Streetsblog San Francisco

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.

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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…

One of the themes of the financial and economic crisis we’ve faced
over the past two years is that government, pressed into responding to
serious economic pain, has often found itself supporting the activities
that got us into this mess in the first place.

Sign of the times? Sde-by-side foreclosures in Massachusetts. (Photo: Yovani via Flickr)

Irresponsible
behavior by banks led them to the brink of collapse — a collapse which
would have sent the global economy into a terrifying period of decline
– and so the government stepped in to prevent bank failures (after
learning a lesson from the dreadful experiment with Lehman). But these
interventions have put banks in a situation where they stand to gain
enormously from taking large and dangerous financial bets.

Similarly, government policies such as low gas tax rates and
import protections on light trucks encouraged the development of a
bloated domestic auto industry focused on the production of inefficient
SUVs.

When high oil prices and deep recession then
threatened to push General Motors and Chrysler into bankruptcy, leading
to hundreds of thousands of lost jobs, the government felt it had no
choice but to step in to keep the companies afloat.

Now the
government owns large stakes in companies that will only profit if the
American public goes car-buying crazy over the next few years.

The
list goes on. The economic crisis that currently afflicts us has made
it clearer than ever that we need to change the way we do many things,
but because the economy is in such difficult shape, it is hard to
pursue anything other than policies designed to keep the economic
engine from stalling out completely. Big transitions must wait for
later.

Can the same be said for sprawling urban development?
Have government interventions essentially bailed out the very places
that proved most vulnerable amid oil shocks and housing busts?

Read more…

When three agencies in President Obama's Cabinet -- DOT, Housing and Urban Development, and the Environmental Protection Agency -- banded together to promote "sustainable communities," the initiative sounded promising but somewhat lacking in concrete ideas.

Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-CO) attached his green-housing legislation to the recently passed House climate bill. (Photo: AP)

Enter a bipartisan group of lawmakers, led by Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-CO), who successfully attached their green housing legislation to the climate bill that recently cleared the House. Perlmutter and his co-sponsors took a victory lap of sorts today at the Library of Congress as a Senate counterpart to their plan was officially unveiled by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI).

The green housing measure aims to promote sustainable development through several channels. Transit-oriented development gets a substantial nod via location-efficient mortgages (LEMs), a brainchild of Fannie Mae that offers to count transportation savings as part of a homeowner's income when approving a loan. LEMs, therefore, help make transit access easier for first-time, urban, and lower-income buyers.

People who take out LEMs have a lower-than-average risk of default, Perlmutter said today, "because they have better control over costs."

His legislation would ask the Federal Housing Administration to insure 50,000 LEMs and energy-efficient mortgages, or EEMs, (in which energy savings can help offset homeowners' income) by 2012. The bill also requires Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to work on underwriting standards that would help make LEMs and EEMs more commonplace.

"Too many Americans are forced to drive until they qualify, to buy homes further and further from their jobs -- the result is more congestion, more emissions from cars, and more sprawl," said American Institute of Architects CEO Christine McEntee, a longtime backer of the bill.

Other provisions in the legislation reflect an ethos of empowering renters and homeowners alike to avoid over-consumption.

Read more...