SF Loses again: Housing Element must have an EIR

The City of San Francisco has lost again in court, as the First Court of Appeals threw out the city's 2004 Housing Element because the city failed to do the required environmental review under state law. You can view and/or print out the decision from this site, and the case number is A112987. The city was rebuked by the court for failing---again---to do an EIR on a project that clearly required one. The city's policy evidently is to do whatever it wants, forcing citizens and neighborhood groups to litigate to get it to obey the law. And the Bicycle Plan and the Housing Element were not isolated instances of this policy. The latest example is the city's Wi-Fi agreement with Earthlink.

The Market/Octavia Plan: Destroying the heart of San Francisco

Market & Octavia Plan

Last Tuesday the Board of Supervisors passed the Market and Octavia Neighborhood Plan, which will essentially give developers a number of incentives to build on thousands of parcels in the heart of San Francisco, including an undetermined number of 40-story highrises in the Market/Van Ness area. 

The Plan rezones more than 3,000 parcels---it's hard to determine the exact number, since the Planning Dept. continued to amend the ordinances long after public comment ended---to allow developers to build with no set-backs, no backyards, and more liberal height limitations. Planning's goal is to allow a radical increase in population density in an area that already has more than 26,000 people.

The Plan is aggressively anti-car and anti-parking, limiting the amount of parking that can be included with the new housing units, which is why the SF Bicycle Coalition endorses this destructive Plan. 

The fiction that Planning bases this imprudent policy on is the Transit Corridors myth, that the city can build an almost unlimited amount of new housing in the area, because it's near city transit corridors. Of course as anyone who lives in SF knows, Muni already struggles to cope with its current passenger load of 685,000 boardings on a typical workday. 

The Plan will encourage 6,000 new housing units and, by its own conservative reckoning, 10,000 new residents in a part of town that is in traffic gridlock much of the day due to the revamped Octavia Blvd. that now carries much of the traffic that used to use the Central Freeway through the heart of Hayes Valley. Not surprisingly, "progressive" political lemming and District 5 Supervisor Ross Mikarimi voted for the destructive Plan....