make sure that the street fair and all those other things that make south of market would still be able to exist there; that we weren't going to be a padlum of planners that was going to turn everything like something like first floor residential with something above. you'll find our plan does reflect these principles. it's very nuanced. the last thing that paul lord brought to this, and most beneficial ways, is that we weren't going to reinvent the planning code. we used the eastern neighborhood zoning where possible, and we tweaked it. so, you'll find that when the plan gets to be really introduced and the nitty-gritty, we're able to use the umu, the umo, all the type of types of zoning character -- zoning categories that were already introduced. we did not rethink, let's say, the fees or the bmr units or

anything else like that. we actually looked at what was there and if it could be adapted to reflect this fine grain community, we adopted it or we tweaked it. and, so, i think that what you'll see is this is a plan that allows for the next 20, 30 years of the growth of south of market, that reflects our planning principles and grew out of all the nuance pieces of it. thanks. >> thanks, toby. once upon a time in planning, transportation came first. they would build a streetcar line out into the wilderness, and then the housing and the commercial would follow and it would build around that. today it seems like we engage in a community plan and we slap on transportation after the fact.

tom radulavich, director of livable cities served on the task force for the first four or five years, i believe, representing transportation advocacy, working with chester fong from transportation authority and mark solomon, as i mentioned. they wrote the transportation element of the plan. it's one-fourth of the entire plan, which is based on good, smart transportation. so, let me introduce tom radulavich. >> thank you. good afternoon, commissioners. i think i've just got one slide here. all right. well, i don't have a pointer today, but let me just launch in. one of the things that i think

was most glaring was we began to look at this plan as we had all of these great intentions, these policies, these thing we wanted to protect, these things we wanted to conserve, these things we wanted to have happen and foster in the neighborhood. we really needed to look at the street grid and how it's used. and as toby mentioned, there is kind of this sort of two scales of streets in the neighborhood. there are these huge 82-foot wide arterial streets, the numbered streets, streets like folsom, harrison and so on that kind of formed the major street grid. some of these blocks are rather large, some of the largest in the city, so 5 25 i think 800 something feet. and theme got miniature neighborhoods in them because they're affected by so-called alley ways because the traffic volumes on those big streets, a lot of the neighborhood life,

pedestrian life, the place where kids play, those sorts of things happen on those alley ways. so, kind of a goal hereof could we reclaim those streets? could we rebalance the transportation system? so it wasn't looking just at the needs of through traffic, but that it also serve better neighborhood needs and supported sustainable transportation modes, better walking, cycling, and public transit. so, could we rebalance those major streets and also protect the alley ways? so, this is basically our transportation schema. it's tied very closely to land use. as jim mentioned we didn't do what's happened in other neighborhood plans, which is do all the land use planning and try to figure out the transportation planning later. we needed these things integral and they needed to speak to each other. what you see here is these concepts for the purposes of these various streets is outlined here. so, there was kind of a street

that runs this way, in yellow and green, that is 7th street to orient yourself. the other yellow and green street is folsom. there was a realization that the really the heart of downtown or downtown western soma, if you call it, is at the corner of seventh and folsom street. so, folsom is the main commercial artery for the neighborhood. and we felt like the main commercial artery, it should be transit oriented street should be a pedestrian oriented street and a possible cycling oriented street. just to its north. slightly to the left of this on this diagram is howard street. that's another street that we felt was an important neighborhood street. so, one way to think about the streets is regional serving streets are neighborhood serving streets. so, we wanted to reclaim some of those numbered streets and howard and folsom streets as more community serving streets,

stronger emphasis on public transportation, walking and cycling, wider sidewalks, amenities, lower traffic, hopefully lower traffic volumes. the other streets in this plan which i'll talk to a little bit, we call them the regional serving streets. we'd still like to enhance the streets as walking streets, support commerce on those streets, but understand that these are going to be major, major traffic arterials, at least in the near future. so, you see that's a corner of seventh and folsom. so, folsom, the importance east and west and north and south here. folsom is one important access, 7th is the other. and we worked very closely with the transit effectiveness project and the good news was muni was doing their tep planning at the same time we were planning here. so, we were able to sit down with the mta planners. one of the goals was a real strong emphasis on transit on folsom. there is a line that runs on folsom and harrison street is now, because it's one way cup

