Proposition K would start a process that could, about a year later, permanently close a large section of San Francisco’s Great Highway to car traffic so that the city could later turn it into a park. The measure would not fund the design or creation of the park.

The measure would affect a section of roadway called the Upper Great Highway, a 2-mile stretch along Ocean Beach on the city’s western edge, from Lincoln Way to Sloat Boulevard.

Proposition K marks the latest chapter in a saga that began early in the COVID-19 pandemic. At that time, the Board of Supervisors closed the Upper Great Highway to vehicle traffic so that residents could walk and bike there while social distancing, to slow the disease’s spread — a move that was widely popular. In 2022, the board approved a pilot project that kept the street closed to cars on weekends but open to them during weekdays. The pilot project is set to end at the close of 2025, at which point the board would decide whether to change the road’s use.

If passed, Proposition K would decide the Upper Great Highway’s fate instead.

Listen to a summary of what this ballot measure would do.

Support

Five San Francisco supervisors co-sponsored Proposition K’s placement on the ballot: Myrna Melgar, Dean Preston, Rafael Mandelman, Matt Dorsey and Joel Engardio, who has been the most vocal of the measure’s advocates. Engardio represents the Sunset District, which contains the Upper Great Highway.

Proposition K is a “once-in-a-century opportunity” to transform the road into an iconic oceanside park that could bring the Sunset to life, Engardio has said.

Proponents say that the highway’s pilot project has been a success, drawing an average of 4,000 visitors per weekend day. Making the road a permanent park could boost business opportunities, reduce automobile pollution in the area and create more safe space for pedestrians and cyclists to enjoy the beach, they say. The park would also increase coastal access for people with mobility challenges, such as wheelchair users and those with physical disabilities.

Proposition K has secured support from prominent political figures, including Mayor London Breed, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, state Sen. Scott Wiener, BART Board director Janice Li and former District 1 Supervisor Eric Mar.

Friends of Great Highway Park, a group that hosts events and activities on the roadway during weekends, has advocated loudly for the proposition. Other supporters include a diverse array of organizations focused on urban planning, environmentalism and local politics, like Livable City, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, Sierra Club, SPUR, the San Francisco Democratic Party, San Francisco YIMBY and GrowSF.

Opposition

Since the proposition’s announcement, it has divided residents on San Francisco’s west side. Opponents expressed frustration that Engardio did not consult them before deciding to place it on the ballot. They argue that it’s unfair for voters citywide to decide their neighborhood’s future.

Opponents say the Upper Great Highway is vital for north-south travel, and permanently closing it to vehicles could worsen traffic and divert it into residential areas, as well as lengthen commutes — a recent study by the city’s transportation agency found a minor potential impact on commutes. Some merchants worry that these inconveniences would discourage long-time customers from continuing to patronize them.

District 1 Supervisor Connie Chan represents the Richmond District, home to many Great Highway commuters in the city’s northwest. She opposes the ballot measure, arguing that it’s too extreme; she has proposed converting only half the road into recreational space and keeping the rest of it open to cars.

Some prominent local groups representing Chinese and other Asian American residents oppose Proposition K, including the Edwin M. Lee Asian Pacific Democratic Club, Chinese American Democratic Club and Chinatown Merchants United Association of San Francisco.

Aaron Peskin, Board of Supervisors president and a mayoral candidate, also opposes Proposition K, calling it divisive and an “unfunded mandate.” Mayoral candidates Daniel Lurie and Mark Farrell oppose Proposition K, too.

Other detractors include Open The Great Highway, a group formed to oppose the road’s closure, and several neighborhood groups, including Planning Association for the Richmond, Coalition for San Francisco Neighborhoods and Neighborhoods United SF.

What it would do

Proposition K would not immediately and permanently close the Upper Great Highway to cars and transform it into a park.

Instead, the measure’s passage would begin a long bureaucratic process, involving numerous local and state government agencies, that would lead to that outcome.

Because the measure would not create funding for the park, officials would have to find a way to pay for it.

If voters passed Proposition K, then the San Francisco Planning Department would propose changes to the land-use rules governing the Upper Great Highway so that it could become a park. The Board of Supervisors would publicly review that proposal, and residents and concerned citizens could attend hearings and offer comment.

The board would likely approve the proposal, as rejecting it could be seen as “not implementing the will of the voters,” said Jonathan Goldberg, legislative aide to Supervisor Engardio. That would be “unheard of,” he added, and could expose the city to risk of lawsuit.

To proceed, the city would also need approval from state regulators.

At that point — possibly 10 months to a year after Proposition K’s passage, at the soonest — the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department could start designing the new park, a process that might take several years, Goldberg said. In the meantime, the department could apply to close the road to vehicle traffic permanently, so that it could be used entirely for recreation.

The Recreation and Parks Department did not respond to requests for comment about its role in implementing Proposition K.

Cost

The San Francisco Controller’s Office analyzed what it would cost City Hall to manage the Upper Great Highway after permanently closing it to car traffic — a scenario that Proposition K’s passage would enable, but not immediately bring about.

The office’s analysis did not include the costs associated with obtaining regulatory approval for the closure. It also omitted design and construction costs for a new park.

By closing the Upper Great Highway to car traffic, the city would save an estimated $1.5 million in one-time infrastructure expenses, Deputy Controller ChiaYu Ma wrote in the office’s analysis. That factors in $4.3 million that the city would avoid spending on canceled road construction and traffic signal replacements, offset by $860,000 to $2.7 million in new costs for traffic calming measures and traffic lights to divert vehicles from the Upper Great Highway to alternative routes.

Keeping the road closed to cars may cause increased expenses for trash collection and other operations, Ma said. But overall, the city would save $350,000 to $700,000 each year in reduced road and traffic light maintenance, as well as sand removal.

Campaign finance

As of Oct. 7, the “Yes on K” campaign committee had raised $608,553, according to data from the San Francisco Ethics Commission.

Much of that money has come from leaders in tech and finance, including $350,000 from Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman; $75,000 from Emmett Shear, a partner at venture capital firm Y Combinator; $50,000 from Anatoly Yakovenko, CEO of Solana Labs, a public blockchain platform developer; and $49,900 from the Benjamin Spero, managing director of Spectrum Equity, an investment firm.

The “No on K” campaign committee had raised $110,645. Matt Boschetto, a candidate in the District 7 supervisor race, created the committee.

