Streetsblog San Francisco

Supervisor Mirkarimi addresses the crowd.

At last night's community meeting, held by Target execs interested in opening a store at Geary and Masonic, there wasn't a NIMBY in sight. Instead, the prevailing sentiment was, "YIMBY: Yes! In my backyard! How soon can can you move in?"

Target's executives must have been surprised that not one speaker at the hour-and-a-half meeting expressed animus towards the chain store, while many speakers were unequivocal in their support, and some offered suggestions and requests to help the proposed store conform to the unique space.

In conceptual illustrations developed by designers at Studio One Eleven for Target, wind turbines adorn the roof and news stands engage with pedestrians on the Geary side of the project. "Right now it's pretty uninviting and harsh," Lasley said. "Let's try to get some activity on the street."

"We want to mitigate the bulky scale," said Thom Lasley, Target's Lead Design Project Architect. He gestured to photos of the currently-bleak exterior, built in 1961 for Sears. Lasley described upgrades ranging from a fresh coat of paint to improved signage to more landscaping with native species. If all goes to plan, the store would open in March of 2012, with significant alterations to the building.

"This community meeting is just the first step in the process," said John Dewes, Target's Regional Development Manager. The company hasn't yet approached the city with a proposal; instead, their strategy was to engage with the community first, so that they could incorporate neighbor's concerns in their proposal. They expect to apply for a Conditional Use Permit later this year.

Some neighbors could scarcely contain their excitement over the 100,000 square-foot store, which would carry a familiar array of apparel, home goods, electronics, health and beauty products, and groceries.

With financial reform nearly complete, the Senate Banking Committee
turned its attention today to one of Senator Chris Dodd’s (D-CT) next
priorities, the Livable
Communities Act. Local government came out strong for the
initiative to promote sustainable and integrated regional planning, with
representatives of the nation’s cities, towns, counties, and regional
planning organizations testifying in favor. Among committee members,
concerns persisted about whether
the bill would disadvantage rural areas. 

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris
Dodd (D-CT) (Photo: The
Washington Note)

The Livable Communities Act would
provide
about $4 billion in competitive grants to coordinate housing,
transportation, and economic development policy with an eye toward
promoting sustainable development. About $400 million would be slated
for planning with the remainder funding implementation. The bill would
also create a new office within the Department of Housing and Urban
Development to guide and administer the programs. If passed, it would
strengthen the Obama administration’s multi-agency Sustainable
Communities effort. 

At today’s committee hearing representatives of the National League
of Cities, the National Association of Counties, the National
Association of Development Organizations, and the National Association
of Regional Councils each strongly endorsed the goals of the bill. 

Witnesses drew on professional experience — from trying to
revitalize barren neighborhoods in Indianapolis to managing the growth
of a rural Maryland county — to explain how federal policy could spur
better development where they live. The Hartford region, for example, is
investing in a new bus rapid transit line, said Lyle Wray, the
executive director for the region’s Council of Governments, but they
haven’t been able to tie the transit project to broader goals. "Linking
that opportunity to affordable housing, jobs, and sustainability is what
the Livable Communities Act would allow us to do," he said.

Describing the bill today, Dodd stressed that integrated
transportation and land use planning can help address a host of
challenges: high foreclosure rates, climate change and oil dependency,
deteriorating infrastructure, traffic congestion, and the loss of
farmland. Those problems, Dodd argued, aren’t urban or rural. "One
community can use the grants to develop brownfields in a post-industrial
area," he said, and "another might create a livable town center or main
street." 

Even so, Senator Jon Tester (D-MT), expressed doubt about whether
his rural state would benefit under Dodd’s legislation.

Read more…

I’ll be slowly going through San Francisco transit history over the next few months. All of this information is derived from our Shaping San Francisco collection that you can explore on Foundsf.org. Also, I'll be conducting a 4-hour "Transit history" bike tour on Sat. April 24. Today we start where it all began, in the sand.

The Portolá expedition sights the Bay in 1769.