let, it's not very frequent. and to get from one side of soma to the other requires three or more transfers. so, we wanted to do it in fewer. i think we had great cooperation with the tep. their plan actually reflects ours in term of the one-way streets and in territorixv of land use and so on. so, there's been that integration with folsom as a major transit artery. * through the neighborhood. and we also toward the tail end of the trips process got started, which you probably heard about. it's kind of under delivering. we hoped it would resolve, you know. what you see here is a schematic, some ideas about how streets should function. but they're not street designs. they're not plans in the sense you can kind of give them to an engineer and say build them. so, we were hoping that process would actually really solve the problem. it hasn't yet. i don't think it will in terms of just harrison -- folsom and

howard streets. we're told now i think that the central corridor project is going to look at those streets as well. because the other challenge with this planning area, of course, is folsom runs from the embarcadaro into the mission. so, you can't -- we've had various plan areas look at pieces of folsom and many have come to the commission. rincon hill. plan had ideas for transit bay plan, the idea is for folsom. we have ideas for folsom, et cetera. you don't want this to be a game of exquisite corporation. -- corps. we needed integrative planning. we don't have yet projects on these streets, but we'll transform the streets in the ways that this plan calls for. it still is schematic. we still have a lot of work to do, i think working with city agencies to make sure that we can deliver on the promise of these plans. so, but those are the neighborhood serving streets. i should also mention 12th street has a lot of cultural activities on it. it doesn't really go anywhere, but it's a very wide street.

so, you can see that outlined in green. that was a real opportunity for greening and reclaiming a lot of public space for community life. 11th street is an important street. at its lower end close to division street in terms of nighttime entertainment. but as you go north on 11th street it separates the two residential clusters on eitherver side of 11th. could we give 11th a quieter residential neighborhood? that enclayv between 11th and 12th with that, with the extension of lafayette, [speaker not understood], kipling on the next block. so, 12th and 11th. you have the big regional serving streets, 10th and ninth. i think the idea with those they'll carry large volumes of traffic, but they will need to be high-speed and high volume because that's really the killer. that's the thing that drives

commerce away. that's at the high speeds. dangerous for pedestrians, other users of the street. could you accommodate large flows of traffic, but at a saner pace? could we add things like pedestrian improvements, crosswalks, corner build outs, greater visibility for caracas? things that improve the safety, easier to cross, less barriers for the neighborhood. then you have 8th street. that's one of the streets you wanted to reclaim for neighborhood serving uses, transit street as well. 7th street you see in the plan. and then coming from north to south mission street, just out of our plan area but that is a important commercial street and transit street as well. howard and folsom which i talked about. and on the next street down is harrison and bryant. these are freeway fronting streets. and, so, what we tried to do was concentrate the residential uses and actually intensify the amount of residential that's permitted. but did that north of harrison street. so, the idea is harrison and bryant will be carrying large

volumes of traffic from the freeway through the neighborhood. also front on the freeway, the freeway itself is a blighting influence on the neighborhood. so, could we concentrate residential uses north of that and leave that more for the pdr uses, commercial uses, nighttime entertainment, that type of thing. all the residential enclaves in that part of the area. it's hard to see on this map, but many of the alley ways will run through and stop. arterial streets interrupt them. we wanted to create connectionses between those biggar tierial streets. these little alley way neighborhoods begin to connect to one another so you don't have to walk several hundred feet to a major intersection and then back in order to go from one of these alley ways to another. you see quite a number on folsom street, streets like rausch and so on that we wanted

to connect across the freeway bridge. so, here's our plan. as i said, the devil is in the details in terms of implementation. implementing this is going to require cooperation of a lot of city agencies, mta, planning department, transportation and so on. we've had great cooperation with transportation authority as jim mentioned working with chester fong. they extended this kind of idea of reclaiming alley ways that was first pioneered in the eastern soma area, the som pac area, developing it as part of that. we are definitely going to need more planning work to realize this plan. i think if we do realize this plan, we'll allow this to serve the city-wide transit phoenixes we do now, and be a livable neighborhood and stainable neighborhood. unless you have any questions, i'll let you see the rest of the presentation. thank you for your time today. >> thank you.