By a quirk of election laws, the measure-focused committee lacks the per-person $500 contribution limit that applies to committees focused on getting candidates into office.  Boschetto cannot legally use the funds from “No on K” for his supervisorial campaign. Boschetto’s father, Michael Boschetto, had contributed $50,000 to “No on K,” while the Boschetto Family Partnership added $10,000 and Matt Boschetto himself gave $5,000.

Anti-Proposition K group Open the Great Highway is the target of an ethics complaint, which alleges that it fundraised without first registering as a political action committee.

History and context

Proposition K is highly controversial. Both supporters and opponents have contested how it is presented to voters, from its title on the ballot to its official financial analysis. It has been the focus of numerous political demonstrations and media roundtables, and candidates in many supervisorial races have invoked the issue in their campaigns.

In 2022, San Franciscans considered a ballot measure that would have ended the Upper Great Highway pilot program and allowed cars back on the road seven days a week, as well as let cars resume driving on John F. Kennedy Drive in Golden Gate Park. Voters overwhelmingly rejected the measure, with 65.11% voting against it.

Closing the Upper Great Highway could leave the city’s Chinese American community feeling isolated, said Supervisor Chan at a recent debate on Proposition K, hosted by local radio station KALW. Chan, the only Asian American on the Board of Supervisors, said that Chinese residents frequently use the thoroughfare to travel between the Richmond and Sunset districts, both of which have historically served as cultural hubs for the community. But, of all drivers who take the Upper Great Highway, just 5% use it to commute between those districts, according to a 2021 study of pre-pandemic traffic data. Most drivers use it to get to the South Bay, the study found.

The section of road south of the Upper Great Highway, which is called the Great Highway Extension and connects the Sunset District to Daly City, has already been slated for closure due to coastal erosion. The Upper Great Highway faces a moderate risk of erosion, with its southern portion particularly affected.

Votes needed to pass

Proposition K requires a simple majority of “yes” votes to pass.

Click here to return to our full voter guide.

Editor’s notes:

On 10/15/2024, this article was updated with information about the share of drivers who use the Upper Great Highway to commute between neighborhoods, as well as to the South Bay.

On 10/18/2024, it was corrected to call Rep. Nancy Pelosi speaker emerita.

The post Proposition K — Authorize Great Highway to Become Car-Free, Possibly a Park appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

“It will be on an alley that we pass through every day to go home,” said Amanda Li, whose family lives in an affordable housing complex across from the site. “It will definitely affect us.”

The dispensary will be on one of Bayview’s less developed streets, near low-income and senior housing. Over a dozen cannabis facilities already operate in the neighborhood, nearly all of which are used only to grow the plant. Many residents, especially Chinese Americans, have opposed the new facility, which will sell cannabis products, out of fear that it will encourage drug use and make the area less safe. Despite their objections, the city’s Planning Commission approved the project Thursday because it did not violate city laws.

[ Read also: “As Attacks on Asian Americans Regain Spotlight, SF Group Seeks to Soothe Community” ]

Construction of the 2,500-square-foot facility at 2330 Lane St. is projected to begin by the end of 2024, though the project has yet to obtain building permits. Doors could open to customers about a year later.

Mubasher Choudhery, a Bayview native and owner of the site and forthcoming dispensary, proposed the project as a participant in the San Francisco Office of Cannabis’ equity program. The program is designed to help groups disproportionately affected by the War on Drugs of the 1980s enter the cannabis industry.

Choudhery said his vision is for people to come to the store not only to buy cannabis products, but also to consume it and see how it is grown.

San Francisco and California have legalized the production and consumption of cannabis, but the federal government has not. Many first-generation Chinese Americans, especially seniors, still see it as similar to harsher drugs like opium, which the British exported to China during the period of its invasion.

“The stigma behind cannabis is what we’re fighting against,” said Choudhery, a third-generation immigrant of Southeast Asian descent.

More than 30 people attended the Thursday hearing that was triggered by an official request by Josephine Zhao, a community leader who previously ran for the city’s public school board, on behalf of residents who spoke limited English.

One-by-one, people took the microphone to express their concerns. They said they were troubled that teenagers were already smoking in the neighborhood’s streets and parking lots, and feared that the dispensary would entice more to try cannabis and become addicted to it. They said that people high on the drug could not control their behavior, which worried them in light of recent high-profile instances of anti-Asian violence.

“Many people here have a lot of concerns,” Zhao told the commission. “You may say that they are uneducated about marijuana, but that’s their life experience.”

The residents objected to yet another cannabis facility in an area that already had so many. As they had organized to oppose Choudhery’s project, they said, they found out about two other proposed facilities near their homes, both of which would only be for growing cannabis.

The Bayview is one of few areas in San Francisco where much of the land can host light industrial and manufacturing facilities, including those in the cannabis industry. The facilities are cheek-to-jowl with diverse, low-income communities.

“We expect this is going to be an issue moving forward,” said Dyanna Volek, who came to the hearing as a neighbor and member of the Bayview Hunters Point Citizen Advisory Committee, a volunteer group that advises city government on land-use and other neighborhood issues.

After they approved Choudhery’s project, the Planning Commission suggested that he remain in contact with the neighborhood advisory committee to field concerns they might have in the future.

The post Cannabis Dispensary and Lounge to Open in SF Bayview, Despite Residents’ Objections appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Dance company LionDanceME’s amplified-sound permit, with the board-imposed constraints, will expire in June. At that point, the company can apply for a new one. 

At the board’s Wednesday hearing, merchants and others said that the community had not been adequately informed about the company’s efforts to get this permit. That’s why they had not shown up and voiced their concerns at the public meeting where it was granted. 

“This time our community will for sure know it,” said Ben Marcus-Willers, referring to the possible future hearing for a renewed permit. He, alongside others from Chinatown’s merchant community, triggered Wednesday’s hearing. He said he believed the board’s decision was fair. 

Following the decision, Norman Lau, LionDanceME founder, said: “It’s not about winning a battle. It’s about avoiding a war.” 

For weeks, Lau and a group of local merchants have been in contention over the permit, as part of a larger, ongoing conflict over outdoor events in Chinatown.  

The events were originally intended to help the neighborhood recover from the ravages of COVID-19, which injured the tourism industry in Chinatown and throughout the city. But as local groups increasingly obtained permits for outdoor street closures to hold events, merchants along Grant Avenue, a major tourist corridor before the pandemic, began to object. They claimed that the events were creating too much noise and disrupting their businesses. 

The dispute came to a head when the merchants group got the Board of Appeals to intervene, temporarily suspending Lau’s amplified-sound permit. The two sides failed to reach a compromise ahead of the board hearing.  

