The Vancouver design philosophy is aimed at creating neighborhoods dense enough to support numerous businesses in nearly every city block, so errands don't require driving. Official traffic studies show that even though thousands of new residents have been attracted to the downtown area, car traffic has plummeted as pedestrian traffic has increased. Because everyone's walking, the city is strangely, and sublimely, quiet. And because Vancouver has built thousands of apartments during the past decade, vacancy rates remain greater than 4 percent, the tipping point below which rents tend to rise.
Despite a Vancouver economic boom that is related to capital flight from Hong Kong, the Canadian city's rents are just over half San Francisco's. The streets become even more beautiful when you realize that they're not exclusive: Any working stiff can afford to live there.
As exotic as it feels, Vancouver's accomplishment is not based on a secret recipe. Anyone with a master's degree in city planning can recite the municipal benefits of very tall, narrow condominium high-rises, dense urban/commercial neighborhoods, and a mixture of parks, stores, and apartments in a filigreed urban lacework. But those benefits require coherent planning and public consensus, and those are attributes that have, so far, been impossible to foster in San Francisco.
Unlike Vancouver, where the city runs a highly professional planning process that decides general development guidelines and then allows expert planners to implement them without interference from politicians, San Francisco has, under Willie Brown's leadership, concocted the Italian Parliament of the planning world.
S.F.'s planning process is rife with back-room deals, interest-group wars, and lengthy and costly appeals, delays, hearings, and new hearings. Planning is an endless interest-group battle between NIMBY neighborhood associations and developers, without a good-faith vision of the city's future in sight. Negotiations between developers and neighbors can last decades and lead to canceled projects in some cases, bastard-child edifices in others. Housing everywhere remains scarce and expensive. And in areas where housing could be built – including SOMA, the Van Ness corridor, Geary Boulevard, and the central waterfront – the landscape is filled with empty lots, ugly, low-slung cinder-block buildings, and traffic-clogged streets.
In Vancouver, there's been a concerted effort to depoliticize the planning process. Decisions are made by a panel of professional architects and planners whose work is monitored by a citizens advisory committee. But San Francisco needn't change the structure of its planning bodies to see that development decisions are made on the basis of professional planning.
Our Planning Commission – for the last eight years a layperson's club of political hacks – could just as easily be composed of prominent local planners and architects whose only allegiance is to improving the cityscape. The job description of the planning director needn't change dramatically, either. A national search for a top-notch visionary to replace Willie Brown yes-man Gerald Green would go a long way toward returning the Planning Department to its previous role of articulating a vision for the city's future.
The most important necessary change, of course, is at the top; our next mayor must be more than an arbiter between interest groups.
Happily both mayoral candidates have made reforming the Planning Department a central plank of their campaigns. Matt Gonzalez has made public integrity a campaign cornerstone. Gavin Newsom has said he'd replace the department's leadership and attempt to depoliticize the planning process.
For the sake of San Francisco, I hope they're both sincere.
For 18 years, city planners have viewed the areas surrounding the Transbay Terminal and on Rincon Hill – now a ratty pastiche of asphalt parking lots, one-story warehouse buildings, and surface streets – as the site for a potential urban renaissance. This area is near the greatest concentration of public transport in western North America; it's within walking distance of hundreds of thousands of downtown jobs; it's in a potentially beautiful location, near the bay, away from the fog, close to North Beach, Chinatown, and many of San Francisco's urban amenities.
Earlier this month the Board of Supervisors voted to certify an environmental impact statement for the first buildings in the planned Rincon Hill neighborhood – a 35-story tower and a 40-story tower at 300 Spear St., and a 35-story and a 40-story tower at 201 Folsom St. The four towers would bring a total of 1,600 new apartments. Next month the board will consider zoning changes needed to build them.
But the towers are the result of a deal between builders' lobbyists and the mayor, and planners complain they were squeezed out of the process. As a result, the buildings have aspects that benefit developers at the city's expense. For one thing, the towers are fat and extend too close to streets, creating lightless canyons; they include some 1,600 parking spaces, which will encourage cars and driving, rather than mass transit and walking; and many of those spaces are to be built aboveground, creating a pedestrian alleyway lined by blank walls. These towers are a tragedy, almost regardless of what happens. If they are built, they will make a dark, view-blocking, unwalkable neighborhood that will, in turn, make it more difficult to muster needed support for plans to build additional apartment towers in the Rincon Hill area. And if the Board of Supervisors heeds neighbors who are protesting the towers and rejects the zoning changes necessary for them to be built, San Francisco will lose some 1,600 units of desperately needed housing, a fifth of it subsidized to serve low-income renters.
The project should go forward despite its faults. And it probably will. Supervisors across the ideological spectrum, including Matt Gonzalez, Gavin Newsom, Tony Hall, Chris Daly, and Gerardo Sandoval, have said they support the project in principle.
But putting housing on Rincon Hill didn't have to be such a difficult decision. Clear building guidelines could have given us a beautiful, livable, amenity-rich walking neighborhood that would have saved developers time and money. "If the Planning Department had been clear about saying, 'These are the public benefits you have to pay for,' the builders would have saved money on lawyers. I blame the Planning Department as much as the developer," says Kate White, executive director of the Housing Action Coalition, a group dedicated to increasing the number of housing units built in San Francisco.
