesis of new scientific studies, the Ocean Protection Council’s guidance documents recommend approaches for addressing sea level rise that emphasize the use of wetlands and other natural barriers.

“While hard structures provide temporary protection against the threat of sea level rise, they disrupt natural shoreline processes, accelerate long-term erosion, may increase wave and storm run-up, and can prevent coastal habitats from migrating inland, causing loss of beaches and other critical habitats that provide ecosystem benefits for both wildlife and people,” the report warned.

Adrian Covert, vice president of public policy for the Bay Area Council, a business group, praised the focus on wetland restoration and said the new projections detailed by Brown’s scientific working group for the Bay Area should be “assumed to be true.”

But he said he’s unconvinced by the notion of “managed retreat,” the idea that neighborhoods threatened by rising waters could be turned into parks or natural areas rather than protected by seawalls.

“The report says that it should be considered as a possibility. No one would disagree with that,” Covert said. “I’m skeptical. It doesn’t take a whole lot of infrastructure to make a managed retreat economically unfeasible. We’re not going to be relocating the city of San Francisco to the Sierra Nevada because of sea level rise. It’s going to require a defense. And the same is true with Silicon Valley. And the same is true with a lot of the East Bay, and a lot of portions around a lot of areas around the bay are going to need to be defended.”

The guidance document asks cities to assess the risk of rising sea levels with online flooding prediction mapping tools developed by the U.S. Geological Survey, Our Coast, Our Future and other institutions. The Ocean Protection Council said these tools “are also helpful aids in communicating about sea-level rise across local, state, and regional communities and planning and decision-making venues.”

Pier 70 Development

The council also recommends developers consider how long buildings will be used. Mike Mielke, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group’s senior vice president of environment and energy, said the guidance document will be useful for local adaptation and restoration planners.

“We’re understanding that we can’t continue to build right up to the bay water line,” he said. “The water line is going to rise, and it’s going to change over time. We have to think about how we are now going to respond to that threat and how we’re going to develop differently.”

In October, San Francisco gave final approval to the redevelopment of a 28-acre former industrial site at Pier 70 that will include up to 2,150 homes, as well as 1.75 million square feet of stores, offices and light industry. The environmental review prepared by developer Forest City in August relied on the National Research Council’s now-outdated predictions for sea level rise of 3 feet by 2100. Those plans might have required changes had they been approved a month later. The approval process is evidence of the breakneck speed at which climate science is advancing and the difficulty local governments have in keeping up with waterfront building standards.

After lower courts chipped away at the long-held interpretation of the California Environmental Quality Act, the state Supreme Court in 2015 overturned decades of land-use law by upholding lower court rulings that cities could no longer require developers to take into account the effects of climate change on their projects. The decision has unsettled public officials and planners, and critics say it will allow real estate interests to saddle taxpayers with a gigantic bill to defend against rising seas.

Steps Toward Setting Standards

Even the Ocean Protection Council’s fresh predictions seem to be superseded by more recent science. In December, Robert Kopp, a Rutgers University researcher and member of the governor’s working group, published an updated prediction that if global carbon emissions from industry remain high, sea level rise could pose a runaway risk by the end of the century. In a blog post, Kopp wrote:

“Consider two roads. One leads to 2 feet of global-average sea-level rise over the course of this century, and swamps land currently home to about 100 million people. The other leads to 6 feet of rise, swamping the homes of more than 150 million. … At least from measurements of global sea level and continental-scale Antarctic ice-sheet changes, scientists won’t be able to tell which road the planet is on until the 2060s.

“But our study also shows that the world can make the 2-foot road much more likely by meeting the Paris Agreement goal of bringing net greenhouse gas emissions to zero in the second half of this century.”

While more detailed science about ice-sheet behavior will help narrow predictions, he added, “decision-makers at all scales — from homeowners to governments — should plan for the future cognizant of this ambiguity.”

The new state effort is not merely advisory. It takes tentative steps toward setting standards for waterfront planning and holding local planners accountable.

Under the Ocean Protection Council’s guidance document, cities will be required to incorporate the new policy into their general plans. The requirement stems from a provision in a 2014 climate bill proposed by state Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson, a Democrat from Santa Barbara. The bill requires cities to draft their own climate policies by 2022 that reflect up-to-date state guidance on climate issues including sea level rise.

“While some cities and counties have been proactive in developing climate change plans for their localities, many have not,” Jackson said at the time.

Cities Will Bear Heaviest Burdens

A report on climate change policy by the Little Hoover Commission, an independent state oversight agency, said local leadership is necessary because cities will bear the “heaviest burdens of emergency response and recovery during disasters and disruption.”

The California Building Industry Association, which has opposed many state regulations and spent significant resources shooting holes in the California Environmental Quality Act, opposed Jackson’s legislation. In a statement logged with the bill, the association said the state should rewrite its existing flood and fire code rather than require cities to craft climate action plans.

For years, scientists have warned that melting ice sheets and glaciers pose a danger to Bay Area cities. Rising sea levels will cause the San Francisco Bay to expand, threatening neighborhoods across the region.

Shoreline development has boomed in the last decade as more and more people want to live and work near the water. Many residents have moved to the shiny new neighborhoods that have risen out of derelict industrial areas and defunct navy bases along the bay.

Related: Sinking land will exacerbate flooding from sea level rise in Bay Area

Cities benefit from the tax revenue of this development. Politicians see building new homes on marginal lands as an answer to the state’s housing shortage And developers seek the profit and prestige from building high-profile mega-developments, including the headquarters of technology giants Google in Mountain View and Facebook in Menlo Park.

But there is little regional coordination on solutions to the threat of rising seas, and cities disagree about what constitutes the best and most current science.

In the absence of consistent regulation, shoreline development has accelerated in recent years. Bay Area builders are planning to build at least 35 waterfront megaprojects located at elevations that could see occasional flooding at the end of the century, the Public Press has found.

Reporters began a tally in 2015. Besides corporate campuses for technology giants, developments include projects at Treasure Island and in San Francisco’s Mission Bay neighborhood, and an arena for the Golden State Warriors, who are relocating from Oakland.

In April 2017, the Public Press reported that industry groups, led by the California Building Industry Association, pursued a legal strategy to undermine a key provision of the state’s preeminent environmental law that cities had used to help protect their waterfronts.

The post State Looking to Require Cities to Plan for Rising Seas appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Full page view of interactive map

Cartography by Maia Wachtel, Marcea Ennamorato and Brittany Burson // UC Berkeley CAGE Lab. Map by Amanda Hickman, with research by Lulu Orozco // Public Press.

The Bay Area’s current boom times represent a good news/bad news story. From Dogpatch to San Mateo to Alameda, bayside property is especially desirable — but increasingly complicated. Although Bay Area planners have in recent years elevated the role that sea level rise projections play in the permitting and design process, cities are still under pressure to approve more development quickly on under-used land.

Perhaps, while sitting in traffic during that ever-congested commute, you’ve taken note of the skyline filled with cranes. Builders are in a frenzy as they attempt to meet the region’s demand for office space and housing.

The Bay Area has outpaced the rest of the state and country in economic growth for each year since 2011, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. But only 94,000 new housing units were permitted in the region between 2011 and 2016, despite the addition of 530,000 jobs, the Building Industry Association of the Bay Area found. Over the past decade, as housing prices have escalated, residents have looked farther afield for affordable homes, contributing to a 27-minute increase in average daily commutes, according to the 2016 Silicon Valley Index.

A 2015 analysis by the Public Press found that Bay Area builders were investing more than $21 billion in 27 large waterfront projects at less than 8 feet above high tide. That elevation could see occasional flooding by the end of this century.

Since then, developers have crafted plans for another eight large-scale commercial and residential construction projects in that zone. Though not all amounts are yet known, we have tallied more than $1.8 billion in costs associated with buying land parcels and building these proposed projects.

Regionally, policies guiding sea level rise adaptation and design continue to be inconsistent. Of the new and in-progress waterfront developments, some failed to include any proposals to mitigate future flooding.

For other projects in the permitting and approval process, rising water is a principal design consideration.

But adaptation is not cheap. The firm planning to redevelop the Alameda Marina, for instance, will spend $44 million to make the 13-acre site resilient to sea level rise and storm surges by rebuilding degraded sections of the landing and erecting a seawall.

In part because long-term forecasting of future climate change is inherently imprecise, the exact amount of sea level rise that Bay Area communities are planning for varies greatly. Most agencies are using 2012 projections by the National Research Council, which predict a rise of anywhere between 3 and 4.6 feet by 2100 — enough to permanently flood the Ferry Building at the foot of Market Street, for example — not counting the possibility of 3.4 feet of surging water during extreme storms.

The Bay Conservation and Development Commission has very limited jurisdiction over the Bay shoreline, from the water’s edge to just 100 feet inland. The regional agency requires developers to use climate change projections to assess the risk of structures being flooded by 2050.

“We advise people to be conservative,” said Brad McCrea, regulatory director for the commission. “It’s easier to build for high water now rather than respond to it later.”

But an uptick in the melting of the Antarctic ice fields means that earlier projections could be low. State law does not provide any hard numbers, and developers can pick conservative estimates as long as the science has been peer-reviewed. Bay Area planners are watching this closely.

Until recently, developers had to complete vulnerability checks as part of the California Environmental Quality Act review process. The assessment included future flooding from rising water levels.

But in 2015, a California Building Industry Association lawsuit challenged these standards and the state Supreme Court ruled that climate change was beyond the limited scope of these state environmental rules.

Our map shows planned construction projects. In many of these vulnerable areas, cities are encouraging new construction with special zoning and tax incentives.

To compare other sea level rise outcomes — including a 3-foot rise in sea level (considered by scientists the “most likely” scenario for 2100) — download a pdf of the map from our print edition, or order a copy of the newspaper.

NEW MAJOR PROJECTS, April 2017

These eight megadevelopment projects, with a known cost of more than $1.8 billion, are in areas vulnerable to rising floodwaters on the edge of San Francisco Bay, join 27 we assessed in 2015.

Redwood Landfill

Photo courtesy of Strada Investment

WHAT: 420 acres, landfill, recycling and compost facility | WHERE: Novato | STATUS: Legal challenge denied | DEVELOPERS: Waste Management | COST: $39.6 million | INCLUDES: Project cost estimate (for a new energy plant on the premises), land value

In 2006, a group of North Bay residents raised red flags over developer Waste Management’s interest in expanding its 420-acre landfill and recycling facility. After Marin County certified the project’s 2008 environmental impact report, the group sued the county in part because of what it called an inadequate plan for adapting to sea level rise. Under the plan, every five years the facility’s operators are to assess, using the latest scientific projections, whether levees surrounding the property are tall enough to prevent ocean waters from flowing in, carrying waste to San Pablo Bay. Per this plan, Waste Management raised a levee once, in 2008, said Rebecca Ng, the county’s deputy director of Environmental Health Services. Waste Management did not respond to a request for comment.