The board voted 4-1 to let LionDanceME temporarily retain a more limited version of the permit.

The permit’s original terms allowed for amplified sound at events during Saturdays and Sundays, from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., along a three-block span of Grant Avenue. The board’s decision limits the use of amplified sound to Saturdays, from 12 p.m. to 5 p.m., along the 700 block of Grant Avenue, between Sacramento and Clay streets. 

LionDanceME possesses a separate permit, which is valid through March 2025 and allows it to hold outdoor events without amplified sound on weekends, from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., along three blocks of Grant Avenue. The board’s decision did not affect this permit. However, Lau can choose to modify its terms, said Nick Chapman, the manager for street closures and special events at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. 

At the Wednesday hearing, Lau said he was open to reducing the scope of that permit too. 

The post In SF’s Chinatown, Conflict Over Outdoor Events Resolved — for Now  appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

The dispute, which the city’s Board of Appeals is set to weigh in on Wednesday, is the latest skirmish over the purpose of Grant Avenue, once filled with throngs of daily visitors, and how it should serve the neighborhood’s commerce and culture.  

“We’re not a theme park,” said Ben Marcus-Willers, branding director for Red Blossom Tea Company and one of a handful of people opposing the potential expansion of outdoor events. Other closures of Grant Avenue for events have disrupted the flow of customers to the shop, he said. 

Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who represents the district and is running for mayor, is trying to help settle the dispute before the Wednesday hearing. 

[ Read also: “New Parade Dragon Carries on Local Legacy Dating Back Nearly 175 Years” ]

Since the start of the pandemic, Chinatown groups have closed pockets of the neighborhood to vehicle traffic, making space for events that might draw people. As the closures increased over time, local merchants began to bristle. Those frustrations boiled over this March in response to the latest attempt, by a dance company, to potentially expand events. A group of merchants had the Board of Appeals intervene, temporarily halting the expansion. The two sides then set up dueling online petitions, both trying to garner public support. 

By April 12, the merchants’ petition, on the website change.org, had 1,453 signatures. The competing petition had 1,626 signatures. 

Neighborhood mixed on outdoor performances

Chinatown’s denizens have mixed opinions about the recurring street closures and the events they enable.  

Norman Lau is a Chinatown native and the founder of LionDanceME, the dance company whose application for an amplified-sound permit sparked the current conflict over Grant Avenue. For years, Lau’s company has used the street for weekend lion dances, in which costumed performers mimic a lion’s movements.  

Lau said he believes that hosting dance practices and performances on the neighborhood’s busiest street has helped attract not only tourists, but also young people who had grown up there and later moved away.  

Members of younger generations seldom have a reason to return unless their families own shops, Lau observed. “We don’t really have anything to offer for people in their 20s and 30s,” he said. 

Some nearby merchants agree. They said the performances increase the area’s gravitational pull as a cultural hub for Chinese Americans.  

“Just last week, one of my customers drove two hours from Sacramento with his family to see the lion dance in Chinatown,” said Wendy Li, who has worked on Grant Avenue for over a decade. 

However, for Chinatown residents like 89-year-old cartoonist Xu Shu Lei, who lives in a small room on Grant Avenue with his wife, the constant drumming sound during performances can be frustrating. It often wakes him from his afternoon naps.  

“At this age, I don’t get a lot of sleep at night,” Lei said. 

“We all support lion dancing and youth engagement,” said David Au, one of the local merchants who triggered the Board of Appeals’ intervention. But Au said he would like to see at least some of those dance practices and events occur elsewhere in Chinatown, outside of Grant Avenue. He also suggested that local groups could offer other forms of youth engagement, like more after-school programs at the Chinatown YMCA. 

Cherry Cai, who runs a gift store on the street, echoed that idea. She said the lion dance performance benefited her business and suggested that it could be rotated among different locations. 

Uptick in events irks some

Outdoor events in Chinatown began ramping up soon after COVID-19 struck a blow to tourism in San Francisco. Neighborhood groups obtained permits through the city’s Shared Spaces program to close a section of Grant Avenue to car traffic on weekends. The site became home to cultural performances and outdoor businesses that drew pedestrians. 

The weekend closures were extended after COVID restrictions lifted. Over time, additional groups got permits to close the street for events.  

Some local merchants and residents began objecting to closures. They said that some event organizers were not consulting the community enough before getting permits for events, which were reducing parking for residents, customers and vehicles unloading merchandise, and resulting in more unsightly trash on the streets. The merchants were concerned that increasing closures would further hurt their businesses.  

“Eventually, all these permits are merging together,” Marcus-Willers said. “At a certain point, we are going to lose complete access to our street if this trend continues.” 

Merchants group slams the brakes

In 2022, LionDanceME took over a pre-existing permit to close three blocks of Grant Avenue, and the company has renewed it annually ever since. On weekends, the group generally used one block for lion dancing. 

Following the most recent permit renewal, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency installed a street sign this March prohibiting cars from stopping along the three-block stretch without prior notice on any weekend. 

Merchants were surprised and bothered that the affected area would expand. “A metal sign means that this is no longer temporary, it’s permanent now,” said merchant Au. He is one of the merchants who first spotted the sign. 

They met with Lau and transit agency representatives and expressed their concerns. Lau agreed to limit dancing to one day per weekend, and only on one block, and city staff covered the sign so that drivers could stop along the street again. But less than a week later, the merchants discovered that Lau had gotten yet another permit, this time for amplified sound at the dance performances — and for full weekends. 

The merchants saw this as a breach of their agreement and got the Board of Appeals to temporarily put a hold on the permit.  

If the two groups fail to reach a compromise before the Board of Appeals hearing next week, the Board will decide whether to revoke the permit. 

Editor’s note (4/16/2024): An earlier version of this story named the wrong person as the author of the merchants’ online petition, and incorrectly described a type of event that company LionDanceME participated in. That information has been removed.

The post Chinatown Merchants Frustrated as Outdoor Events Disrupt Business appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Proposition C would change San Francisco’s tax policy to allow a one-time transfer tax exemption for owners of properties converted from commercial to residential use the first time they are sold following conversion, as long as the change of use is approved before Jan. 1, 2030.

San Francisco currently requires a transfer tax of 6% on properties that sell for more than $25 million. The proposed exemption could be applied to up to 5 million square feet of converted properties. The measure would allow the Board of Supervisors to amend, reduce, suspend or repeal the transfer tax without voter approval, although voters would have to approve increases. It would also let the city increase the amount of commercial development allowed in a given year by adding to that tally the square footage of property that has been converted or demolished.

