The Planning Commission has been down to four members, the minimum to hold a meeting, for more than a month now, after the terms of three members appointed by the Board of Supes ended. It’s taken Board President Rafael Mandelman a while to make his nominations to fill those slots.
Now we know the three names, and two of them will come before the full board Tuesday/28.
Since the voters changed the City Charter in 2002 to split appointments between the mayor and the board, the supes appointees have almost always been the most independent, progressive—and qualified. Kathrin Moore, an architect with a deep understanding of local planning issues, served for 20 years as a board appointee, often challenging developers (and planning directors).
On many key issues, particularly housing, critical votes came down 4-3, with the board-nominated commissioners siding with the community and the mayor’s folks siding with the developers.
Mandelman is much more of a moderate centrist on planning issues than was Aaron Peskin, who served as board president for several terms and made some excellent appointments. So we’ve all been waiting to see who was on the list.
He announced his nominees, which still need full board approval, July 22: Malea Chavez, Elizabeth Macdonald, and Joel Koppel.
Chavez is chief program officer at Mission Economic Development Agency, and a former executive director of the Women’s Building and deputy director of the Homeless Pre-Natal Program. Macdonald is a planning professor at UC Berkeley who mostly has worked on urban design.
Koppel, a career electrician and leader in IBEW Local 6, already served two terms on the commission, where he was mostly a bad vote under the late Mayor Ed Lee and former Mayor London Breed.
At the Rules Committee today, Koppel said he is a strong supporter of the mayor’s upzoning plan, and said nothing about affordability. He will join the mayor’s four members as a supporter of just about every developer who shows up with just about any plan. So at best, the votes will be 5-2.
The committee couldn’t consider Chavez, since her paperwork wasn’t complete. That will wait until after the August recess.
Macdonald presented an interesting case. She said she supported the upzoning plan, and nobody on the committee asked anything about the impact of density on affordability. But she actually mentioned climate change, and said that planning decisions—including the placement of new housing—need to consider sea level rise. Sup. Stephen Sherill pushed her on whether she would demand urban design changes that could make housing more expensive, and she said “good design doesn’t have to be more expensive.”
Sherrill, one of the most pro-development board members who says the free market will solve most of the city’s problems, then came out in support of her.
The Yimbys did not. Three speakers from SF Yimby said they weren’t convinced she was sufficiently supportive of market-rate housing, and asked for her nomination to be continued.
The Sierra Club, which has been taken over by Yimbys, also declined to support her.
I sent Macdonald an email asking one question:
Do you agree with Profs. Condon and Storper that allowing more market-rate housing will not help with the affordability crisis? If you dispute their findings, esp. the new Storper study, can you explain why?
She did not respond.
The support of Sherrill means both nominees will likely be approved by the full board.
San Francisco for years has moved to limit parking in most new highrise housing development. The idea is that putting housing on transit lines, and limiting parking spaces, will encourage new residents to take public transportation.
That policy was put in place before Uber, Lyft, Waymo, Doordash, and Amazon started clogging the streets and giving people ways to increase vehicle traffic without personally owning a car—or using public transportation. But it’s still part of an effort, however feeble, to reduce private vehicle use.
Now, Sup. Matt Dorsey wants to scrap that concept for any building that is converted from commercial to residential use. A lot of older commercial buildings have large underground garages.
The Planning Commission, perhaps with two new members, will consider July 30 a proposal that would change to code to allow all existing parking to remain in place for conversions:
Parking maximums would not apply to any existing off-street parking that serves new residential uses under the Commercial to Residential Adaptive Reuse Program, as long as the parking is within or on the same lot as the existing structure.
The proposal would also eliminate floor-area ratios for housing conversions, and eliminate
active uses of the ground floor, transparency, and building design elements relative to the street.
I wonder how Macdonald, who has built a career promoting good urban design, will respond to this.
That hearing starts at noon.
