should be able to listen to the hearing live. please wait for the item you are interested in speaking to and for public comment to be announced. to comment you must enter star three to raise your hand once you've raised your hand, you'll hear prompt state that you have raised your hand to ask a question. please wait to speak until the host calls on you. when you hear that, your line is unmuted, that is your indication to begin speaking. for those of you joining via webex, please log in via the link found on today's agenda and enter password cpc. 2023 and you'll

need to use the raised hand icon to ask a question. you will hear a beep and then see a prompt that the host has unmuted you and that is your indication to begin speaking. best practices are to call from a quiet location and please mute the volume on your television or computer for those persons attending in person, please line up on the screen side of the room or to your right. please speak clearly and slowly. and if you care to state your name for the record. finally, i'll ask that we all silence any mobile devices that may sound off during these proceedings. at this time, i will take roll commission president tanner here, commission vice president moore here, commissioner braun here. commissioner dimond here. commissioner imperial here, commissioner koppell here, and commissioner ruiz here. thank you, commissioners. first on your agenda is consideration of items proposed for continuance. item one, case number 2023 hyphen 005549. pca eliminating public art requirement for 100% affordable housing projects is proposed for continuance to

november 2nd, 2023. item two case number 2023 hyphen 005567 pca for parcel delivery services definition planning code amendment is proposed for an indefinite continuance in item three. case number 2022 hyphen 011807 coa for the property at 51 prosperous street. a conditional use authorization has been withdrawn. commissioners commissioner ruiz will need to recuse herself from item one, so we'll take up that matter separately. but at this time, members of the public, this is your opportunity to address the commission on any of these items proposed to be continued only on the matter of continuance. again, if you're in the chambers, please come forward. if you're calling in remotely, you need to press star three. i'm seeing no members of the public in the chambers. let's go to our remote caller. good afternoon, commissioners. my name is mark gleason. i'm here speaking on behalf of teamsters joint council seven

leadership. the planning staff has asked the teamster leadership to support the continuance as the collaboration with supervisor chan's legislation is ongoing. teamster leadership remains engaged with supervisor chan staff and with planning staff on this issue. all the parties, teamsters, planning staff and supervisor chan's office continue to talk through the details of the legislation and when that process of the legislation is complete. we are assured that the teamsters will be in full support of that conclusion. thank you very much for your time. thank you. last call for public comment on items proposed for continuance only on the matter of continuance. seeing none public comment is closed. and so, commissioners, if we could take up item two and three separately from item one. thank you, commissioner moore. move to approve items two and three on

the on the continuance calendar. second. okay. on that motion to continue items two and three as proposed commission honor braun high commissioner dimond high commissioner imperial high. commissioner coppell high. commissioner ruiz high. commissioner moore and commissioner president tanner i so move commissioners. that motion passes unanimously 7 to 0 if we can have a separate motion for item one and commissioner ruiz, you're recused from that. okay, let's just. commissioner moore, did you want to make a motion or a motion to recuse commissioner ruiz from consideration? second, thank you, commissioners, on that motion to recuse commissioner ruiz from item one on the continuance calendar, commissioner braun, high commissioner ruiz high. commissioner dimond high commissioner. imperial high. commissioner coppell high. commissioner moore and commissioner. president tanner

high. so move commissioners, that motion passes unanimously. we and if we can have a motion to continue, item one. now commissioner braun move to continue item one second. thank you, commissioners, on that motion to continue. item one to november 2nd. commissioner braun , high commissioner dimond, i, commissioner imperial high commissioner coppell high, commissioner moore high and commission president tanner high. so move commissioners, that motion passes unanimously 6 to 0 and we'll have a similar recusal for several items on the consent calendar commissioners that will place us on your consent calendar. all matters listed here under constitute a consent calendar are considered to be routine by the planning commission and may be acted upon by a single roll call vote of the commission. there will be no separate discussion of these items unless a member of the commission, the public or staff, so requests in which event the matter shall be removed from the consent calendar and considered

as a separate item at this or a future hearing item for case number 2022 hyphen 008162 3995 alemany boulevard a conditional use authorization item five case number 2023 hyphen 004249a at 225 gough street a conditional use authorization item six case number 2022 hyphen 0060178 at 11 franklin street number 602 conditional use authorization for item seven. case number 2020 hyphen 006371 at 2900 franklin street. a conditional use authorization item eight case number 2023 hyphen 002723. see you at 255 10th avenue conditional use authorization and item nine case number 2023 hyphen 004014. see you at 815. powell street commissioner imperial needs to recuse herself from items five and six. and commissioner dimond needs to

recuse herself from item seven. and i believe, commissioner moore, your commissioner moore, would like to take items eight and nine off consent. please very good. and so we shall take those up at the beginning of the regular calendar. very good. commissioners so that leaves us with item four that you can all vote on at the moment. so if we could take up that matter first, maybe. certainly. is there a motion on item four? commissioner moore? anyone commissioner braun move to approve item four? second. thank you, commissioners, on that motion to approve item four on consent, commissioner braun high commissioner ruiz high commissioner dimond. oh oh, thank you. apologies it's been a month. so a little rusty here.

yes. members of the public this is your opportunity to request that any of these items be pulled off of consent. so items eight and nine have already been pulled off of consent, leading leaving items four, five, six and seven as the ones you can request to be pulled off of consent again, if you're in the chambers, please come forward. if you're calling in remotely, you need to press star three. seeing no request to speak public comment on the consent calendar is closed and we can go back to the motion made by commissioner braun and seconded by commissioner coppell. on item number four to approve item four on consent. commissioner braun, high commissioner ruiz high commissioner dimond high commissioner. imperial high. commissioner coppell high. commissioner moore high and commissioner, president tanner high. so move commissioners, that motion passes unanimously 7 to 0. and if we could have a motion to recuse commissioner

imperial from items five and six and commissioner dimond from item seven, so moved second. thank you, commissioners, on that motion to recuse. commissioner dimond from item seven and commissioner imperial from items five and six, commissioner braun, high commissioner ruiz, high commissioner dimond high commissioner, imperial high. commissioner coppell high. commissioner moore high and commission president tanner high. so moved commissioners, you are hereby recused from those matters. so maybe we should take up items five and six next. is there a motion on items five and six? commissioner dimond second, thank you, commissioners, on that motion to approve items five and six on consent. commissioner braun, high commissioner ruiz high. commissioner dimond high. commissioner coppell high. commissioner moore high and commissioner president tanner high. so move commissioners that motion passes unanimously. 6 to 0. and if i could have a motion

for item seven, commissioner imperial move to approve item number seven. second. thank you, commissioners, on that motion to approve item seven on consent. commissioner braun, high commissioner ruiz i, commissioner imperial high commissioner coppell high. commissioner moore and commissioner president tanner high. so move commissioners that motion passes unanimously 6 to 0. again, we will take up items eight and nine on at the beginning of the regular calendar. commissioners that will place us under commission matters for item ten. the land acknowledgment. the commission acknowledges that we are on the unceded ancestral homeland of the ramaytush geloni who are the original inhabitants of the san francisco peninsula as the indigenous stewards of this land, and in accordance with their traditions, the ramaytush geloni have never ceded, lost nor forgotten their responsibilities as the caretakers of this place, as well as for all peoples who reside in their traditional

territory as guests, we recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homelands, and we wish to pay our respects by acknowledging the ancestors elders and relatives of the ramaytush ohlone community and by affirming their sovereign rights as first peoples. thank you. thank you. item 11 consideration of adoption draft minutes for july 20th and july 27th 2023 members of the public. this is your opportunity to address the commission on their minutes. and again, if you're in the chambers, please come forward. if you're calling in remotely, you need to press star three. seeing no request to speak commissioners public comment on your minutes is closed and they are now before you. commissioner imperial move to adopt the minutes. second. second. thank you, commissioners on that motion to adopt the minutes. commissioner braun, a commissioner ruiz, a commissioner dimond high commissioner, imperial high. commissioner coppell high. commissioner moore high and commission president tanner i so move commissioners. that motion

passes unanimously 7 to 0. item 12 commission comments and questions. well, i just want to start by saying welcome back, commissioners. it's been a few weeks. hope we all enjoyed our recess. i think that was a new experiment for the planning commission having a whole month off credit to the board of supervisors for inspiring us to do that. so hopefully you are all refreshed and excited to get back to work here on the business of the commission. again, very good to see you and thank you, secretary, for helping us get started. we had a lot of procedural matters in our first just 30 minutes. so i think we're we're back in the saddle as they say. i just want to note that we do have some hvac upgrades that are happening on the fourth floor during this time. it seems like right now our ac is on. i feel it. but in coming hearings there could be some either noise or limited ac. so hopefully those days miss us somehow on thursdays. that would be great if that could somehow work. but if that does happen in the coming weeks, just to be aware of that. so ventilation could be be challenged or be different than normal, but at

least for today, it seems to be working fine. hopefully that continues through the duration of the hearing. with that, i will call on commissioner imperial and then commissioner moore. yeah i would like to welcome back everyone from the hiatus summer hiatus. i just would like to comment on around during this weekend. i went to the ikea store downtown and it was great to see or to have ikea in the city. i think that kind of retail is really important to have in the downtown as part of downtown recovery. i think we've had this kind of discussions of like how to recover downtown and having those kind of retail that is ikea is one of the one of those affordable retail spaces. and you can see that there are people coming into those spaces and i think, you know, ikea is or, you know, that kind of retail is that, you know, open to the public in a way that what is needed in terms of furniture, usually you don't have that kind of needs here in san francisco. you have to apply online or

order online for that. so it's great to have that kind of spaces here in downtown. so we'll be back there. definitely fauci okay, that's all awesome. did you put anything together when you got home? yeah i will be. i will be. i was just taking pictures. okay i will be ordering more. okay got it. commissioner moore, i just wanted to welcome everybody back from a long hiatus and i want to give a shout out to san francisco as being a beautiful place to return to. i was in europe for five weeks where every day in different cities and different countries. it was a learning experience, a positive learning experience, how how people can deal with the aftermath of covid and a general sense that we need to hold together to continue making cities work. but but what was disturbing to me and i do not want to kind of like affect my

own good spirits about what happened is to read international news about an increasing negative reporting on san francisco. so i was very disturbed by that because i think it is completely uncalled for. i think it is made up because coming back, i see the city as being beautiful, vibrant, with lots of tourists who are curious to experience just how beautiful the city is and i believe that it's our weekly daily conversation on of how we live in the city and how we want to work together and how we want to live together to project a more positive message. i can go into more detail and i will do that with my respective commissioners. share experiences about particular initiatives, about particular innovations and european cities, just like san francisco, like grand street or others have stores which are which are papered up and are empty. however there is no doom feeling to the contrary. the

