neighborhood with foot traffic that starbucks would bring. when we took over our location, market was a similar thing and it was an eye sore to the block, we came in, we invested, the way that starbucks is willing to invest in this location and we have made it a nice business there. and since, then, it has been over 12 years since we have been in business and multiple other small businesses have come into the neighborhood. so we believe that this will be the similar effect and we would love to see starbucks come in and rejuvenate this which is right now an eye sore, thank you. >> good afternoon, i'm (inaudible) and i support this project. i think that either small or big businesses both help the community. and in the city like san

francisco. they said that... they stop for everything. the people that eat in the local, small, places and the local small places and the people that eat in the big court places eat in big corporate places and so i think that there is room for everybody and there is a lot of good things about everything, and just denying a place is denying the job opportunity, i think that it is the most important thing that this creates a lot of jobs right now, and this is a big opportunity for a lot of kids, that they don't have the training. they don't have the school, they cannot do it to get a job to get themselves toegtd and to progress and to become somebody some day, thank you. >> i am here to support the

store and i am a business owner and i think that the competition in general is a healthy thing and promotes, progress and innovation and so it does not matter how many coffee shops are in the area and from the standpoint of a new business owner, i think that it is, the neighbors should be blessed with this project because those who have small, limited resources, cannot finance, you know, the big projects. and this building, requires a lot of investments. so i support that in this project, thank you. >> >> david, pruit and i am a residents close to the proposed location, i like to thank the commissioners for the projects that you sponsored in the area and a lot of the things that you have moved forward and you have much of a ten asty for

seeing the future and how to revitalize the certain communities and i have appreciate the things that you have done and i believe that this proposal is in the vision of what you are trying to do in this area. and i believe that it continues on with revitalizing those areas and bringing in a unique perspective that we can all appreciate as a community regardless of the locations that are there. again, i believe that it goes with what you are trying to do in our communities. and so i appreciate your moving forward with the acceptance of this proposal. >> commissioners, i am a propose nent of this proposition and being a four year residents in castro, this is the corner that i pass on a regular basis, up and down market street there has been much turnover, and due to local small businesses that have not

been able to thrive. starbucks would be able to kind of put a strong hold on this corner, allowing further small businesses to expand and grow, and kind of revitalize the unique character that this neighborhood provides. the castro has been my home over the last four years. what i have seen at that corner has been graffiti and numerous homeless and other people that have provided, and i, you know, it would be nice to have a change. it would be nice to have something new and different in the neighborhood. that is going to be at that corner. and i know that the restaurant association has been opposed. they actually don't hold residents on that corner, so they really don't have any authority to speak to what we have going on in our

neighborhood. and i know that they kind of mucked up the trader joe's proposal down the street. and since then, they have not had favoritism in the castro, so again thank you for your time. >> good afternoon, commissioners, my name is karin lee and i am a resident of the neighborhood i live on 19th and castro, i am in support of this as i believe that it will help to clean up the corner and make it safer for residents like me. i believe that starbucks does play a large role in the community and coordinates new events and my hope is that the new store will have a positive impact and i have heard a lot of discussion about how starbucks and the design of the stores are not unique but the design of 18th and castro has evoked many feelings of the uniqueness of the designs and so my thought is that the sanchez location will do just that as well.

>> good afternoon, chris, holmes long time san francisco resident, born and raised in the bay area. starbucks has been a big part of my life for many years. i have visited often not as a place to hang out but a place to grab a cup of coffee, these stores are not all the same, this store as i can see is a phenomenal design and it would be an excellent addition to the street. i am a strong supporter of the growth and cleaning up corners like this one and thank you very much for your time. >> good afternoon, i'm a resident in san francisco i have been in san francisco for 20 years and the coffee stores are co-existed but they thrives. i would just like to read a segment from the phil's coffee who are in support of this proposal. having starbucks nearby is a good thing because they attract customers to their location who

later patronize us as well. we believe that the competitiveness is come mri men triand they have gone nationwide over decades and the starbucks will contribute to that. and much of that growth comes from small businesses like theirs. and i am in support of this. thank you. >> thank you. >> is there any additional public comment? >> excuse me. members of the audience, standing near the door in front of the doorway, please find a seat or move to the other side of the room. >> good evening, members of the commission, peter cohen in upper market and the triangle. i support the recommendation of the planning department staff and it is actually a very thorough and thoughtful analysis and basis for the recommendation. i read through the entire planning staff report. and bottom line, i think that your staff demonstrates and you