Under this measure, the transfer tax exemption could be applied to portions of buildings converted from commercial to residential if other parts of the properties continue to host business operations.

The opportunity to use Proposition C transfer tax exemptions would expire at the end of 2054.

The controller’s office estimates that the city could lose between $34 million and $150 million over 30 years if it allows transfer tax exemptions on 5 million square feet converted from commercial to residential use. By removing space occupied by businesses, the city could lose additional revenue currently provided by commercial operations, including gross receipt and other taxes that would not apply to residential properties. However, the city could see an increase in property taxes because the assessed value of residential property is often higher than it is for commercial property of the same size.

The calculations are complicated and are based on guessing what will happen: “If the transfer tax exemption makes residential conversion of an office building financially feasible, but that building would have been eventually occupied by future office tenants, the exemption would most likely lead to a net negative revenue impact for the City,” wrote Controller Ben Rosenfield in his analysis of Proposition C.

Mayor London Breed submitted this measure for inclusion on the ballot. It is also supported by Supervisors Matt Dorsey, Joel Engardio, Rafael Mandelman and Catherine Stefani, who together signed the official rebuttal to the opposition statement.

“San Francisco’s Downtown is undergoing a period of change — and there is a tremendous opportunity to attract investment and excitement in the future of what Downtown can be: a thriving, 24-hour neighborhood filled with residents, workers, arts and culture, and successful small businesses,” Breed wrote in her official statement supporting Proposition C.

More than a dozen business associations and organizations and nearly 50 individuals signed onto paid arguments submitted in support of the measure, including state Sen. Scott Wiener, along with groups including Housing Action Coalition, GrowSF, San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research, and SF Yimby.

Proposition C is opposed by organizations including the Council of Community Housing Organizations, the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee, Affordable Housing Alliance, the San Francisco Tenants Union, Senior and Disability Action, the Harvey Milk LGBTQ Democratic Club and Small Business Forward. In their statement against Proposition C, they called it “a deceptive ballot measure that takes power away from voters and allows City Hall politicians to hand out corporate tax breaks to billionaires and huge property owners.”

They noted in their rebuttal that current law allows tax exemptions for converting office buildings to affordable housing, and that the measure would extend that benefit to developers of luxury housing.

This measure requires more than 50% affirmative votes to pass.

A “yes” vote means you support changing San Francisco’s transfer tax policy to allow a one-time transfer tax exemption for the owners of properties converted from commercial to residential use the first time they are sold following conversion.

A “no” vote means you do not want the proposed changes to the city’s transfer tax policies.

The post Proposition C — Real Estate Transfer Tax Exemption and Office Space Allocation appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in late May gave the 22-year-old complex a failing physical inspection score of 40 out of 100 as part of its regular oversight process to ensure safe conditions in subsidized housing.   

Andrew Ten, a HUD public affairs officer whose jurisdiction includes San Francisco, wrote in an email that issues related to building exteriors, systems and other health and safety concerns contributed to Plaza East’s failing score.  

Failing scores “are not a common experience, but it does happen,” Ten wrote.  

Neither McCormack Baron Salazar, which owns the complex, nor the San Francisco Housing Authority have responded to requests for details regarding the failing score. Pedro Abril, who works for the John Stewart Company, which provides management services for Plaza East, said at the meeting that the complex is filing an appeal with HUD regarding certain line items noted in the inspection, but that reversing those may not give the property a passing score of 60.  

HUD expects the San Francisco Housing Authority to immediately correct and document the correction of the most pressing health and safety issues at the 193-unit complex, and the federal agency will conduct a follow-up inspection in a year, Ten wrote.  

Of all public housing sites in the country, 13% failed their most recent inspections, according to data posted on HUD’s website, which includes inspection data through October 2022. Prior to the May inspection, HUD last inspected Plaza East in January 2017 and gave it a passing score of 82. HUD paused on-site visits during the pandemic.  

Additional Plaza East units had been repaired since the May report, and repairs had been completed on 154 units, according an email sent Tuesday by the Housing Authority. Because every single unit needed emergency fixes, 39 still await repairs.  

San Francisco gave McCormack Baron Salazar a $2.7 million loan to fix habitability issues at Plaza East in April 2021. A schedule outlined in the loan indicated that the work would be completed by May 30, 2022. As of this week, the company had used about 66% percent of the available loan, according to Audrey Abadilla, a communications and outreach associate at the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development. 

At the meeting, Joaquín Torres, president of the Housing Authority Commission, expressed frustration at the slow pace of repairs and poor oversight by McCormack Baron Salazar.   

“I just want to say again, as I did last month and the month before that, that these gaps in repair service are quite simply not helping any of us achieve the goal of building confidence and trust with the residents,” Torres said. “The rate at which these issues are being quote resolved or quote addressed is something that is tremendously disappointing right now. And I want to be sure that this is something that is taken seriously, because the manner in which we’re getting this information — or rather not getting information — continues to be extremely dispiriting.” 

The city hands out loan money through reimbursement, which the recipient can request once a month. The Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development aims to process requests within 30 days. The contractor making repairs at Plaza East typically does about $50,000 worth of work and then stops until the reimbursements come through, which can result in interruptions of two to four weeks, Jerry Johnson, an associate project manager at McCormack Baron Salazar, said at the recent Housing Authority Commission meeting.  

Other factors contributed to slow repairs, including staffing shortages and supply chain delays related to the coronavirus pandemic, a transition to new property management, severe winter weather, and resident concerns regarding repairs and relocation efforts, Abadilla wrote. McCormack Baron Salazar managed Plaza East until it hired the John Stewart Company, which has managed the property since June 2021.  

On top of the approved loan, the city has provided an additional $160,000 loan to McCormack Baron Salazar because the company “didn’t have the operating funds to support their portion of the services contract” for the 2022-23 fiscal year, Abadilla wrote in an email. 

Operating funds will continue to be a challenge for Plaza East in its current configuration, according to a written statement from the Housing Authority. 

“The existing funding model is not able to consistently and substantially address all necessary repairs,” according to the statement. “In the short term, all repairs are prioritized by health and safety. In the long term, Plaza East must be rebuilt, which will provide brand new units that our residents deserve and higher operating subsidies to keep those units in good condition.”