rest of the street, the rest of the piazza plaza or whatever you want to call it, picks up the spirit of what isn't. and it's not just about staring about empty stores and complaining about it, but it's trying to forge ways how to continue to use working cities in the most positive way. and that is up to each and all of us. and that includes i'll save that comment for a later, later comment. i think commissioner hill is already director. i'm going to say i think it's all up to all of us and when to kind of create that basis for our weekly discussions and what we're doing today. thank you. thank you, commissioner moore, commissioner lewis, thank you, vice president moore, for those comments. i feel like that really resonates with me. while we were on break , like i was reading about the proposed changes at un plaza, and i also noticed that the commission and the department received a letter on those changes. and i was just curious

if the planning staff could explain what is the planning department's jurisdiction in regards to that? is that going to be coming before the planning commission? but no, i mean, is the short answer. there will there could be some action if there are larger, more substantive in in permanent changes. i mean, we did environmental review to on the on the skate park and the changes being made at the skate park. but the shifting of the farmers market in the relatively modest physical improvements to the to un plaza. we don't have a role. i mean that's a quirky space in that it's not rec park. it's actually dpw property where rec park has been taking taking a lead. and as you know, we've got a civic center public realm plan that you know, is got some issues around how to pay for it. so it's been a little bit stuck because of because of that. but

we you know, engage the community on that and would like to see elements of that implemented. and some of them have like the dog run that's there now. so we'll continue to work with the community around un plaza on those efforts. maybe just a follow up. could you share if the public do have comments, should they direct those to dpw or rec park? i think rec park at this time is the best. okay, great. thank you. commissioner moore, do you have a follow up question? follow up question for director hillis. we received a very thoughtful letter from a citizen inquiring about bird safe buildings. there was a concern and very thoughtfully deliberated by the department and by the commission, a number of years ago. i would like for that particular discussion to come forward again, bring to the attention of our current commission, including the public, as we're building more and more buildings. i thought that particular letter hit the hit the spot, and we really should be continuing to actually make it a legislative requirement. so that's possible.

i would like to see a presentation and for that subject to be brought forward again and there are elements already in the code. i mean, i think they happened when i was on the commission, but it's been a long time since we've talked about them here, so we can do that. i can forward it. yeah, it would be great. i don't think i've seen it. extremely thoughtful letter. great. and we should follow up on it. thank you. thank you. is that all, commissioners? great. thank you . okay. if there's nothing further, commissioners, we can move on to department matters. item 13 directors announcements one welcome back. thank you for the positive words in news two i was at ikea. i think our staff's been going to ikea too, and it's been. it's been crowded and energetic, so it's great. just a plug on our housing element, rezoning efforts. there's an online forum, open house coming up next thursday. so it's a week from today at noon to supplement the work we're already doing out in the community and the open houses. we've held in the past couple of months. a couple of

you have asked just broadly about the timeline for our housing element work in the rezoning. you know, as you know, january is the date we hope to be before you with a package that you could approve to put forward then to the board of supervisors. but before that will go back to the community with a more specific proposal in november. we're going to come back to you. also to get your comments and direction and feedback on that. there will be probably meetings in between november and january to get further comments and refinements from you. but that's the general schedule as we move forward on on housing element rezone, i just have a question, director, regarding the affordable housing leadership council. are they going to make a report back to the planning commission? yes, i'll get back to you on timing. i think it's early next year, probably about this same time we had we didn't meet over the summer. we've kind of been in our research due diligence phase. but but i think we've got

a meeting on the books coming, coming back in september. so i think we're to you in later this year or early next year, but i'll get more details on the timing. okay. thank you. okay if there's nothing further, commissioner moore has a question. do we have been away for quite some some time? the early panel is that we had was very important event including speaking about housing and particular parts of the city. will we be able to get updates for the commission particularly? i think that discussion falls into all sorts of housing element and how to look for yeah, we have a we have an item scheduled in october. yeah. okay. thank you. to hear their final report that i think is close to complete as well as we'll bring an economic development to talk about at the broader city plan and how the early proposal feeds into that and elements of that that have been adopted into the city's plan. so we'll have a presentation to you with food and early in october. great. thank you. okay item 14 review

of past events at the board of supervisors, board of appeals and the historic preservation commission. good afternoon, commissioners. welcome back. i hope you all had a nice summer break. so this week there was no land use committee hearing because of labor day, but the full board did have its first meeting. back after break and just finishing up some old business. so passing second read was as supervisor melgar's family housing opportunity special use district. the small business small business month fee waivers, ordinance and then the changing of our inclusionary fees and changing how we index fees all passed their second read and that was all they did. so that's all i have. i don't have a all right. good afternoon, president tanner. commissioners corey teague, zoning administrator. it's great to see you all again. after the break, there were a few board of

appeals hearing over the last month with a few items of note. first, the project at 2061 to 2028, 61, 28, 65. san bruno avenue case you're all very familiar with just fyi, they had some outstanding appeals that were kind of waiting on the commission to act. so one was an appeal of a suspension request for a permit. they withdrew that appeal. another one was one of the notices of violation that had been issued for that project. and we essentially all agreed to amend that notice of violation so that the abatement requirements matched the conditions of approval of the conditional use. so just want to let you know that was all cleaned up and that project is moving forward to comply with the conditional use authorization that that you all approved. we did have a project that was a bit in the news. 931 tree avenue in dispute over an unusual parcel that was a former railroad spur, and that was an appeal of interior work in a

warehouse that was being used for the company monkey brains. the real dispute is the issue over this parcel, 36 in terms of determining ownership and what the permitted uses are. the appeals were denied and but that issue is outstanding and it's something we're continuing to work with in our department. and the supervisor's office. on august 16th, there was an appeal of a notice of violation issued for 5400 geary boulevard. and this is for the alexandria theater. and that was issued because it had required conditions of approval from a motion that the planning commission had granted prior to allow basically the renovation and reuse of the theater and also the construction of a primarily residential building on the same property that was previously a parking lot. as some of you may know, that project went forward for the residential component. the for the theater renovation did not. there were conditions of

approval there that essentially require the property owner to maintain the building and protect it. and especially the architectural elements over time until that renovation occurred and it had not occurred. and that essentially kind of hasn't happened. and it got to the point where the blade sign over the street had to be removed for safety purposes because there was concern from it was going to fall onto the sidewalk. we've been working with them to try to get that replaced and making sure they're maintaining the building appropriately. this appeal went to the board aid, but the board ultimately determined that the that the notice of violation was issued correctly. they unanimously upheld the nof. and we are actively working with those property owners on that issue. and then last but not least, we had reported back a few months ago about an appeal of the demolition permit for 2550 irving street. this is a 100% affordable housing, sb 35 project that appeal was eventually denied, but the new construction permit was also appealed. that was heard on

august 16th. that ultimately also was denied. it was a there was one member absent. it was a22 vote. you need for two over overturn. so that permit was i mean, that appeal was denied. there was a rehearing request filed for that which is scheduled to be heard next week, too. and where the appellants are requesting for a new hearing based on new information. but that appeal on august 16th of the new construction permit was denied and that's it for the board of appeals. thank you. thank you. commissioner, do you have a question for mr. okay. thank you, commissioners. the historic preservation commission met yesterday, and the only noteworthy item was actually on their continuance calendar for film. the fillmore street property. the clay theater was continued and they're proposing interior and exterior alterations to modify it from a single screen theater to a retail sales establishment. but again, it was continued and will

be considered at a later date. i see commissioner reece has a hand up as well. did you have a comment or question? yeah, just follow ing the information on 2005 50 irving i'm just thinking about how we as a city have very ambitious goals to produce affordable housing and how much of a detriment it is to the community be to affordable houser's. when we have folks appealing for much needed affordable housing projects. and is there anything that we as a planning department have learned from that in terms of what we can do as a city, as a department, as a commission, as a community to prevent hopefully those things from happening in the future? because before the appeal process, i mean, we all heard what the commotion was with that project. and that's a well resourced neighborhood,

right? we're going to hope that we see more affordable housing projects in in those areas. so what can we do? it's a good question. this is a bit of an unusual case, but hopefully we see you know, more projects similar to this where in well resourced neighborhoods, along commercial corridors adjacent to transit, you know, we we're able to purchase land and finance affordable housing projects. and i think tank and the city did did did a great job in kind of talking about this project and engaging with the community. hopefully some of the work we're doing around the housing element . you know, we'll we'll get residents to understand like these projects can and hopefully will be coming especially to commercial corridors in well resourced neighborhoods. so i mean that's that's a hope. certainly this project you know, there were issues around conditions of soil and dtsc was

involved. there are issues in that neighborhood. i don't think this is the right forum to address those right dtsc i think has been extremely cooperative. and the board or epa could could ask for hearings to talk about this issue. but holding up this project in response to that, i just think was the wrong place and a bit of an abuse of the of the process you know where there yet again to talk about a rehearing request. i don't think these should even be before the board of appeals. they're they're ministerial approvals but they are and you know there's not much the board of appeals can can actually even do when they're before them. so the outcome was right. but it obviously took it was costly for dc to go through this project process. it took a lot of time and money. so, you know, hopefully some of our housing element work in the rezoning work will, will, will talk about what's going to happen. so we

don't we don't get these appeals . yeah, i was going to say maybe it can be part of a procedure changes as well as rezoning to think about how do we streamline things and do just what both of you are talking about. thanks for the question, commissioner reece. okay, commissioners, at this time we can move on to general public comment at this time. members of the public may address the commission on items of interest to the public within the subject matter jurisdiction of the commission except agenda items with respect to agenda items. your opportunity to address the commission will be afforded when the item is reached in the meeting. each member of the public may address the commission for up to three minutes and when the number of speakers exceed the 15 minute limit, general public comment may be moved to the end of the agenda. good afternoon, commissioners. happy september. regarding the email i sent on 3932, 39, 34, 26 street, my point was to urge the commission to codify the residential flat policy to act as a damper on this type of speculation. if you

read the email, you know that not only did the original speculators sell the entitlement, but the project is not completed yet. this is a legal pair of residential flats built in 1910. in 2016, 2017, one flat was occupied, although that fact was hidden from the staff during review. the first hearing was on february ninth, 2017. even when the hrc, which is attached to the email, omitted the 63 year long tenancy of carl jensen junior. the original scope of the project was to consign one unit to the area behind the garage and then create a three floor mega mansion using planning code section 317 b seven. this would have been a de facto unit merger as has occurred throughout the city with the original flat absorbed by the mega mansion and marketed as a single family home priced at 5 to $7 million or more. given the market at that time, the history of this project shows the need to codify the residential flat policy to preserve flats in their original

configuration. this is basically what the commission did in taking on this project, revising the scope of the project as voted 5 to 4 5 to 0. excuse me, in on october fifth, 2017, doing so could preserve this type of housing, which can be found all over the city in both the well-resourced neighborhoods and the priority equity geographies . the commission wants to protect tenants and said so as recently as july 27th at the hearing on the rezoning. tenant protection is hard to coordinate who is responsible. all the rent board the planning department, the planning commission, dbe, the board of supervisors, the mayor, the project sponsors, developers. the community. it seems like it's everyone and it's no. one. a moral issue. fundamental values, dare i say, the golden rule all came to the forefront with this project on 26th street. that is probably why the commission had four hearings on it. as some may