Beginning in 1999, the Planning Department began discussions aimed at producing a plan for an integrated, Vancouver-style neighborhood in the Rincon Hill area. The Planning Department's long-term planning division hired UC Berkeley professor Peter Bosselmann to do the sort of urban modeling that helped put high-density housing towers and uncrowded-seeming neighborhoods in downtown Vancouver. He created a simulation of the Rincon Hill buildings that developers Tishman Spier and Marty Dalton were proposing, showing that the buildings would create a massive, most un-Vancouver-like, light-blocking wall. Bosselmann presented his results at a public meeting hosted by the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research (SPUR) Association. The following week, Bosselmann's contract was canceled. People in the Planning Department believe the Rincon Hill developers exerted pressure to censor the report.
This ongoing tug of war, in which developers are awarded points for lobbying and NIMBY neighborhood groups gain advantage by clamoring (while the city's staff of planners is left out in the cold), benefits nobody. Jim Chappell, president of SPUR, supports approval of the zoning changes that would allow the Rincon Hill buildings now proposed. But he is dismayed at the politicized process that brought them this far.
"There's nothing to be gained by our process here except by lawyers, expeditors, people who thrive on chaos. It doesn't serve anyone – developers, residents, anyone," says Chappell. "I was just in a meeting with a bunch of people, and we were talking about Rincon Hill and these issues. It's hard to know why it happened, this piecemealing of the neighborhood, going one project at a time without a new, adopted plan.
"This was advantageous to the mayor, and not to a long-range planner."
Indeed, anyone who follows San Francisco planning issues closely lays blame for the politicization of city planning at the feet of Willie Brown and his handpicked planning director, Gerald Green. Green was working as a low-ranking department official with no academic planning background when Brown aborted a national search and elevated Green to the department's top post.
Green has told me he believes a planner should play a mediating role among competing city interests, rather than advocate a particular vision of urbanism. Green's deal-making-first attitude, combined with his unfamiliarity with many basic planning concepts, has demoralized the Planning Department. According to a recent complaint obtained from the department's staff suggestion box, planners believe Green routinely meets in private with attorneys for developers, informally approving high-profile projects before his professional staff has even seen them.
The situation has become even more chaotic during recent months.
A year ago, Green applied for a one-year Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, using, in support of his application, the work of long-term planners who say Green routinely sabotaged them. He was accepted and left for classes in Cambridge in September. Yet Green remains San Francisco's salaried planning director. In an arrangement worked out between Willie Brown and the Planning Commission, with the guidance of the City Attorney's Office, Green attends class for three weeks, then returns to San Francisco for a week of work here.
Green's absences, Planning Department staffers say, have positive and negative aspects. The staffers say it's been a breath of fresh air to work with Lawrence Badner, a city planner and a manager with whom they can actually hold meaningful discussions about technical concepts. But the experience has been disconcerting for those who deal with the department from the outside.
"It's not really clear who's in charge," says Planning Commissioner Lisa Feldstein. "On the one hand we say, 'Planning and land use are really important.' On the other hand, we say this should be handled by a quarter-time director."
White, the director of the Housing Action Coalition, puts the positives and negatives in the same thought. "The last time I met with Larry Badner, the acting director, he had just gotten off the phone with Gerald Green because he had to check everything with him," she says. "I think it's absolutely absurd that the director of the Planning Department is in Cambridge, Mass. The head of the Planning Department has an impact on every single person in the city. It's the department that lays out the future for the city."
And then she adds: "Because Green did such a poor job when he was here, it's better that he's not here, in a way. Badner has stepped up, and he's moving things forward that were stalemated. But because Gerald has the ultimate authority, I'm not sure what he [Badner] can and cannot do."
Not everyone agrees that the current situation is problematic. Tim Tosta, an attorney with Steefel, Levitt, and Weiss who represents developers of Rincon Hill buildings, recently visited Green in Cambridge, where they dined together. "It's a stunning experience for the community of which our common interest binds us together," Tosta recently told the Planning Commission, according to meeting minutes. "It's a wonderful environment where Mr. Green is right now."
It's a wonderful environment, indeed, for developer-lobbyists who can afford to fly to Cambridge and visit the city planning director.
During the coming years, as city planners attempt to flesh out the Vancouver-style neighborhood envisioned for the Transbay Terminal and Rincon Hill, the city's planning director, the Planning Commission, and the mayor will face a gauntlet of interest-group pressure as lobbyists and NIMBY neighborhood associations battle for control of this old industrial land in the morning shadow of the Bay Bridge. They'll face high-rise-ophobes, left over from the 1970s anti-Manhattanization movement. They'll face developers, who once again will hire every lobbyist in town.
Amid the clamor, I advise the new mayor to close his eyes and imagine strolling past Coal Harbor, on the north side of downtown Vancouver, along the split-level pedestrian-bike trail that encircles the Vancouver peninsula. He should imagine walking past trees, lampposts, a four-level cascading pool, and then looking up to see the twin, 22-story condominium buildings of turquoise-colored glass that flank the trail. He should think of a sweeping grassy knoll that envelops a children's water park, all paid for by developers anxious to buy into a detailed and relatively unpoliticized vision of the city. It's a vision San Francisco's professionally trained planners will be happy to share with the new mayor – if, that is, he really meant his campaign promises to depoliticize the Planning Department.