have heard today that starbucks at this location and in this community is not either necessary, or desirable or compatible with the community for a variety of reasons. and this is not about starbucks corporate philantropy. and it is about whether it fits with the community and i think that you have heard why it doesn't. >> i would like to use the overhead and show you the map that is from the staff report. and again the question of whether you can get a cup of coffee in the upper market. i think is well answered. the green dots here, you know, within a two-block radius, i count 13 different viable places to have a cup of coffee, including a couple of other starbucks. so it is not a question about need. it is a question about what to do with that particular space and i want to emphasize the point that i think has been made earlier. that there are places that are held off the market we are finding because the rents are

high. and they are essentially inaccessible to any business but a chain store and that is why you see some places that are sitting vacant for a long period of time or they are not maintained and allowed to deter ate and so you hear the folks that get frustrated about the condition of the property. it has nothing to do if there are local businesss that could fill the spaces it has to do with beat behaviors of the land lords. i ask you to deny the cu request for the starbucks. >> my name is marie sorenson and i am here to speak on another project. i have to say please reject this, there are a number of

coffee shops, cafes in the neighborhood and starbucks talks about how they provide jobs and trying to fill a need. well they are really try to fill the need, go out to the bay view and open some starbucks. because there is definitely people out there that could use jobs and as far as i am concerned a really mediocre cup of coffee. we have had the united way and teachers trying to buy there, actually paying their respects to starbucks that is not the issue, the issue is that it is a saturated market you don't need a big chain coming in. because i live in mission and we have two starbucks that is more than enough, i think that san francisco needs to keep its uniqueness and i think that putting a starbucks on sanchez and market is a terrible idea.

i think that the landlord needs to be held accountable for the crapy condition his property is in. and also, the fact that i agree with the last speaker. that there is no commercial rent control, so they just hold properties off the market. any way, i hope that you say no to the project. >> good afternoon, my name is steven guard and i am a resident of san francisco, the upper market neighborhood. and i am here tonight, in support of this project. this project will resolve one of the last three remaining lighted properties on market street, so the home restaurant and this particular location and the old gas station, it is going to make a tremendous improvement of the condition of the neighborhood as well as deal with the homeless

encampment neighborer to the needles and and a place that is safe to walk your dog in, thank you. >> good afternoon. i am my name is stephanie longextra and i am actually a partner of starbucks. in the reason that i wanted to come up here is to share i have been with the company 20 years. and i want us to look at this and we have been talking a lot about, you know, whether it is the landlord, whether we have formula retail, well, you know what? we helped to develop the economics of the communities we go into. we have proven that time after time but not only do we do that, we don't just fill jobs, we build careers and i am an example of that. i started in the stores, in 20 years later, i am here a resident and i spend money here and i contribute to the independence as well as to the organization that i work at as

well. so i would like us to consider not only just the development, but the development of the economy within the communities we are in and the careers that we build for the employees that work with us. so obviously for it, thank you. >> hi, my name is stephanie sly and i am here to read a letter on behalf of the san francisco council of district merchants who could not be here. >> it is not the policy of the association, to support formula retail. but from the reasons provided by the merchants upper market and castro, we have decided to act and solidary with them and to support starbucks in occupying the space at 2201 market street, we feel that starbucks will be a good neighbor and an asset to the neighborhood and will generate traffic flow which will positively impact the other

businesses in the castro area, thank you. >> good afternoon, my name is craig and i am a resident of the inner sunset district, i am not employed by star buck i am an electrician an, i have visited the starbucks on 18th street and it seems to embrace the neighborhood very well. it does display, our artwork and it also has a gay pride flag hanging proudly. i feel that a starbucks at this location would benefit, not only the neighborhood, but it would also benefit commuters and our tourists who visit the area. thank you very much. >> good afternoon, commissioners, my name is kevin, and i am a small business owner of a sign

language interpreting agency. and besides my own personal experience with competition from national firms, i do have a lot of personal experience of how local businesses do keep resources and employ loc people, and it is not top heavy, we keep the money in the community. >> the main thing that i would like to consider is the obvious and i urge you to vote against this for quality of life reasons and business vitality reasons and to consider the other neighborhoods who do have a much lower percentage of this short of formula retail and how economy vibrant they have become, the haigt area and these are the kinds of neighborhood that i want to go and spend my money and the castro, i believe is at a turning point and so perhaps this is symbolic and there is already a great deal of this sort of thing and this is not the direction that you should be going. thank you very much for your consideration. >> is there any additional

public comment? >> okay, seeing none, public comment is closed, opening it up to commissioners, commissioner antonini? >> thank you for your comments and very interesting, and someone told me yesterday and i thought this was an exaggeration but there is a certain amount of truth in the remarks that this person made, you try to do something nice in san francisco and invest a lot of money and make improvements and you have a fight on your hands and you often get rejected. and i think that this is kind of the instance here, often times, we tend to fight good, clean, progressive businesses, because they happened to fit into a profile we don't like. and there is a couple of things going on here that i think are misguided one is protectionism. somebody talked earlier about the increase in the number of coffee shops in san francisco before and the united states, before there was a starbucks, which was the beginning, there were very few coffee shops. now the spin offs are a lot of