Richmond Terminal One

Artist rendering of Richmond Terminal One. Courtesy of Terminal One Development

WHAT: 13 acres, residential with public trail and park | WHERE: Richmond. | STATUS: Construction to begin late 2017 | DEVELOPERS: Terminal One Development and Laconia | COST: $14 million | INCLUDES: Land value, fees

This project will entail 21 single-family homes, as well as five condominium buildings containing a total of 295 flats, on a former oil- and gas-storage facility next to the Richmond Yacht Club. To adapt to a projected 3-foot increase in sea level and to mitigate storm damage, the buildings will be set inside the Bay Trail, to be built at nearly 11 feet above current sea level.

Pier 29, Embarcadero

WHAT: Approximately 20,000-square-foot commercial development, within 123,000- square-foot pier | WHERE: San Francisco | STATUS: In approval process | DEVELOPERS: Jamestown | COST: $5.8 million | INCLUDES: Project cost estimate

This pier, on San Francisco’s Embarcadero, was built in 1915 and was to be used as an event space for the 34th America’s Cup before a fire damaged the structure in 2012. It has been rebuilt and the Port of San Francisco is negotiating a lease with developer Jamestown to add commercial space to its bulkhead, which is one-fifth of the total building site. The Sierra Club and other groups have objected, saying the space should be for recreational purposes, but the city said it needs the tax revenue it would receive through the planned use. The Port of San Francisco, which owns the land, will work with the developer to make an adaptation plan for future sea level rise, said Port Commission spokesperson Renée Martin.

75 Howard St.

Artist rendering of the 75 Howard St. project from a pier. Courtesy of the Paramount Group

WHAT: 4-acre lot, residential tower | WHERE: San Francisco | STATUS: Permits granted, demolition of current structure to start soon | DEVELOPERS: Paramount Group | COST: $218.6 million | INCLUDES: Project cost estimate, land value, fees

When finished, this 21-story tower will contain 120 luxury condominiums as well as street-level commercial space. The project’s environmental impact report notes that, based on current projections, the bottom floor of the building will likely be inundated during a 100-year-flood event by 2050. But developer Paramount Group faces no legal mandate to adapt the design to future sea level rise because the property lies outside the jurisdiction of the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, which requires risks associated with sea level rise to be assessed. Paramount declined a request for comment.

Former Potrero Power Plant

WHAT: 1201 Illinois St. | 21 acres, mixed-use development | WHERE: San Francisco | STATUS: In approvals, land remediation phase | DEVELOPERS: Associate Capital | COST: $71.5 million | INCLUDES: Land value (partial amount)

This property is owned by Associate Capital, an investment group that includes eBay’s Meg Whitman. Real estate developer District Development is remediating toxic soil at the site of this former power plant, as a first step to converting it to 3 million square feet of housing and commercial space, plus public waterfront access. The developer has not yet submitted plans for the site, said spokesman P.J. Johnston, but it will “conform to existing and new planning requirements” around sea level rise.

Brisbane Baylands

Artist rendering of Brisbane Baylands development. Courtesy of Universal Paragon Corp.

WHAT: 684 acres, mixed-use development | WHERE: Brisbane | STATUS: City reviewing project through June 2017 | DEVELOPERS: Universal Paragon Corp. | COST: $1.37 billion | INCLUDES: Project cost estimate, associated infrastructure costs

Since 2006, developer Universal Paragon Corp. has been advancing this massive proposal to replace a defunct rail yard and landfill with 4,000 housing units, a large park, and 7 million square feet of commercial space. Some Brisbane residents oppose the plan due to concerns over congestion, but SPUR, a Bay Area urban planning think tank, and other smart-growth proponents endorse it because it would provide dense housing and access to nearby Caltrain, SamTrans, and Muni buses and trains. If approved, construction could start in 2019 and take up to 20 years.

Tidelands Condominiums

Artist rendering of Tidelands Condominiums development. Courtesy of the New Home Company Inc.

WHAT: 2.8 acres, 76 condominiums | WHERE: San Mateo | STATUS: Completed, October 2016 | DEVELOPERS: The New Home Company | COST: $42.6 million | INCLUDES: Project cost estimate (construction only), land value

This 76-condominium project resulted in the removal of one-third of an acre of seasonal wetlands, and the developer, which declined to comment for this story, made up for that by buying credits meant to finance wetland restoration elsewhere. The developer also added two landscape features, called bioswales, to remove pollutants from runoff into adjacent wetlands. The structures were not designed to accommodate rising sea levels.

Alameda Marina

WHAT: Redevelopment Proposal 44 acres, mixed-use redevelopment | WHERE: Alameda Master | STATUS: Plan submitted, in approval phase |DEVELOPERS: Bay West Development COST: $44 million | INCLUDES: Site improvements (to prep land for construction)

Almost 90 percent of the Alameda Marina is still undeveloped. This project would fill much of that open space by adding about 670 residential units and 200,000 square feet of commercial space, reconstructing the shoreline in the process. The developer has said it will build seawalls to shield the property from at least 24 inches of projected sea level rise, per the city of Alameda’s requirements. Its design accommodates future adaptive measures, such as increasing the seawall height above that level, according to the project plan.

The first San Francisco Public Press survey listed the following 27 major real estate developments proposed, planned or underway around San Francisco Bay that would be vulnerable to severe flooding due to climate change. Their known cost is more than $27 billion (as of 2015).

Mission Bay

Photo courtesy of Strada Investment

WHAT: 2.2-acre mixed-use development | WHERE: San Francisco | DEVELOPERS: CIM Group | STATUS: Scheduled to open Fall 2017 | COST: Undisclosed

The Mission Bay neighborhood continues to transform into a mixed-use development with One Mission Bay — a 350 luxury residential project, with 41,000 square feet of resort-style amenities, 16,000 square feet of retail space, and 348 parking spaces. The projects consist of two towers: one 198-unit, 16 story high-rise, and a 152-unit, seven-story building. CIM Group is the owner and developer of the project site, while Strada Investment remains CIM’s representative.

Central Waterfront

Photo courtesy of the City and County of San Francisco Planning Department

WHAT: Mixed-use development | WHERE: San Francisco | DEVELOPERS: Many | STATUS: Still in planning phases| COST: Not set

The Central Waterfront Neighborhood would stretch about 500 acres along the city’s eastern shoreline between Potrero Hill and the bay. Long-term plans include Pier 70’s 28-acre, mixed-use development. The environmental impact report states that city Public Works hydraulic engineers will review building permits to suggest improvements “on a project-by-project basis to ensure that properties are removed from risk of flooding.

Pier 70

Photo courtesy of Pier 70: A Forest City Project

WHAT: 28-acre mixed-use development | WHERE: San Francisco | DEVELOPERS: Forest City | STATUS: Seeking approvals Summer 2017 | COST: $2 billio

The historic district in the Dogpatch neighborhood will get between 1,100 to 2,150 housing units, 30 percent of them designated “affordable.” Includes between 1 million and 2 million square feet of office space, 500,000 square feet of retail, arts and light industrial space, in addition to 9 acres of open space. New building heights range from 50 to 90 feet. Historic buildings would be rehabilitated. DEVELOPERS to seek project approvals in 2017 from the San Francisco Port Commission, San Francisco Planning Commission and the San Francisco Board of Supervisors

According to Forest City, sea level rise projections are based on the high end of state guidelines for 2100 and there is a financing mechanism to fund future improvements for sea level rise. Protections involve raising the grade of the entire site to elevate buildings and ensure that utilities function properly. With improvements, Pier 70 can coexist with higher tides and storm surges. Many of these protections will be part of creative designs that maximize shoreline access for public use. The Pier 70 project includes a Community Facilities District financing mechanism that generates revenue long after the project is built to fund future sea level improvements, if needed

Executive Park

Photo courtesy of the City and County of San Francisco Planning Department

WHAT: 14 acres, mixed-use development | WHERE: San Francisco | DEVELOPERS: Yerby Co., Universal Paragon Corp., others | STATUS: In planning phases| COST: Undetermined

The Executive Park subarea plan, which would create a new residential neighborhood east of Highway 101, includes two projects: the Yerby Company and the Universal Paragon Corp. The Yerby Project, renamed the Thomas Mellon Waterfront Residences, was approved Dec. 1, 2016, and has been expanded from 500 to 583 residential units. The Universal Paragon Corp. project has not yet submitted an application for its portion but is expected to do so soon. The draft environmental impact report relies on a predicted sea level rise of 3 feet by 2100, which does not include storm surge and is at the low end of projections.

Golden State Warriors Arena

Photo courtesy of MANICA Architecture, images rendered by steelblue

WHAT: 12-acre sports complex | WHERE: San Francisco | DEVELOPERS: Golden State Warriors | STATUS: To open during the 2019-20 NBA season | COST: Estimated $1 billion

The team broke ground in January 2017 on the Chase Center, a state-of-the-art sports and entertainment complex in Mission Bay. The 135-foot-tall arena will feature 18,064 seats for basketball games, with a maximum concert capacity of 18,500. The development will include 100,000 square feet of retail, restaurants, cafes and public plazas, in addition to a new 5½-acre public waterfront park. The arena is reportedly the only privately financed facility of its kind in the United States. A final environmental impact report has not been released yet, but the draft environmental report states that the “planʹs effects related to flooding and sea level rise would be less than significant.

India Basin

Photo courtesy of Build Inc

WHAT: 15.5-acre mixed-use development | WHERE: San Francisco | DEVELOPERS: Build Inc. | STATUS: Seeking approval in 2017 | COST: $800 millio

The project, adjacent to the India Basin Shoreline and 900 Innes — a separate city-owned parcel that will become a park — could be developed with up to 1,240 apartments, 275,000 square feet of retail and commercial space, plus a 50,000-square-foot K-8 public school. Traversed by 13-mile Blue Greenway bay trail, the project and all major infrastructure would be situated at higher elevations, DEVELOPERS said, and would accommodate the current worst-case projections for sea level rise in 2100 — 69 inches, including 100-year storm conditions. DEVELOPERS added that the site would also be able to accommodate higher projections. The shoreline is specifically designed to adapt and allow for upland habitat migration and enhanced ecologies in future sea level rise conditions

S.F. State University

WHAT: Satellite campus | WHERE: San Francisco | DEVELOPERS: Lennar Urban | STATUS: Exploratory | COST: Undetermined

A university spokesperson said the school is still considering opportunities to establish an S.F. State presence in Bayview-Hunters Point.