remember in the middle of all this, mr. jensen died on march 6th, 2017 by codifying the residential flat policy to preserve flats in their original configuration. the commission could assert its authority and play a stronger role in tenant protection going forward. thank you very much. good afternoon, commissioners director hillis. i'm toby morris. yes, an architect that has brought projects before this body time and again. but today, as a san francisco resident to thank you for your service and to ask that we keep our eye on the future of the city and its residents. i was born here in the 60s, was educated in the public and independent schools demonstrate against vietnam war in the fourth grade, experienced bussing our efforts to desegregate late and the city's liberal and inclusive values became my own values. part of

those values is supporting housing for all. here, i want to thank this body for its thoughtful deliberations and adaptation of what can only be seen as a radical and intelligent revisioning of the city with the adopted housing element. if you study urban planning and you learn quickly that density is the key to a good city density creates great neighborhoods, supports local businesses, fosters interact between people with wide backgrounds and enables strong and robust transit. the san francisco housing element laid the framework for more housing production, but even more importantly, to ensure a forward looking city providing for future generations of san franciscans consistent with the values of social, racial, social, economic diversity. here is where the rubber meets the road. and as an architect, i know firsthand the forces that are working against this. the process of getting through,

planning and review is long, arduous, unpredict, able and expensive. it results in inherently unaffordable housing produced in the market. this is why i fully support the broad goals outlined in constraints reduction ordinance of cutting the planning department and review times in half by february 2024. i'm also heartened by some of the goals reduction of removal of for state density bonus projects, for example. i'm also puzzled by what is not there broad ministerial approvals for abandonment of the process exemption from secret review to and appeals to the board of supervisors is a bold approach is needed to turn around housing production and to provide for a vibrant san francisco future. the planning department and this body is about to start the in-depth review of the fuzzy upzoning and

new heights ordinance outlined in the housing element maps and courage. the commission and the planning department to stand fast to the vision outlined there and translate it into actionable code as quickly as possible. thank you. good afternoon, commissioners. tom radulovich with livable city here to talk today about the how the department and how the planning code reviews large projects. you know our planning code is was imposed on the city after the city was built so it kind of assumes that you already have a pattern of human scaled blocks and lots in place. and so what happens is when you have a very, very large chunk of the city that's being developed, it kind of confounds the planning code. they don't know what to do, like the rear yard requirements don't make sense. bunches of stuff don't make sense. if you need a pattern of blocks and lots doesn't make sense. there's no procedure in

there. most cities have a subdivision code which kind of allows you to create a pattern of blocks and lots very large parcel that's being developed. you don't have any of that. so how do you do this? so you know, we're all for the streamlining, you know, the mayors and supervisors and guardians, bill included. a lot of stuff that we've been recommending for decades that will allow the projects that we want and the types of projects that we want to go through with less rigmarole and less constraint. but what it did do also is it got rid of all of the cues, all a lot of the approval processes for large projects. again, that's, that's appropriate because q is not a great way to review large projects or approve large projects, but you do need a procedure, and we've written about this numerous times in the context of the housing element and so on. so and nobody's going to do it, but this department. so we urge you to take this up. we think you have great urban design guidelines, right? so if you look at the urban design guidelines, a lot of the departments blood, sweat and tears went into them. it's very good if you've got large sites, how to develop them, how to create, replicate the pattern of

open spaces and how to divide those spaces up with large lots and so on. but as we also know, in the current regulatory environment, guidelines are they can be ignored because it's just what's in the code is all that gets done. so most large projects can use the various state approvals to ignore your own guidelines. so you need to codify them. other cities are doing this. marin county just got through a big process where they've codified a lot of what used to be in guidelines urban design controls, architec textural controls. et cetera. into objective standards that meet the state requirements. we're for getting rid of red tape. that doesn't make any sense. but we're not laissez faire. you know, we do believe that there's a role for planning around large projects, and we do think that well-designed and regulation actually can make projects better, make them go through quicker because it creates certainty. it creates clarity about what's expected. and then you don't have to go through this process that most large projects go through, whereas special use district, you know, mayor's office gets

involved, you know, development agreement, et cetera. so it becomes a crafts project and can actually slow down on the approval of large projects. whereas if you had that in your code a procedure for large projects to go through in the code itself, then less of that would be necessary. so we urge you to take this up and take it up soon. no one's going to do it for you. or if they do, you probably won't be happy with it. but please add it to your work program. we think it's a very, very important way to make sure that big projects that have a big impact on neighborhoods in the city are well-designed. thank you. okay seeing no other members of the public in the chambers coming forward, let's go to our remote callers. eileen bogan with speak when willie brown was mayor, the acting planning director was amit ghosh . amit seemed to believe that san francisco was not a world class city. his proposals to address this became known in the neighborhoods as the flavor of the month. first, he proposed

that san francisco should be like paris. some months later, he proposed that san francisco should be more like vancouver, despite these proposals being retro, some folks are yet again proposing that san francisco should be more like paris. new subject picked up the july 27th hearing of the planning commission during the items for 2,745th avenue speaks stated that it was its understanding that the icc had closed down even before the pandemic. that being said, media reports from 2018 have stated that only the bar and restaurant had closed while the rest of the center was reported to have remained open. the media stated that the banqueting business appeared to be in sharp decline, so there appear to be different narratives. thank you.

commissioners. we filed for appeal against the planning department to keep the 83 year old rincon annex landmark from being further disfigured by more modern new signs. i'm pleased to announce our efforts have been successful. the signs will not be installed, but no thanks to the planning department, which issued the permits. there are some takeaways from this process . the our view is the planning department clearly has no fire in its belly to protect the landmark. they will you will exploit any loophole or vague code language to give out-of-town developers what they want. an ordinance passed in 2018, specifically to streamline the permitting of affordable housing is now being cited by

the department as justification for streamlined permits across the board. the department also is ignoring article 11 of the planning code, which specifically is designed to protect the 1 or 200 historic buildings downtown. and the department is also ignoring the protections of code. section 106.6. one note about the secretary of the interior standards for historic buildings , which are often cited for guidance. we learned, unfortunately, that the planning department uses the wrong set of guidelines. i don't know if you know this, but there are actually four separate sets of standards, two of which are preserved version and reable

station. those are different standards. since rincon annex is pretty well preserved, the preservation standards should have been used. instead, the planning department provide the board of appeals with pages and pages of analysis of the rehabilitation standards. and most of these often don't apply for a building that's fairly pristine in. it was also disturbing that the assistant zoning administrator later testified that there were actually no restrictions on the size and number of signs allowed on buildings downtown in and the documents that were supplied by the building owner made it clear that all buildings downtown would fall under the same week. guidelines. this episode is almost another example of the blanding of san francisco. okay,

last call. for oh, this is sue hester. i want to follow up with tom mordukhovich comments, which i agree with transferring into the planning code guidelines that are administered by staff is a good idea. one of the things that also should happen is the same time is, is where there's a major revision to the planning code and those will trigger them. and couple things that are coming through in the next couple of months as planning code amendments. please make them a two week staff report so people can see what the language is and give some input to the planning commission in writing the current practices. and you have one one

enormous planning code amendment on the agenda today, expanding allowable commercial uses. the staff report came out the friday before before the election. pardon me? the election, the holiday. and so there is no opportunity for people in the public to really dig into that language. age eight was 89 pages long and to give any input and to organize if there needs to be organized against organized for not against. please, preston and vice president, you is your power to require a staff report on big planning commission amendment pcas as they're on their agenda planning code amendments. thank you very much . okay. last call for general public comment. seeing no additional requests to speak, commissioners general public comment is closed. we can move

to your regular calendar where we'll take up items eight and 910. so item eight for our case number. 2023 hyphen 002723 coa for the property at 255 10th avenue for a conditional use authorization. good afternoon, president tanner and members of the commission. ryan balboa planning department staff of the project before you request a conditional use authorization to allow the change of use from a residential care facility or to a single family dwelling residential use at 255 10th avenue in an r one zoning district to 55. 10th avenue is a three story over basement building located in district one's inner richmond neighborhood. the existing building, once contained a license rcf doing business as san francisco's san francisco women's rehabilitation foundation mission, also known

as stepping stone. the building is currently owner occupied with no active residential care activities from research into department files. the building was originally constructed as a single family dwelling and the use was subsequently established . in 1963. so stepping stone operated at the project site until some point in 2018, when it dissolved its business and the property sold to 55 10th avenue was used as a single family dwelling, then sold again to the current property owners. december 20, 22. at the time of packet publication, the department had received one correspondence about this project from the public. the correspondence noted that another rcf is being proposed for a change of use and asked to note such in the staff report, which you can find in the report we received a letter from supervisor chan yesterday which expressed concerns about a trend of converting to single family dwellings as the project will

not cause any residents or patients to be displaced and will restore a dwelling unit. no changes are proposed to the interior or exterior of the building and there will be no change to the existing buildings footprint and massing. the department finds that the project is on balance, consistent with the objectives and policies of the general plan and meet all applicable requirements of the planning code. the project will restore a single family dwelling, a use compatible with the one zoning district and immediate neighborhood. the department recommends approval. this concludes staff's presentation and i am available for any questions. the project architect has a short presentation and i will hand it over to them now. thank you. okay project sponsor. you have five minutes. thank you . good afternoon, commissioners . directors. my name is jeffrey ide. i'm the architect. i'm an architect and project sponsor

for the cu application for this address. the history of the subject property is outlined in the coa, so i won't spend time recounting that. but i'd be happy to answer any questions to the best of my ability. i will add that at the time the nonprofit running the residential care facility dissolved in, liquidated its assets. there were no agencies offering to purchase the building. and so at that time it was sold to a single family, which then lived in it for four years and then sold it to my client, who currently resides there now. i wanted to also address supervisor chan's letter and in her letter how she's asking the commission how can the property be maximized and maximize the housing unit availability rather than the current request for single family residence? i wanted to express the difficulty and expense to add an additional unit to this property, just due to its existing physical

location. physical limits of the building and compliance with planning and building codes. in addition, the homeowners do not wish to become landlords and purchase the home with the understanding that this was a legally was legally a single family home per the title report and that the seller had resided in the home for four years prior to selling it as a single family home. the existing layout of the home is as a single family home in every sense of the word, except that a bathroom and powder room have been squeezed into the mid-level landings of the interior stairs and a few rooms have been added into the upper level. plans to accommodate multiple bedrooms. the basement level has a ceiling height of six foot ten with a brick perimeter foundation and would require extensive excavation and foundation replacement to make this level. have habitable habitable. we understand supervisor chan and san francisco's need to create more housing, but to do that at this property would be a costly burden to the homeowner and would not be in line with their desired use of this home to live in and enjoy with their family.

