Rich Hillis: San Francisco's new Planning Director

From the SF Examiner:

[Rich]Hillis is the executive director of the Fort Mason Center and has previously served as Deputy Director of the Office of Economic and Workforce Development, where he led development projects such as the acquisition and redevelopment of Treasure Island and Yerba Buena Island and oversaw plans for the development of the Octavia Boulevard corridor.

As Planning Director, Hillis means more of the same for the city: accelerating gentrification and population density with lip-service to "affordable" housing, a word that always requires quotation marks. (What does "affordable" even mean in San Francisco?)

The dumb Treasure Island project: allowing 20,000 more residents on an island that now has a population of 3,000. What could go wrong with that? Think traffic is already bad on the Bay Bridge and in downtown SF?

And Octavia Boulevard, the name---and the cause---of that daily traffic jam in the Hayes Valley neighborhood. 

Back in 2010, Hillis told us that developments among that chronic congestion were somehow "healing" that part of the city:

"At one time the freeway bisected the area and developing the parcels is helping to heal the neighborhood," said Rich Hillis, deputy director in the Mayor's Office of Economic and Workforce Development. "A lot of the changes in Hayes Valley were sparked by the removal of the freeway and we think the developments near Octavia Boulevard will close out a project that has been successful."

In the SF Chronicle:

“It’s not just building 50,000 [housing]units, it’s figuring out how to do that in an equitable way.” He added that he’ll take a proactive approach to finding sites, including meeting with executives from Safeway, which owns multiple stores with large surface parking lots.

He compared the Safeway to Whole Foods, which has opened stores below housing developments on Ocean Avenue and Upper Market Street, and has another under construction in Mid-Market. “There is no reason to have large parking lots with Safeways throughout the city,” he said. “Those are prime sites for new housing.”

No "reason," except supermarkets need customer parking, particularly for families that can't haul their groceries home in backpacks or on bicycles. Single people like me can do that on Muni.

As Planning Director, Hillis will make $265,854 a year. He and his wife have three children. Hard to believe they don't have a car to help with their grocery shopping.

See also "Healing" Hayes Valley with the Market and Octavia Neighborhood Plan and John King's amen chorus: Norquist and Macdonald.

And Tim Redmond: The fix was in: Mayor appoints political ally to run city planning.