Planning Surgery Required on Luxury Condo Cancer at Market/Octavia

Senior planning staff, in the service of developers, have hijacked a once promising community-based planning process by giving one neighborhood most of what it wants -- if that neighborhood agrees to offload undesirable development to adjacent communities that were not part of the planning process.

Since then, the largely consultant and staff-driven process has suffered carcinogenic mission creep, and meta-stasized into a quartet of high rise (400') luxury condo towers and increased heights far afield from the new Octavia Boulevard. There is no constituency for these towers aside from the highest levels in the Planning Department and the ever voracious, avaricious developers who assure planning staff how important they are if they entitle lasting phallic symbols in glass and steel.

I had attended early sessions of this process, but dropped out in 2002 as it became apparent that Willie Brown and Gerald Green were orchestrating it all behind the scenes. After an early and informative discussion of the history of the urban fabric in the neighborhood, each meeting was like policy whiplash with ADD — moving in far-flung directions, having no connection to the previous meetings, not to mention to Hayes Valley or Octavia Boulevard. One meeting would discuss housing over Safeway, another Bus Rapid Transit on Van Ness, another a transit center on the first few blocks of South Van Ness, which would be closed to traffic. All very interesting, but little of it germane to the scope of work. It was as if the public process was designed to support propaganda that is used to legitimate the process at the Planning Commission today. We had so many hundreds of people at so many meetings over the past years that this is truly a community plan, and since so many have worked so hard on it, we must pass it now — quickly. Whenever I hear that argument — "pass it now because we've worked so hard" — it is all but a confession that our proposal is lacking and we can't make better arguments in support of it.

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