thank you. okay, we should take public comment. members of the public, this is your opportunity to address the commission on this item. if you're in the chambers, please come forward. if you're calling in remotely, you need to press star. three good afternoon, president tanner and commissioners. i'm robin burke. i'm a legislative aide to supervisor connie chan, and i'm here today to read the letter that was just referred to you on behalf of the supervisor. i understand that before planning commission this month, there are two pending, pending conditional use authorization requests on the west side to convert residential care facilities into single family homes. 255 10th avenue and 2277 33rd avenue. i respectfully ask for careful deliberation from the commission and department staff with this conversion trend. currently, the proposal would convert the use of residential care facilities with the potential of multiple

unit housings into single family housing likely becoming mega-mansions if this trend continues, the west side may lose the opportunity to increase housing units that we desperately need to meet the state mandate for housing. therefore for i ask you to consider how we can maximize housing unit availability with these conversion requests. instead of allowing for mansion style single family homes. i appreciate your consideration. motion to increase the housing availability in both of these conditional use authorizations. thank you. thank you so much. okay. last call for public comment on item eight. seeing no additional requests to speak commissioners public comment is closed and this matter is now before you. i think the staff and thank the supervisor for her letter and thank you, ms. burke, for being here as well. commissioner moore, i asked for this. i asked for this project to be pulled off consent and here are my reasons. first, it

is very unusual to come back from a five week or one month hiatus and see five cours on consent. that is highly unusual given that at least at this moment, the definition of conditional use still requires a higher bar for us to look at projects. that's number one. the second one is i am concerned that doing sale this project sold for. $22,300,000 in its current makeup. it has a capability by code to accommodate 12 people and while the plans point toward the care facilities that are probably use the original floor plans, i believe that at every step of the way it is the planning department and the planning commissions obligation to search and explore opportunities to increase density. we cannot only

grow the city by demolish housing and upzoning to the extent that some of the upzoning impairs livability and the future health of the city. so i look at every project for the possibility to reach that objective. this project struck me as being a possibility irrespective of what the architect, speaking on behalf of the owner, says, that there are abilities to convert this building, at least into two flats or it has three stories over basement into two flats and an adu. i'm leaving that as a theoretical comment. i do not have the numbers, but i assume that where there is a will, there is a way and it's for that very reason that i pulled this project off because there will be others just like it coming down the pike all the time, including others which are on our calendar today. i urge all of us as commissioners to take a very, very careful look at where

the real opportunities are for density without redoing this entire city. thank you. thank you, commissioner. muriel. yeah. um i also would like to share the sentiment of vice president moore on particular this item. as i see it. and i think we've had this kind of discussions before and something that is also identified in the housing element in terms of the needs when it comes to the residential care facility. and of course, the issue is, is always the funding and the, you know, the funding and also who are the, i guess, the project's sponsors that going to do it. however as a planning department or in planning commission, we also need to, of course, lay out the land in terms of the need for those kind of residential care facilities and looking into this, the proposed dwelling unit is. 3000 403,445ft!s, and it's a

single family home. and again, you know, we i find those kind of single family units. that's something that can be, you know, affordable by design. and perhaps it can be subdivided into two units or what vice president commissioner moore was saying in order to utilize this space. so that's also my sentiment in this, that whether if it's returning to a residential or residential home , that it should be more dwelling units and it will be more appropriate if it's a residential care facility. we but yeah, i guess that's something that for us in the department in terms of what we've been discussing in the housing element when it comes to those public health options as well. and we've had those kind of conversations, but i don't think we've really laid out as

to what can be the department do in it. so i guess that's my question to the director. in terms of, you know, how were we identifying these necessities or the lack of facilities his but at the same time coming as a project? yeah, it's something we're looking at. we're working with, with db and others on it. but i think one of the problems is and we've seen this before like this size of facility is not great. ultimately, you know, historically i think they've been used as residential care facilities, but more and more we see this size of, of, of building not working for those, for those service providers. and so you see some of them coming back as as cues to convert back to residential. so i think we grappled with that as well. but somewhat come to the conclusion it's tough to find operators who are willing to take on

facilities of this size that work. so, you know, we're pivoting then to look at where are there opportunities and what types of buildings, you know, fit better for this for this use. and that is part of the work we're doing both with the add back that we got from the board to look at care facilities and our own housing element work. can i ask as a follow up to that, when the when you talk with the care providers, is it both at the scale of the facility and the cost? because and i'll say an idea that maybe has been explored and maybe it wouldn't work is if the properties that remain residential care facilities were publicly owned but operated by a provider like would that change the business model enough to make it work? or is it just this model just does not work. it's just too small and they need to pivot to a different way to provide care for folks. yeah, i think there are a couple issues. i don't know enough to answer that in detail. we can certainly get you a memo or additional information on or even come back and have a have a presentation

on it at some point and bring in the relevant departments that fund, you know, these types of facilities or providers. right? because i think part of the challenge that we see with this is just like the industry changing and in particular in san francisco being a very expensive place to have, you know, an industry that relies on real estate and living as part of it and the costs that are associated with that. so it's really hard because we want to have i think we want to maintain care for people who need these types of facilities. and it being in a neighborhood and not a giant institution, i think that feels good for all of us. like we like that idea. but if the industry is moving away from that, you know where does planning come in or other departments in the city really is providing folks places for people to age, right when they need care and to be able to age in the city. so i think it's a larger question than just obviously this particular property. and what about how do we provide the types of places for different residents in san francisco to live in ways that can meet their needs? and if

this type of use is on its way out, then how do we fill its gap right. that's being created by that exodus and the closures there? commissioner rees and then commissioner diamond. yeah, i think, you know, this. oh, yes, go ahead. i'll follow you. okay. okay um, i think just in my short time of being on the commission, i've, we've seen a lot of projects propose what we're calling mega mansions. and i think a lot of commissioners here have encouraged how can we increase density, especially following the housing element? i think this is an example of that. i also think this is a difficult decision for the commission to not approve, especially if we're seeing that there is not a need for a residential care facility. i'm just thinking about the last hearing that we had had where they wanted to change the use from a laundromat because there was not a need for a laundromat

in the area and it was a financial burden to the owner. and so they were trying to maximize the space. and, you know, alter it to something that the public would use. and so i just wonder, you know, we could use this as an example and not approve or we could approve and then follow up with some action on what we as a commission and a department can do to really encourage change instead of, you know, maximizing a house and only having four people living in this space. what can we do as a commission to maybe change the rules so something like this is not allowed? or we're rather encouraging density. so i don't know. i just i would feel although i'm not that supportive for mega mansions, i would feel a little uncomfortable not approving, but would encourage us to be proactive. what can we do? what does the department think could be a solution to

this to encourage more density? yeah. and i think, you know, we share your concerns. you've given us direction in the past to encourage density. we don't have like minimum density rules. i think you've seen it most recently in supervisor peskin's ordinance regarding rc and where it's the reverse, right? there's a icu you if you don't maximize density on new construction. so i think that's where we've got to go or we're doing it a bit ad hoc. you know, as somebody comes in for a doctor, we face that challenge where, you know, we encourage them to add an adu to maximize density. but the rules aren't in place to require that. and i think that's something where, again, we're looking at in the housing element, i think we're moving towards it in what supervisor peskin proposed recently where there is a minimum density and you need a cu to go below that minimum density, but that's the kind of code shift we have to do in

order to get there. right. thank you. but it could be where you where you you know, you're asking for a cu to remove a use and convert back to residential. you've got to maximize density or you need an additional cu. if you're not maximizing dense city. so those are the types of things i think we can look at further. we are definitely we share your concerns and want to put rules in place that will get us projects that maximize density. it's easier on new construction than it is and kind of looking at building by building of existing building stock and how you actually how you actually do that. yeah. commissioner any other comments or questions? no, that's it. thank you. we'll go to commissioner moore and then to commissioner dimond. and brian, i think we are engaging in a careful evaluation. the reason why we pulled it off further to this, i like to say why i think the ongoing consider options about residential care facility is important. i am looking for the department to take a proactive stand on seeing

opportunities and discussing with applicants and potential owners or the city at large. what do we do with larger buildings which could increase residential density. i appreciate mr. barba's comment that in this particular case we would be able to go up to three dwelling units by law in order to be in order in code compliance. the other thing, and i want to inject that before commissioner diamond and brown are speaking on our calendar, in two weeks there will be another residential care facility on 22, 22, 77, 33rd avenue, which will also be abandoning residential care in the same supervise district. and i think we should be taking what we say today into consideration relative to that comment in a couple of weeks. thank you. thank you. commissioner diamond. um, we have an aging population in the

city and clearly are in need, as was shown by various studies that have been done by dpi of additional facilities for older adults. but we've also been made aware that these residential care facilities that do exactly what you said, commissioner tanner, which seem to appeal to people which are smaller scale and in the neighborhoods are not financial viable and it feels like we're swimming upstream in trying to preserve these and the market is speaking. that's why they've gone out of business and while i absolutely would support more efforts and think we should be doing more to figure out solutions for appropriate housing for older adults, i don't think this is the place with residential care facilities. i don't think it makes enough of a difference and it's not financially viable and we should be focusing our efforts where we really can make a difference. i think the purpose of the conditional use hearing when they go out of business and when we want to put in a new use, was to have us

actually have this exact discussion about residential care facilities. but i don't think that we should be using this opportunity to then on an ad hoc basis, say to somebody because you used to be a residential care facility and now you need to be a multi family facility. if we want to have minimum density zoning, then we should adopt rules that require minimum density zoning. and i don't think we should do this on an ad hoc one off basis. so with that in mind, i'm going to move to approve the project as proposed. second, thank you, commissioner brown. i think that this has been a really interesting and helpful discussion and thank you, vice president moore, for pulling this off consent so we can have this discussion. um i, i echo the comments in just in terms of wanting to better understand what opportunities do exist for residential care facilities in the future, but also not seeing