other chains, and independent coffee shops, modeled after starbucks have taken the place of where there were none and they have become neighborhood gathering places and places where people often do their work and socialize. and so, i think that it is not a competitive situation. it is competitive but it often has the benefit of helping the independence to work. and the other misconception is the formula retain in particular, something like starbucks is going to raise the rents for everybody else. well, if you look at some of these model neighborhoods that have almost no formula retail, i am not sure about the rents, but the prices are through the roof in haze valley and even in north beach. so i mean that it is not necessarily true that formula retail drives it up, sometimes the prices at formula retail places are a lot lower than

they are independent. these are broad generalities that i don't think are correct. also the points have been made about the fact that there are a lot of other coffee shops in the area. and therefore. and i am sure that most many of them are very good coffee shops, but some of them are kind of hybrids, there are bars and coffee shops, they are not really quite the same place. and you know, people go to a starbucks because they know what they are going to get. it is going to be neat, clean, and accessible bathrooms and they know the kind of service and they know the staff that they are going to get and they will be well groomed and polite and i am not going to say that they are not going to happen in independence but they have a model, and that is why they are successful because they have kept true to their standards and the people from other places as was pointed out by i think that it was mr. richards, earlier this is a good place for the new residents to land and then from there, they can move on to other areas, and discover, the other coffee shops. and of course, the new building

and the new signage is beautiful, and ginsler is a first class architect and so i think that there may be an independent that might end up at that place or some other business if this were to fail. but i am not sure whether they will be or if they will have the wherewithal or actually fit, the triangles are difficult. we have seen a number of the triangles on market street that have trouble staying in business, a number of them converted to housing now. which is something that will stay in business and one of the other ones is probably going to be before us with another proposal which a home went out of business there. for some reason it just seems like you need the right kind of fit and i think that this starbucks is probably the right size and the right usage to do that. the present tenant, could be anywhere else, i think that they would be better in a mid block and in the many, many vacantcies that exist in the area where they don't really need that triangle space.

in regards to the 20 percent within 300 feet. if it was presented by staff that we voted unanimously, i thought that i voted against it. but i might have voted for it. only because after a long discussion, they assured me that i would have discretion and i would not be forced to oppose a project just because the staff opposed it, i think that this is a bad policy because it is too narrow, 300 feet is a narrow area, you should take in the whole neighborhood commercial district but you may have one block with no formula retail and you may have one block with a lot of formula retail and you are looking at the concentration for 300 feet is too narrow and even so as was pointed out by projects sponsor, the policy has changed since they began the whole thing. so, and it is only brings them to one percent over what this rule would be. and also, the other big problem with this rule is that it lumps all formula retail together and

there is one other coffee shop, but there is a bank, a company and a store, it is not like you are getting a hyper concentration of financial institutions or bars or coffee shops, it is just all formula retail that was thrown together as they have no relationship to each other. so, i think that policy probably should be broadened in its scope and maybe the percentages is too low, it probably should be more like 25 percent. and there is a lot of businesses supporting the starbucks, i mean, mumsi and a lot of others, more the merchants seem to be more in favor it, not all of them are opposed to it. it seems like the merchants know business and everybodis that pointed out all of the good things that starbucks does and we have their northern california head quarter heres with a lot of employees and there are all treated very well and i think that 1400 employees

and 85 percent of which live in san francisco. and so that certainly is a good model and we have heard from the united way and all of the good things that they do but as someone said it is not about all of the good things that they do, it is about this particular site, i think that it is really a great site, 1,000 new housing units in there. their store at 18th and castro is you know, overflowing and there is enough demand that they really need another site. and there are two others, within a mile of this less than a mile, but it is a little bit of a hike. and it is a block and a half down the hill to get to the safeway or the store that is near the safeway and it is a little bit of a walk to get up to the 18th and castro site. and they are busy, and it means that there is a demand and if you don't like starbucks, then you don't have to go there and if you really want the independence and patronize the independence, but, you know,

there has to be competition, if your business is not good enough to survive, it is probably not because of starbucks it is the fact that you are not doing a very good job, so i am in favor of this. however, would i like to see what the other commissioners have to say. and i might be inclined to request a continuance because there was one thing that came up and it was regarding the out reach but also the point was made many times that projects, the starbucks was not going into other neighborhoods. if i could ask mr. phil burnet a question? >> i know that we had a conversation yesterday. and i had suggested that we look into places like sand bruno avenue and geneva and maybe the sunset, which we had a bad fight there a few years ago so that might be tougher and places like that and third street and do you think that is a possibility in the near