In a March 2021 interview, Adhi Nagraj — who at the time was McCormack Baron Salazar’s senior vice president and director of development, and is now the company’s chief development officer — blamed a lack of federal funding for ongoing maintenance issues, saying that dwindling federal subsidies have led to a situation where there is not enough funding for repairs. The company cited the decline of federal funding for public housing as part of the rationale for the company’s plan to tear down the complex and replace it with a mix of market-rate and subsidized units. 

Redevelopment plan and next steps 

In August 2022, McCormack Baron Salazar and the Housing Authority submitted a preliminary proposal to the San Francisco Planning Department that included replacing Plaza East’s existing 193 public housing units and adding 270 market rate and 292 affordable units that would be rented below market rate to tenants who qualify by income. This proposal almost quadruples the existing number of units, and could add 200 to 300 more units than a plan to redevelop the site from two years ago. 

The future of Plaza East Apartments has been up in the air since January 2021, when McCormack Baron Salazar requested permission from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to demolish the then 20-year-old public housing complex and rebuild it as a mixed-income site with 450 to 550 units. This proposal was supported by Mayor London Breed and the San Francisco Housing Authority. 

HUD denied that request in March 2021, determining that the costs of rehabilitating the complex did not meet a high enough threshold to merit demolition and redevelopment according to the program under which the developer originally applied.  

The developer is working on next steps to seek approval from the Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors for the current proposal. Housing Authority representatives hope the application will be submitted this year, according to a statement sent in response to questions about the proposal.

“We are hopeful that pending additional discussions with the community, an application will be submitted this year,” according an early May statement from the Housing Authority. Once that happens, the project approval process is expected to take about two years before construction can begin.  

Supervisor Dean Preston, whose district includes Plaza East, called living conditions there “unacceptable.” 

“My office has stood with tenants demanding repairs and a tenant-led process for planning the future of Plaza East,” Preston said in an emailed statement. “We successfully pushed for $2.7 million that was released for repairs at Plaza East, and won $20 million in last year’s budget for life-safety repairs in public housing which the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development continues to delay. It’s time for the city to listen to residents, finish the emergency short term repairs, and create a real tenant-supported plan for the future of Plaza East.” 

McCormack Baron Salazar did not respond to multiple requests for comment regarding the ongoing repairs or future plans for redevelopment of the site.  

Following HUD’s rejection of its 2021 demolition plans, McCormack Baron Salazar has shifted gears to focus on a different HUD program. This would involve tearing down the existing property and converting it to a new operating model, which “offers the best financial resources to rebuild the existing public housing units at Plaza East and secure ongoing subsidies that are stable, predictable, and greater than those provided through the Public Housing program,” according to a statement from the Housing Authority.  

Many tenants oppose rebuilding the site as mixed-income housing, and at least 100 of them signed a petition last June asking the developer to consider alternatives, such as rebuilding the site as 100% affordable housing. They said the developer should not move forward without tenant input and transparency.  

“We want to make sure that we’re not played,” resident Yolanda Marshall told Mission Local last June.  

Poor conditions and ongoing vacancies 

Department of Building Inspection records document a history of problems at the site, including leaks, mold and pest infestations. In November 2021, several tenants whose units received emergency repairs said the fixes were inadequate. As of June 6, Department of Building Inspections records showed 11 unresolved complaints and 28 outstanding code violations at Plaza East, bringing the total number of violations at the site to 136 since 2004. 

A group of 18 tenants at Plaza East sued for damages in May 2021, alleging that their units posed “severe health and safety hazards,” citing habitability issues such as mold growth, leaks and vermin. The plaintiffs also alleged that the building’s management, which was McCormack Baron Salazar at the time, harassed them and refused to carry out necessary repairs. The group settled in January, though the terms of the agreement were not divulged by the plaintiff attorneys or accessible online.  

Since the owner initiated emergency repair work, vacancies at the site have gone up.  

As of June 1, there were 25 vacancies at Plaza East, according to an email from the Housing Authority. At the start of the repairs process, there were 20, nine of which were supposed to be immediately repaired and leased out to new tenants, according to the loan agreement.

Vacant units at a public housing site reduce the operating subsidy provided by HUD, wrote Ten, the regional public affairs officer at HUD, adding that it is in the Housing Authority’s best interest to maximize occupancy.  

Both the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development and the Housing Authority are concerned about long term vacancies, but Plaza East is not filling vacant units unless they are being used to house existing Plaza East residents. Such practices are common at large public housing properties slated for redevelopment, Abadilla wrote.

The Housing Authority and the site property manager, the John Stewart Company, are responsible for filling vacancies, according to a statement from the Housing Authority. However, “even if all units on site were occupied, Plaza East would still not receive enough subsidy to pay for all necessary operating costs.”

UPDATED 06/07/23: This article was changed to indicate that emailed statements sent by Linda Mason, general counsel for the Housing Authority, should be attributed to the San Francisco Housing Authority, not to her individually.

The post Emergency Repairs in Public Housing Complex Are Behind Schedule as Owner Advances Redevelopment Plans appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

After 2½ years of meetings, community discussions, historical deep dives and policy generation, a panel tasked with proposing how San Francisco might atone for decades of discrimination against Black residents is ready to ask the city to step up and support equity rhetoric with action.

San Francisco’s African American Reparations Advisory Committee is aiming to submit its final recommendations to the city on June 30, according to Brittni Chicuata, director of economic rights at the city’s Human Rights Commission. In the meantime, the city’s annual budget process is in full swing, which may affect funding and the timeline for whatever reparations policies the board decides to pursue.

The recommendations are nonbinding, meaning the Board of Supervisors may choose to support any number of the policies, or none at all. It can also amend them.

“Where the rubber hits the road is what that Board of Supervisors does,” said the Rev. Amos Brown, president of the San Francisco NAACP branch and health subcommittee lead for the reparations committee. “The ball is in their court.”

The recommendations, released only in draft form, number more than 100 and tackle disparities in educational achievement for Black students, differences in the median life expectancy for Black San Franciscans and the overrepresentation of Black people experiencing homelessness and incarceration.

In a March meeting, supervisors voiced support for reparations, unanimously voting to accept the draft in a nonbinding resolution. Of the proposed policies, some could be enacted quickly, while others would require more time. In some cases, advocacy at the state and federal level is required.

Breed must propose a city budget in June. Tinisch Hollins, vice chair of the reparations committee, said the group has been discussing how to secure funding in this year’s budget.

