Encouraging Business - and Livability of - San Francisco

By Janet C. Campbell

I wish to be instrumental in encouraging fair, open competition in public bidding; to promote policies that encourage business to grow and not flee San Francisco; and to stop the insanity in planning which is forcing out families in San Francisco through the manipulation of a false set of demand/supply of car parking spaces and travel areas.

This paper is not about criticism. This paper is about downright concern over the facts of what this City is doing and facing - and a challenge to all of us about just what we are going to do about it.

As an architect with a really great education and a really great background in my work and project experience, plus being fairly well-traveled, I just can't sit back and do nothing, when I know so much that can help all of us.

You can only take so much.

In order for a City or region to survive, one cannot be a "one-horse" town or dependent on just one sector of the economy - and that fact was apparently not recognized soon enough, about 30 years ago. The military sector is gone. The ports are gone. Any number of heavy and light industrial companies are gone. Left are some service businesses, some construction, medical and educational - a significant portion of which is a "fourth branch of government" that does not have to obey any laws - in the middle of us and all over the city - and even the military had to obey many more laws than these guys.....including EPA laws... Now, even significant portions of the business community have gone - to Charlotte, NC and elsewhere. (It's not that I would quibble about their choices; given the current business climate in San Francisco and the issues of terrorism, plus the great family life and great, much cheaper education one can get in the South, I can't blame them for their choices.)

But this City could and should have done better.

In essence, this city now caters to the young - college students - and the old and the poor. They are the most easily "manipulable". Forget the middle class, or those who strive or even hope to be in it. With recent planning policies now being superimposed on the planning code, families are being shoved out. As an Architect dealing with folks attempting to make their properties livable, I hear all the time - and see - many good folks leaving.

It isn't working, folks. This City is fast becoming a controlled society without the real freedoms necessary and guaranteed by our Constitution.

It's not about total freedom or none at all - it's about freedoms exercised within boundaries, enforced laws that help all of us to find even more freedom and build lives and businesses and ideas creatively....

Right now, San Francisco enjoys the distinction of having more of its residents go out of the City to work than in it - the basic definition of a "Bedroom Community" or "Suburb" in the Planning world...

Is that what residents want? Is that what Businesses wanted or want? And why are they fleeing such a beautiful locale? Puzzling....until you live here and get at the facts....

Long-term business is not about greed, it's about survival. And this City is not providing the survivability necessary to keep businesses, families, etc. - through its policies.

I always find fascinating looking into history, the facts, and then following the inevitable money trail....and then you can figure out exactly what needs to be fixed or enforced. It's always in the research, the facts, and then the solutions literally drop out of the facts - that's what you learn at some of the toughest Research Institutions, like I graduated from, in this country. We need to enlist the local media into doing the same, as the Central Committee - a detailed, hard look at real facts can bring health back to this City, in many areas.

Further, our City Officials are sworn to uphold the law, are they not? We need to help them to do so, as the Republican Central Committee.

As a resident affected by present policy-making of various City Officials, I hope that you are just as interested in getting at the facts, and then doing something about it, as I am. If you are, you need to vote for me - and call or write me with your concerns! I listen.

By holding City Officials accountable to uphold the laws that are there to protect us and encourage life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness - not just a bohemian's ideal, a student's ideal or just a family's ideal, but also that of business - we make life better for all.

A City should not punish its residents for living there, as so many angry residents tell me about, some native, some not. I have witnessed severe anger, and people leaving in quite a state - one well-educated, with a good job, thirty-some year old man, throwing some of his possessions, destroying them, in the gutter as he literally ran, over one night, out of San Francisco (and California) - in despair and great anger - and with reason. He's not the only one.....Does this city really think it lives on an island? Does it not know that what goes on here gets not only talked about elsewhere, it will cause the inevitable and rightful withholding of taxpayer dollars from elsewhere into this City's coffers?

This City needs to recognize that laws provide the guidelines that make it easier for all to live, within an organized fabric of life. Without it, nothing works. We are not an "Island to ourselves".

And that's what we now have here in San Francisco. It has to be openly recognized in order to be solved.

