"Progress" in Hayes Valley and the SF Weekly

From: Michael Mullin michael@michaelmullin.com
Date: Aug 23, 2007
Subject: Matt Smith "The End of Our Progress," August 22, 2007[below in italics]
To: letters@sfweekly.com

Dear Tom Walsh, Editor of SF Weekly

This article shamefully misrepresented the context of the proposed rezoning and redevelopment of the UC Berkeley Extension Campus. Recent zoning for Hayes Valley in the Octavia/Market Plan will double the population there. This zoning was developed in a community process which assumed the existence of the open space and public use of the Laguna Street Campus. The proposed rezoning and redevelopment of the campus marks the failure of one of the City's rare attempts at pro-active community-based city planning. 

This neighborhood already suffers the negative effects of high density, poor planning and limited open space, including violent crime. The City has no planning process for future public uses like social services. Without the campus, quality of life in the neighborhood deteriorates. Surely the City should apply standards for the development of planned open space and public services in areas of intense housing development. 

When this City was founded, that land was set aside for public use, demonstrating remarkable foresight that should not be forgotten. UC Berkeley was given this land in 1957 in order that they provide higher education there. If this land is now rezoned and redeveloped, then the lost potential for public services and open space will be felt most strongly by the residents of the many neighboring affordable family housing apartments, not to mention those soon to be developed.

Michael Mullin,

CEO Michael Mullin 
Architect, LTD

Ironically, to the extent local social struggle happens at all here, it's often aimed at making San Francisco even more staid and rich. One such effort happened to take place right next to the gay-homeland Castro neighborhood.

I spent a lunch hour last month with Cynthia Servetnick, a Public Utilities Commission employee who has used her off time during the past year or so struggling to stop UC Berkeley from leasing its abandoned extension campus in S.F. at 55 Laguna St. to a housing developer.

Servetnick led me around the site, consisting of several large parking lots surrounded by a mix of Spanish-colonial-style and 1970s California-government-bureaucracy-style buildings. She bemoaned the idea that the site would be occupied by "market rate" apartments, something she stated San Francisco doesn't need more of. She praised the success of activists in Berkeley, another Venice-like city whose residents have shunned growth.

"San Francisco could learn a lot from them," Servetnick said as we strolled through the abandoned buildings.

Servetnick had teamed with the president of the small, private New College of California to try to halt a proposal to build 440 apartments, 66 of which were to be builder-subsidized for lower-income people; a half-acre park; and 80 apartments for elderly gay and transgender people. Servetnick's plan was to have the property zoned as a historic landmark, making the UC development plan economically impossible, thus driving down the lease rate to a point where New College would be able to afford to occupy the building.

Despite countless months of lobbying by New College President Martin Hamilton and Servetnick, the plan fell apart this month. Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin — usually sympathetic to those who would halt change — likened Servetnick's scheme to a City Hall version of tortuous interference, where a person seeks to gain by damaging someone else's business dealings. So Peskin brokered a deal last week allowing the development project to go forward largely as planned. New College, which came under new leadership Aug. 3 for unrelated reasons, is no longer interested in Servetnick's plan, interim New College President Luis Molina told me earlier this month.

This is hardly a return to historic progress in the Monaco of California. But it's a start.