Mirkarimi destroys the Market/Octavia area

One would think that Supervisor Mirkarimi had it in for the Market/Octavia neighborhood, since he's done more to destroy that part of the city than anything since the 1906 earthquake and fire. First he praised the awful new Octavia Boulevard more than two years ago. Okay, to be fair, once city voters chose to tear down the damaged Central Freeway overpass, something like what we have now was more or less inevitable, since all that traffic had to go somewhere. 

But Mirkarimi, like a lot of city progressives, is still in self-congratulation mode for tearing down the freeway. A corollary to that self-congratulation seems to be that whatever replaced it is by definition a Good Thing, even though Octavia Blvd. is now carrying 45,000 vehicles a day that used to pass overhead on the Central Freeway through the heart of Hayes Valley. At the very most, this is a mixed blessing for that neighborhood, but you will never hear Mirkarimi and city progressives make even that modest concession to reality.

Then Mirkarimi endorsed the awful Market and Octavia Neighborhood Plan, which essentially loosens city zoning regulations to encourage the construction of 6,000 new housing units and 10,000 new residents in an already densely-populated part of town (it's a lie that the M/O Plan involves anything like a neighborhood, since the Plan covers thousands of properties in the middle of the city, not a distinct neighborhood). 

Why burden one part of town---already struggling to cope with all the new traffic on Octavia---with a massive amount of new housing? The rationale has always been the now-discredited "transit corridors" theory, that the city can allow an unlimited amount of new housing anywhere near a major traffic artery. Even one of the originators of that concept is alarmed by the city's complete misunderstanding and misapplication of his idea to fragile SF neighborhoods.

Finally there's the Murk's roll-over for UC's land-grab at the old extension site on lower Haight Street.

Mirkarimi apparently sees himself as a bold, radical leader, but the reality is that on important city planning issues he's completely in the pocket of an aggressively pro-development city Planning Dept. A question for city progressives: How would a Republican supervisor have voted any differently than Mirkarimi on these proposals?