Mission Rock

Photo courtesy of The Cordish Companies

WHAT: 28 acres, mixed-use development | WHERE: San Francisco | DEVELOPERS: Giants Development Services | STATUS: Construction starts 2017 | COST: $1.8 billion (estimated)

In November 2015, 74 percent of voters approved Proposition D, which raised the height limit for the residential-commercial buildings from 190 to 240 feet. According to DEVELOPERS, 40 percent of the proposed 1,500 apartments will be permanently affordable across a range of income levels including low income and workforce housing. DEVELOPERS plan to raise the land to protect against 66 inches of sea level rise, with other adaptive strategies if it accelerates

8 Washington

Photo courtesy of 8 Washington

WHAT: 3.2 acres, mixed-use development | WHERE: San Francisco | DEVELOPERS: Pacific Waterfront Partners | STATUS: Rejected by voters, project was canceled | COST: Estimated $200 million

S.F. Ferry Terminal Expansion

Photo courtesy of San Francisco Bay Ferry

WHAT: 3 acres of ferry gates | WHERE: San Francisco | DEVELOPERS: WETA | STATUS: Begins May 2017.Construction to be completed by 2019. | COST: $80 million (First of two phases

This project would demolish Pier 2 and build three new gates between Pier 1 to the north and Pier 14 to the south, while creating a new plaza south of the Ferry Building. DEVELOPERS plan to raise the plaza and deck structures to make them “resilient to expected sea level rise conditions over at least a 50-year time frame, the assumed design life of the project.” Additional strategies to keep the Ferry Terminal viable until 2100 will also be incorporated

Treasure Island & Yerba Buena Island

Photo courtesy of Treasure Island SF Bay

WHAT: 46- acre, mixed-use development | WHERE: San Francisco | DEVELOPERS: Treasure Island Community Development, Lennar Urban, Wilson Meany | STATUS: Demolition began in February 2016; first subphase wrapping up. Geotechnical work on Treasure Island will begin in summer 2017. | COST: $3.5 billion to $5 billion

Treasure Island (367 acres) will see 8,000 new homes, up to 550,000 square feet of commercial, office and retail space, and up to 500 hotel rooms, plus 300 acres of parks and open space. On Yerba Buena Island (94 acres), contractors are mobilizing to begin building water reservoirs and roadways/utilities. Development plans include raising the perimeter of Treasure Island to protect against an initial 3 feet of sea level rise, plus an adaptive management plan and a project-generated funding stream to provide for greater adaptations as necessary in the future

Hunters Point Shipyard & Candlestick Point

Photo courtesy of the City and County of San Francisco, Office of Community Investments and Infrastructures Hunters Point Shipyard

WHAT: 750 acres, mixed-use development | WHERE: San Francisco | DEVELOPERS: Five Point | STATUS: Second phase under development | COST: Undetermined

The first 88 townhomes and condos opened in 2014. Next up will be 12,100 affordable, workforce, and market-rate homes across the shipyard and Candlestick Point. The shipyard site will include 350 acres of parkland and a 300 slip-marina.

Burlingame Point

Photo courtesy of Burlingame Point

WHAT: 18-acre, mixed-use development | WHERE: Burlingame | DEVELOPERS: H&Q Asia Pacific, Genzon Property Group | STATUS: Broke ground in early 2017 | COST: Undetermined

The bayfront office project is to include 767,000 square feet of office and life-science space in five buildings ranging from two to eight stories. DEVELOPERS stated buildings in the floodplain would remain dry if the bay crests 7.1 feet above current levels

Lincoln Centre Campus

Photo courtesy of BioMed Realty Trust

WHAT: 20 acres, mixed-use development | WHERE: Foster City | DEVELOPERS: BioMed Realty Trust Inc. | STATUS: Pre-construction; ground not broken | COST: $149 million (estimated)

The Lincoln Centre campus will include three new buildings totaling 595,000 square feet of office, lab and manufacturing space.

Redwood City Saltworks

Photo courtesy of Google

WHAT: 1,433-acre, residential | WHERE: Redwood City | DEVELOPERS: DMB Pacific Ventures | STATUS: Withdrawn | COST: Unknown

While the original plan would have brought up to 12,000 new homes to Cargill industrial salt ponds, the developer’s attorney said the “50/50 Plan” is no longer being pursued. “Beyond that, salt-making operations continue and there is no further update.

Crossing 900

Photo courtesy of Hunter/Strom Properties

WHAT: Mixed-use development | WHERE: Redwood City | DEVELOPERS: Kilroy Realty Corp., Hunter/Storm Properties | STATUS: Completed in early 2017 | COST: Undetermined

The corporate headquarters for cloud-storage company Box Inc. consists of about 334,000 square feet, and up to 5,000 square feet of retail. The first phase of the two-building project — 226,000 square feet of office space — was occupied in 2015, and the second 108,000 square feet space was completed in the first quarter of 2017. The Redwood City Downtown Precise Plan says a “limited portion” of this development zone is vulnerable to 4.6 feet of sea rise, but stresses “uncertainty” in climate predictions.

Pete’s Harbor/ Blu Harbor

Photo courtesy of the Redwood City Planning Department

WHAT: 14 acres, residential | WHERE: Redwood City | DEVELOPERS: RWC Harbor Communities | STATUS: Under construction | COST: $76 million

First residential units available April 2017. The development plan would include at least 411 homes in addition to a 45- to 65-slip marina. The 2003 environmental statement predicted 1.3 feet of sea level rise by 2036 for the project and the surrounding area

Facebook West

Photo courtesy of Matt Harnack / Facebook

WHAT: 22-acre corporate headquarters | WHERE: Menlo Park | DEVELOPERS: Gehry Partners | STATUS: Completed in March 2015 | COST: Undetermined

The 430,000-square-foot structure, known as “Building 20,” was designed by world-renowned architect Frank Gehry.

North Bayshore Development Area

Photo courtesy of Google,  Big / Heatherwick Studio

WHAT: 650 acres, mixed-use development | WHERE: Mountain View | DEVELOPERS: Many | STATUS: Awaiting approval | COST: Undetermined

Since the City of Mountain View awarded LinkedIn 1.4 million square feet of its 2.2 million-square-foot location, Google has emerged with an 18.6-acre site, through a property swap, allowing both tech giants to move forward with development plans in Mountain View and Sunnyvale. Mountain View officials said they are working on a revision to the North Bayshore Precise Plan that will study up to 9,850 residential units, in addition to approximately 3.4 million square feet of office space. The city council will consider the revised Precise Plan in June 2017

Google Moffett Federal Airfield

Photo courtesy of NASA

WHAT: 1,000 acres, mixed-use development | WHERE: Mountain View | DEVELOPERS: Planetary Ventures | STATUS: Began testing on Hangar One in 2016 | COST: $1.16 billion (estimate)

In 2016, Google began testing methods to purge toxic contaminants from the Hangar One as part of its plan to restore the giant iconic dome. Google has a 60-year lease with NASA.

Google Moffett Place Campus

WHAT: 55-acre, mixed use development | WHERE: Sunnyvale | DEVELOPERS: Jay Paul Co. | STATUS: Under construction. Estimated completion April 2020 | COST: Undetermined

Google bought six, eight-story buildings totaling 1.9 million square feet located along Highway 237 near Highway 101 in Sunnyvale. The first phase started with the buildout of three buildings in 2013. Infrastructure work on the second half began in 2015. The draft environmental report states people or structures would not be exposed to injury or loss as a result of flooding.

Centennial Gateway

Photo courtesy of the Montana Property Group

WHAT: 8.4-acre, mixed-use development | WHERE: Santa Clara | DEVELOPERS: Montana Property Group., others | STATUS: Construction began 2016-Slated to open 2017 | COST: Undetermined

Montana’s project would include two hotels, up to 400,000 square feet of office, and 150,000 square feet of retail plus a Montana-operated restaurant. The environmental review is not yet public

Alameda Point Site A

WHAT: 68-acre, mixed-use development | WHERE: Former Naval Air Station Alameda | DEVELOPERS: Alameda Point Partners | STATUS: Construction 2016-2029: Moving through planning board review | COST: Undetermined

The project would bring up to 800 homes — 25 percent of them designated affordable; 600,000 square feet of commercial-retail space in new or rehabilitated buildings; a new ferry terminal; and 15 acres of parks and open space. The project is being built in three five-year phases.

Brooklyn Basin

Photo courtesy of Signature Development Group

WHAT: 65-acre, mixed-use development | WHERE: Oakland | DEVELOPERS: Signature Development Group, Zarsion Holdings Group, Reynolds & Brown | STATUS: Construction to begin in spring 2017 | COST: $1.5 billion (estimated)

Construction of first building of the 241-unit mixed-use residential project is to start April 2017, with completion scheduled for the first half of 2019. Construction of the 8-acre Shoreline Park is to begin April/May 2017, with the same timetable for completion

Oakland Army Base

Photo courtesy of California Capital & Investment Group

WHAT: 360-acre, mixed-use development | WHERE: West Oakland | DEVELOPERS: California Capital & Investment Group, Prologis, portion of the former OAB, Port of Oakland | STATUS: Phase I | COST: $1.2 billion (estimate) for the two-phase redevelopment project on parcels of the former base owned by the city and the Port of Oakland

DEVELOPERS said some of the land on the city’s portion of the Oakland Army Base sits on dredged bay sediment and is still settling, which would be expected any time there is development in this area. Engineers working on a portion of the City of Oakland OAB property in Phase I would “densify” the soil and raise it at least 1.3 feet. Completion of initial phase is slated for 2018-2019

Jack London Square

Photo courtesy of Ellis Partners LLC

WHAT: 12-acre, mixed-use development | WHERE: Oakland | DEVELOPERS: Jack London Square Ventures, CIM Group | STATUS: No response from DEVELOPERS | COST: Undetermined

CIM Group bought six buildings, and two development parcels that make the 12-acre Jack London Square mixed-use development site in downtown Oakland. The site consist of 243,000 square feet of office space, 191,000 square feet of retail, in addition to a 250-room hotel and a 665-unit residential tower. A recent update to the environmental statement claims no significant flooding risk but does not detail its methodology

San Leandro Shoreline

WHAT: 75-acre, mixed-use development | WHERE: San Leandro | DEVELOPERS: Cal-Coast Slated to break ground summer 2017 | COST: Undetermined

The site consist of 52 acres of land and 23 acres of water-surface land. The development has taken 10 years, and once completed would consist of a 200-room hotel, up to 400 homes, 150,000 square feet of offices, a conference center, restaurants, library, amphitheater and recreational space with an artificial beach.

