outrage over the consequences of uncontrolled downtown growth. especially the concern was the loss of buildings and affordable housing in downtown. there were also transportation and packs that were of concern. the downtown plan essentially covered the configuration of the district boundaries. lower height limits and protected growth, specifically passed to the terminal area. the preservation of hundreds of historic buildings created five conservation districts. the downtown plan also called for the retention of housing. chinatown, the plan also said

transportation goals for transit rider ship. it also established a new open space or a childhood care requirements. this shows the original downtown zone. as part of implementing action, pieces of the tenderloin, south of market, the thai town -- how well do we do the last 25 years? we have forecast a growth for 90,000 and space needed -- employment will remain flat and

some of the original areas actually lost jobs. there is 12 million square feet of office space. in some ways, it is branded as the financial district, a loss of almost 40,000 jobs. it was distributed down south of market and also to the west. and there was a total of about 47,000 jobs lost in the downtown area.

that is south and also west. the downtown plan aims to maintain chinatown, south of market, north beach. about 29,000 units were retained as affordable housing. new housing areas were also rezoned, primarily around south beach, south of market. the gold of the downtown plan has set for housing production at that time was about 10041500 a year. this is for citywide, and over the last 25 years, the average into the being 1600 units a

year. much of this occurred in the last 1015 years. as far as open space and developments that were required to provide open space, 27 open spaces were created since the plan. there were also used to improve existing open space instead of acquiring new space intended because of the lack of preservation. 250,000 buildings are now protected, an additional 150 buildings are encouraged for retention. the buildings were demolished, that includes important

buildings. as mentioned earlier, conservation districts were created. 2.5 million square feet have been applied for development and the other 5 million are certified as eligible. the transportation scorecard, we did not get more people per vehicle. the transit share has likely increased, and downtown long- term parking is being managed. the document actually talked about what we did not anticipate 25 years ago when we have

forecast of 90,000 more jobs. but we did not anticipate was the employment will stay flat over the course of 25 years. there has been growth in our educational and institutional jobs at small businesses instead of offices. that is what the downtown plan had anticipated. san francisco is not the center of the universe. employment growth happened in areas outside downtown and outside san francisco. another thing that we did not anticipate is that there would be housing, including high-rise housing downtown. that there would be housing developments in downtown instead

of offices. about 18 office buildings were converted to housing. there was also an increase in walking, biking to work, and that is something that is not thought of. downtown today, the unemployment rate is pretty much stable. it is down from last year. office vacancy is down to 12% which is not bad considering the amount of space that has been built and the fact employment was stagnant. there is about 5500 housing units in the pipeline, just in

the downtown area. and as far as the commercial pipeline is concerned, there is 3.8 million square feet. that is its. president olague: i have one speaker card, sue hester. i was going to defer because you're tired of hearing from me, i am sure. john and i are part of san franciscans for reasonable growth, the driving factor on the downtown plan san francisco has a history of boom and bust cycles, so we were very much in the boom cycle in the 70's.

after dianne feinstein became mayor, we started moving with office development again. at the same time, we were feeling stresses in chinatown, south of market, the tenderloin which are the low-income communities being displaced. john can speak to south of market because he is still there, still working in the south of market. with that report says, and what you need to figure out is the planning department doesn't have a perfect view of the future of the city. the view that they had in the late 70's and early '80s is without unlimited office growth, the city was going to die. it was incorporated into the annual office spaces. we said that we think it is high, but you can have that much. and you haven't had that amount of office development.

what we had was the internet, computers, there were no pcs. i typed every lawsuit against you what an electric typewriter. we did not assume that we needed to change our transit system. when you need to be doing now is saying, what didn't happen and what other trends that we need to get ahead of right now? we do not have a transit system that works for south of market and that is where the development is happening. it is not just mission street and market street. we need a transit system that works in the south of market. we desperately need the corridor transit system. the planning department should be ahead of these issues rather than behind the these issues. we need to be building affordable housing and we need to be building transit systems for the way the city is working

now. not for what we thought we were doing in the 70's. we need to really do planning, and doing planning means thinking about things at not just consulting years that because your staff doesn't have a perfect wisdom. you were dragged into the downtown plan because we were out in your face saying that you need to build housing and transit. we got it, but it was market street transit. that is not where we are right now. thank you. >> commissioners, i am executive director and i want to direct your attention not to the past,