* >> i've lived in south of market since 1977, so, i guess that's 35 years. to john [speaker not understood], i'm the new kid. john has lived and worked in our neighborhood for i don't know how long, many years. he is a nonprofit housing developer, developed his land use skills, being a key person involved in the original south of market plan, and in the redevelopment agency's. and this afternoon john would like to speak about some of the key outcomes of this process. john elderling. >> thank you, jim. and good afternoon, commissioners. actually, jim has one year on me. i got there in '78. when i took the job at top coat. and i've only lived there since

'96 actually physically. what i want to address is what to expect the actual real life results to be over the next two decades given the enactment of this plan. what actually will happen, what are the key outcomes. and the first thing i want to draw your attention to is that the plan is a substantial up zoning in terms of residential development in particular compared to the 1990 zoning that is in place today. what we expect to come from that -- and, of course, it depends on the economics of the housing market over the next 20 years and the business cycles, but it's reasonable to expect several thousand housing units and perhaps 10,000 new residents. that would be more than double the existing population. so, you could say the population will double at least in west soma based on this plan. of course, that has -- and what

we did in terms of that up zoning was do what we can in terms of the rules, the height limits, the various things that govern individual lot development. to try to focus most of it on the larger sites, the sites over a half acre in size. the reasoning for that is we didn't want a wall of buildings on a block face or, you know, one big lumpy high density area somewhere in the neighborhood. what makes -- once of the things that makes of the south of market what it is today is that you have sosuch a wide mixture of building sizes and heights and ages and types and, of course uses residential and businesses * right next to each other all over the place. the neighborhood is real hodgepodge. physically and economically and socially. and we wanted to keep that character. and, so, the method that we identified to work towards that end is because the large lots are scattered at random

throughout the district to focus as much of the new development on them. it's also of course easier to have design guidelines and that also produced good results on the larger properties. we did increase the number of residential enclave districts that exist now on the alleys throughout the district. the alleys are a special place with a special, very typically low-rise character, low-intensity character. and everybody in the community wanted to maintain that pattern as well. thanks to the double population and also the make over of folsom street being planned, perhaps a two-way boulevard, as tom mentioned the increased muni service, we really envision folsom street becoming the neighborhood shopping retail street that re dents of south of market have wanted for decades.

* residents we propose to zone it as an nct district, neighborhood commercial transit, and we have special zoning regulations where we're hoping to get two floors of commercial space, for example, in the new development sphere so that neighborhood retail and professional offices and others could locate there. we, of course, as mentioned earlier, would be for the neighborhood infrastructure needs, we have proposed all along to incorporate east neighborhoods community benefit fee process which you are familiar. from the city-wide perspective of course as well as the major new housing supply, we wanted to accommodate substantial economic growth in western south of market * . for the tech industry in particular, we expanded the former sso district, now it will be known as west soma nuo, so that it reaches -- it will

reach from caltrain to showplace square along townsend street. this is a substantial development opportunity. but perhaps more significant, throughout the whole area, in particular in the nct and the urban mixed use on th and 10th street, we have really relaxed the 1990 zonings limitations on business development. * ninth we allow most times any kind of office and any kind of business in those areas. we would expect to see dozens, certainly, probably -- how can you predict, but a hundred or more new small businesses take advantage of this over the coming 20 years to open up. and that also is consistent with our vision of a genuine mixed use neighborhood with substantial small business activity as well as substantial

residential neighborhood amenities. we also specifically maintain south of the freeway the commercial only district, the current sli from the 1990 zoning to become the service arts light industrial district, the sally district under our west soma plan. there is a real need for this district. that is the most auto accessible and auto impacted part of our neighborhood. there is need for substantial large scale retail. we allow retail up to 25,000 square feet, which we call a mid box. it's not a big box. costco is 100,000 feet or something. it's not anywhere near that scale development, but it is large enough for a retail development that addresses the needs of central city residents rather than having to drive to

a center to find something, they'll be able to find it in south of market. and we continue to allow pdr, the production distribution and repair uses almost anywhere? in our plan area. * of course, this historically, of course, a big issue in the eastern neighborhoods was very prevalent in south of market. the economics are diminishing it gradually, but we believe there will always be a demand for space for those pdr businesses what are called high value, they have high revenues per square foot. and, so, they can pay more for their space or they can even afford to buy their building in order to remain there. and that would be especially true of any pdr business that has to be close to its customer base in the central city, in the central business district. and there are such. and, so, we expect them to remain and they're a very important part of the