future. >> we are opened in different areas of san francisco. >> we go up into the south bay and many areas that we go in from under served areas to lower income areas and so we are more than interested at looking at that. >> the second thing that i would ask is know that you had public out reach meetings and the staff said that they were adequate. and there is criticism that the public did not have at least organized public groups. i am sure that individual people could ask you questions. but you did not provide a forum where they could speak at and as a group. ; is that correct?? >> we set up table and they were able to come and speak to the heads of the departments and ask the questions about the site and what we were doing in the process, yeah. we did reach out afterwards to the dtna and we did make the statement about that and offered to go back to their meetings and speak in their meetings and offer any questions for open and we did offer that up and we were rejected. >> yeah, it certainly, i have

been to a number of community meetings, out around and the snows town and lake pmerced area and it is like you described where they are there and they give a presentation and they are a table and you can come and they don't necessarily have a forum where they provide time for groups to come up and lobby, against, a project. i mean, sort of, individual, >> right. >> participation which i am in favor of. i would ask if you are amenable if there is a continuance to having a meeting and allowing the neighborhood groups to come up and air out their concerns. >> you willing to do that. >> let's see what the commissioners have to say, if those are the two areas if there are continuance that i would like to see to work on by the time it came back. >> thank you, all for coming and testifying. i have been on the commission for 9 months. and this is by star the most public input in e-mails that i have received on one project. and when i tell people that,

they say well san franciscoans are crazy. you know, i think that people are passionate about their neighborhood and their commercial corridor and want to say in how they are developed and i think that is why this cu process was put in place and it was nut put in place by the voters to put in a higher bar for retail. because they tend to impact. and i think that there are good things about this project and i think that the design is good and well thought out and i think that starbucks is a good company and they go into spaces that others will go go into. and you can walk into this space which was vacant for many years and starbucks acts activated that and it is a much better environment. and now they do well in that community. the 18th street is crowded and i have seen the overflow traffic in there and so it is safeway. but i agree with that speaker, who said that it is not really

about the starbucks, per se, or that building and kind of renovating that building, it is about kind of the broader feel of the commercial corridor and making sure that stays diverse and unique. i mean when i moved to the city, because i like that the neighborhoods are diverse and they are unique. and i travel around the neighborhood and you can look at some of the newer neighborhoods like king street which i don't tend to go to often where there are not controls and it is kind of, there are not too many and it does not str that kind of unique san francisco flavor and i think that in this case we have to respect what we are hearing from the community and certainly there are people that are supporting it and i think that the comments that we have received are running two to one against and i also think that we have to look at the fact that there are two starbucks already in walking distance in the neighborhood in that there is a good deal of formula

retail, especially on this stretch of upper market street. and you know, we are looking at a change in the neighborhood where there is going to be a lot more retail coming on-line in retail and developers, and the retail projects tend to look to formula retail because they are credit clients and they are trying to get, credit worthy tenants in. and so, you know, for those reasons, i am against the proposal and will vote no. >> commissioner? >> thank you. >> i think that it is important to support the staff or the new commission's policy that we voted on. i think that it is a very precise policy and i think that instead of just asking for a formula retail ban across the board it looks specifically at concentration and it is something is that we ask to give us the tools around. even if the policy were not in

place, we still have the five criteria to which we looked at formula retail. included concentration and whether or not the goods were available in the neighborhood already and i think that those two points, specifically for me on this project is that there are five on formula retail establishments within the 300 feet. and that, coffee, or the tea or whatever snacks are available at whatever locations and so it does not rise to the level of necessary, or desirable for me. >> commissioners? i am going to follow on those comments if that is all right. >> my thoughts are very much along the two fellow commissioners, who have just commented. it is not a starbucks issue, this particular block it could be toys r us, but what is unique about san francisco and i think that what we love about san francisco is every district is different. every area is different. every block is different. and in this particular case, i really look at that particular block and we just approved this

policy, not very long ago with a radius, this happened to follow a 21 percent, i feel obligated to back up that policy and support it, that does not mean that very soon we might come back and change that policy and that number, but for the time being, that is what is there. so i am not supportive of this particular project. however i do want to publicly say that i am supportive of the starbucks, i think that they are a good, corporate citizen. and i think as commissioner hillis said in certain location and blocks and certain areas they bring vitalization and some of the comments in support speak to that and i agree with that. and i have had success with them as well personally. as a customer but also in business, and in the right place in the right spot, they are good. i don't think that this particular in this right block and this right address it is good. and i appreciate the comments, in thinking about, you know, as mentioning if you think about san francisco, beliit