but to the future. what we should learn from this experience so that we can deal with the issues of today at the next 20 years. these plants have a shelf life of about 20 years. the downtown plan was focused on growth and was focused on a small part of our central city, it was focused on selling because the zoning we had in those days was archaic and had to be changed. what we need to do now is really focused not simply on growth, it did not turn out to be quite as much as we anticipated. we need to focus on change. the economic change, the social change, the cultural change because the city is changing, very obviously, in front of our eyes, and we need to look at the broader down town, the district that was in the chart where you

saw where the jobs went. away from the old financial district and into the broader central city. we need to talk not about zoning, but a strategic vision for the city, the realities of this century in this decade. they are very different than they were before. we have to realize that down town reaches all the way from mission bay to fisherman's wharf, and all the way over to the waterfront. from a regional perspective, that is what you think of as downtown when you come to san francisco. we need to recognize that there are huge changes in our economy. what i'm going to recommend to you is that you need to do a strategic vision section, and overarching peace to the master plan that pulls these pieces

together. i looked at the master plan, and there are parts, various plans, elements. they don't add up to a cohesive vision. you can't find one there about how you can manage to change for the next today's. we need to do that, and it needs a key economic vision that this department has to work out. the two of you were not on the same page now. we need to pull it together to say what it is. for example, the central city, what do we do? the private market housing, and pacificorp of the tenderloin and chinatown will justify in the foreseeable future. so this is the message i would like to get to you.

it really belongs to the planning department to take the lead. it has to be brought in by the entire city at the court. thank you. president olague: is there additional public comment? public comment is closed. commissioner antonini: thank you for an excellent report, i reviewed it again, and like a thing else, there is good news and bad news. the good news is the fact that the transit share is extremely high in the center of the downtown area, which is good. and we have added the medical, cultural, institutional education. but we have lost a significant part of our share of the job market in the bay area that was 33% and is now 16%. i think we have a huge opportunity, because a lot of the area has the buildings and

the infrastructure in place, perfect place for businesses to relocate. i think they will do that for a few reasons. you have legislation that discourages suburban development in suburban business. i think people are realizing that of driving 50 miles a day to get to their jobs doesn't make a lot of sense. we have had a lot of growth and population in the downtown area. i think the grain movement is where things can help us. we need other incentives where you eliminate the payroll tax and other things to get businesses to want to come to san francisco and not be in a situation where we are driving businesses over because we are not competitive economically. we need something on the avenue,

something out to the richmond district. hopefully a subway or something they utilize is what we did 80 years ago where we went through our hills at the advantage of the tunnels, it makes a lot of sense in this set of trying to go through the streets. and provide transit to the richmond district, then we can make it much easier for those coming in this advances go from the north bay to easily get to downtown. we have plans for the train extension, central subway, all of these things will begin to address some of the problems south of market. we need transit that runs east- west and closer in where it will allow people to move between mission district and mission bay. it is a huge corridor. some other good news is, it looks like the center could be

the great headquarters for businesses and corporations. if we get those buildings built, it will be iconic and where people want to be. we did get good news about the possibility that we may get the -- and also is talk about the purchase of that building that was a postal center for the metropolitan agencies and the transportation agencies of the bay area. and relocating from oakland, that would be a great thing. i think we have to work hard on continuing to attract business and to take advantage of what is probably the finest corps for business that exists anywhere in the western united states. commissioner borden: i want to thank his staff for this report, it relates a lot about

employment and things throughout the city. i think the challenge for us is to really look forward and to think about how we would improve upon that which we now. i work in the tech industry, and there is a move to work from home and all of those things. at the same time, we know things are cyclical. and there is a move to bring people back together, face-to- face collaboration, and what happened during the dot com boom, people don't want to be a traditional office buildings. the floor plans don't really work for people that are trying to be creative and innovative. that is something that we need to deal with when we look at planning for the future, because that is something that is changing. we know that more and more people are becoming self- employed and are choosing to operate its own businesses. you're talking about that about