, you know, blocking this conversion of a residential care facility that's very small and went out of business quite a while ago as being a way to address the issue for a individual development project. but still, i am happy to, um, i'm glad that we are having this conversation. and then i also echo the comments that i do look forward to us continuing to look at how we can encourage additional density in every way possible. and so if we do have those rules in place or policies in place that will make that happen, then we can at least change the odds that we won't be seeing these facilities just converted back to a large single family home. thank you. i think those are all the comments. we have a motion. very good, commissioner hayes. there's a motion that has been seconded to approve this matter with conditions on that motion. commissioner brown, i, commissioner ruiz, i, commissioner diamond i commissioner imperial no. commissioner coppell i. commissioner moore no. and

commissioner. president tanner i so moved commissioners. that motion passes 5 to 2 with commissioners imperial and moore voting against commissioners that will place us on item nine nine for case number 2023 hyphen 004014 cu eight 815 powell street a conditional use authorized motion. good afternoon, commissioners. welcome back dakota. speaker department staff the item before you today is a community business priority processing program request for conditional use authorization to establish an automotive rental use doing business as 60 within an existing vacant ground floor retail space that is approximately 3000ft!s and is in an existing garage approximately 2700ft!s for a total of ten parking spaces. the proposed use will be incidental to the existing hotel use the fairmont hotel, located at 815 powell

street within the four zoning district and nob hill special use district. the required pre-application meeting was held on april 19th, 2023. one member of the public attended and expressed comments, which included increased parking fees and perceived safety concerns at nearby intersections. since the since the packet was published, the department has received two additional public comments. one of which was from the same individual who attended the pre-application meeting expressing similar remarks. a second individual who provided comments today, september 7th, 2023, and express dissatisfaction with the business. sixth conditional use approval to establish automotive rental use would activate a vacant and underused, prized tenant space at the ground floor, would increase employment opportunities in the area, and would provide a service to guests of the fairmont hotel. the department recommends approval for a conditional use

to establish automotive rental use. incidental to the fairmont hotel. this concludes my presentation. i'm available for questions and i believe the project sponsor is here for presentation. project sponsor. you have five minutes. good afternoon, commissioners. caitlin schieber from ruben junius and rose on behalf of the project sponsor sixt, i'd like to start by thanking the planning department staff for their work preparing this project for hearing. we are asking for a conditional use authorization for sixt at the fairmont hotel as an incidental commercial use to the hotel pursuant to code section 238. the nob hill special use district. i'd like to start with some background on the request today. the fairmont hotel is a very unique location in the city that occupies an entire city block and is within the rm four zoning district and nob hill special use district, which was established to provide for the unique combination of uses and

special identity in the area. the said section 238b allows incidental commercial uses in connection with any permitted or conditional use that is located within the district. at here, the fairmont hotel approached six for a car rental use on site so it can provide guests with a full service experience. many convenient amenities exist just at the fairmont hotel, including a restaurant ups store, full service spa and bar and lounge. the fairmont hotel has had a vacant retail space at the corner of powell and california streets since 2020. the project sponsors car rental business would activate at the vacant location while rounding out the services available for guests and guests are expected to access the project sponsors. retail space without needing to walk outside of the hotel. only ten spaces will be used by the project sponsor within the fairmont hotel's existing parking garage, which contains

139 parking spaces. this will leave ample space for the hotel's guest parking. i'd also like to quickly highlight a few benefits of the project. the project will help activate the currently vacant site, bringing commercial activity to the corner. in addition to the benefits for fairmont hotel guests, the project will serve other visitors staying in nearby hotels and residents within the neighborhood that may temporarily need a vehicle. the project is also anticipated to provide up to four employment opportunities. for all these reasons, the project is necessary and desirable for the neighborhood. so i wrapping up the project sponsor is seeking to occupy a retail space that has been vacant since 2020 with a use that will ensure the fairmont hotel is able to provide a full service experience for all of its guests . the use is not only compatible with the neighborhood, but will benefit the neighborhood. thank you for your time and the project sponsor and i are here

for any questions. okay. members of the public, this is your opportunity to address the commission on this matter. if you're in the chambers, please come forward. if you're calling in remotely, you need to press star three. seeing no request to speak commissioners public comment is closed on this matter is now before you. commissioner moore i asked for this project to be pulled off consent and i'd like to disclose that. i live four blocks away from this facility, walk by this particular block and building and corner at least 2 or 3 times a day. having said that, that i believe that this project, it simply by its size, is 2984 square square feet of car rental is a dated, backwards looking project which i believe if it would be smaller and would make careful use of the corner location would be supportable at

its size, though i believe it is detrimental at what i consider to be an iconic tourist site, which is a corner of powell and california street that is the intersection of two cable car lines, the major attraction of san francisco, edged by large, large hotels. stanford court, the fairmont and previously the huntington hotel, which is going to be most likely revitalized as a hotel. i see tourists every day in front of the fairmont, either walking, calling for a cab or having a car share and going where they go. many of the most of them walk. and this corner is the first corner where you really discover the city of san francisco. you discover the topography falling towards the bay, too, while the cable car takes you to fisherman's wharf, it is falling towards the financial district where few people take the cable car to go

down towards the embarcadero, looking uphill towards nob hill and then looking south and west southwest, east, southeast, actually towards the west of downtown. it's one of the most iconic spaces other than being on top of telegraph hill. but that said, i believe that occupying the corner with 2984ft over six rental car is just like coming to a dead airport and not having any way to go anywhere. i believe that at a cafe which used to be there, which was a major attraction for people taking the cable car, waiting for either direction, where to go is an answer. and i think the fairmont should be asked to make an effort to at least have part of the space be reinstituted, as some cafe, some small bookstore or some whatever. but not a non pedestrian friendly dated car. i

believe that this is an inappropriate space. if there is a need for car rental, i am all in support for that. being internal to the to the hotel in the gorge, which many other places in town. but putting it on the most iconic corner of the city i think is absolute unacceptable for me personally. i believe that for your consideration. thank you. thank you. commissioner moore, are there any other commissioner comments or motions? commissioner diamond could we hear from the fairmont as to their leasing efforts and if they've looked for other tenants for this space? if the staff want to respond, that'd be great . good afternoon. members of the commission. my name is tiffany calderon. can you move? you can move the microphone down a little bit. that's perfect. thank you. is that better? yes okay. apologies. i am not a representative of the fairmont, but i am in close contact with the fairmont as a representative of six rent a car and i do want

to just reiterate that the fairmont has made significant efforts to fill this space over the last three years, and hence why they've approached us to fill the space in lieu of becoming a cafe where they've struggled to find any type of tenants for that business. i think that a big piece of their struggle revolves around the orchestrated action of the business of a cafe or restaurant, right? and also conflicts with the existing restaurant and cafe that they have on the lobby floor. so that has been an issue for them. and we feel that we feel the need for their hotel as well as some of the residents in the area and tourists in the surrounding hotels. and we would love the opportunity as far as the size of the space goes. i don't disagree with you, commissioner moore. it just is the size that it is in square footage, we only intend to occupy a small window space as far as the hotel, and we're very flexible and open to alternative suggestions on how we can share the space. but we're definitely not intending

to use the full two stories of the space for car rental. thank you. miss schieber, did you want to respond at all on behalf of the fairmont or does anybody here on the fairmont side that can speak to this? only on the car rental side? because i think what's interesting to think about would be present any demising of the space into smaller spaces which i'm not sure that would obviously be to permit, that would need to be filed on behalf of the property owner to devise the space further for. so maybe there's some more information that we could either obtain, but i definitely share your sentiment, commissioner. more of the iconic nature of this location certainly, and the size of it. and at the same time, it's been vacant for quite some time. so that is also of a concern. on commissioner dimond, do you want to follow up with any other comments or questions? i don't have any objection to the car rental site in and of itself for the use, especially because it's been empty. and i really don't like seeing i mean, i'd rather see a car rental site there than see that vacant space there on

the other hand, if they don't need this much space, it feels like it's hard to make this decision without a representative from the fairmont. here to discuss whether or not the space could be split so that it's smaller and it preserves an opportunity for another use. so i'm kind of ambivalent about whether we should approve it today or continue it until representative from the fairmont can be here. actually, it's a little annoying that there's no representative from the fairmont here to answer questions like this. so you know, miss sullivan, did you want to respond? thank you. tara sullivan from ruben. jason rose here with the project team. i do want to say fairmont hotel is not our client, obviously, sixth is our client. i do want to reiterate fairmont did approach sixth. this is a preexisting retail space that was constructed in the late 60s, 67 to 1970, when this back half of the building was constructed with the tower. it hasn't been significantly modified since then. the size of the space is

the size of the space. sixth has plans they've submitted to the department and in your packet, but they've renderings, they do plan on using the entire space. whether or not that can be broken down into multiple retail spaces is i think, a larger question. and i don't think it's part of this application to be honest. the q is the fairmont hotel feels that they used to have hertz at this property be they vacated a while ago, a couple of bankruptcies ago. they feel like a rental business is needed for their guests and they approach sixth, this is a preexisting space. it's not too small, not too large. it's not a significant number of parking spaces. it's accessible internally. it's the garage is right there. so it seems like for right now, this is the best space and i think asking the fairmont to come back and chop it up as a condition of getting this approved is beyond the scope of i think this application. did you say hertz used to be in this space? hertz, i don't think was in the space,

but it was in the hotel. i see there used to be a pharmacy at this corner. i have lived in this area since 1978, and there used to be a pharmacy there, which was actually accessible from california street. and then came the cafe, which was actually supported by the hotel kitchen. et cetera. i was very, very well attended. very, very popular. and i think the when covid came and basically having public gathering not happening, that is when that cafe was closed. so it is not just the vacated the hotel itself chose to cease operations. yeah i'm really struggling with this because i feel like, you know, a vacant storefront is worse than having six there. so i mean, i'd like to see what the other commissioners feel, but i could support this motion if there are three others or more that want to do this. yeah. commissioner reece, you had your hand up, but it's down now. did you? are you okay? i'm okay. okay i'll just

say i would consider a continuance only to hear if the fairmont would be interested in subdividing the space to have more opportunity, but otherwise i was prepared to support this on consent. and for the reasons that you stated. commissioner koppel. yeah, i am still seeing lots of vacant storefronts on very, very iconic roads. i mean, you come out from the powell street turnaround heading towards union square, and still that whole right side of the entire powell walkway is absolutely vacant, except for urban outfitters, i think, at the end. so this is just the sign of the times. i mean, there's still an incredibly busy parts of town are still an exorbitant amount of still empty storefronts. i think we still need to give these property owners the tools they need to fill them somehow. so i'm in support. thank you, commissioner. muriel yeah. um i think i'm on the cusp between vice president moore and. and

commissioner diamond. in terms of the comments of i see the importance of the location itself and at the same time, i know that the fairmont hotel representative is not here, but, you know, i'm my feeling toward this is that i'm not really thrilled on the idea of the car retail, but at the same time, it also serves the purpose of the fairmont hotel guests. so i'm not thrilled. but i think i will be able to support this. so yeah . thank you, commissioner braun . yes i'm not generally supportive automobile related uses in general, but i've had to just grapple with that myself throughout my time. on the planning commission, i did come here today thinking being in support of this item and nothing that i've heard has changed my mind about that. i'm not so sure that short of blocking the use

by six of the space entirely, which would lead to a sitting vacant for a long time, i'm not sure that there would be a lot of other opportunities for devising the space or subdividing it in the future for some other use. so i'm still in support of approving this item. thank you, commissioner reece. did you want to share? yeah, i just keep going back and forth in my head and i, you know, align with a lot of the comments that vice president moore has stated. and also, i think we're in a city that wants to encourage public transportation option. and so, you know, another reason why i think it would have been great to have a hotel representative here to talk through what their initiatives were to seek out other options. and so if a continuance would be something that the commission is supportive of, i would be supportive as well. just so we could hear from them what their work has been to seek other options other than a car rent space. i also wonder, you know,

is it the amount of rent that they're charging? is that excluding a lot of other opportunities that we could have in this particular space other than, you know, a corporate company like this, rental? so i would be supportive of a continuance if others would like that. okay. thank you, commissioner diamond. i'm going to move to approve, i think, one other factor we haven't talked about here is the importance of our tourist business and hotels sales and how necessary it is at this point in time to make sure that the hotels stay vibrant. and if they want this as an accessory use, i you know, although again, like the rest of you, i'm not thrilled. i can still support that. so i moved to approve. i'll second that commissioner moore i like to make a comment in opposition to what commissioner diamond says. i think it is equally important for us to cater to the