Had you been one of those settlers at the far edges of the Spanish empire, you might have been in the caravan that slowly made its way up from Monterey in 1769, crossing the dense redwood forests along the San Mateo hills to suddenly catch a glimpse of one of the world’s great harbors. Funny to think that a site so rich in maritime history now, once surrounded by the most abundant natural supplies of seafood imaginable, was “discovered” by European settlers who were traveling extremely slowly on foot and horseback.

Sir Francis Drake had passed by the Golden Gate more than 100 years earlier, as had many other seafaring explorers, but no one noticed the entry to San Francisco Bay. It was another few years, 1776 in fact, when Spanish settlers established permanent structures in what is now San Francisco, at the Presidio, and at Mission Dolores (then at the edge of a good-sized freshwater lake fed by a year-round stream gurgling down what is now 18th Street). We’ll start to examine the water-born transportation that really shaped the early city next time. But from the beginning, less than 100 Spanish settlers founded a settlement that, thanks to enslaving the local Indians (those who survived smallpox, chicken pox, and other European diseases), was able to start producing hides and tallow and carry on a modest trade with passing ships from other European powers (Russia, England, Prussia, France, and of course the USA).

They lived in two settlements, and to go from one to the other was mostly done on foot or by horseback. Early in San Francisco’s pre-history, a path was beaten that still exists today: Lover’s Lane in the Presidio, presumably so named because lonely soldiers had to walk it to the Mission to court the few eligible young women in the area. Here’s a photo that shows it from the 1870s:

Lover's Lane has been there since the 1780s but here it is in the 1870s as seen from the Presidio gate.

Read more...

At today’s debate on conservative support for transit, developer Chris
Leinberger had a modest proposal for lawmakers who are desperately
seeking new transportation financing strategies in an era of diminishing gas tax returns: Ask real-estate developers to pay for projects that will increase their profits.

Chris Leinberger at last year’s Walk21 conference. (Photo: M. Katz)

The
concept is often referred to by the wonkish term "value capture,"
evaluated by the University of Minnesota in a groundbreaking study last fall. But Leinberger, an active player
on land-use issues who founded the group Locus to help make urban
planners part of the federal transportation debate, kept his case
simple and accessible.

Many developers are willing to "share part of our financial
upside" to ensure continued local investment in transit and mixed-use
development, Leinberger said. "We in the private sector need to be at
the table because, a) we need these systems, and b) we have the
financial means to pay for it."

Leinberger’s approach, which
attracted vocal interest today from House transportation committee
chairman Jim Oberstar (D-MN), would not solve the problem of uneven
federal support for roads — which are funded through an 80-20 split
between Washington and local governments — and transit, which tends to
receive a lower 50-50 federal match.

"If we need to lower the
federal match, that’s fine," Leinberger said, as long as private-sector
buy-in could be counted as part of a locality’s contribution to transit.

Yet
despite value capture’s increasing presence in transportation financing
debates, it has a long way to go before members of Congress could
consider enshrining it in legislation. Increased property taxes are one
established method of requiring land owners to contribute to transit
construction, but cities such as Portland have attempted a largely
opposite approach by offering property-tax exemptions to developers who build up in walkable areas.

The Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), an advocacy group working to
reform local development practices, is seizing on House Financial
Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank’s (D-MA) recent call for a new system of housing finance to replace government-controlled Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Mixed-use
developments, such as Atlanta’s Atlantic Station (above), are often
incompatible with Fannie and Freddie’s rules. (Photo: AJC)

The
CNU’s concerns about Fannie and Freddie, which the government has used
for more than 40 years to promote home ownership by backstopping
trillions of dollars in mortgage loans, predate the government’s takeover of the two entities in 2008.

Urbanists’
frustrations with Fannie and Freddie stem from a key fact: both
mortgage guarantors will not deal in home loans for properties with
more than 20 percent of space set aside for non-residential use. Plans
for walkable, mixed-use complexes that combine housing, retail, and
office space, therefore, are often out of luck.

"Every Main Street in America violates Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s
rigid standards," CNU President John Norquist said in a statement yesterday reiterating his group’s support for housing finance reform.

Citing
"plenty of mixed-use streets" in major cities where Fannie and Freddie
have played no role in development, Norquist added: "These
neighborhoods often have
impressive purchasing power, transit-service and the potential to be
sites of new opportunity and green redevelopment, but this flawed
government-subsidized lending approach works to keep them locked in a
pattern of disinvestment."