“We’ve been actively having conversations as a committee, looking at the recommendations that are what’s been called low-hanging fruit, that the city could potentially move forward on in this budget cycle,” Hollins said in an April interview. She noted that the majority of city departments have equity plans that could offer starting points for improving accountability and addressing the needs of Black residents.

“Since you have an equity plan, you can then reallocate or reconfigure your budget so that this becomes a priority for what you need to do,” she said.

An Office of Reparations

After its plan is submitted, the committee — which is authorized to operate until January 2024 — will continue meeting to discuss how the city can follow through on reparations.

Some community leaders are eager to ensure this work continues. Supervisor Shamann Walton, who represents Bayview-Hunters Point, Potrero Hill and Visitacion Valley, introduced legislation in March requesting $50 million to establish an Office of Reparations that would help implement policies and find people eligible for programs.

Walton is trying to get the proposal on the agenda at the board’s Budget and Appropriations Committee, which is the first step before a budget request would go to the full board for a vote.

“If we get the supplemental heard and passed, obviously that will go into this budget cycle,” he said. “And then my hope is, of course, to be able to extend and get resources into the next budget.”

However, Breed indicated in late April that she had “no plans at this time” to back the proposal.

In response to recent questions about the mayor’s thoughts on the reparations plan broadly and how implementation of any policies would work without an Office of Reparations, her office wrote in an email: “The policies presented in the plan will be considered once they are final.” Instead of commenting on policy proposals, the email pointed to other programs that address racial inequity, such as the Dream Keeper Initiative and guaranteed income programs. The Dream Keeper Initiative provides down payment loans for first-time Black home buyers. The reparations plan suggests turning these loans into grants for those who qualify, among other housing-specific policy changes.

Walton is still trying to gain support from Breed and Board of Supervisors colleagues. If he fails to win over the mayor, he will need a veto-proof majority of eight supervisors on his side.

Breed’s lack of support for the office was disappointing to at least one committee member the day after it was announced.

“I haven’t talked to any other committee members, but I imagine they’re all discouraged right now,” said James Lance Taylor, a political science professor at the University of San Francisco, who also sits on the reparations committee.

However, in the April interview, Hollins expressed what she called a “cautious optimism” that reparations work would move forward.

“If we do our work at helping to identify what’s immediate need, what the opportunity is, and then we collaborate with both the Mayor’s Office and the Board of Supervisors, we’ll be able to start moving things downstream, even before we have an Office of Reparations, or whatever entity is going to be in place,” she said.

‘The Second Oldest Idea in Black Politics’

The committee’s draft plan spurred a wave of headlines across the country when it was made public. A proposal to give each eligible African American in the city a one-time payment of $5 million led to criticisms regarding cost, especially as the city faces a $780 million budget deficit in the next two years.

Support for reparations is skewed heavily by race. A 2021 Pew Research Center study shows that 77% of Black Americans support reparations, compared with 18% of whites.

Much like the California State Reparations Task Force, which recently voted to approve policy proposals for the state Legislature’s consideration, the San Francisco committee is running into the question: Why are reparations being considered in a state where slavery was never legal?

For his part, Taylor said the concept of reparations “is the second oldest idea in Black politics, the first one being abolition.”

Hollins said California shared responsibility with the rest of the country for enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act, a law that compelled people in free states to capture those who had fled and send them back to enslavement out of state. California also at various times banned Black people from voting and failed to provide them with other legal rights and protections.

“California may have never had slavery as they put it, but the badges of slavery were here,” she said, adding that California “certainly supported all of the racist policies that excluded black people specifically, and that harm has had real consequences.”

Today, the lifespan of Black San Franciscans is 11 years shorter than the citywide average. Black households in San Francisco have a staggering low median income, $34,000 per year in 2019, compared with a citywide median of $112,000.

Urban Renewal

But slavery isn’t the only reason Black San Franciscans are pushing for reparations.

“Where people often think about slavery as the qualifying act that brings on the need for reparations, we know we have this very long history of deep housing discrimination and instability,” said Rachel Brahinsky, a professor of politics and urban studies at the University of San Francisco.

Starting in the 1930s, the federal government began denying Black borrowers loans based on a discriminatory housing practice known as redlining, in which certain areas — especially those with high concentrations of people of color — were deemed “high risk” for lending. Though redlining was a federal program, municipal officers as well as local bank officials, real estate agents and appraisers helped those creating the maps and designating risk. The maps informed local lending decisions in both the private and public sectors, which is how redlining contributed to racial disparities in homeownership, residential segregation and disinvestment from communities of color.

Brahinsky said racially restrictive covenants, which were rules written into property deeds that barred Black people from owning or renting these properties, as well as a practice in which real estate agents would encourage African Americans to move to certain parts of town when looking for homes, preserved segregation.

These policies contributed in part to the segregation of Black people into two main neighborhoods in San Francisco: the Fillmore and Bayview-Hunters Point. Both neighborhoods were later subject to another discriminatory housing program known as urban renewal. Under this federal program, which purported to remove “blight” from cities, the government seized land using eminent domain, and cities razed buildings to make way for new construction.

“The way that blight was defined, it was about peeling paint, it was about infrastructural problems,” Brahinsky said. “But it was also about people and was also about race very much.” She said that up to 20,000 people were displaced by the program in San Francisco.

“It drastically changed the community,” said Ericka Scott, a Black businesswoman who was raised in the Western Addition and now owns Honey Art Studio. “What was once said, originally, to remodel, redevelop, fix up the community, was really code for demolish the community, get people out of here and get new people in.”

Today, San Francisco’s Black population is an estimated 5.7%, compared with 13.4% at its peak in 1970.

Before urban renewal, the Fillmore was a thriving cultural hub with numerous jazz clubs and Black-owned businesses, and was known as the Harlem of the West. Scott’s gallery gives visitors a taste of what that was like through a series of photos from “Harlem of the West,” a book of photos by Elizabeth Pepin Silva and Lewis Watts that chronicles the local jazz scene in its heyday.

Lily Robinson-Trezvant, 78, remembers hearing jazz music as she walked down the streets of the Fillmore during her childhood. Her family came to San Francisco in the wake of World War II. After living in military housing, her parents purchased a home.

“It was a beautiful two-story Victorian house. And it was perfect for our family,” she said. “They finally were living their dream. And just like they got it, they lost it.”

Robinson-Trezvant’s home was seized by the government, and her family moved to Plumas County near Reno, Nev. In compensation, they received “just nothing,” she said. “You couldn’t buy a house with what they gave us.” Her mother had a nervous breakdown. Eventually, the family returned to San Francisco, this time as renters, only to be displaced a second time when that home was torn down, she said.

