center of the technology industry in the city. so we propose the expansion and new class a offices in the neighborhood, but only there. the one other key factor in this character is the -- established arts communities in south of market. it was the existence of the professional design community in south park that first drew the technology industry to san francisco when it was multimedia in the 1990's. that is how it has happened. it is in story in a important that non-profit and commercial art can continue in south of market as much as possible. our plan makes parts of all kinds it permitted use everywhere. on community-and building, we have a vision that folsom st. would become a neighborhood shopping district. that is the one element of the

traditional residential neighborhood that west soma does not presently have. because our plan provides a very substantial -- for a very substantial increase in the residential population with new housing development, that is an important goal to make it a good neighborhood for the residen ts. the tools are to allow a more flexible commercial district along folsom than is otherwise possible. again, paul can describe it in detail, but it includes, for example, a small hotel would be allowed. another key feature of the plan for the residents is we are incorporating the eastern neighborhood's community benefit fee system. we think that is a good system.

we know you went through a lot of trouble to figure it out with the eastern neighborhoods, and we're basically adopting it. we think the one key adjustment to it is to allow projects, large projects, projects over a half acre in lot size, to apply it at least half that fee to improvements on the site, like open space, are directly adjacent to it. our alleys and our major streets are presently largely unpleasant in many cases and need improvement. this is the funding tool that can make that possible. when you are going to allow a lot of residents to move into a district, you have to allow a mechanism to make those neighborhood improvements that they need. the social justice approach is another perspective that has the

same basic point. it is the class and cultural integration of south of market that makes it a special place. if the market alone decided who shall live in south of the market, it is going to lose its character, lose its spirit, lose its soul. and it will not be as an attractive place for people to come do business because that spirit pose them in. the key element for our plan is we assume that the existing inclusionary housing ordinance will be continued. it is up for renewal. if it were not going to be continued, i do not think we would be recommending the increased development for the district, and it is a vital tool to foster long-term social integration. as to affordable housing, that

is actually the easy part. a great amount has been built in south of market by all the city's nonprofit organizations. and we simply continue to make it possible for that to continue. the problem now is, of course, is the lack of funding for affordable housing. but that is beyond our purview, although vital wish for you in the city family and wearing another hat in another context, we will be talking to the mayor about that one. thank you. president olague: thank you. >> commissioners, my name is toby levy, and i was vice chair of the citizens task force for planning western soma, as well as the chair for the complete neighborhood fabric subcommittee. this is a map that actually shows the alleys south of

market, and as jim mentioned, we were established to actually preserve and have the planning based on what the supervisor at that time conceived as the biggest asset of being western soma. they're all the little green lines. you can also see on this map that the big swatches of green, which are our parks, do not exist in western soma. so in establishing the vision for our planning, we were looking to create a complete neighborhood. and i think jim started with its, and it was really that we had these planning principles, and it was really to preserve and enhance the diversity of uses and people and jobs in western soma. you'll hear that again, preserve and enhance diversity of uses. i brought more pictures.

they include everything from the lgbtq community that is an asset to the community city-wide. to the filipino community, as well, which comes back even now that a lot of it has been relocated elsewhere. this is still the heart and soul of their community as well. and somehow it all blends in. and as people have mentioned, in looking at the other map, this is a comparison of the two. although you do not -- i do not want you to read it, you can see that the one was a theoretical map. it blocked whole blocks as uses, so a whole block was either slr, sli, rsd, but what our new map is is a finer grain. it acknowledges a variety of uses, sort of preserves them, and likes to mix it up. in it is no longer its

theoretical goal. it is actually one that sort of acknowledges the uses and tries to let them exist and to mix it up. we started with the alleys. there is little ability we had in the district called the residential enclave district. it had to have 75% of all the buildings residential. we had eight or nine of them existing in western soma. but this is the reality of the other part of our alley. so we now have an r.e.d. mix that is basically to enhance and preserve all those warehouse buildings that used to be the plumbers, electricians, and the people living upstairs. now their offices, consultants, businesses, and there are printers. but we want to preserve those uses. we do not want to turn our commercial alleys and the back doors for folsom st. or howard. we want them to have their own life, their own viability.