A final environmental review acknowledges that “the project would place housing within the 100-year floodplain and within areas subject to sea level rise/coastal high hazard.” However, “the current FEMA firm panels are undergoing revisions and it is possible that no portions of the Project site will be within the 100-year floodplain when the project is scheduled to start construction.” In addition, the project would be designed to adapt to sea level rise projections and would include “appropriate design standards for building construction to protect structures from sea level rise, such as including elevated grades or floodable development, hard structures such as seawalls and bulkheads, and/or soft structures such as Low-Impact Development (LID), green infrastructure, detention basins, mini- floodplains, biofiltration, and stormwater parks.”

Data Sources

Sea level rise: Projections for San Francisco flooding are from U.S. Geological Survey LiDAR data from 2011, using sea rise scenarios projected by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.

Total flood estimates are approximations; the estimate of 3.4 feet of storm surge is a baywide average. This map incorporates a dynamic computer model from Our Coast, Our Future, showing that floods can vary by location.

Outside San Francisco, these projections are based on metric elevations, which we converted to feet to provide the best match for San Francisco’s scenarios. (See the interactive version: ourcoastourfuture.org.)

Different bay-wide flooding models using ocean dynamics have been produced by FEMA, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Bay Conservation and Development Commission and the nonprofit research group Climate Central.

Development: Information about projects in San Francisco comes from the Planning Commission, Department of Building Inspection and Port of San Francisco. Baywide maps derived from environmental impact reports, developer websites, and news articles and maps in the San Francisco Business Times, Silicon Valley Business Times and San Francisco Chronicle. Areas are approximate, calculated using the Spatial Analysis toolbox in ArcMap. Some elevations have changed due to construction since the last aerial elevation survey.

The post Mapping the Shoreline Building Boom as Seas Rise appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Across California, policymakers and urban planners at every level of government are struggling with how to respond to new computer models that show massive ice sheets in Antarctica on the brink of collapse.

The melting of fields of ice in West Antarctica could send sea levels to heights twice those estimated by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just a few years ago, according to new estimates published in Nature.

If the West Antarctic ice sheet melted, it would push water along North America and in San Francisco Bay far higher than the global average. The most extreme estimates suggest that sea levels could rise by more than 8 feet globally and as much as 10 feet in the Bay Area, even without a storm.

Compounding that, recently published research from the North Pole shows that melting glaciers and ice caps in Canada’s Arctic are contributing significantly to rising seas. Only Greenland holds more Arctic ice than Canada.

2050 — The Dividing Line

In January, Gov. Jerry Brown convened a scientific working group to review the latest studies. On April 12, the group issued a report that echoed those projections and warned of “the potential for extreme sea-level rise in the future, because the processes that could drive extreme Antarctic Ice Sheet retreat later in the century are different from the processes driving loss now.”

Midcentury will be the dividing line: “After 2050, sea-level rise projections increasingly depend on the trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions.”

The authors concluded their seven key findings with a warning about dithering or denial: “Waiting for scientific certainty is neither a safe nor prudent option.”

“High confidence in projections of sea-level rise over the next three decades can inform preparedness efforts, adaptation actions and hazard mitigation undertaken today, and prevent much greater losses than will occur if action is not taken,” they wrote. “Consideration of high and even extreme sea levels in decisions with implications past 2050 is needed to safeguard the people and resources of coastal California.” 

That assessment will shift the target for Bay Area planners, who, after years of deliberation, had only just settled on a consensus estimate. 

“We all know that’s out the window,” said Larry Goldzband, executive director of the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, the nation’s oldest coastal zone regulator.

In October, the agency began creating a baywide plan to adapt to sea level rise. In coming years, the commission plans to produce renderings, engineering designs and financing documents for a proposed fix, which is expected to cost billions of dollars. With polar ice melting faster than governmental decisionmaking generally happens, it is a race against science and time.

“We have 27 members of the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, and 13 of them are locally elected officials,” Goldzband said. “They want to see us get this done.”

No Change to S.F. Policy

San Francisco leaders are also grappling with how to protect the city from rising waters. Their strategy has been informed by the work of David Behar, director of the climate program at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. He is following the research closely.

“When it comes to sea level rise, what happens in Greenland and the Antarctic are the biggest uncertainties,” he said.

But for now, despite new research, he is not recommending any changes to city policy.

“We cannot change our guidelines every time a new article comes out,” said Behar, who chairs the city’s Sea Level Rise Committee. “Otherwise we’d be changing our targets every few weeks.”

Behar does not believe the latest projections have reached a scientific consensus, and he is looking for other model-based studies that confirm the conclusions in the Nature paper.

“The question we are asking ourselves is, is this actionable science? The jury is still out on that,” he said.

In 2015, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee asked all city departments to prepare the waterfront and public facilities for the threats posed by climate change. What emerged was a sea level rise plan billed as a “call to action.” By next year, San Francisco is expected to produce a list of project investments “to best improve climate resilience” with potential funding sources.

The city based its plan on research on the effects of climate change on the West Coast conducted in 2012 by the National Research Council. The study predicted that the rise in ocean levels would accelerate later this century, inundating thousands of acres of shoreline. Under what Behar said is the “most likely” scenario, water could rise by some 3 feet by 2100. The model also included an upper range where the bay could rise by 4.6 feet, a worst-case scenario in which greenhouse-gas emissions continue unabated, raising the temperatures of the atmosphere and the seas. Add to that 3.4 feet of surging water and the total rise could hit 8 feet during a bad storm.

But the new research in Nature shows how rising greenhouse-gas emissions could melt the Antarctic ice sheet, contributing several feet of sea level rise independently. The models were based on studies of how high global sea level was during warm periods in the distant past, and simulations showing how rising temperatures can splinter ice sheets and force massive chunks to calve off.

Disrupting Earth’s Gravitational Field

This research, conducted by geoscientists Robert DeConto and David Pollard, was included in a new report released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which included runaway projections for the San Francisco Bay Area.

The ice sheets in the Antarctic are massive. If all the ice were to melt, the mass of water that enters the oceans could disrupt the Earth’s gravitational field and rotation, magnifying sea level rise off North America, according to Rutgers University’s Robert Kopp, an author of the NOAA report.

“The consequence of the gravitational changes is that you have a sea level fall near the ice sheet and a greater than global sea level rise far away from it,” he said.

Another scientist scrutinizing the latest research is Gary Griggs, director of the Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a member of the governor’s working group. The potential for sea level rise is “enormous,” he said. The oceans are warming and that warm water is getting onto the ice shelves and melting them from above. At the same time, the water levels are rising and pushing the ice up.

“There are these massive ice sheets — glaciers that are coming down to the coast,” he said. “They’re being buttressed by these big ice shelves.”

The NOAA analysis was released on the last day of Barack Obama’s presidency at a moment when, fearful that the Trump administration would destroy key data or make it inaccessible, federal climate scientists were scrambling to store climate data on safe servers. Oceanographer William Sweet, a co-author of the NOAA report, told The Washington Post that the scenarios provide “communities a better sense of what the future might hold with continued sea level rise so they can plan accordingly and have better insights and make smart decisions about how they want to plan for the future.”

The post Local Planners Brace for Faster Antarctic Ice Melt appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Even within the Bay Area, encroachment of bay water is sure to require a bigger response in low-lying communities, such as Alviso, near San Jose, than in places that, based on models, are less vulnerable, such as parts of Richmond and Brisbane.

Likewise, there will not be a single most effective adaptation strategy, but many. Broadly, responding to sea level rise requires actions that fall into three categories: fortify infrastructure, accommodate higher water and retreat from the shoreline. Given the economic and cultural ties Bay Area residents have to the water — and because the level of the bay will rise slowly, unpunctuated by the type of hurricanes or cataclysmic storms the East Coast experiences — retreat is a hard sell. 

Dikes, Levees and Wetlands

But relying solely on bigger, more numerous “hard” solutions, such as dikes and levees, not only would harm the region’s aesthetic value, but also could undercut the effectiveness of restoring San Francisco Bay’s once-thriving wetlands and marshes — including a massive network of former industrial salt ponds in the South Bay. Municipalities, ecologists and planners agree that robust wetlands are key to adapting to rising sea levels.

If done correctly, wetlands — natural fortifications against the encroaching water — will migrate upland to accommodate the level of the bay, which could rise a foot by 2050 and 5 feet by the 22nd century, according to some projections. For now, planners are using a more modest 3-foot estimate for 2100.

Bay Area residents want to take action on sea level rise. In June 2016, voters approved Measure AA, a parcel tax that will put $500 million toward improving wetlands over the next 20 years.

But unless it is done in combination with other innovative, potentially disruptive baywide adaptation measures, restoring wetlands will be like siphoning a few drops from a brimming bucket, said Nate Kauffman, a landscape architect and urban planning consultant.

Offshore Landforms

Kauffman’s vision, called the Live Edge Adaptation Project, combines large-scale engineering, such as the construction of offshore landforms that would act as barrier islands and absorb wave energy, with tidal marshes that would form behind them. Leading up to the shoreline would be another engineered landform, such as a wide, sloping levee made of constructed wetlands to absorb storm surges, similar to the horizontal levee project in Hayward.

How could such a plan be achieved? Kauffman said that implementing the plan would have “huge resource and enormous economic implications” but that the concept is also his “vision and argument for a different way of doing things.”

“Systems designed and built 100 years ago are not sustainable, and increasingly less so as we add more people to area,” he said.

Realistic, Affordable Designs

Beginning in April, an incentive program called Bay Area: Resilient by Design Challenge will bring together local governments, designers, planners and other stakeholders to generate 10 design solutions aimed at addressing sea level rise in specific Bay Area communities. The program, inspired by a similar challenge in New York and New Jersey in the wake of Superstorm Sandy, is being underwritten by a $5.8 million grant, led by the Rockefeller Foundation.

Past design challenges aimed at sea level rise have floated audacious ideas, such as building levees across the Golden Gate to separate the Pacific Ocean from the bay. What sets this challenge apart is that rather than starting with design concepts, which may or may not have realistic applicability, it seeks out cross-discipline teams willing to delve into vulnerabilities of localities and communities. The goal is to generate adaptations that are visionary but also realistic, replicable and affordable.