In the years following demolitions, many plots of land remained vacant, said Lewis Watts, an archivist and co-author of “Harlem of the West.”

“For 20 or 30 years, the Fillmore almost looked like a ghost town. It would look like a war zone because there were a number of empty lots,” that remained undeveloped for years, he said.

Though it’s impossible to put a value on the trauma her family suffered, Robinson-Trezvant can point to the current value of her family’s first home. Unlike many buildings that were torn down, Robinson-Trezvant said her home was actually moved to the Mission District and she keeps tabs on it by checking real estate websites. The house is worth about $2.5 million today.

The Fillmore wasn’t the only African American community to be affected by redevelopment. Learning from what transpired further north, Black San Franciscans in Bayview-Hunters Point fought for redevelopment on their own terms, with some success. A group of Black women known as the Big Five secured $40 million in federal funding for new housing during redevelopment, but ultimately the neighborhood was hampered by a lack of investment in other areas, such as jobs, public transit and other factors like environmental racism.

[For a more in-depth exploration of how the Fillmore and Bayview-Hunters Point were affected by urban renewal, listen to the full “Civic” episode.]

Looking ahead

At the time of the interview, Robinson-Trezvant had not been following the reparations plan closely. However, she now has a copy of the draft plan, and said she wanted to read it through before forming an opinion on it. When asked if the city could repair past harms to the Black community, she said, “Anything is possible if you try and you care.”

Taylor, the political science professor, said he believed some kind of reparations would be approved, because these conversations are happening simultaneously across the country, and at the national level.

“We’ve mobilized hundreds of people in the city,” he said. “We’ve mobilized cities around America, where we’re inspiring people all over the planet.” Particularly children, who someday will be responsible for carrying on this work.

“We planted the seed for the next generation,” he added. “So even if we don’t win this battle, ultimately, if America can ever be right, we will win the war.”

Read the draft reparations plan.

The next African American Reparations Advisory Committee meeting is June 5 at 5:30 p.m.

The post SF Reparations Plan Nears Submission, but Funding Not Yet Secure appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

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.

Urban renewal was a publicly and privately funded effort across the U.S. wherein local governments acquired land in areas deemed “blighted” — often using a racially biased lens — through eminent domain, forcibly displacing residents and demolishing existing buildings with promises to rebuild. In San Francisco, urban renewal targeted Black cultural centers and neighborhoods, uprooting thousands of families and destroying lively, well-established communities.

Seeking the “relative acceptance” of Black musicians in France, Leslie Crawford left San Francisco to pursue his musical career in Europe. The move did not go well.

“My dad died of an overdose in France and never returned home alive,” Majeid Crawford wrote in an email. “I blame urban renewal in part for my dad’s death and many others who died from broken spirits and hearts.”

Crawford’s story is one of thousands illustrating the far-reaching effects of urban renewal on San Francisco’s Black communities. Today, he is executive director of the New Community Leadership Foundation, a nonprofit partnering with the city of San Francisco to find people displaced by urban renewal — and their descendants — who might qualify for residences here through the Certificate of Preference Program. Certificate holders move to the head of the line to get into city-funded housing.

Though the program has existed for decades, the city is giving it renewed attention as the Board of Supervisors prepares to review a draft Reparations Plan to address historic harms against Black San Franciscans at a meeting March 14.

Because of high demand, San Francisco runs a lottery for city-funded affordable rental housing and units available for purchase. When individuals apply for units in a particular building, those with certificates of preference are placed in a separate category giving them priority over all other applicants. Then, their applications are reviewed for eligibility. If an applicant is eligible for an available unit, it will be offered to them. The process starts from scratch in each new housing project that is built.

Recent California legislation requires that San Francisco’s certificates of preference — and similar programs in other municipalities — be extended to descendants of people displaced due to urban renewal.

“If you get it, it’s the golden ticket,” said Cathy Davis, executive director of Bayview Senior Services, a nonprofit that provides housing and other services to seniors. The agency asks everyone who walks through its doors, mostly African Americans over the age of 50, for a childhood home address to see if they may be eligible for a certificate.

The Certificate of Preference Program is not new; the first certificates were issued in the 1960s as homes were razed and families were displaced from neighborhoods like the Western Addition and SoMa, though many of those certificates were never honored. The New Community Leadership Foundation hopes to change that and reach newly qualified descendants.

Historical wrongs

A federally and city-funded program, urban renewal led to the displacement of as many as 20,000 San Francisco residents — most were Black, though some were Japanese and Filipino. Writer James Baldwin famously stated after visiting San Francisco in 1963 that urban renewal “means Negro removal.”

It was an era of false promises: “Residents and businesses were given worthless promissory notes that they could one day return, but historically certificates of preference have not been tracked and have rarely been honored,” according to a draft reparations plan prepared by San Francisco’s African American Reparations Advisory Committee.

At the same time families were being forced from their homes, “a San Francisco Redevelopment Agency survey showed that 34 out of every 35 apartments in the city prohibited African Americans, and the housing that was available was typically segregated, substandard, and expensive,” according to a report from the University of California, Berkeley. Many families moved to new neighborhoods in SoMa, Mission Bay and Hunters Point, and were displaced a second time when parts of those neighborhoods were seized under eminent domain and razed for redevelopment.

Renewed efforts and key changes

In November 2022, the New Community Leadership Foundation partnered with Lynx Insights & Investigations, a private investigation firm, and began scouring records for the names of people who were displaced and their descendants and trying to track them down. They have reached hundreds and anticipate reaching “well over a thousand” in the next two months, Giles Miller, a principal investigator at Lynx, wrote in an email.

Many of the people who were displaced remain in the greater Bay Area, Sacramento and Southern California. People also moved to Texas, the Carolinas and Georgia, Miller wrote.

This renewed tracking effort is benefiting from two key changes: a 2021 law that makes descendants of people who were displaced eligible for certificates, and a stronger commitment by the city to search for and alert people who may qualify.

The search starts with a document called a “site occupancy record,” which families filled out when they were initially displaced. Investigators cross reference the names on that list (heads of households and dependents) with commercial databases to find potential certificate qualifiers and their descendants, relying on tools like social media when the databases fall short.

Though many initial attempts are unsuccessful, the group is persistent in leaving voicemails and speaking with relatives. Once potential qualifiers are reached, they are referred to the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, where they are instructed to fill out a certificate request form and may be asked for additional records such as birth certificates.

