Organized Labor

I have argued that San Francisco must grow. The Bay Area’s population certainly will. This growth is best accommodated not in far-flung suburbs, with their demands on fossil fuels for highway commutes and their consequent production of greenhouse gases, but in mass transit-rich cities like San Francisco.

Where will San Francisco grow?

The City has planned most of its housing growth on its east side. Readers of this newspaper will be familiar with many of these plans – Treasure Island, Rincon Hill, South of Market, Mid-Market, Octavia Corridor, Mission Bay, Hunters Point, Candlestick Point, Bayview, Schlage Lock, HOPE-SF.

Housing advocates have long complained of this and asked for “density equity” between east and west sides. Affordable housing advocates have been prominent among them. One of the most renowned of these, Calvin Welch, was paraphrased in the San Francisco Chronicle (March 24, 2011) as saying, “If San Francisco is going to make housing affordable, density must be spread citywide, including the western neighborhoods.”

The major exception to this eastern clustering of new housing has been ParkMerced. Although in some important ways it is unique, in others it prefigures debates that will shape our work for a generation and more to come.

ParkMerced’s design is unlike anything else in San Francisco. A sister complex to Park LaBrea in Los Angeles, it was built in the 1940s and 1950s for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. The design of both complexes derives from the concept of the ville radieuse of the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier did not want to build cities like most of the rest of San Francisco, with residential buildings packed side by side. The ville radieuse was meant to be composed of residential towers and low apartment blocks separated by primarily ornamental landscaping. The automobile would provide transportation. At ParkMerced town homes stood in for the apartment blocks. Given this history and uniqueness, some opposition to the demolition of the ParkMerced townhomes and landscaping for the project has been for the sake of “historic preservation.”

More important opposition, though, has come from tenant advocates. Present tenants have been guaranteed replacement units and continuation of rent control, both through an agreement worked out through the Mayor’s office and through additional measures crafted by Board of Supervisors President David Chiu. These tenant protections exceed what tenant advocates accepted for Angelo Sangiacomo’s Trinity Plaza project at Eighth and Market. Nonetheless, some of these advocates have excoriated Supervisor Chiu for his critical vote in favor of the project, despite his added protections. The advocates claim that decisions of state courts on tenant protections have made the Trinity Plaza standard doubtful.

This gives us a foretaste of what we can expect elsewhere on the west side.

Options for new housing on the west side of San Francisco that does not disturb existing residents are few. Much could be built at Stonestown. Some could go above reconstructed supermarkets on their current sites. Some might even go above schools. A very little could rise atop small City parking lots. None of these would avoid controversy, but the controversy would not involve demolition of residences.

The real possibilities for new housing on the west side, though, are along commercial corridors well served by public transit. Geary Boulevard and Taraval Street are two of these. (Use of the N-Judah line already exceeds its capacity at commute hours, or Irving Street, a block away, could be another such corridor.) Along these corridors small commercial buildings are interspersed with residences, or storefronts are topped with a story or three of flats or apartments. Increased housing along these corridors would mean going up, if only a little. This would mean new foundations and new structures; this would likely mean demolition of residences.

In addition, some foresee a second transbay Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) line that would land south of Market, traverse Mission Bay, cross west near the University of California San Francisco Parnassus campus (UCSF), then turn south by Stonestown, San Francisco State University and ParkMerced to rejoin the original BART line in Daly City. Any station between UCSF and Stonestown would provide opportunity for additional transit-oriented development, and this development would mean additional residential demolition.

The debate over tenant protections at ParkMerced will be replicated again and again in years to come, then.

This is where we in the Trades are going in San Francisco. This will be our debate, both within our ranks and with the City’s body politic. We will have to steer again and again through our essential allegiance to working-class tenants, our need for work and the need of the City and the region to provide housing on San Francisco’s west side.