John King's fantasy and the "city's best-laid plans"

Is this a neighborhood?

After years of puffery in his Chronicle columns, John King's fantasy about Octavia Boulevard---and what the city has done and is trying to do in that part of town---is finally coming into at least some contact with reality. For reasons he's never convincingly explained, King has been enthralled with Octavia Blvd. since it was in the architectural drawing stage. 

Why a six-lane street designed to handle the traffic that used to travel over the Hayes Valley neighborhood on the Central Freeway should be the inspiration for King's years-long epiphany remains a mystery. If his latest column is any indication, the dream is finally over; even King is now becoming disillusioned with what's happening in that unfortunate part of town.

But King still refuses to face the reality of the ongoing Planning Dept. disaster of the Market and Octavia Neighborhood Plan. He even calls it "the so-called Market and Octavia Neighborhood Plan," though that is in fact its name. 

King now understands that his beloved Octavia Blvd. fantasy is being swallowed up by the Market/Octavia Plan fiasco: "But it's absurd that one small piece of the map---which evolved because of true community involvement---is jeopardized by the larger games...If that happens, Octavia Boulevard won't be such a success after all."

The much-heralded "community involvement" in that area has always been exaggerated, since a relatively small number of people---mostly the leadership of the Hayes Valley Neighborhood Association---has been encouraging the poor planning choices the city has made in that area. 

Instead of being satisfied with simply developing housing on the old Central Freeway parcels next to Octavia Blvd., the Planning Dept. hatched the grandiose Market/Octavia Plan that rezones thousands of parcels in that area, eliminating set-backs and backyards, changing height and density regulations, encouraging 40-story highrises in the Market/Van Ness area, and discouraging developers from providing adequate parking for the 10,000 new residents the Plan encourages in the area.

Octavia Blvd. never had a real chance of fulfilling King's "success" fantasies, since six months after it opened in 2005 it was carrying 45,000 cars a day through the middle of Hayes Valley. 

King blames Ross Mirkarimi and unnamed "activists" for stalling the new housing near Octavia Blvd., but the reality is that the housing on the former freeway parcels always depended on changing city zoning regulations on height, density, and parking to get it built. Octavia Blvd. is in fact located in the heart of the Market/Octavia Plan.

King's animus is misdirected. If the Planning Dept. had left well enough alone and simply encouraged the housing on the old freeway parcels, it would have been built by now. Instead, Planning hatched the grandiose, grotesque and destructive Market/Octavia Plan, which has now subsumed the projects along Octavia Blvd.

The EIR for the Market/Octavia Plan has metastasized constantly since the period for public comment expired way back in 2005. Of course that means the city should have recirculated the EIR to allow the public to comment on the whole Plan that Planning has changed so much in the past three years. 

And, by the way, since the Planning Dept. has been working on the M/O Plan since 2002, why is there still no landmark study included in the EIR? CEQA requires such a study be included in the EIR, but the city never got around to commissioning it until late in the game, as if the preservation of the many Victorian buildings in the area was only an afterthought.

Hence, King's disillusionment is a consequence of his inexplicable infatuation with a four-block section of a street that is now nothing but a link for drivers coming on and off the freeway. Even the relatively modest housing developments---800 to 900 units---planned for the contiguous freeway parcels have been subsumed by the bogus Planning Dept. vision behind the Market/Octavia Plan, which threatens to further trash that whole area with over-development (6,000 new housing units and 10,000 more residents) and traffic gridlock.

Finally, we have the utterly clueless and irresponsible Board of Supervisors, which, as on UC's land-grab on the nearby lower Haight Street, has been essentially AWOL on the M/O Plan, simply rubber-stamping whatever the incompetents in the Planning Dept. put in front of them.