For half a century, San Francisco has required large institutions, primarily hospitals and universities, to file every ten years a master plan for growth and development.
The idea was simple, and even Sup. Dianne Feinstein, a friend of developers if ever there were one, supported it. If your institution has a large footprint on the city, planners need to know what’s coming next, so they can prepare to handle the transit, housing, water and sewer, and other needs.
It’s not a terribly burdensome process, since most of these big institutions are doing this planning anyway; they just have to share it with the Planning Commission and the public.
But it gives the community a tool to hold these large actors accountable. The Academy of Art University converted some 22 residential buildings—apartments—into student housing (dorms) without permits or a master plan.
Because of the lack of a master plan filing (among other things) activists led by Sue Hestor and Aaron Peskin convinced the City Attorney’s Office to take AAU to court. “Thousands of units were returned to the city,” Calvin Welch, who helped devise the IMP concept, told me.
Now Mayor Daniel Lurie wants to create broad exemptions for universities. His proposal, carried as legislation by Sup. Matt Dorsey, would exempt all colleges and universities located outside of a residential area, would end IMPs for an institution planning to expand by less than 10,000 square feet—and would completely eliminate student housing from consideration under a master plan.
One key problem, Welch told the Planning Commission last week: Lots of housing exists in areas zoned industrial or commercial. Most of the housing that AAU illegally converted was outside of “residential” zoning.
Worth noting: Vanderbilt University, which is taking over the campus of the soon-closing California College of the Arts, will be moving into an area with light-industrial zoning. So Vanderbilt, as it takes over the Showplace Square campus, can expand all it wants with no master plan—that is, with no notice to the neighborhood of its long-term goals.
“All institutional growth is not benign,” Welch said.
Commissioner Kathrin Moore said she saw no reason for the change. She said the impacts of ACU were “devastating” and the impact on affordable housing “was unacceptable.
“When you saw their real-estate portfolio your jaw dropped,” she said. “There is no need to change what we have, and I see no benefits from this.”
Commissioner Gilbert Williams said he didn’t see the IMP requirement as a barrier to attracting more colleges to San Francisco. “Many of these institutions are very well funded,” he said. “The IMP is about accountability to the citizens of San Francisco.”
But because four of the seven commissioners are appointed by the mayor, the panel voted 4-3 to endorse the legislation.
Now it goes to the Board of Supes, where again Lurie generally has a majority.