livability and continuance of the city as being occupied by residents, tourists are continuously being mentioned as being the reason of why we're making decisions. and i do believe that we need to balance the playing field. and i do believe that a car rental at a smaller size would be perfectly fine. however, at this size, just saying because it is a vacant space is enough to give it away. personally speaking for myself, it is not enough and i'm expecting everybody to participate in curating for a better city. i will just add that it's a while. the space is large. there's not that many rental cars. i was actually happy to see it's only ten parking spaces, not that many vehicles, and tourism is one of the top industries in the entire city, so it helps to put money in people's pockets so they can have go to work and live in the city and still be part of it and have have jobs. i think it's more than just the tourists. it's the industry that is part of the tourist industry that is persuasive to me. commissioner ruiz, i would like to at least

try for a continuance, so i'll make a motion then to continue this and hope that hotel representative comes to the next hearing. um, yeah. there a second to that motion. okay. and we do have a late request for comment. i am taking it. maybe it's somebody from the fairmont. i doubt it, but we'll see if it's someone from the hotel. hi, rudy gonzalez with the san francisco building trades. i'm sorry, i'm not from the fairmont hotel, but one of our affiliates, teamsters a-556, represented the car worker rental rental workers at the hertz desk that they used to have. it's generally an appropriate use for that facility. and i think that the comments from the organization that represents the workers in that industry would lean toward approval and not continuance. the fairmont, like many other hotels in that class or series in the city, have suffered dramatic reductions in hours, and that's directly impacted the economic vitality for other surrounding businesses. so while

it may not be the ideal to just have more cars, i think that it is important to note this is a use and an appropriate use and providing that also increases, we believe, the positive narrative around the recovery of not just the nob hill and the suv. there but the entire tourist community. we can use all the good news we can get, particularly for vulnerable workers who have lost their health care, lost retirement security through the pandemic. so i appreciate the commissioner lens around economic vitality, not just for businesses, but for working class people who very much contribute to the vitality of the city overall. thank you for the late comment. very good commissioners. there is a motion that has been seconded to approve with conditions, but there was a subsequent motion to continue, which takes precedence as a procedural matter. did you have a specific date, commissioner ruiz? just maybe one week to allow them to

comment. very good. then on commissioners, there is a motion that has been seconded to continue this matter to september 14th. on that motion. commissioner braun. no commissioner ruiz i. commissioner diamond no. commissioner imperial no. commissioner coppell. no no. commissioner moore hi. and commission president tanner no. the motion fails. 2 to 5 with commissioners braun diamond, imperial coppell and tanner voting against if there is no another motion, we should take up the matter of approval with conditions on that motion. commissioner braun, a commissioner ruiz, a commissioner diamond high commissioner, imperial high. commissioner coppell high. commissioner moore no. and commissioner. president tanner high. so move commissioners, that motion passes 6 to 1, with commissioner moore voting against. thank you, commissioners. very good discussion. commissioners that

will place us on on item 15 for case number 2023 hyphen 005354 pca for the city wide expansion of allowable commercial restaurant and retail uses. this is a planning code amendment. thank you. before we begin, we've got a recusal and a disclosure from commissioner braun and commissioner ruiz. i guess i'll go first. so i just i have a disclosure. the background findings section of the executive summary in the staff report for this item includes a reference to study completed in 2018 by my employer , strategic economics for the office of economic and workforce development. so they're my employer and i was at strategic economics at the time. the study was completed, although i did not work in the study and that contract ended a long time ago. so i don't believe that the strategic economics preparation of the study would have any impact on my ability. to be fair and impartial in hearing this item. thank you. commissioner

ruiz. yeah, i just wanted to disclose that my employer, ccdc , and more specifically, the team that i work on, submitted a letter seeking specific amendments. and although i didn't work on the letter or have been involved, i think i'd just like to err on the side of caution and recuse myself for this item. great. should we have a vote on the recusal? is there a motion to recuse? commissioner reece from this item? so moved. second, thank you, commissioners , on that motion to recuse commissioner ruiz. commissioner braun i commissioner ruiz, high commissioner imperi cole i commissioner coppell high. commissioner moore and commissioner president tanner i so move commissioners. that motion passes unanimously 6 to 0. thank you. okay good afternoon, commissioners. veronica flores, planning department staff. the item before you right now is the citywide expansion of allowable

commercial retail and restaurant uses. this was an ordinance introduced by mayor breed and we do have katie tang from the office of small business, who is here to present on the item. so i'll allow director tang to present first and then i will follow up with staff presentation. thank you. well, good afternoon, commissioners. katie tang here from the office of small business here to present on this item. so first i just wanted to go over some of the goals behind this behemoth piece of legislation, as you all talked about it, in terms of commercial vacancies in relation to some of the items before you today, one of the top goals is to reduce the number of barriers that small businesses experience when they're trying to either open up a new storefront or expand into a new space. secondly, as we've gone out to talk to small business owners, both existing ones as well as ones that are trying to seek

permits to establish themselves in san francisco. so we keep hearing that they want greater flexibility in what it is that they want to do with their business. and this is due to not only what has occurred as a result of the pandemic, but really a global shift in just how people are spending their money shifting more and more so to online retail and wanting more and more to seek that experience in a storefront, a third, we want to allow more businesses to open without going through the month long conditional use authorization process by principally permitting more uses throughout the city and reduce ing the ability for appeals to cause even further delays, which really causes or costs money for a lot of these business owners. we also want to allow business use more business use types to open on the ground floor more, and this will help provide more options in filling vacant commercial ground floor spaces large that we want to address challenges for venues which, as you probably heard, have had a

lot of challenges during the pandemic. so these venues that provide entertainment and or alcohol as well as businesses that offer outdoor patios for patrons. so just a high level overview of some of the changes . and i know planning staff will go over these in greater detail in order to give businesses greater flexibility to adapt to the changing times. the proposal before you is to expand flexible retail citywide as principally permitted on the ground floor. currently flexible retail is allowable in only about half the city and it allows a business the ability to change between six different uses without going back to the city each time for permits. we also want to clarify in the planning code that multiple uses are permitted in the same space. again, this is something we hear over and over again that people want to experiment with different and different businesses. co-locating ang sharing of the cost and rent and so forth. and so this change is specifically to address that next out

allowing more business uses on the ground floor is principally permitted. one an amendment before you is redefining professional services and allowing them on the ground floor as principally permitted citywide. we also want to note that as part of this definition change, we would also propose to allow co-working as part of professional services and i just i'm sure you know this already, but it is distinct from office use as we hear a lot actually, as we're talking to businesses that people want to add on in the ability for people to just share that space and get out of their living room couch or their dining room table to go and work somewhere in a storefront in terms of lifting restrictions on restaurants, limited restaurants and bars is currently there are several commercial corridors that have restrictions in place for these types of uses. some of them include not permitting them, some of them include imposing a cap on the number

that can be established or also requiring conditional use authorization. so the proposal will lift restrictions on restaurants and limited restaurants in chinatown, along haight street and taraval street . also, new bars are currently not permitted or are restricted along haight street, pacific avenue, sacramento street, union street, and in the mission. and this ordinance proposes to lift the restrictions on the bars in these areas as well as specific to mission street lift. the cap on will not lift, but we would increase the cap on restaurants, limited restaurants and bars to increase from 167 to 179. and later on, i will just mention that one amendment we do need to make. we just caught a typo in the legislation where it refers to the cap increasing to 187. it should be 179. next, i want to speak to the new liquor license type, the type 90 that was

approved by abc earlier this year. currently already available to two operators. however we'd like to incorporate the type 90 into the san francisco planning code and so the type 90 music venue liquor license, it authorizes the sale of beer, wine, distilled spirits and one key feature is that it allows minors on the premises. so we do believe this gives venue an additional option to stay viable. next in terms of outdoor patios. so as the city has been moving to a post-pandemic era for shared spaces, and we all know that many people have been enjoying outdoor dining and so forth in the front as well as in the back of restaurants and other establishments, as we have discovered that some of these businesses must go through a conditional use authorization process if they cannot provide clear document nation as to when

their outdoor activity area was first established. so this ordinance would create a legalization pathway that would be easier for any outdoor activity area that has been in operation for at least ten years and not have to make the operator go through a conditional use authorization process. next, in terms of neighborhood notification, we are tracking some of the changes that were approved by voters under proposition h in november 2020. and so we are proposing to remove the public notice requirements in the eastern neighborhoods. mixed use district specifically in the visual you see above you. that would be the area shaded in magenta and red that would allow us to be able to help businesses get through the permitting process without the notice and the appeal process. and again, this would track changes that have already been adopted in in the other parts of the city, which you see shaded in yellow in the map with regard to

nighttime entertainment bars and restaurants, we would like to add them to the planning department and commissions, community benefit priority processing program, other otherwise known as cb £0.03 to help again with the goal of getting people through the permit applications in a more efficient manner. so it's still requires that they go before you. they're still public notice , there's still an appeal process. we just want to help these business owners get through the permitting process and on to your commission calendar quicker. now, i know that this is a lengthy piece of legislation, and i'm sure you're wondering how we arrived at some of these recommendations. i wanted to note that our office does go out to commercial corridors every week to try to speak with business owners in their locations, knowing that they do not have time to come to meetings at city hall. also

about a year and a half ago, our office added a team of two small business permit specialists and they help up project applicants through the process from beginning to end or when they are in the middle of a process and get stuck. and from these cases, we have learned where people are having pain points in the permitting process and their journey. what's costing them more time and money. and so a lot of that has been informing our work and these recommendations in this legislation. of course, we have ongoing conversations with merchant organizations as well. but i also want this commission to keep in mind that really we're trying to help those people who are either trying to establish a new business or maybe they already have one and want to expand. and so many of them may not be part of these merchant associate plans yet, but they would like to be. and so i would like to walk through a couple of upcoming amendments that we anticipate making. and so these are highlighted on the

slide here within the polk street, there was recently legislation on sponsored by supervisor peskin and it was adopted by the board of supervisors that addressed health services as and so we are no longer proposing changes because of this legislation that already deals with health services with regards to professional service uses, we want to track what was done through that same legislation i just referenced and only allow them as principally permitted on the ground floor for properties that don't have any frontage on polk street or california street within the haight street cd for health services. we are no longer proposing changes on the ground floor. they will continue to not be permitted within jackson square. sud we are no longer proposing changes to this sued those changes originally proposed had to do with where bars limited restaurants and restaurants could be located within limited for with regards

to limited commercial uses and limited corner commercial uses and outdoor activity areas, we realized there were some errors in the drafting and so we want to make a correction to table 209.1 and 209.2 and two, correct . what is stated under formula retail controls, they should be np instead of c and in table 2 or 9.2. similar correction, but essentially under the formula retail row it should be not permitted in r one and two and conditional use required in r three and four. we also plan to make amendments to clarify that outdoor activity areas are allowed at the front or must comply with requirements of planning code section 202 point 2a7 within the nc two table 711 under the activities row, we realize that we need to remove footnote ten, which references the current geographic boundaries of where flexible retail is permitted. so we're

