I am wary of trained planners who claim that they can build community through zoning and land use regulation, especially in San Francisco with the economic pressures and corruption surrounding land use. One need only look to the “neighborhood” around the ball park to see what their handiwork looks like. If you like that, then you’ll love Planning’s “new neighborhoods.”

-marc

True and illustrative, I guess, of who is making decisions in City Hall – or at least in whose favor decisions are being made.

The city needs to represent its true constituents and impose regulations on converting industrial land to residential. You want that entire square block South of Market? Tough, you can’t always get what you want. Bring in the assessor-recorder, divide up the lot and force the owner to sell to multiple new owners, with bans on re-consolidating the lots. Then let market forces determine what gets built. A lot more small investors will be able to get involved in the land grab, and I’d predict more money would wind up being invested in the area as a result.

This is a land rush, Planning has unlocked billions and billions of dollars in latent value in the formerly industrial areas in the Eastern Neighborhoods by rezoning to a very large degree residential with added heights.

It has not been economically feasible to do four to six stories of stick over two stories of concrete in small parcels. Plans have regulations on lot consolidation which can alter those economics.

The economic regime under which those plans were conceived no longer exists. It is quite likely that the US will need to ramp up its industrial capacity if for no other reason that it will become very costly (fuel, environment) to move goods around the planet in “free trade.” The reality under which “those jobs are gone” has passed. Once parcels go residential, there is no going back.

It is axiomatic that in San Francisco we can only produce a plan after the assumptions no longer hold, obviated by circumstance.

If the US is going to reindustrialize, doesn’t transit and residential proximate industrial TOD make sense as well?

-marc

Nail, meet Head.

This is the biggest issue to whiz over the heads of our civic leaders. Big Box architecture is a failure in Tracy, and it’s a failure in Mission Bay, South Beach, etc.

The land being redeveloped in SF is predominantly old industrial land. Those lots were big because civic leaders of the past granted larger deds to industrial outfits. For naive and selfish reasons, those same leaders only allowed residential lots to be much smaller.

Why on earth are we allowing new residential units to be built on industrial-scale lots? Because the developers want it? At what point to we consider the success of the neighborhood after the John Stewart has left town?

The city’s vibrant residential neighborhoods (and its densest) are built on small lots. The city has a duty, IMHO, to require large industrial lots to be divided into many smaller lots before they can be turned residential.

Nobody wants to walk down a block with only one door on it.

I live in South Beach by Bayside Village and Delancy St. Both were master developed in the last 20 years envisioning a new SOMA neighborhood center-of-gravity with lots of storefronts. Now they are about 50% vacant with only a few promising establishments. King St. (also master planned) is too noisy and isn’t exactly “it”. Instead, the “bright spot” for Eastern SOMA is 2nd St./South Park, which has redeveloped organically into the existing fabric. Businesses and institutions like diversity of choice. Having only one landlord for a whole block limits that variety.

That said, where are the pretty maps?!

Also, to add to the challenge of keeping neighborhoods straight—the dialogues at City Homestead were actually about the boundaries of Westlake, not West Oakland, which is a bit more clearly defined. Both the blog and the neighborhood are located on the northwestern edge of Lake Merritt—generally considered North Oakland.

I liked your New York trial plaza article. Here’s to Valencia Street Park.