neighborhood and they add a lot of character and variety to it as well. for the community building aspects, we of course allow arts activities just about everywhere. there is strong support for the arts. we know that the economics of space is going to have a big impact on which arts organizations and activities can afford to remain here over the long term. but we make it possible. finally, we certainly expected there will be substantial amounts of affordable housing built, but the inclusionary housing and the thousands of new market rate units and also a good number of nonprofit affordable housing developments. and those in particular, we would anticipate, as has been the practice for the last 10 years in many, to include social services space, child care and so on, within those

projects. that is the long-term strategy to be sure that the nonprofit organizations that do provide services to our residents can afford to remain in the neighborhood even if rents go up in the open market. so, these are some of the major outcomes we anticipate over the long term. thank you. >> thank you. >> good afternoon again. just wanted to briefly wrap up and summarize. can we get the overhead again real quick? just to remind you again, the purpose of today, obviously you know by now, was to give -- really give you a good understanding of the process that the community and the task force went through to develop the plan, what are the big ideas coming out of the plan,

where the potential impacts for the area. there are a lot of details that need to be discussed. and when you get your packets this afternoon for next week, you should have the initiation packets which will have a lot of detailed information about the proposed zoning, proposed heights, the proposed planning code changes, and general plan changes. and you'll be able to take a look at that, and on the 15th we'll be able to have a robust discussion on those specific details leading up to an adoption hearing on the sixth. but that concludes our presentation and we're available for any questions you may have. >> thank you. is there any public comment on this item? good afternoon, commissioners. my name is paul warmer. i just want to point out what a beneficiary other parts of the

city can be from the learning of this project. i speak from my experience working on the japantown activities. and how incredibly valuable a number of the concepts that came out of the western soma plan were to helping us. everything from establishing community goals and objectives that can be used as a touch stone to say, does this planning proposal meet the objectives? does it support the objectives or does it not? a very valuable tool that frequently isn't there and should be. the work of the community outreach and the work that chris schaeffer and the cop folks have done, again, something that carried over superbly. the means of engaging with planning staff and the way paul lord was able to educate us, just phenomenal. so, the benefits have come out of this, what they have done, really is far reaching and i

encourage the planning department to take advantage of that as they look at other community planning and revisions to community plans going forward. thank you. >> thank you. any further public comment? good afternoon, commissioners. my name is bernadette [speaker not understood]. center located at the corner of sixth and mission. our organization has been around for 10 years in the neighborhood working very closely with the filipino residents in the neighborhood. and i just want to commend the hard work of the staff and the other community members. it's a long time coming and we've been involved in the process. the residents have been involved. i particularly worked closely with the social heritage, the filipino social heritage district. and its formation. and the whole process allowed

community to be involved. and myself not being a planner, i think it's very important for not only the leaders in the community leaders in the neighborhood, but also the residents to be brought on this journey, on this path to understand what the planning is, to be involved in the process. and i think this was done well. and give some overview, i just encourage you to support this plan. -- west soma plan. thank you. >> thank you. sue hester. i want to follow-up with paul warmer's comments in particular. i give a large thank you to paul lord who is not here, but his presence is here as well as the members of the task force. if this is a one-off planning process, we will have failed.

this process has involved the community at a level that is much deeper than i have seen in just about anything. i went through all the hearings on eastern neighborhoods and particularly paid attention to the mission because i have a stake in the mission. it is not top-down planning that you have today. you have bottom-up planning, and the planning department doesn't always have a friendly relationship with that which comes from the community. the community keeps banging into doors and saying, hey, there are skill sets in the people in the community. it has been done in the tenderloin. it has been done in chinatown. and it is part of your planning code. but everyone pays a lot more

attention to that which has come through the planning department staff. it's what you put in your general plan. you do not put community plan in the general plan unfortunately. there is no chinatown plan. it exists in the planning code. and i think i have learned a lot by my off and on participation in western soma. i don't go to anywhere near all of their meetings, just a little bit. and i learned a lot from today. and my brain has been thinking about all the planning processes that i'm involved in already and things that came up today that are input that are really of value for other planning processes. there are imperfect planning processes all over the place

and i ask the commission to start thinking and start analyzing and asking the questions of how we can -- as a planning department representatives, the planning commission can change the process to use the skills and what we have gone through on the western soma plan in every planning process. thank you. >> is there any additional public comment? okay. public comment portion is closed. commissioner antonini. >> thank you for an excellent presentation. i have -- before my comments, i have a question which could either be answered by mr. yeager or mr. makko. this is for the benefit of the public, but the boundaries of the western soma could be confusing because a bow tie configuration. anb