going to remove that footnote and then as i mentioned, this is not on the slide here, but as mentioned earlier, under the mission street, we just noticed a typo that the cap on limited restaurants, restaurants and bars should be raised to 179, not 197. these next set of amendments have to do with planning department recommendation actions. we are in agreement with three of the four of the staff recommendation ones and those that we are in agreement with are that codifying £0.03 program under section 303.2 next mirroring the lcu youth size limitations for the new eligible districts. so up to 1200 square feet in r one, r two and rh districts. so that would track to at and eliminate the mission street formula retail, restaurant subdistrict. lastly the amendment that we plan to make has to do with a

temporary five year impact fee waiver for change of use projects. i spoke about this before the planning commission back in july. however we that amendment did not make it into the legislation. that was as was originally intended. however it tracks the goals behind the legislation before you today, which is really to try to make it easier, faster and cheaper for people to establish their businesses. in san francisco, with a slight change in the amendment is, as you notice, it's a temporary five year one. so we'd like to evaluate after five years the impact of this waiver. we are also excluding from this waiver, a change of use to establish an office use parcel delivery service and fleet charging. it excludes affordable housing related impact fees and also excludes additions to an existing structure or new construction zone. so so that concludes the summary, and i'll turn it back to planning staff to go over the details and then i can be back

up. if you have any other questions. thank you. thank you, director tang. so she actually gave a very thorough presentation of the changes, the overall goals of this ordinance and how it came to be. a lot of the background as well. so i was just going to focus on public comment and go over some of the letters we received and then also dive into the recommended modifications. so for the public comment in your staff reports, you did receive about 50 letters regarding the ordinance. most of them were in support of the legislation and the efforts to really revitalize our neighborhoods and help support small businesses. there was a strong support for expanding more allowable uses in our neighborhood codes and helping address storefront vacancies, support for removing bureaucratic hurdles, helping small businesses through the process less get through the process more quickly. there was

also support for allowing flexible retail citywide. there were a few comments that shared some concerns regarding the proposed legislation. there were two comments from two business owners in the mission that generally supported the ordinance but hoped to see to actually see more restrictions lifted in the mission street neighborhood. commercial transit district, particularly with the respect to the cap on eating and drinking establishments. also in the packets was a letter from the golden gate valley neighborhood association, and they shared they did not support lifting the bar restrictions within various neighborhood commercial district acts and one that they noted in particular was the union street neighborhood commercial district . after the packets were distributed, the department did receive about a dozen more additional comments. some were sent directly to you commissioners. the others i had

forwarded recently. so just to note, there were more additional letters of support, including but not limited to chamber of commerce. the american industrial center and sf travel . there were also two letters which director tang already addressed this, but they were specifically from the jackson street historic district and the lower poke community benefit district. so as you see or as you saw, there were some upcoming amendments in response to the concerns raised from these two groups, there were also some letters, two letters from the telegraph, hill dwellers and the pacific avenue neighborhood association that requested no additional changes. so no changes at all. be made to their respective districts. an and lastly, we did receive a letter from the chinatown

community development center, and they shared that they opposed the new proposed definition of professional services and they also opposed permitting that new professional service use within the chinatown district. it's moving on to the recommendation. staff does recommend approval with modifications. again, this is to support our small business cases. this is kind of the next layer after our prop h and small business recovery act efforts. director tang already noted in her presentation. they will be taking three out of the four recommend modifications. so i just want to focus on the last or the remaining recommended modification and that recommended modification is to continue to regulate the retail professional services as and non retail professional services separately and maintain the two

separate definitions. so keep it status quo here. the concern is that the two different uses and the way that they interact with the neighborhood really has a different effect on the surrounding streets, surrounding neighborhoods. the non retail professional services, when they're not operating and not open to the general public, they do feel as if they're more like an office use and that's where we have concerns of the lack of street activation there. and when we're opening that up to the neighborhood commercial districts, it actually goes against the original intent of the neighborhood commercial districts, which wanted to originally preclude such office uses. the proposed new definition would also permit co-working space. but again, we have some concerns with the street or lack of street activation there, staff noted in the report that there was a new

definition of flexible workspace created under the recent downtown legislation and that it could potentially create a path for some co-working aspects while still maintaining learning and active use. facing the street. so that would be a potential option to kind of balance out both perspectives here. this concludes the staff report. staff remarks and along with the team are available for any questions. thank you. thank you. do we should open up public comment? members of the public. this is your opportunity to address the commission on this matter. for if you're in the chambers, please come forward. if you're calling in remotely, you'll need press star three or raise your hand via webex and through the chair you'll each have two minutes. hi kevin thomason of the lower pearl community benefit district. our name did just come up. i wanted

to thank director tang and planning for understanding the needs of our diverse community and the necessity of keeping laura polk and van ness activated so thank you. thank you. hello, commissioners. sharky laguana. i had the pleasure and honor of being president of the small business commission throughout the pandemic and i just wanted to add a little bit of context here to what we've seen over the past 4 or 5 years. it's largely been a decimation of small businesses . so many friends, so many colleagues have lost their livelihoods. they've lost their businesses and critical to their survival, critical to their being able to continue or refashion or reform or start up

again. is foot traffic. it's drawing people in. earlier today during the hearing, i heard you talk one of the public commenters was talking about the importance of density in urban environments. that's equally true of commercial density and right now what we have is unprecedentedly high vacancy rates are are small business performance is underperforming. the rest of the nation by a fairly wide margin. last controllers economic report believe as of just last month, our new business formation is flat out and unchanged. and unless we can get our new businesses to start forming again at a rate similar to what we were experiencing pre-pandemic, we're going to have a very difficult time, um, getting ourselves in a better economic place. so i urge you to

please approve this change. i support it wholeheartedly. thank you. mr. clerk. i have a letter to circulate to the commissioners. good afternoon, commissioners. my name is eric wu. i'm the policy assistant at the chinatown community development center on behalf of chinatown, cdc. i am here to strongly oppose the proposed legislation and urge the commissioners to do the same. to summarize from the public comment letter submitted, we request the chinatown mixed use districts to be removed from the present proposal and a more appropriate approach to be developed to sustain and strengthen the local chinatown economy. alternatively we urge the commission to pause the

approval of the present proposal until there is a meaningful opportunity for vulnerable community such as chinatown, to engage with the department on how to adjust the proposal to fit our community needs. the changes proposed by this legislation directly. conflict with and undermine the chinatown area plan passed in 1986. the present proposal imposes generic models of commercial enterprise without inclusive community input or specific attention to existing neighborhood level vulnerabilities and strength, and detracts from the ability of the mixed use districts to encourage business use that are residents serving and preserve the economic engine of chinatown as a visitor attraction. and as a result, in our assessment, this plan could cause great, irreversible harm to the essential characteristics of chinatown. to share a few reasons why this legislation would be catastrophic to chinatown, the legislation proposes the application of new professional service category in

chinatown, while existing chinatown zoning permits certain public serving professional services in specific locations. this legislation would expand the definition to include co-working offices. consultant firms and other businesses that do not serve chinatown residents . this would invite uses that interrupt and compete with existing retail while undermining street level commercial activity that is essential to the chinatown experience and economy. we see the same issues, including professional services, as a use category under the flexible retail, which this legislation proposed to principally permit in chinatown. that is your time. okay um. yeah. please see the letter for thank you, sir. thank you. good afternoon, commissioners. tom radulovich, executive director of livable city. and here to support the staff recommendation runs on

this ordinance. over the years we have worked and you have supported a lot of different ordinances to really get rid of a lot of the rigmarole for the types of small businesses that we desire. and this is in most part a very positive way forward. i think we can say with a straight face that all of the, you know, retail businesses and service businesses and arts and nonprofit businesses that we want in storefronts are going to be principally permitted. most of the city now, i think, though, the non retail commercial businesses, that's an important distinction. we support the staff recommendation for this reason. they're not active businesses. they're basically offices and office is dead and ground floors on streets like retail consultants will tell you this like that title insurance company once they move in, when they can pay a lot of rent. so they actually compete with the types of businesses that are desirable. and so if you open up to office , especially tech office, you're going to price out. i think the businesses that we want in storefronts and commercial districts. the other thing is they're not active. you know,

there's no comings and goings. the windows are often shuttered. et cetera. so they don't do anything to activate the space. limited hours, no weekend activity, no evening activity. so support the staff recommendation on that. on the corner, retail. we love this. the are let's see, it's the one and two districts i've been talking to friends with in twin peaks and they're like, why don't we have any corner stores here? why don't we have any cafes? i'm like, they're illegal. this would allow somebody to create actually a corner cafe in these neighborhoods that are deserts where you have to get in your car to get the quart of milk or at least get on muni. so we urge you to support it. the 50ft from the corner from any corner is problematic. maybe you should allow 2500ft!s total so that you could use the full 25 by 100 foot lot as retail, because otherwise if you only use the first 50ft, let's say it's parking on the ground floor, what do you do with the last 50ft? it either needs to stay vacant. couldn't be retail, right? so maybe make it 2500ft!s up to 100ft as long as you don't exceed 2500. thank you. thank

you. good afternoon, commissioners. ozzie brown with san francisco land use coalition. so i was watching miss tang's presentation and all i could think of was the field of dreams. and if you build it, they will come. that is not necessary. really true. as you know, the retail pattern shopping pattern of our people, of americans as san franciscans have changed greatly and we can't count on allowing any shop to go anywhere and thinking that, okay, we're going to, you know, actually have more commercial activities. to your point, commissioner diamond, we don't want to see boarded up storefronts. so what will assure the public that if you're going to have businesses that are going to be just popping up without any checks and balances, that we're not going to have a couple of months later, the business is going to fail. the

thing that this that that we need the most is of course, things that unfortunately most people are using amazon and online service to get delivered. so that will leave the only thing that would be left is basically coffee shops, restaurants, bars. i don't have anything against that. the problem is the pattern of these commercial corridors, the way they have been built. you have residential in the back. so the back of the commercial corridor of any neighborhood. so if you're going to allow expansion into the patio, it could be a nuisance for the people who are living in the back and also don't forget that the reason we have q is for you to for other shopkeepers to make sure too many restaurants, too many bars are not going to be detriment to the existing rest current business, existing coffee shops. there is some control over

having so many restaurants, so many bars in a particular commercial corridor. and that's that's what the q is for. that's it. thank you. hello. planning commissioners. my name is nas and i'm a resident and a small business owner on mission corridor. in addition to the proposed changes, i would like to request that restaurant and bar applications within the mission and ct area be amended from conditional to be permitted , and the new magical number of 179 eating and drinking places to be lifted altogether until the corridor recovers from its heartbreak. 75% vacancy rate from 14th street to cesar chavez conditional use authorization process in the mission is required for businesses such as gas station. large scale urban agriculture and adult businesses, aka strip clubs. why eating and drinking places? this lengthy and costly process, which i have gone through myself in 2020, made my many merchants