Allison Brooks, who as the executive director of the Bay Area Regional Collaborative coordinates adaptation-planning efforts of four regional agencies, is on the team implementing the Resilient by Design Challenge. She said that until this concerted effort, “local jurisdictions have been attempting, because no one else was doing it, to develop solutions to their sea level vulnerabilities. But we can’t think about issues related to climate and flooding from a jurisdictional standpoint, because climate does not pay attention to city lines.”

The design challenge seeks to tap into sea level rise adaptation and planning efforts already underway, said Brooks, and use strategic plans developed in San Francisco, Berkeley and Oakland as guides. Although the 10 adaptation projects that resulted from the Resilient by Design Challenge on the East Coast are funded through $930 million in federal disaster relief, paying for adaptation in the Bay Area is likely to require capital project funding in the tens of billions of dollars.

Redefining ‘A New Urban Edge’

Gabriel Kaprielian, who directs the Design and Innovation for Sustainable Cities program at the University of California, Berkeley, said how we frame the expensive, complex tasks related to sea level rise adaptation is vital. “Can we think about these problems as opportunities to redefine a new urban edge?” he asked. When it comes to redefining that space, the hardest part might not be designing and engineering, but rather changing policy.

Take, for example, the Port of San Francisco’s 100-year-old, 3-mile-long seawall that runs under the Embarcadero, absorbing the brunt of tides, boat wakes and storm swells. It is far from an adequate defense against rising seas, but remaking it in its current design could mean separating the city from the bay with a large concrete wall. As Gil Kelley, then-director of citywide planning, told a panel on sea level rise last summer, no one wants that. Yet making the port more resilient might mean changing its mandate, Kaprielian said. He endorsed a redesign in which structures along the waterfront are raised, perhaps even floating so they can rise with the tide. Paying for such a change might entail creating public-private partnerships and adding commercial and residential spaces.

Floating Islands, Homes

The San Francisco nonprofit Seasteading Institute is designing futuristic floating islands off French Polynesia, featuring solar power, sustainable aquaculture and ocean-based wind farms.

The project’s pilot islands would cost a total of $10 million to $50 million and house a few dozen people, Randolph Hencken, the institute’s executive director, told The New York Times. And the initial residents would most likely be middle-income buyers from the developed world.

On a smaller scale are so-called amphibious developments. These structures are built on and anchored to land but have the ability to float during periods of high water. Unlike floating cities, these structures are already in use in New Orleans, the United Kingdom and Southeast Asia.

Hope Hui Rising, assistant professor of landscape architecture at Washington State University School of Design and Construction, described amphibious housing concepts to residents of the Dogpatch and Potrero Hill neighborhoods during public workshops in January. She said amphibious housing could be built inside of large levees and, along with open spaces and parks, could help alleviate the compounding effects of coastal, river and inland flooding.

Including Low-Income Areas

Most current Bay Area residents will not be alive at the end of the century and therefore will not know whether adaptations designed for 3 feet of sea level rise succeed or fail. What regulators can do, however, and what Bay Conservation and Development Commission executive director Larry Goldzband considers a priority, is to ensure that adaptations keep all communities safe and that changes made to one part of the shoreline do not harm adjacent areas. “Many of the neighborhoods that exist now along the bay are underserved neighborhoods, low-income,” Goldzband said.

He pointed specifically to East Palo Alto, Alviso, West Oakland, the Canals District in SanRafael, Richmond and Hunters Point. Making sure they are not underserved by sea level rise adaptation plans is a priority for the commission.

In considering environmental justice and the need for baywide solutions, Kauffman said people leading the region’s adaptation efforts should reflect the diversity and needs of the region, which is predicted to add 2 million people by 2040.

Groups that have long been in the vanguard of efforts to protect the bay should accept that they need to make compromises to adapt to rising seas, Kauffman said.

Adding fill to the bay has always been antithetical to groups such as Save the Bay, since the 20th-century extension of the urban shoreline disrupted the functioning of natural ecosystems. But under his concept, filling parts of the bay would be required.

“We’re all going to be way dead before the more dramatic parts of this start to manifest,” Kauffman said, “so it’s easier for those environmentalists to keep fighting as they’ve always been than it is to reinterpret their mission or method for saving the bay. The net effect of all these people trying to protect pieces of the bay will mean that nothing happens and all of the bay is in worse shape.”

RELATED: Q&A With Nate Kauffman

The post Visionary Solutions to Bayfront Inundation appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

But when it comes to weakening environmental protections, sometimes California’s wounds are self-inflicted. For nearly a decade, the real estate and construction industries have pursued a legal strategy that has undermined the landmark 1970 state law that some cities had used to help protect their waterfronts from sea level rise, a Public Press review of thousands of pages of legal and planning documents shows.

After lower courts chipped away at the long-held interpretation of the California Environmental Quality Act, the state Supreme Court in 2015 overturned decades of land-use law by upholding lower court rulings that cities could no longer require developers to take into account the effects of climate change on their projects. The decision has unsettled public officials and planners, and critics say it will allow real estate interests to saddle taxpayers with a gigantic bill to defend against rising seas.

At the same time, the state Legislature, controlled by the Democrats, and Gov. Jerry Brown have neither proposed amending the law nor drafted new statutes to encompass the effects of climate change on coastal development. In January, Brown tasked scientists with reviewing the latest research on sea level rise, and preliminary guidance and preliminary guidance was published in April.

Local and regional governments also have been slow to respond with new regulations or funding measures.

Lawyers who specialize in compliance have circulated memos and held several meetings to share strategies for conforming to this interpretation of CEQA. Although many project plans do address sea level rise, public filings are now peppered with references to the 2015 case to inoculate developers from challenges by planning agencies or environmental groups.

The development industry has a lot at stake. Scores of buildings are queued up for construction on prime waterfront land that scientists say could be intermittently or permanently underwater by the end of this century. These include big projects such as office parks, residential towers, hospitals and entertainment venues in which some of the largest development firms in the country have collectively invested tens of billions of dollars.

Local leaders have touted tax revenues and their own political legacies to advocate large-scale development along the water’s edge — even amid warnings from climate researchers that many low-lying areas will require major public investment to be protected adequately.

The state’s highest court has complicated governmental planning efforts.

The decisive case, California Building Industry Association v. Bay Area Air Quality Management District, did not turn specifically on sea level rise but ultimately limited the reach of the California Environmental Quality Act, known as CEQA. In their opinion, the justices accepted the argument from one of the state’s biggest developer lobbying groups that the act concerned only the “effects of a project on the environment,” and not changes in the environment that could affect a project. Those include risks from sea level rise flooding, wildfires, earthquakes, shifting wind patterns, air quality and carbon emissions that warm the atmosphere.

As a result, industry lawyers argue that under CEQA, waterfront developers no longer appear to be required to pay for expensive fixes to protect their properties from flooding by elevating building entrances, waterproofing ground floors, constructing levees or seawalls or using other engineering techniques.

RELATED: Timeline of Rulings, Actions That Blunted CEQA

The Public Press found that since 2011, developers of at least eight major Bay Area waterfront projects have included key language from court rulings in dozens of land-use filings and lawsuits, some in an effort to block requirements to build or pay for flood protection measures. Six of the projects used this tactic in environmental planning documents filed after the high court’s ruling in December 2015. Among our findings:

• Statewide, developers, cities, environmentalists and others have argued about the scope of CEQA in at least 15 real estate lawsuits since 2009, when courts in Southern California began reviewing challenges to the law.
• Two cities — San Francisco and Menlo Park — have used the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the CEQA reinterpretation to justify their own land-use plans.
• Three companies seeking to build on the San Francisco Bay waterfront have used the industry association case to attack regulations or suits: the Golden State Warriors; Facebook, which expanded its Menlo Park campus; and the Redwood Landfill in Novato. Developers of five other major projects, including the mixed-use development at Pier 70 in San Francisco being built by Forest City, cited the language limiting CEQA in environmental review documents or in court when analyzing sea level rise, air quality, wind or other environmental effects.

In July 2015, the Public Press reported that scientists projected that sea level rise, combined with the severe storm surge, could push the bay 8 feet above today’s high tide by 2100. Leading agencies, such as the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, concurred with that finding. A citywide task force last year issued a wide-ranging report outlining the dangers to the city’s heavily urbanized eastern waterfront.

Since then, predictions for sea level rise have only worsened. Scientific papers have documented the accelerated melting of ice sheets in Antarctica and glaciers in Canada — both the result of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas pollution from industrial activity. These measurements, combined with new atmospheric models, have pushed the federal upper-limit prediction for occasional flooding above 8 feet along the California coast by 2100, even without a storm. (For more on the science see Local Planners Brace For Antarctic Ice Melt.)

Despite growing alarm, local land-use approvals on the waterfront seem to have speeded up. At least eight large-scale developments situated below 8 feet in elevation are proposed, including a residential tower on Howard Street in San Francisco and a marina in Alameda, the island city that could be more than half flooded by 2100, according to the most pessimistic sea rise scenario. (See Solutions to Bayfront Inundation)

Q&A: History Will Condemn Today’s Leaders for Inaction

The building industry’s main critique of CEQA is that it is abused by opponents of development. Industry lawyers tell stories of “not in my backyard” neighbors tying up or derailing what they call perfectly benign projects with what developers consider picayune complaints about auto traffic, wind patterns or shadows cast in parks.

Major local industry players, such as the Bay Area Council and Bay Planning Coalition, supported the effort to dismantle key portions of the law. “Requiring developers to account for external environmental impacts on projects was never the intent of CEQA and would mark a profound and fundamental change in the law, creating unreasonable and extremely costly barriers to infill development that is our best opportunity to address our housing crisis,” said Rufus Jeffris, vice president of communications at the Bay Area Council.

The push-back on the use of CEQA to address climate change, however, goes a step beyond the usual complaints by neighbors. In its Supreme Court case, the California Building Industry Association argued that the law “really is not the right tool” to address sea level rise. Andrew Sabey, an attorney with Cox, Castle & Nicholson, who represented the association, said cities do not need state law to do their jobs.

“There is a robust world of planning and zoning law, a robust world of federal or state laws that can be considered,” Sabey said.

Cities, he said, “should be doing planning and exercising their police powers. It goes back to the analogy that isn’t perfect: A lot of legislative muscles were allowed to atrophy. You have planning law. You should be using it.”

But Chris Kern, a city planner in San Francisco, said that for years his office relied on CEQA to regulate private development threatened by flooding, and that no existing local ordinances allow him to require changes to developments that may become unsafe as the bay rises and storm related flooding becomes more frequent.