One such recent example includes the idea that one can "reform" a City's voting public - hence power and possibly monetary gain for those in power? - through the use of an ill-formed act that allows politicians through eminent domain to "redevelop" areas around a "Light Rail". Don't get me wrong - Rail is not always bad, it has its good points, too, and I like the idea of expanding rail - I worked for MARTA in Atlanta - like BART - as an Associate Planner in the late 1970's, designing the layouts of five stations - including a 5,000 car parking garage.

However, this Light Rail Act affects and could destroy, given current planning ideas put forward in the Richmond, the well-over 1,000 businesses that line Geary Boulevard corridor.

How? The act allows for the use of eminent domain one block back or so from the light rail - encouraging the taking of land and rebuilding at will. Guess what we keep hearing the powers that be want to build? Housing - without parking. Sound familiar?

It was done in the Soviet Union and East Bloc Countries, called the "Plattenbau". It failed - miserably. It was not built well, it was not aesthetically pleasing (boring, minimalist/industrial-looking, cheap, and fell apart easily because of the "minimalist" lack of detailing in the buildings), and it did not encourage "Defensible Space" - and so encouraged suspicion, etc. - all those things that make for the unfriendly and dangerous society many here now fled from in their former countries.

As one of my brothers told me, often in such housing while working to help free the Iron Curtain countries during the 80's, they were "terrible". They were -and even today, basic insulation has to be added to their whole exteriors to make them halfway livable - not even working then.

Is this what you want to see here - government-built/controlled housing in large blocks?

And if you know anything about housing towers and the history of "Redevelopment" Agencies destroying viable but poor neighborhoods across the United States since the 1950's, you would get up out of your chair and be right in those Supervisor's meetings going after the issue.

What has happened across the US?

In 1972, a number of large, tall housing towers were imploded to the ground in a series of planned blasts, only 16 years after they were built, at Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis. Right now, the same thing is happening with Cabrini Green in Chicago, and here in San Francisco, remember what happened to Geneva Towers? And these aren't the only ones...

Built as "compartments" to house lots of tenants, the conclusion researchers came to as the reason for the high crime, etc. at Pruitt-Igoe, the first in a long line of such failures and destruction of viable neighborhoods at the hands of those using "eminent domain", was the total lack of the use of the well-documented and with whole books devoted to the subject about the principle of "Defensible Space".

The crime created by the lack of "Defensible Space" had made the bland, minimalist towers at Pruitt-Igoe completely unlivable almost immediately - and caused its destruction in only 16 years!

Did you know that by destroying a viable, operating community - well living by "Defensible Space" principles in its current condition - along Geary Boulevard with the use of "eminent domain", you could and with very high probabilities will wind up with the same set of problems?

I have seen the end result of "redevelopment" doing their work - "Buttermilk Bottoms", an area close to the Martin Luther King Drive area of Atlanta, was cleared out for "redevelopment" - in the mid-1960's. It never got done. There are, for over 40 years now, open large fields in downtown Atlanta that have never gotten back a hugely livable (yet poor), very viable neighborhood with "defensible space". In Buttermilk Bottoms, poor folks could stay there in their present conditions, or go get an available and very good education within a few blocks (Georgia State University, Atlanta University - Morehouse, Spellman, Georgia Tech and within 5 miles, Emory University, etc.)- and rise from it. It's not there anymore - and the folks who were moved out? They were moved many miles away, to two-story projects, and isolated by long, long bus rides to work. Opportunites were lowered, and crime increased. Isolation - the anme of the game - whether by minimalist towers or distance - created the despair that spiraled down into hopelessness and crime.

"Redevelopment" through "eminent domain" was used there to "reengineer society" - move away certain "undesirables."

And this kind of social "reengineering" can and will happen here - if you let it - by moving away the "undesirables" in San Francisco terms: successful businessmen, thinking middle class - the uncontrollable, freedom-loving classes....

Middle-class San Francisco residents right now sit on the very edge of despair and hopelessness. All it will take is one small push - eminent domain and government-built/controlled housing - and crime and much more increases.