they should not be the driveways for the big alleys. our plan will actually sort of say that we're not having a blanket say no curb cuts on fallston street because that would have such a detrimental affected the living alleys that feed it. everybody has mentioned at our folsom st. nct. another one of our principles besides diversity was to actually use existing zoning where it can apply. so we did adopt the ntz zoning. folsom street is our future neighborhood center. our sli is becoming the m.u.g., the mixed use general. so what -- excuse me, the slr. it is residential and commercial. in most of my pictures, you will see that we're all so liberalizing the use of office specifically to preserve our existing housing stock.

i think you have seen the preservation document. i think there are like 75% of the buildings that are sort of in that document. so we want to have more liberal uses sell the buildings can be upgraded and used, there for the office used within limits will be allowed to preserve buildings. the rcd, ninth street and 10th streets, besides having a sort of the bigger uses that are developed regionally, these are actually freeway onramps and off ramps. as much as we would like to have a neighbor of the functions, these streets will always beefeater streets. we chose not to upzone them for housing. because in reality, we really do not want to encourage that much more housing of places where people are driving 30 and 40 miles per hour. and we want to allow housing,

and the help the measurement will help preserve it, but we do not want to encourage it. we will upzone this sso, but we want to knowledge the reality of these blocks. our sli is becoming our slia during knowledge of the arts. we're actually allowing extra height in buildings of their devoted to arts uses. it is to encourage the use of the buildings and also to allow the arts community to flourish. this is a particularly unflattering picture of our sso district. this is on seventh street and towns in. we have upzoned this to 80 feet. this is going to be our office generator. we want to encourage height and

jobs, regardless on towns in street, that is fine. it is our buffer to caltrain. lastly, one of the most important things is our large sites. we have a number of very large sites in western soma. half an acre, 1 acre, 3 acres -- we want to have a zoning that is inherently flexible. we have upzoned these lots. we want to encourage a mix of uses. we want to be able to do an urban design that if you have a bar on one hand, an alley on another, and a freeway off ramp, you do not have to do the same type of building throughout the whole side. we want that flexibility. we're hoping that we will have the mix of uses south of market. i think our plan has tried to create neighborhoods. we're trying to build on the neighborhoods we have, but again, preserve the -- preserve and enhance the diversity of uses, places, people, and jobs.

thank you. now i will turn it over to the next presenter. >> good afternoon, commissioners. tom, executive director of livable city. i was one of the two cochairs of the transportation task force. we have actually finished our work, but i wanted to present it to you today. it is agreed that i am falling after toby, because the thing that we were able to do, which did not happen in eastern neighborhoods is really look at transportation and land uses as two sides of the same coin and integrate them as best we can. i will show you policies, not actual projects. they are policies and are in the plan. they will be in the area planning. some of them are happening. i will speak in a little bit to the ways that some of these are actually happening. if i can direct your attention to the map on on the mat --

first of all, let me back up. the existing transportation situation in western soma is dominated by one mode of transportation, the automobile. the city has really put the needs of the region and the city-wide needs ahead of neighborhood needs. so what you have is a physical environment that is totally dominated by automobile traffic and what all of that entails. the transit system is poor and disconnected. the bicycle that work is poor and disconnected. walking conditions are very poor. there is a huge amount of pedestrian danger that the public health department has found. our goal was to rebalance the transportation system, to better address neighborhood needs alongside regional needs. and also to emphasize sustainable modes of transportation, walking, cycling, public transit, and not just the automobile. there is sort of a -- i will talk about the hierarchy of

streets. that is the easiest way to explain the transportation concept. you can see running through here are the freeways. the have a huge impact on the neighborhood. the big ideas is a gateway, so we have these freeway exits in soma. can we do something entry those off ramps in a way that you signal the drivers that you're going from free way to city street, so slow down, pay attention, and expect to see pedestrians, cyclists, and cross-traffic. then we have those regional serving streets. we know certain streets in soma, the two freeway fronting streets, harrison and bryant street, they're going to carry large volumes of traffic. the land use plan is to address those. those are not areas where we're pushing a lot of housing or than ever been serving retail. there is a regional retail on ninth and 10th. know how things out of harrison street because of the freeway