Some environmental lawyers who use CEQA to challenge developments worry that real estate interests are passing off costs to the taxpayers. Government agencies could be on the hook for protecting poorly defended buildings that they are still permitting for construction.

“It’s so wrong,” said Doug Carstens, a managing partner of Chatten-Brown & Carstens, a law firm based in Southern California that represents environmental and community groups. He said developers are arguing that a problem exists — but it is no longer their problem.

“People have these concerns and want answers, and developers are saying, ‘We don’t have to give you an answer,’” Carstens said. “It’s putting blinders on.”

According to Richard Frank, director of the California Environmental Law and Policy Center at the University of California, Davis, developers are working hard to consolidate their state court victory. “They will continue to argue for a limited application of the California Environmental Quality Act whenever they can,” Frank said.

Basketball by the Bay

The waterfront’s latest marquee project — the future San Francisco home of the Golden State Warriors basketball team — broke ground in January.

The project, which includes the arena and a nearby office complex, sits directly across the street from San Francisco Bay and a few feet above the current level of the water. (The exact height has changed in successive drafts of the architectural renderings.) When it opens for the 2019-2020 season, the newly christened Chase Center will anchor the city’s 303-acre Mission Bay neighborhood, south of downtown, where new offices, medical campuses and residential buildings are rising every year.

In March, Uber Technologies announced that it had acquired a significant stake in two office towers within the arena project, and that thousands of employees would occupy half of the 580,000 square feet of office space.

The Warriors’ last environmental report, approved in 2015 by the Planning Commission, acknowledged that sea level rise could get bad enough to flood plazas and the arena’s basement during a storm in 2100.

Possible remedies include berms around the perimeter or, in a pinch, strategically placed sandbags. (For more on San Francisco’s sea-rise planning in Mission Bay, see Projects Sailed Through Despite Dire Flood Study.)

Despite these challenges, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee remains a champion of the arena, which he has called his “legacy project.” He stood alongside executives and basketball players to plunge a ceremonial golden shovel into a dirt pile at a groundbreaking ceremony on Jan. 17. The team defeated a bitter legal challenge in November by arguing, in part, that CEQA no longer required the team to protect against environmental impacts such as sea level rise and wind.

San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera celebrated the rigorous legal defense in a press release: “A small group of opponents had threatened to litigate ‘until the cows come home,’ despite losing in court every step of the way,” he wrote. “Well, guess what? The cows have come home.”

This is a crucial moment for environmental planning in California. Last fall, Brown declared California would lead the battle to prepare for the effects of climate change. In a fiery speech in San Francisco’s Moscone Center before thousands of scientists, Brown said California would step in where Washington had failed to do the right thing.

Policies articulated by the Trump administration have focused on reducing funding for some of the programs most cherished by California environmentalists. One such grant is the S.F. Bay Water Quality Improvement Fund. It is a major contributor to a 50-year wetland restoration project that is expected to cost $1 billion, from a mix of federal, state and local sources. Last summer voters across the Bay Area passed Measure AA, which levies a $12-per-parcel tax to pay into the fund.

Responding to threats to defund NASA’s Earth Science division, Brown issued a headline-grabbing one-liner: “If Trump turns off the satellites, California will launch its own damn satellite.”

But land-use regulation is generally less high profile than energy policy or climate research. More than a year after the state court ruling, the state has not given much help to local governments. The Office of Planning and Research, which Brown oversees, has proposed new guidance for local governments on how to interpret CEQA in light of the court’s ruling. But an early draft suggests that it will not recommend that cities or courts continue to use CEQA as a regulatory tool to address climate change.

In November, the California Building Industry Association sent a letter to the planning agency requesting that any new rules include direct language from the court’s opinion. In January, the planning and research office posted the letter online after the Public Press filed a public records request.

Brown has criticized CEQA since at least 2012, and called for local land-use policy to be streamlined. The reform, he said, was “the Lord’s work.”

Last year, he pushed for the deregulation of new market-rate developments that included affordable housing. Brown’s proposal to award these projects approval without environmental review — the so-called as-of-right provision — faced fierce opposition from environmental and labor groups and failed to win support in the Legislature.

Local Response Muted

In summer 2015, the Public Press calculated that Bay Area builders had invested more than $21 billion in 27 major new shoreline developments in areas vulnerable to sea level rise. Records showed that in San Francisco alone, scores of smaller buildings in the Financial District, Mission Bay and South of Market could also end up under water. (For articles and interactive maps, visit sfpublicpress.org/searise.) While many cities touching the bay said they were studying the problem, few had set any limits on development, such as zoning and building codes.

San Francisco Planning Department officials said at the time that they required developers to raise the land or set buildings back. Using the reporting process outlined by CEQA, planners provided developers with a checklist that included a review of the effects of future flooding and references to the most up-to-date sea rise predictions. Kern, the senior planner, said CEQA was a nimble tool that could adapt with the changing science. But after the ruling, while the department could encourage developers to address rising seas, it could no longer force them to do so.

Kern said cities might need to adopt new regulations. “That is something that we have been discussing in the city for some time,” he said. A committee convened by the mayor last year said that any such proposal would come by 2018 at the earliest.

Sea level rise was not the focus of the state Supreme Court ruling. At issue were strict pollution standards for allowing development in areas with dirty air. The ruling criticized what lawyers called the “reverse application” of the state law: “Agencies generally subject to CEQA are not required to analyze the impact of existing environmental conditions on a project’s future users or residents.”

That wording left many planners, developers, lawyers and policymakers confused about the circumstances in which climate change might be relevant. Lower courts may bring more clarity by ruling in future cases in which developments “exacerbate existing environmental hazards.”

Ellison Folk, a partner in the environmental firm Shute, Mihaly & Weinberger, represented the Bay Area Air Quality Management District in the case. She said the ruling created a “gap” in regulation. “I think agencies have the ability to do this kind of analysis and regulate to address sea level rise,” she said. “You can still use the CEQA process as your vehicle for doing that — because the Supreme Court said that if you want to do that, you can. There’s just nothing that requires you to.”

Without new state or local laws, many environmentalists place their hopes in regional planning. The Bay Conservation and Development Commission, which was formed 50 years ago to stop developers from filling in the bay, voted in October to create a region wide climate adaptation plan. But the agency’s own land-use jurisdiction is limited to 100 feet inland from the shoreline, so its challenge will be to cajole normally competitive cities to work together.

Larry Goldzband, the executive director, said that with water now creeping inland, cities on the shoreline will face hard choices.

“Everybody in the Bay Area who deals with planning, or is a planner, or has to work with planners recognizes the bay is going to get bigger, and we have to figure out how we’re going to prosper in spite of that,” he said.

One unfortunate possibility, he said, is abandonment of the lowest-lying ground: “Retreat may well become necessary.”

Developers Begin Legal Challenges

The “reverse application” of CEQA first came under scrutiny in a 1995 appellate court case, Baird v. County of Contra Costa, which centered on an addiction treatment organization that planned to add a 20-bed treatment center for teenage boys. Neighbors sued, saying nearby land was contaminated with petroleum in open ponds at a former Shell Oil plant. The court held that a developer did not need to consider how existing toxic hazards might affect new residents. “The purpose of CEQA is to protect the environment from proposed projects, not to protect proposed projects from the existing environment,” the judge wrote. But this case was considered an outlier and was not relied on as precedent. Lawyers and judges largely ignored its arguments for more than a decade.

Then in 2009, conservative appellate courts in Southern California began repeating language from Baird. In City of Long Beach v. Los Angeles Unified School District, another court held that CEQA did not require the district to mitigate the effects of toxic air pollution when constructing a school close to a freeway.

In South Orange County Wastewater Authority v. City of Dana Point in 2011, the Court of Appeal held that CEQA did not require residents of a proposed subdivision to mitigate odors from a wastewater treatment plant. “The Legislature did not enact CEQA to protect people from the environment,” according to the ruling.

Sea level rise first came under consideration in Ballona Wetlands Land Trust v. City of Los Angeles in 2011. Developer Playa Capital wanted to build condominium and commercial space on a wetland in Los Angeles. The land trust sued, saying the developer did not adequately “discuss impacts relating to sea level rise as a result of global climate change.”

Again borrowing language from Baird, the court argued that CEQA did not apply. The purpose of state-mandated environmental impact reports, it said, “is to identify the significant effects of a project on the environment, not the significant effects of the environment on the project.” After Ballona, some Bay Area developers similarly argued that they no longer had to offer engineering solutions to climate related flood risks.

In 2012, Facebook submitted designs for its new 430,000-square-foot headquarters in Menlo Park, parts of which were just a few dozen yards across from — and a few feet above — San Francisco Bay. The documents claimed that structures would be “raised above future flood risk.”

But officials from the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, the city of East Palo Alto and Save the Bay found the plan to be “inadequate” and asked for “possible options for providing adequate flood protection.”

Facebook followed the anti- CEQA lawyers’ script on how to challenge the law’s authority. Quoting Ballona, the company argued that the review process required developers to “evaluate the effects of the project on the environment, not the effect of the environment on the project.”

The answer satisfied the Menlo Park City Council, which approved the project. The facility opened for business in March 2015.

Late last year, Menlo Park changed its general plan, proposing new transportation and significant building in the neighborhoods of Belle Haven, Flood Triangle, Suburban Park and Lorelei Manor. During public comment, one resident challenged city planners to “detail the number of new residential units and the amount of nonresidential square footage that would be added in areas prone to sea level rise.”

The city responded that it required new development to be elevated 2 feet above the level that the Federal Emergency Management Agency now considers part of the flood zone — a standard that the agency has never updated to account for sea level rise predictions.

Like private development lawyers, the city echoed the recent court cases: “The environment’s effects on a proposed project, which includes sea level rise, are not considered impacts under CEQA.”

A similar fight emerged around a shoreline garbage dump in Marin County. A San Anselmo-based environmental group, No Wetlands Landfill Expansion, filed suit in mid-2012 challenging the state-approved enlargement of the Redwood Landfill in Novato, the largest such facility in the county.

The landfill is near San Francisco Bay and the Petaluma River, and levees would need to be fortified and expanded in five to 10 years. “There is no indication how Redwood must design and construct the levees,” environmentalists wrote. Officials said levees were last expanded in 2008. Landfill representatives said in court filings that Redwood did not want to commit to levee expansion, given the “unknowns associated with sea level rise,” but promised to review and update flood-protection plans every few years. Again, landfill lawyers employed the same CEQA-limiting language as in other cases.

