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Before the Chans would get final approval of the site permit, the board ruled, they had to commission a geotechnical and shoring study -- and come back in February.
According to the Chans' architect, the board's ridiculous abundance of caution and the various compromises and conditions have multiplied the cost of planning the project many times. Gee says his bill tripled to $45,000, and the meter is still running.
Alice Barkley, the Chans' legal counsel, billed the family $15,000 for her work responding at the board.
And there are a host of related costs that have brought the tab for planning the $375,000 home to more than $60,000.
"It's like a nightmare, and I don't know when I am going to wake up," Sandra Chan says. "I would not have started. I'd buy someplace else, because it's going to be cheaper."
"Normal people compromise," she continues from a seat on her living room couch, which has a view across the top of the Presidio eucalyptus groves to the Golden Gate Bridge. "We the ones who live here 20 years. You just move in, and we compromise."
Growing agitated, she adds: "We are still neighbors. But they are stepping all over us."
One of the advantages Roberts and Kiefer had over the Chans was their ability to get prominent people to write letters. Some of the letters can only be described as sanctimonious. In extremis.
Letters such as the one oncologist William M. Wara wrote to the city's Planning Commission and the Board of Permit Appeals:
"The particular proposed home will completely change the nature of the neighborhood. ... I urge you to oppose this proposed development as entirely inconsistent with the laws and values of San Francisco."
Adding a touch of hubris to his piety, Wara, who lives across the street from Roberts and Kiefer and is a professor and department vice chairman at the University of California at San Francisco, sent his letter on medical school letterhead. He copied the Honorable Willie L. Brown Jr., mayor, just for good measure.
"I think it adds credibility that I live and work in San Francisco," Wara said in an interview.
But Wara has a curious sense of credibility.
During an open house to unveil their dramatically scaled-down, 1,400-square-foot home design, Wara quizzed the Chans about how their eldest son, Gary, could ever really raise a family in such a small space. He apparently suspected some nefarious plot, something that involved renting out the new home.
"I asked about that," he said, pointedly.
The Chans responded that the long-range plan is for the parents to swap their larger house for their son's smaller house, as he has children and has a need for more space.
The Chans found this a sensible solution to the space problem.
But Wara found it unbelievable.
"I did not find that a credible answer," he said in a recent interview that revealed the Forest Hill method of calling someone a liar.
Early this year, San Francisco Supervisor Sue Bierman took a drive up to 10th and Mendosa avenues. Bierman is the Board of Supervisors' resident slow-growth champion and was probably predisposed to see things through the eyes of Linda Kiefer, who had complained to the supervisor.
Bierman didn't disappoint.
"The supervisor went out there and thought it [the lot] looked awful small," says June Gutfleisch, Bierman's City Hall aide. "And, there was a wonderful stand of trees."
Supervisor Bierman was so distressed about the Chans' home-building plans that she did something stunningly callous on Feb. 10 of this year.
After Sandra and Anthony Chan had spent years and tens of thousands of dollars trying to comply with the entire panoply of San Francisco land use regulations, playing by the rules in every way in an attempt to build a home for their son, Sue Bierman decided to introduce an ordinance that, if adopted, would accomplish just one thing: It would repeal the July 1994 subdivision of the Chans' lot, and make construction of a home for Gary Chan impossible.
Forever.
The absurdity of Bierman's act was matched only by the tortured nature of the legislation itself.
The city did not have an ordinance that would allow a residential lot subdivision that had been lawfully granted to be repealed.
So, at the request of Kiefer, Roberts, Wara, and company, Bierman asked the city attorney to draft such a law, together with a resolution stating that it was the specific intent of the Board of Supervisors to employ it to merge the Chans' two lots back into one.
And how does Bierman explain this extraordinary action?
She doesn't. She leaves such explanation to her aide, Gutfleisch.
"Supervisor Bierman has taken a leadership position on subdivisions and neighborhood preservation," Gutfleisch says. "And, is adamantly opposed to losing trees."
But Bierman is a politician, too. Her actions could just as fairly be interpreted in a less charitable light.
Back in the spring of 1996, Sue Bierman was gearing up to run for re-election. She also was eyeing the presidency of the Board of Supervisors. The post would go to the top vote-getter in the field for five board seats.
Heading into the contest for the top spot, Bierman knew her chief rival would be Supervisor Barbara Kaufman, who is a darling of the real estate and downtown business community.
On May 30, 1996, mere weeks after he was hired by Roberts and Kiefer, attorney John Sanger dropped $500, the legal contribution limit, into Bierman's campaign coffers, according to disclosure statements.
Sanger says he has known Bierman for 25 years and backed her out of sympathy for her policies, not because he expected favors in return.
But it remains absolutely undeniable that Bierman had performed an extraordinary favor for a political contributor and his clients.