and the regional-serving streets. what we hope for is high volume of traffic but not necessarily high speed. are there things we can do to those streets to make them still carry large amounts of traffic but do not endanger pedestrians or cyclists quite so much? and might mean safety improvements. we're hoping to reclaim some of the streets on these regional routes for neighborhood use. those are folsom and howard streets in seventh and eighth streets. the corner of seventh and folsom is what we're thinking of as a downtown western soma. the goal of using folsom street as the main in neighborhood commercial street, as other speakers were talking about, intensifying the use is there. we would like more frequent transit running in both directions. we have worked a lot with the tep, and those goals are

reflected in the draft and transit effectiveness plan. we want it to be a great walking street, including seventh and eighth. hopefully making them two-way. cycling is important on folsom and howard. so those are the neighborhood- serving streets. we're hoping to reclaim them. and hopefully get the truck routes off of them. if you look to the general plan of truck routes, every street in soma is a truck route. we would like to emphasize it is a night in tents, harrison and brian, not seventh and eighth, folsom and howard. the next group are the alleyways. i will not emphasize it again. but thinking about a gateway, slowing down traffic as it is entering the alleyways, so we treat them as places primarily for the pedestrian with cars passing through. a lot of our policies project -- protect them from driveways and

through-traffic as well. there is the study going on. it had a lot of false starts, but it seems to be finally rolling. they're looking at designs for folsom, going through soma. that is ongoing. a public meeting will be held may be the first week in october. they are addressing, and the plans are very much in keeping with what we're doing. of course, there is the bike plan living for, and some of the recommendations are in keeping with that. there's a lot of work going on on and alleyways. i believe chester is here to speak about that briefly. so things are happening in the transportation realm already, independent of our plan, but i want to lay out the policy framework and talk to you about how we're hoping to integrate land use and transportation into one livable entity.

thank you. >> good afternoon. i am chester from the san francisco county transportation authority. i have been asked to come and get a very quick overview of the work we have been doing on our own to support the implementation of this western soma community plan. the idea here is to take some of the ideas that tom just talked about and pick a few small-scale improvements that we can actually advance to a conceptual design phase and prepare for implementation funding. i have a couple of fact sheets that i would like to distribute. they get a nice overview of this study. so hang on just a moment. i will talk through the fact sheet. what we did in our study was

conducted technical analysis, and we solicited community feedback to really identify the greatest needs and the biggest opportunities for doing these small-scale in perth mint. through that process, we focus mainly on the the alleys. the allies have been talked about consistently by the other speakers as a key focus of really wanting to improve that as a way of improving the livability of the area. so we focused on improving the alessa. the truth -- the alleys. through the committee process, we focused particularly on the street between seventh street and ninth street. natomas street, and ringold street. we identified two goals. one is on traffic. we know that vehicle speeds are pretty high in the alleys. they are used as cut-through routes for traffic.

we want to slow down the traffic using the alleys and improved safety and comfort for pedestrians. the second goal gets back to the idea that there's not that much open space, public open space in the area. what we do have in terms of public space is the streets. to the extent that we can improve the way that the streets provide public space for the community, that is in line with improving livability in the area. the second goal leads us to want to improve and install pedestrian amenities, such as new landscaping, better lighting, widening the sidewalks at key locations, and working on at the crossings. in particular, the crossing of the major streets, like seventh street and eighth streets where there is fast 1-way traffic and long at blogs. there is a need we have identified for helping

pedestrians get across without having to go all the way to a big street light mission and howard, so reducing the travel for pedestrians because of crossing. the trade-off in improving the alleys and providing more pedestrian space is you have to let go of some of the street parking that exist. we no parking is an issue that the community certainly cares a lot about. so we want to understand how to make that trade off. in our study, we conducted some public outrage. we have actually gotten a fair amount of feedback about taking a balanced approach. on the one hand, there is high demand and fairly low supply of on-street parking. we recognize that. but at the same time, we have heard that there is some interest in letting go of some of that parking in getting in

return some new pedestrian space so we can do things like landscaping and the like. the status of our study is that we have developed a few conceptual alternative designs, and we have shared that with the public. we received some feedback. we expect to take that feedback and incorporate what we have heard to refine a preferred said of the conceptual designs for each of these alleys as well as proposals for the cross things that i talked about. we would like to finalize our study, and then would like to pursue funding for implementation. these are hopefully short-term improvements that we can get with an, say, five years. that wraps up my presentation. i am happy to take questions afterwards. if there are no questions at the moment, i will turn control of the presentation over to megan wier.