Initially, the appeals court judges were skeptical and agreed to review the climate change analysis. They said that if water breached a levee, thousands of pounds of solid waste would pour into the river and ultimately the bay. This would clearly be “an impact on the environment.”

But after reviewing the company’s planning documents, the judges ruled in favor of the landfill, saying they trusted the company to review levee improvements every five years for “the entire remaining operating life of the landfill.”

Redwood Landfill staff did not respond to requests for comment. Rebecca Ng, deputy director of Marin County’s environmental health department, said the expansion had not begun.

Lawyers Strategize Next Moves

The court rulings have strengthened the hand of lawyers working for the building industry, who gathered several times in the last year to plan their next moves on behalf of developers.

On Oct. 5, 2016, the Bay Planning Coalition, whose mission is to convene industry and municipal groups around development and watershed issues, held a meeting billed as an “expert briefing” at the law office of Wendell Rosen Black & Dean in downtown Oakland. CEQA experts distributed case summaries with key conclusions and language that could be worked directly into environmental impact reports. The main agenda item addressed the nuances of the 2015 California Building Industry Association ruling from the state Supreme Court. Planners and policymakers from local governments were invited.

Sabey, the building industry association lawyer, works at 50 California St. in San Francisco, which attorneys jokingly call “CEQA headquarters,” where the political sausage of Bay Area real estate development is made.

While lawyers on other floors of the building — which has sweeping views of the bay, including hundreds of acres of land that could someday be below sea level — may disagree, Sabey said cities have relied too much on the California Environmental Quality Act.

“There will be that case where sea level rise is a CEQA issue,” he said, “but it should be a rare bird, where you are causing an impact because of your project.”

The post By Weakening Law, Developers Shift Sea Rise Burden to Cities appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

In 1995, the Diablo Valley Ranch, a drug rehab facility in Contra Costa County, planned to expand. The problem? According to neighbors, the land it wanted to build on was contaminated with oil and toxic chemicals.

The company made what was then an obscure argument: The California Environmental Quality Act, known as CEQA, the state’s premiere environmental law, did not require developers to consider how the environment might influence its project, only how the project would affect the environment.

Today, developers are using the same reasoning to push back on the ability of Bay Area cities to regulate waterfront development and protect residents from rising sea levels, a product of human-caused climate change. Over the last two decades, as developers won over judges in more and more state courts, lawyers began peppering these phrases in environmental impact reports, lawsuits and responses to public comment.

January 1995: RULING

Baird v. County of Contra Costa; Bi-Bett Corporation — The Court of Appeal rules that Contra Costa County does not have to address existing soil pollution in a land-use decision. The case contradicts previous rulings and is largely ignored for more than a decade.

“The purpose of CEQA is to protect the environment from proposed projects, not to protect proposed projects from the existing environment. CEQA is implicated only by adverse changes in the environment”

November 2008: ACTION

Call for Sea Rise Plan Coordination — Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger issues an executive order directing state agencies to plan for sea level rise.

July 2009: RULING

City of Long Beach v. Los Angeles Unified School District — The Court of Appeal rules that school officials are not obligated to account for existing air pollution from a nearby highway when deciding where to put a new facility.

“We digress first to make the point that generally, the purpose of an environmental impact report is to identify the significant effects on the environment of a project not the impact of the environment on the project, such as the school’s students and staff.”

June 2011: RULING

South Orange County Wastewater Authority v. City of Dana Point; Makar Properties LLC — The Court of Appeal rules that a proposed mixed-use development cannot be blocked on account of pollution emanating from a nearby sewage treatment plant.

“The argument is that the environment needs to be cleaned up to make it suitable for the project, rather than vice versa … The Legislature did not enact CEQA to protect people from the environment…”

October 2011: ACTION

San Francisco Bay Plan — The Bay Conservation and Development Commission updates sea level rise findings and policies. Shoreline developers will now be asked to base their climate change analysis on consensus science

November 2011: RULING

Ballona Wetlands Land Trust v. City of Los Angeles; Playa Capital Company LLC — The Court of Appeal rules that a developer seeking to build condominium and commercial space on a wetland does not have to address “impacts relating to sea level rise as a result of global climate change.”

“But identifying the effects on the project and its users of locating the project in a particular environmental setting is neither consistent with CEQA’s legislative purpose nor required by the CEQA statutes…”

January 2012: ACTION

Facebook Campus Project — In applying for permits for a new 22-acre campus in Menlo Park, the social media giant faces criticism from environmental groups, regional agencies and the neighboring city of East Palo Alto, centered on inadequate planning for sea level rise. The company responds to most of the comments with boilerplate language from recent court cases saying it is not responsible for protecting the property from climate-induced flooding.

“CEQA requires an analysis of the effects of a proposed project on the environment…the purpose of an EIR is to identify the significant effects of a project on the environment, not the significant effects of the environment on the project…”

March 2012: RULING

No Wetlands Landfill Expansion v. County of Marin et al., Redwood Landfill Inc. — The Court of Appeal green-lights the expansion of Marin County’s largest garbage dump. The court says it trusts the company to review levee improvements every five years for the remaining life of the landfill.

“… EIR had no duty to analyze or mitigate the environment’s effect on the project (as opposed to the project’s effect on the environment). But Ballona Wetlands is distinguishable because, although the EIR may not specifically say so, future sea rise here presumably would not only impact the project but would also impact the environment by contaminating waterways]…”

June 2012: ACTION

West Coast Sea Rise Study — The National Research Council publishes a comprehensive study of how sea level rise will affect California, Oregon and Washington. The intention is for city planners to use the information as a tool for long-range planning.

July 2015: ACTION

Report on Waterfront Building Boom — Comparing scientists’ predictions with land-use permits from around the Bay Area, the Public Press finds that builders are investing more than $21 billion in new shoreline development.

December 2015: RULING

California Building Industry Association v. Bay Area Air Quality Management District — The California Supreme Court rules that the intention of the California Environmental Quality Act is to protect the environment, and does not apply to the effects on people or property from future climate change. California and local officials acknowledge that it will be hard to require developers to anticipate climate change effects such as sea level rise.

“In light of CEQA’s text and structure, we conclude that CEQA generally does not require an analysis of how existing environmental conditions will impact a project’s future users or residents.”

March 2016: ACTION

San Francisco Sea Level Rise Action Plan — San Francisco adopts guidance documents for addressing the threat of sea level rise for all public facilities and outlines objectives for coastal flood planning and mitigation.

October 2016: ACTION

General Plan, City of Menlo Park — Menlo Park releases a general plan covering a wide variety of goals including land use, transportation, utilities and public investment. One commenter recommends the city “detail the number of residential unites and amount of nonresidential square footage that would be added in areas prone to sea level rise,” but the city responds that it is no longer obligated to do so.

“…Per the recent California Supreme Court decision in the California Building Industry Association [CBIA] v Bay Area Air Quality Management District [BAAQMD], issued December 17, 2015, the environment’s effect on a proposed project, which includes sea level rise, are not considered impacts under CEQA unless the proposed project would exacerbate an environmental hazard…”

November 2016: RULING

Mission Bay Alliance v. Office of Community Investment and Infrastructure; Golden State Warriors Arena LLC — The Court of Appeal rules in favor of the Golden State Warriors basketball team in its application for a $1 billion development including a sports arena and office complex. The legal challenge had focused on the effects on traffic and wind patterns, mentioning sea level rise only parenthetically.

“Defendants argue correctly that CEQA does not require analysis of the wind impacts on the project. “[T]he purpose of an FSEIR is to identify the significant effects of a project on the environment, not the significant effects of the environment on the project.”

December 2016: ACTION

San Francisco’s Natural Resources Management Plan — The City of San Francisco, which owns a golf course and natural area in coastal San Mateo County, issues a wide-ranging parks management plan calling for keeping the level of wetlands artificially stable. In comments, the Sierra Club objects that the proposal “will lack any resiliency in the face of increased climate stress and inevitable sea-level rise.”

“The purpose of an EIR is to provide public agencies and the public in general with detailed information about the effect which a proposed project is likely to have on the environment.”

The post Timeline: Lawyers for Developers Share Tactics to Blunt CEQA appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Before the Golden State Warriors scored a win at the Planning Commission for a new bayfront arena and the San Francisco Giants got the go-ahead from voters for plans to develop housing and offices next to AT&T Park in late 2015, city agencies and the Port of San Francisco sought input from major “stakeholders,” which included the two sports franchises.

But they did not involve the district’s supervisor or the public, and did not widely distribute the June 2015 draft marked “final” before the official publication in September 2016 — two weeks after an official records request by the Public Press.

Ten months earlier, voters had approved Proposition D, the Giants’ Mission Rock development, without being given a chance to compare the developers’ ballot-box claims about resilience to sea level rise with the independently researched report laying out the need to radically re-engineer the burgeoning neighborhood.

The report describes the immediate need for public agencies to plan for massive physical barriers to protect against powerful storms and coastal flooding that are expected to increasingly threaten the city’s southeast and downtown over the next few decades. Costs will likely run into the billions, with taxpayers bearing most of the burden.

“We don’t have 5–10 years before this process can begin,” wrote the authors of the report, prepared by SPUR, a San Francisco-based planning and urban research think tank. “The catastrophic events of Katrina and Sandy show that disasters with unimaginable impacts can happen tomorrow.”

Though the report’s authors shared several drafts with the Planning Department staff, there is no record of members of the San Francisco Planning Commission having seen it before approving the Warriors arena in November 2015, not long after voters passed Proposition D. There is also no indication that drafts were shared officially with the Board of Supervisors before it approved both projects.

RELATED: Emails Show How Flood Study Became Public

Mayor Ed Lee advocated forcefully for both megadevelopments, which together would cost about $2.6 billion. His office and the port jointly requested the sea level rise study in early 2014, but missed several opportunities to bring the report into public discussions about major waterfront developments.

Three members of the city Planning Commission, which approved the Warriors basketball palace in November 2015, said they were kept in the dark about the dangers from rising seas in the city’s fastestgrowing neighborhood. Mission Bay is home to residential towers, offices, medical and research facilities, and the city’s new emergency services center.

District 10 Supervisor Malia Cohen, who represents the city’s southeastern shore, said she was not aware of the draft report’s findings before the board signed off on the Warriors’ and Giants’ plans.

“I was not consulted in the drafting of the documents,” Cohen said. “Of course, I am interested and concerned by the looming impact of sea level rise.”

Public Works Projects Foreseen

The Mission Creek Sea Level Rise Adaptation Study presented strategies for massive public works projects that might be needed to fortify the shoreline against sea level rise. Ideas included reinforcing seawalls, building a tidal gate, creating offshore structures to lessen waves’ impact and elevating Third Street as a kind of levee. In one scenario, a large section of the neighborhood closest to the bay could be retrofitted to flood occasionally. That area would include the Warriors arena.