live work, it is an issue that we have not talked about, but maybe it is something that we ought to be addressing. in general, our feelings about things are cyclical. we're talking about urban farming and back to local, it is hard to pinpoint those trends, but it would be interesting to look experts that bring up these cycles and bring up what is the future of what cities can do to adapt to those changes, what ever they might be in the future. we can't make large corporations -- there are a lot of different factors that go into play there. we can be creative and imaginative about how we encompass all the ways the people work and think about work. i think it is really important. we're developing more housing downtown and we have a good mix

of jobs with the housing that there is a benefit to living downtown as it relates being close to the work and people feeling like that is an added value for choosing san francisco as a location for business location. businesses do choose to locate where a majority of the employees -- living in the east bay, it made sense to move to the east bay. to the extent that we can help and encourage housing types and building types that will allow people to live and work here, it is very important. the big issue will be about affordability, it also is the big determinant of what happens during the growth cycles and why it is troubling. i think we need to be smarter at

how we look at trends, people that look at these and plan a little better. we have the planning department's lead that discussion because we are seeing in every week. we need to know the long-term that we are making the right decisions that are going to support the growth in san francisco. >> i want to thank the staff for putting the report together a, posthumously thanks got that worked on portions of the original downtown plan in 1985. he was with the department to work on the original plan as well as the 25-year reports. that is pretty impressive. i had nothing to do with the original plan, of course, but i think it needs to be said that it is one of the seminal pieces

of american city planning. it is talked about at conferences and has been for years. i remember 20 years ago, looking at the plan with fondness and jealousy from back east with the plan was adopted thinking that i wish we could do something like this back east. no matter what reason the plan was done, and that other was a man a number of good reasons, we should all continue to congratulate ourselves. the fight over some projects that have attempted to change the plan, it is a real testament to that. the one thing that continues to throw me on the plan, when she was preparing the report, i must have after five times to check the job numbers. i was astounded by the drop in that job downtown. what seems to be the case, and i don't know if we know the exact reason for that, job growth in

the city has been generally flat over 30 years. the job numbers downtown have dropped in the largely made up by job growth. even though we added 12 million square feet of space, the job numbers dropped. that is partially because of some buildings were converted to housing, and job density actually dropped. the types of businesses and the number of employees per floor has dropped just because of the types of businesses, the character of the businesses and so on. as we move forward. the other interesting facts on this is the mixed results of transportation. in the very core of downtown, we have achieved great success, 70% use transit.

outside of that, the number gets much worse. my sense of it is that it is primarily because of regional development. people are moving farther and farther away. that has to do with all the reasons we talked about. clearly, it is important that we address transit issues in south of market and particular, and we have been having conversations about that, this is clearly a regional issue. the reason we have high success in the core of downtown is because of the regional transportation system. that needs to be part of the discussion as well. and especially related to the job issue, two of our current planning efforts are an attempt to specifically get at that. fulfilling a recommendation in

the downtown plan to further move density south of market, and the other is the street plan which is an attempt to address some of the issues about where companies want to locate. many companies don't want to be in a high-rise, but they want to be in the city. one of our primary goals, a central corridor project is to figure out how we can accommodate that kind of job growth. i think it is a great time to be taking a look back and seeing what we can learn from the downtown plan and how to move forward in the future. thank you. president olague: that was a good report. thank you to staff and everyone. we should have a follow up, but not this year. so that we can continue the conversation.

>> commissioners, if we can move forward to item 14. the glen park community plan initiation.

>> the good evening, commissioners. this is a big milestone for the glen park community plan, a big moment for the neighborhood and the city at large. this is the plan initiation hearing. today, we will discuss the proposed amendments to the general plan planning code and zoning map in order to implement the glen park community plans and will formally request the commission to initiate these items. as you probably remember, we were here about a month ago to discuss the details about the committee process that had been going on and started nine years ago. we feel the plan is a very strong plays of this point and is ready to move forward toward the adoption and we also have broad community support at this point. tonight, the actions we are asking from the commission are to approve the resolutions initiating the amendment and to

confirm the data for an upcoming adoption hearing. just to give a quick recap of the community plan, when park is so small, but a very special neighborhood. is connected to the region and the larger city by the transit network and a freeway access. the area itself is quite small, about 12 blocks. it is ordered to the west and to the east. the focus of the plan is about the five blocks around the bart station including the neighborhood commercial district. and just to sum up the pieces of the plan, it is really protecting andcharacter. did we like to