I have to state it again: The "reengineering society through redevelopment movement" through the use of the "Light rail system" will destroy a very large retail area, viable neighborhoods, and move in a voting block of the poor and students - those most likely to vote for the policies of those in power, without question, and without the education and experience to hold those in power accountable for their actions and the taxpayer dollar.

And again: The undesirables being moved out?

Businessmen and women, families, low-rise housing with that "suburban character" (quoting a young planner who told me this just a couple of months ago, an idealist with no idea of how she was being used and no clue about recent history.....)

Is this what you want?

Worse, also being proposed along Geary Boulevard is the destruction of the easiest parking available in design standards - diagonal parking - for much fewer spaces. This is literally what was presented recently at a Planning Meeting in the Richmond. When questioned by numerous folks about the parking, and in my case, about why there was far less parking along Geary, which in every other major city except New York, Zoning laws require a minimum of 4-5 car parking spaces per 1,000 square feet of retail/office usage to even build the spaces, the reply came back from the local planner: "The cars can just go back into the neighborhoods".

Residents in the meeting just groaned - loudly. Here we have planners, encouraged by the voting policies of City Supervisors, destroying the working infrastructure of a city - a hugely successful retail area.

Did you hear that? Retail along Geary Boulevard is being proposed to LOSE parking (needed for carrying packages and accessibility for busy families and businessmen getting supplies) - while more parking is needed! Apparently, this "light rail" is designed to gain 5 to 11 seconds in travel time - with the destruction of some or all of the present tunnels? Someone needs to do an Independent Study and really figure out what the real facts are.

The Republican Central Committee needs to push for such a study, and help get media attention on the issue.

I have suggested using the middle of blocks for parking, right behind the commercial strip, etc. - which is most workable - and yet no one wants to listen.

Instead, there is a decided push to eliminate cars from the City.

Here's another example, as of May/June of 2005, that really undermines the viability of the City and freedom-loving residents as to what is going on through the use of "Planning" policies.

I have a client, with a large car, and a very, very large three-flat Victorian building on two large lots, apply for taking cars off the street and his second lot, and putting six cars in a garage easily reached off the street in an existing basement, all this more than a block away from a historic district. (His house was not a landmark.)

I showed the plans to the planner for the garage. She told me she was not going to allow it. I asked why not. Her reply: "We don't require a minimum of car parking per flat be provided on the site." I asked why not, as this is done in all other Zoning Codes (except New York). Her reply: "We do not allow more than one car per flat." I asked where it was in the Code - no answer. What she did say was mind-boggling: "We do not want more than one car per household in this city - or less". I asked how she thought that would work for families. She said, and I quote, "The man can have a car to go to work, the wife can walk to the grocery store, and no teenagers need cars, they shouldn't be driving." I was utterly shocked at the lack of practicality - and said, "This sounds like Communism" and she smiled, and said, "It is" and kept smiling. I asked where she lived, and she said "Berkeley."

I'll bet she has a car....

Who said we as residents want this kind of control? What other city would put up with it? Why are we?

Another client, in the same block, was told by her the next month (same Planner) that "they could not have a garage." He and his wife both work...and park on the street, thanks to her....wonder when a wife who won't be able to walk to a "corner grocery store" and do all the family errands decides life is way too constrictive and gets their family out of San Francisco, leaving behind the ill, the poor....and no middle class.

Especially with ALLLLLLL those businesses being run out of the Geary corridor.

Is that what you want?

If you don't want what is happening to continue in San Francisco, please vote for me. I would love to hear from you!

Should there not be exposure of and a challenge to the potential use of a "light-rail act" to fill the pockets of local politicians, their buddies, all at the expense of a viable, large retail area and its environs?

Neighborhoods are always far safer when folks "own" and can see their own "Defensible Space" - crime is lowered, pride of ownership shows in how well the property is kept up, etc.

The Republican Central Committee, with my help, would be able to get at the these kinds of issues, get media attention, and help to solve the problems.

There are, of course, other issues that I would like to be able to help with, but for now, these are some of the most pressing in our District.

I would like your vote - and to hear from you.

Thank you!