Norquist and fellow urbanists
have reason to hold out hope for government housing support to take on
a more pro-urban cast in the coming years. The Obama administration’s
new inter-agency sustainable communities task force plans to spend some of its initial $150 million allocation on encouraging the issuance of "location-efficient" mortgages that take lower transportation costs into account, rewarding borrowers who move to more walkable or transit-rich areas.

But
where Fannie and Freddie is concerned, Congress has shown little
appetite to make the difficult choices necessary to phase in a new
framework for what’s known as the "secondary mortgage market." Read more…

Homeowners in car-dependent areas without access to alternative transportation are at greater risk of foreclosure, according to a report
released yesterday by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) that
calls for mortgage underwriting standards to begin taking so-called "location-efficiency" into account.

Weeds spring up near a foreclosed home in Illinois. (Photo: Getty)

The NRDC examined data for 40,000 mortgages in Chicago, Jacksonville, and San Francisco, seeking to test the contention — emphasized most
often by the nonprofit Center for Neighborhood Technology — that
affordable housing should include transportation costs as well as
mortgage bills.

And what did the report’s authors find?

In
all three cities … statistically sound results [indicated] that the
probability of mortgage foreclosure increases as neighborhood vehicle
ownership levels rise, after controlling for income. These results
suggest that mortgage lenders should include measures of location
efficiency in their underwriting to more accurately predict the risk of
default.

In addition to including transit access and
walkability in mortgage underwriters’ measurement of borrowing terms,
the NRDC recommended that location-efficiency be formally adopted as a
goal for community planners. Particularly in Sun Belt and West Coast
areas where waves of foreclosures
have prompted new fears of suburban blight, the report suggests that
rebuilding neighborhoods with location-efficiency in mind could stave
off negative effects from any future downturn in home prices.

NRDC’s conclusions are already being heeded by federal officials. Several House Democrats banded together
this summer to add language to their chamber’s climate bill asking the
Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to insure 50,000
location-efficient mortgages.

That climate legislation is
stalled for the time being, but the Obama adminstration’s deputy
housing and urban development secretary said last week that the White House would spend $10 million on research aimed at boosting the issuance of location-efficient home loans.

The potential for a cap-and-trade climate bill to set aside significant
amounts of money for reforming local land use and transportation
planning is often touted by Democrats, environmental groups, and this particular Streetsblogger.

Should
the approach California used in SB 375 (being signed into law above) be
applied to a congressional cap-and-trade climate bill? (Photo: EcoVote)

But what does Mary Nichols,
chair of the California Air Resources Board and administrator of the
state’s landmark effort to cut emissions by changing development
patterns, think of the idea of tackling sprawl via climate legislation?

"I don’t necessarily think SB 375
[the California land-use bill] should be in a cap-and-trade bill,"
Nichols said today during a session of today’s Transportation Research
Board (TRB) conference devoted to climate change.

The
provocative question of how important a congressional climate bill
would be to transportation was first raised by EMBARQ program director Nancy Kete, a veteran sustainability advocate.

Asking
the TRB audience to consider that "whatever happens on climate change
really is not going to have much impact on transportation," Kete
praised the climate bill’s grants for transit and land-use planning but described them as unsuitable for achieving "significant, short-term" pollution reduction.

Nichols’
uncertain perspective on the path to addressing transportation — which
produces 40 percent of California’s emissions and 30 percent of total
U.S. CO2 — through climate legislation may surprise some, but it
tracks with what she described as an "unsettled" political climate
surrounding the issue of pollution limits.

Indeed, Nichols’
remarks today emphasized the importance of a federal climate plan that
did not attempt to preempt the regulations of individual states, and
California is one of several seeking a go-slow approach to greenhouse gas restrictions from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

So if climate change legislation, which faces
considerable resistance from Senate Democrats, isn’t the vehicle to
begin remodeling the nation’s transportation planning system, what is?
Kete proposed a shift in focus to the six-year federal transport bill
– though its political future is as murky as the climate measure’s.

Yet Kete’s suggestion brought a telling remark from John Stoody, an aide to conservative GOP senator Kit Bond (MO).

Read more…