>> good afternoon, commissioners. i am an epidemiologist with the program on health, equity, and sustainability with the san francisco department of public health. for over five years, we have been part of the task force. we were asked to join the task force to for support the community planning process and provide data, analyses, and expertise, and looking at how planning decisions and that the health of our communities. including factors such as housing and job conditions, transportation systems, pedestrian safety, noise and air quality, and access to open space, schools, child care, and community facilities. in support of our work to advance health considerations in planning committee to permit a public health develop a measurement tool which reflects the vision that as our city grows, we must provide the necessary infrastructure and community design elements december help the communities.

we apply this to evaluate how health needs are considered, including the western soma plan. as the plan was being drafted, we apply the healthy development measurement tool to each element of the plan to judge the objectives, policies, and actions and how they would benefit held there be a burden to health. we then submitted recommendations to be incorporated in the plan to improve public health goals. overall, the plan performed very well in protecting the health of residents and workers. one example, which were referred to in the presentations, is that the transportation element includes policies to improve pedestrian safety and access in the area, including by adding mid-block crosswalks as well as safety features, slow traffic coming on and off the freeway, through the streets in the community. where the plane could have been approved, the task force is receptive to incorporating these

suggestions. one of our largest inputs was the development of the community facilities element to support adequate and efficient provision of community facilities and services in the community and addressing needs including recreation, public health of the food access, child care, and education facilities in this growing residential community. we work closely with the planning department to ensure implementation measures are consistent with the department of public health's ongoing work to mitigate and analyze the impact on air pollution on uses such as child care facilities. we are pleased by the extent to which our health-based recommendations were incorporated into the western soma plan to protect and promote the health of current and future residences and employees. we're happy that the collaboration has been successful and reflects a model of collaboration between the government agency and community members, as well as the planning department. we and understand that the planet is the beginning of

creating a healthy western 730 polk street, and being -- we understand this will create a healthy western soma. we looked forward to implementation. thank you for the opportunity to speak today. i would like to turn this over to paul. >> good afternoon, commissioners. my name ispaul lord from the planning department staff. it has been a long but very fruitful process working with this citizens group has established by the board of supervisors. a couple of points, i do not have a formal presentation for you today. this is a community-based planning effort, and i think you have heard generally the highlights of the plan that has been presented to you in detail as a proposal for adoption. in terms of our returning to you

for that action, it will probably be sometime early next year when we are considering certification of an environmental review document. but there are going to be a number of component pieces associated with this plan. what i transmitted to you earlier was not only the plan itself, but i also transmitted to you in a very elaborate matrix that had to do with implementing actions that were tied to the objectives and policies in the plan. i originally when the plan was prepared, those implementing actions were embedded within the document itself. but by formatting needs and following the particles that were established by eastern neighborhoods, those implementing actions were removed and will be considered as part of an administrative code amendment for the plan on the heels of the plan adoption. in the course of developing that matrix, i took the time to contact every department that

had been identified as a possible player in the implementation of those recommendations and discussed with them and modify those implementing actions to the greatest extent possible to meet as various departmental needs, whether that be the department of the environment, sfnpa, a whole host of city agencies were contacted and are reviewing those implementing actions, and it will come back to you as an administrative code amendment, similar to what was done in the eastern neighborhoods. to highlight a couple of things, even though it was emphasized of the importance of the automobile in this neighborhood, or at least its prominent influence in the neighborhood, i want to stress that this neighborhood, more than any other san francisco neighborhood, has modal splits that favor pedestrian, bicycle, and transit

use over automobile use. much of the transit automobile domination is not by the people who live and work in this neighborhood, but it is by people who travel through this neighborhood to get to other places in a san francisco as a result of that freeway constellation that is in the neighborhood. one of the things, going back to a point that has been raised, about the large parcels. when we held our town hall meetings, which president olague attended at least one of those and possibly two, one of the things that we heard repeatedly from the neighborhood was -- we will accept height, but we do not like the idea of the whole area be a upzoned uniformly.