The report cites a 2012 study by the National Research Council which found that global warming could raise bay waters above the current street level at Mission Bay in just a few decades. In an extreme scenario, builders engineering new structures could expect San Francisco Bay to rise 4.6 feet above current high tide, plus 3.4 feet of storm surge, scientists found. Much of Mission Bay lies below the 8-foot level.

The Mission Creek report warned forcefully against complacency: “The slow pace of sea level rise does not communicate a sense of impending threat; however, that danger could materialize in this community. It is urgent that work on solutions begins now because major developments in the inundation zone are currently being planned or built. It can take years or decades to conceptualize, design, earn public support, fund, permit and construct major capital shoreline projects.”

Fuad Sweiss, the mayor’s adviser on sea level rise, said the study is part of the city’s broader resiliency planning process. Its recommendations include public-works projects that would extend beyond any individual development or even the borders of the recently established 303-acre Mission Bay neighborhood.

He said the original six-month timeline for the report was overly ambitious for a project of this magnitude because it required fact-checking, consultation with many departments and new imaging data that reflected recent landscape changes made by developers.

“We were busy with so many things that were related to sea level rise,” he said. “We had so many issues. We tried to unify the work by all city agencies under one umbrella.”

Yet for all that work, the final report in September 2016 looked remarkably similar to a draft distributed to stakeholders in the summer of 2015, and contained the same core message: Mission Bay is in danger of flooding within the lifetime of buildings already in place or under construction, so the neighborhood needs to be redesigned as it is being built out.

While several Planning Department staff were involved in reviewing drafts of the report for more than two years, one member of the Planning Commission, which oversees the department and grants city approval on major developments, said he had not read the report until its publication last fall — nearly a year too late to make a difference.

Dennis Richards, the commission’s vice president, said he might have viewed the Warriors arena and other Mission Bay developments in a new light if the study had been available to the seven-member panel in 2015.

“Given that this was not available, would we have done something differently?” Richards said. “That’s the question, I think.”

By the time the report was released, the Planning Commission no longer had a chance to weigh in, and a lawsuit against the proposed arena, which the developers beat back in November 2016, was near resolution.

“What’s really funny is that all of the appeals have been exhausted — and this piece of information comes out after the appeals have been exhausted,” Richards said.

Developers Eye Early Drafts

The Port of San Francisco, the Planning Department, the Office of Community Investment and Infrastructure, and the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, among others, cofunded the $200,000 study, which was started in 2014 by a team of consultants led by SPUR, with help from the Dutch engineering firm Arcadis.

The Public Press first inquired about the publication schedule in December 2014. In an email, Laura Tam, SPUR’s sustainable development policy director, said her government counterparts told her it would be published likely in “late January or early February.” In late February 2015, she said completion was delayed further because of “technical issues.”

Reached for a comment recently, Tam said she could not recall any occasions when drafts of the report were presented to policymaking bodies.

“As the SPUR project manager of this report I can share that it did not occur to me, and would not be typical for us, to share drafts of our study with the Planning Commission or the Board of Supervisors,” she said.

AnMarie Rodgers, senior policy adviser with the Planning Department, was involved in the project until 2015. “As a SPUR report, it does not require city adoption,” she told the Public Press.

Emails from the port show that in June 2014, Brad Benson, a project manager who oversaw the Mission Creek report, asked Lee’s office in an email if he could reach out to the Warriors’ developer, Strada Investment Group. “I want to make sure they don’t have any concerns about the study,” Benson wrote.

Three months later, the Giants hosted a meeting at AT&T Park at which an early draft of the study and slides were shared with an array of stakeholders, including staff from Mission Bay Development Group and representatives from city agencies. At that time, the Giants were seeking voter approval to raise the height limit for Mission Rock, a $1.6 billion, mixed-use development with 1,500 homes along the south side of Mission Creek. That narrow channel separates Mission Bay from South of Market, and meets the bay at McCovey Cove, where home run balls make a splash.

The slides indicated that the final report would be drafted by November 2014 and published by March 2015.

On Sept. 19, Tam followed up with the group by sending the draft presentation and requesting responses to design details within a week.

“It seems important to share within your departments and teams at your judgment so that the final product is the best it can be, and our key stakeholders are not surprised by it,” she wrote.

Three days later, Tam outlined to the capital planning committee the city’s need for spending on major public works to protect Mission Bay from sea level rise.

“We cannot just protect individual buildings,” Tam told participants at the Sept. 22 session. “We need something that protects the whole area in the long term.”

The presentation made headlines — “Study: SF may need to build levee to protect Mission Bay from rising sea levels,” the San Francisco Examiner reported. But the draft report was not released.

Later that fall, the project team began to further involve department heads and developers to “take more time to get people bought in to what we are doing,” Arcadis consultant Peter Wijsman wrote in an October 2014 email to Tam and Benson.

Eight months later, in June 2015, a version of the study stamped as a “final draft” was circulated to the stakeholders group and the University of California, San Francisco.

Fran Weld, the Giants’ vice president of development, said the team was “able to learn from the process.” She said the 28-acre Mission Rock site would be re-engineered and could function as a levee. The Giants’ plan to raise the buildings to 5.5 feet above today’s mean high tide, surrounded with graded parks that drain to the streets and the bay. She said a Mello-Roos tax — a special neighborhood-based real estate surcharge — would help pay for future sea rise protections.

“We know we don’t know everything that will happen with climate change today,” she said, “so we are doing the best we can today and structuring the financing for what we don’t know in the future.”

Luring Basketball Back to S.F.

For the Warriors’ dreams of returning to San Francisco, the second time was a charm.

In April 2014, the team’s brass abandoned its initial plan for an arena on Piers 30-32 near the Bay Bridge after it generated fierce political opposition from neighbors concerned that it would create congestion and block views. Instead, the team purchased its current 12-acre site in Mission Bay from cloud-computing giant Salesforce. Developing on a private plot instead of port property directly on top of the water eliminated the need for voter approval as well as reviews by the Bay Conservation and Development Commission and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

“We just have to deal with the city agencies, and that’s a lot simpler, quite frankly,” Warriors co-owner Joe Lacob told the San Jose Mercury News.

In December 2014 — a few months after the study began — Strada Investment Group received a draft to review.

On Dec. 12, Benson emailed Strada executives about the adaptation study and design concepts. “We would very much like to share these with you to get your feedback, as the study area includes the arena site at its southern boundary,” Benson wrote.

In a recent interview, Benson qualified that communiqué, saying he merely wanted to alert Strada to the existence of the study.

“We didn’t get any feedback from the Warriors,” Benson said.

Strada representatives did not respond to repeated requests for comment. The team has said it would raise buildings and waterproof below-ground features. Environmental documents acknowledged that during a storm the main court, practice courts and parking garage could be flooded as soon as 2100, if the more pessimistic scientific predictions hold true.

Benson said that he shared drafts with Planning Department staff, and that it would have been their responsibility to bring it to the commission. He described the Mission Creek study as a “thought exercise” to develop a range of concepts. “I think it will serve the public education function as it was intended,” he said.

“The purpose of the report was never to inform development proposals,” Benson said. “It was not to inform development in Mission Bay. It was to look at the shoreline — what will happen to the shoreline over the next 50 or 100 years? It is a concept document.”

But the study itself warned that large sections of the neighborhood, including the areas where the teams are building, would need expensive retrofits.

Catherine Reilly, with the city’s Office of Community Investment and Infrastructure, suggested in one email “that we set the tone” with “solution graphics” that are “attractive for reprint in a news article so that we do not only end up with the ‘sky is falling’ flooding map and the story of solutions is lost.”

The mayor did seem concerned about the dangers of sea level rise to the megadevelopments he was pushing hard for in Mission Bay. In fact, his staff was working on multiple, parallel tracks to study the problem.

In March 2015, Lee convened a citywide committee to coordinate sea level rise planning across departments. About year after that, the panel published an “action plan” for assessing flood risk for public buildings. That document received only a half-sentence mention in the Mission Creek study.

But it did make a promise: A follow-up report would be completed by summer 2018 that would detail funding strategies and possibly new regulations on land use.

The post Projects Sailed Through Despite Dire Flood Study appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

The Public Press initially inquired about the Mission Creek study in late 2014 and was told that it was in draft form and delayed for more technical information, feedback or bureaucratic review.

On Sept. 15, 2016, the Public Press emailed the Port of San Francisco’s head of communications, Renee Martin, officially requesting the Mission Creek study, which was prepared by SPUR, the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association. The port co-funded the study with the Planning Department and other agencies.

On Sept. 20, port project manager Brad Benson emailed Martin, Eileen Malley, the port’s general counsel, and Fuad Sweiss, Mayor Ed Lee’s adviser on sea level rise.

“The study in question is in final draft form, with planned release on Monday or Tuesday,” Benson wrote, indicating Sept. 26 or 27. “This does not appear to be a public records request in my view. Is that a correct reading?”

Malley responded that day: “Why don’t you think this is a public records request? It looks to me like a request for the latest draft copy of the Mission Creek Study: Adapting to Rising Tides. I had a conversation with Renee this morning regarding the Sunshine Act disclosure requirements for this type of document. Give me a call or stop by and I can review them with you.”

The next day, Benson sent an email to city stakeholders notifying them that SPUR, with whom Benson had worked closely, would be releasing the report on behalf of the city and the Bay Conservation and Development Commission.

“Reporters/news outlets who have expressed interest include John King, PublicPress, and the NY Times,” Benson wrote.

“Report publication was delayed by a number of factors: a need to make sure that the SLR maps in the report include accurate data about street elevations in Mission Bay; a need to re-up the contract to revise the report to incorporate comments from City departments; and, for a significant period, collective focus on the recently released City SLR Action Plan.”

By the end of the week, days before the scheduled release, the report had been leaked to King, the urban design critic at the San Francisco Chronicle.

In an email, Laura Tam, director of sustainable development policy at SPUR, sent low-resolution copies of the report to a broader group of officials and developers, including the San Francisco Giants and the University of California, San Francisco.

“Please note this report is embargoed until Monday afternoon. Do not send it to the media, share it, or put anything up on social media before Monday afternoon around 2 pm. We gave John King an exclusive and he is planning to have a story ready around then, and it will be in the Chronicle on Tuesday. After that it is fair game for you to share, and please do.”

The post Emails Show How Flood Study Finally Became Public appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.