Since the Certificate of Preference Program was established in 1967, almost 7,000 certificates have been issued by city agencies. In ensuing decades, the program expanded at various stages to include not just displaced heads of households, but other adults who were household members, children who were displaced, and most recently descendants of those who were displaced. But until now, the program has been underused, in earlier decades due to city government not honoring certificates, and more recently due to lack of trust and a lack of information in the communities it is meant to serve.

Of the nearly 7,000 certificates of preference, only 1,483 have been exercised. In January 2022, the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development began issuing the first certificates to descendants of people who lost their homes during urban renewal, and since then has issued more than 30 new certificates to children and grandchildren of displaced residents. As of December, 914 certificate holders were in contact with the office and about 100 were actively applying for housing opportunities.

Reparations connection

Reinvigoration of the Certificate of Preference Program comes at a time when the city has renewed efforts to right past injustices. San Francisco leaders are considering reparations and other potential responses to the historical wrongs of slavery, redlining, urban renewal, displacement and other ongoing disparities. The Board of Supervisors is slated to hold a hearing March 14 on the draft of the city’s Reparations Plan.

In it, certificates of preference serve as one of several mechanisms that could establish whether a person might be eligible for reparations. Suggestions related to certificates of preference include offering certificate holders automatic qualification for city-funded units and first right of refusal for any rental or home ownership opportunities rather than making them enter the citywide affordable housing lottery, giving them stipends to assist with relocation costs for moving into any housing in the city, creating a more transparent process for residents to determine whether they qualify for certificates, and allocating more money for promoting the program and toward displaced resident location efforts.

To Brittni Chicuata, economic rights director at the Human Rights Commission, whose role also includes management of the San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee, certificates of preference are one piece in a puzzle of housing policies outlined in the plan.

“The hope for the housing solutions and recommendations is that there would be kind of a coordinated action or just understanding there’s the ecosystem of housing,” she said, noting such programs as down payment assistance and access to federally subsidized housing. “It takes multiple levers to actually make any progress.”

Employing certificates of preferences in conjunction with the reparations plan “creates a huge opportunity to prioritize this group of people,” she said. “If the city made that political and policy decision to only give housing to people who are on this list until that list was exhausted, that would be reparations.”

Remaining questions

Given the history of racial terror, distrust and shortcomings of San Francisco’s past governmental response to urban renewal, some community leaders still have questions about the scope of the certificate program and the larger affordable housing system within which it exists.

The Rev. Amos Brown said he doesn’t want policy solutions to solely focus on those displaced and their descendants, but to have a broader scope that applies to Black people more generally. Urban renewal “was not done individually, it was done to a group,” he said.

Urban renewal did “indescribably psychological damage to black folks,” said Brown, pastor at the Third Baptist Church in San Francisco and leader of the San Francisco Reparation Task Force’s health subcommittee. Brown is also president of San Francisco’s NAACP chapter and serves as vice chair of California’s Reparations Task Force. In addition to bearing the trauma of these memories, Black San Franciscans today also carry the burden of lower median incomes, more housing instability, and worse health and education outcomes compared with their white counterparts. Black households in the city earn on average $30,000 — less than a quarter of the median white household income.

A lot of people affected by urban renewal who qualify for certificates are struggling to get housing in the lottery system, which Davis of Bayview Senior Services called unfair. Eliminating the lottery for certificate holders, as the reparations plan suggests, could remove this barrier. Davis also said she wants to see the program expanded for those who were displaced in public housing, who do not currently qualify.

Crawford acknowledged that some people who have certificates of preference simply cannot afford available units, even when they are designated “low income,” but said that the program creates an important opportunity for those who were harmed to return to San Francisco, and could act as a galvanizing effort to unite community nonprofits on myriad issues related to affordable housing.

“Billions of dollars of wealth have been stripped from the Black community in San Francisco as a result of urban renewal, redlining and other government policies,” he wrote. “The Black community pulled themselves out of the ravages of Jim Crow just to have everything stripped from them. Reparations is needed to give back what was stolen.”

If you or a family member were displaced during urban renewal and may qualify for a certificate of preference, click here to see a list of affected addresses and here to submit an online application. To find out if you may qualify to be a Certificate of Preference holder, you can visit www.findmysfcp.org, email certificate@findmysfcp.org, or call 415-275-0035. For more information about the Certificates of Preference program, visit this city website.

UPDATED 3/3/23: Additional details were added to the resource information section at the end of this article.

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Proposition N would give the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department control of the Music Concourse Garage in Golden Gate Park. The 800-space parking garage is managed by a nonprofit created by a ballot measure in 1998 that raised private donations to help finance the facility. Supporters of Proposition N cite a series of financial scandals and mismanagement of the garage and say the parking lot is underutilized because parking rates are set too high. They want to amend the earlier ballot measure to give control of the facility to Rec and Park.

This measure requires more than 50% affirmative votes to pass.

Proposition N would overturn part of a ballot measure (then-Proposition J) passed by voters in June 1998 that placed construction of the Music Concourse Garage in Golden Gate Park in the hands of a nonprofit called the Golden Gate Park Concourse Authority.

The authority took over management of the garage from the Music Concourse Community Partnership, another nonprofit created to raise tax deductible donations to build the 800-space garage. Organizers raised $36 million of the $55 million needed to build the garage. Ongoing profits from the garage were supposed to pay off loans taken out to cover the balance.

The original measure also called for any excess parking funds to be returned to the operation, maintenance, improvement or enhancement of Golden Gate Park. No such funds have been distributed.

In 2008, a $4 million embezzlement scandal by a former chief financial officer rocked the original fundraising nonprofit. Since then, the concourse authority has struggled to pay rent to the city.

Critics of the nonprofit said that the parking spaces are overpriced, with many of the 800 parking spaces often going unused. They also criticize the authority for not providing discounts to park employees who work in the De Young Museum, California Academy of Sciences and other attractions near the garage.

No opponents to the measure have placed a counter argument for maintaining the current system in the official ballot pamphlet.

Mayor London Breed issued the “Official Proponent Argument.” She said that the passage of Proposition N would allow the city “to spend public dollars on the garage, which creates flexibility over the management and parking rates.” She said the change would make it possible for the city to offer discounts to low-income and disabled visitors who drive to the park. The mayor said that “flexible pricing” will also allow the city to pay down the debt incurred from building the garage. 

The post Proposition N — Golden Gate Park Underground Parking Facility; Golden Gate Park Concourse Authority appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.