and myself subject to harassment and threats by so-called neighborhood stakeholders dictating from what hours we should be open to approving our color of our color swatches. and the croatian and menu items have wasted days and resources putting together absurd paperwork, 300ft radius research, print shops producing thousands of envelopes, campaigning and collecting 103 letters of support and 1500 signatures for my business to avoid going bankrupt due to oppositions or delays, all to open a wine bar restaurant and a music venue that supports hundreds of musicians, performers, vendors, farmers, winemakers and my 20 staff go growing in two years. this process is being abused and it is time for it to stop. i encourage the planning commission to find reasonable and official ways to protect and preserve what needs to be protected. but still allow for a breath of fresh air in this particular corridor without needing for normal citizens to be victims of political power plates. use your to judgment when you walk down mission corridor. is this okay? as long

as the project sponsor follows all the million city building planning, police, fire and all the other codes this should be streamlined to be permitted. this will be an important step to help revitalize one of the last neighborhoods in the city to recover economically. i really appreciate you if you consider this. thank you. okay. if there are no additional members of the public in the chambers coming forward, i'd. oh, nobody's raised their hand remotely last call for public comment on this item. seeing no request to speak, public comment is closed and this matter is now before you commissioners. great. thank you. especially want to speak. thank the last speaker for coming and for your successful business. but thank you for sharing your testimony on your experience and the challenges that you went through. but thank you so much for being here. wow what a robust piece of legislation we have before us. so lots to talk about. don't all jump at once, but i'll get us started here. i

want to dive into this non retail sales and services and professional services. and because i am inclined to agree with planning staff in particular, because i understand we if i understand our code correctly, we do have retail workspace which would seem to cover co-working and is part of this. so i'm just trying to understand if coworking is a leading reason why we would want to combine the definition and it's already permitted or conditionally permitted under a different definition. i guess i'm not seeing the rationale to combine them so you've got to convince me a little more about why these need to be combined and what the vision is around what types of uses would be inhabiting these spaces now that they're combined. thank you for the question. so one, if you look at the existing definition between retail professional service and non retail professional service, they look very, very similar. and i think there's cause for a lot of confusion as to which category you would fall under. would you be retail professional service or non retail professional service. the so one is to clarify to for the most part

they are not permitted on the ground floor citywide. and so this is a bigger change where we are trying to permit them on the ground floor. i would also argue that it and i always use this as an example, let's say that there's an accountant office on the ground floor and i'm going to go turn over my tax documents to my accountant. i'm probably going to go and visit the coffee shop in the area or other stores. it still does bring foot traffic to the area. it can today i was just out doing a merchant walk and the most active business that was engaging in that in a particular corridor was actually professional services. and i think that the idea that we have of what professional services is has changed over significantly over time. i see so many creative storefronts where the professional service actually looks way more active than what we would traditionally consider an active ground floor use. and so they actually, for example, encourage people, their workers,

to work in the front of the store there. it's fully transparent. it's beautifully designed. so i think there's a whole range of what we could consider professional services. and it's not all the same, but really at the heart of it, we again like to expand it to be permitted on the ground floor where it's currently not. and also eliminate the confusion around the definition, because again, if you look at it, it's so similar and you could argue your way to fit into one or the other category. okay so let's stay with that. maybe for a little bit because i definitely can see the idea of we want to have places activated. i think where i where i am kind of more stuck in kind of our current way of doing it is kind of just around we are we have permitted still during this pandemic and still more office space in the city. and we hear from the comptroller about all the vacant office space. and so there's kind of this glut of empty offices. so it would be concern. on one hand, these retail spaces are much smaller, so it's much more likely that if i'm starting up a small company that might be

more professional services, i could afford perhaps a storefront it versus like leasing a tiny bit of space from a giant, you know, tower which may not even want to lease me space because i'm so small, right? they're like, we don't care about a business of your size. so i see that. but at the same time, it's like we have so much empty office and so how do you square that? like empty offices existing with kind of like the needs of filling empty storefronts, preferably with retail. but again, even as jerome was saying, retail has changed, right? what we could expect on retail corridors is not going to maybe be the same as it has been in decades past. so how do you how do you think about that balance right. and certainly we thought about this and when we have been out there talking to whether it's business owners or even just residents, you know, we don't think that this will be competing with the vacant office spaces downtown because these are people who are already telecommuting. the majority of the week, and they just want to get out of their dining room, you know, table and maybe once a week they want to go out to it's i mean, it's very similar to the coffee shop model that's already occurring and

where you can already pretty much co-work right? so that's actually the segment that we're trying to address. and the citywide the new definition that was adopted for flexible workspace space, it does have a few more limitations where it does require some level of retail in the front of the space. this co-working definition would not have that requirement tonight. but, you know, we've heard everything from like the yoga studio that just wants to have a little bit of their back space to open up to neighborhood neighbors in the community. it's really a community building use that we've heard the desire in terms of i just i want to give my neighbors a space to come into my another reason to come into my business. and maybe though when they're here, they might take a class, they might buy a cup of coffee or they might do something else. so it's another way to expand their their business model. and hopefully make them even a little bit more viable. so. okay. thank you, director chang miss flores, i wonder for if you could respond a little bit just in terms of as

staff looked at this and came the recommendation to kind of keep the non retail and retail professional. i'm confusing all the words, but you know what i'm trying to talk about it separate like did you see a middle ground of maybe there's size regulations or other ways to have guardrails around if we do combine or again i'm wary of adding more restrictions when we're trying to liberate. but i just wonder what staff considered as you came to this recommendation. yeah yes. so the staff recommended modification really stems on the intent of the neighborhood commercial districts. we're wary of allowing office like uses in the neighborhood, commercial districts, the co-working as director tang described it does not it's not currently allowed in that description. so the proposed new definition of professional service allowing co-working space, that is a big departure from our current practice and our current definitions today i, i did briefly describe or bring up the

flexible workspace use that was really a potential compromise that could still allow a path for co-working spaces, but still maintain an active use at the front. that's one of the primary, our primary concerns that would need to be included as a new permitted, principally permitted or conditionally permitted use within the various zoning districts. but that is one possible path both for our staff recommended modification. we have just kept it as retain the status quo for the two separate definitions. regulate these differently and then offer that as a potential option. if they're interested. i mean maybe help me understand where retail workspace definition and use fits in because as i'm reading it, i'm looking at the code right now. it seems to speak to co-working as i'm reading it, you know, offering space on a daily or hourly basis can you

can have eating or drinking. and most co-working do provide like food and beverage to i mean, i don't know, maybe just help me understand how that retail workspace differs from the co-working because i feel like we have the pieces here. maybe they're just in the wrong part of the code or different permissions are not allowing it to go forward. and there's the different controls pending on the district. this new proposed definition does not have the food and beverage requirements. so it really is it might just be tables, desks or chairs. okay. that would be one distinction that i can share because i guess i would want to hear it from other commissioners. it just seems if we're trying to do co-working, can we just like say that, define co-working and allow that instead of saying all office uses could now potentially be on the ground floor? i don't know. maybe i'm oversimplifying, but it just seems like if what we want to do is provide like good third spaces or different definition of third space, as ms. tang was

even saying, in terms of folks being able to open up their yoga studio to different types of activities, can we just create something that does that instead of perhaps including things that were not really intending to include in the definition? john, did you want to address this? mr. shah's i think one of the concerns is that we're going to have three sort of work definitions lines in the code. we have something that was passed through prop h, we have something that was just recently passed through the downtown thing. both of them sort of do the same thing, the one that was passed through the downtown ordinance is more flexible and that's why that was adopted. we can amend the one that was done through prop h, so with those though, you do need a use up front to keep it more active. but i don't think co-working is prohibit std from the existing definitions. the flex workspace or whatever. the big difference though is that the non retail

professional services and the retail professional services, the only difference is one is open to the public and the other one is not. and so, so in the past we've tried to discourage those that are open, not open to the public from going on the ground floor for the reason they're being merged is because if you allow them on the ground floor, there's no purpose in having two definitions. so that's sort of where that genesis came from. great. thank you. all right. well, i will rest my deliberation on this part and open it up to a mother . speakers call and commissioner braun, commissioner koppell, then commissioner dimond. mr. braun, thank you. i, i was i'm in agreement with the recommendations. one, two and four by staff for this legislation and then for recommendation three. i'm also that is the one that also immediately struck me as the thing that i needed to dig into and think about a lot more. um you know, i completely understand the idea. that, you

know, you can use spaces like co-working space or even offices that aren't open to the public as sort of an anchor to attract people to a space. i've seen this happen very successfully at a nonprofit organization space in downtown oakland. where there's a lot of vitality on that block because it's functioning as sort of an anchor for a number of people coming and going throughout the day. um but you know, i, i am not comfortable with the idea of completely merging the definitions of the retail and non-retail professional offices because the, the, i agree with the principle that we need to have some sort of way of controlling for maybe the quantity of space that is not an non-retail professional office space or, or the size of it or i don't know anything along those lines. i'm just not comfortable with the idea of just opening up our commercial corridors and districts completely to allow these uses that don't actually necessarily be will be customer

serving. you know, i think there's probably a balance that needs to be in here. i had the initial thought as well of maybe we just need a different definition for co-working. if that was the primary intent of this. but but it sounds like that might. not be a helpful way to go. and so i wonder if i'm curious to hear what other commissioners have to say about this. but i kind of wonder if there's just sort of a recommendation we could make that that the definition still need to be retained separately. and maybe there's an alternative approach to putting in the legislation in the quantity of space or controls on the quantity of non-retail professional office space that is in a given district or some other controls along those lines . that's where i'm at with this . great. thank you, commissioner koppell yeah. just a question for director tang, and this is something that's out of our purview and out of your purview . but the two words i heard today that resonate the most are foot traffic and i'm very

familiar with almost all the neighborhoods in ncds, here in the city, and have just, you know, over the course of the years, witnessed the exorbitant amount of vacancies, a lot of them that previously weren't vacant. and i know two years of covid and many businesses weren't able to adapt or pivot at that time. but it seems as though we're kind of coming out of that. i would have maybe expected to see a little more activity. do you think that in some instances is there's less foot traffic where there might be more brt lanes or bicycle lanes? and i hear a lot of neighbors complain when parking is removed. and how does that equate into foot traffic for businesses? because we have so many vacancies. and i just i want to see them filled. what can we do? yeah, i think it really depends on really the mix and variety of retail in a particular corridor. obviously transit and proximity to that and easy transportation helps so much. but where we have seen

neighborhoods continue to thrive throughout the pandemic were ones where, you know, you actually had a lot of grocery stores and you had the mix of both restaurants and, you know, i mean, frankly, even formula retail, right, for example, some people that can be an anchor for certain communities to then support the small businesses alongside a corridor. so really, i think the mix is important. but i think the other point that i've heard made at this commission, too, is would we rather see in a time where there are just so many vacancies compared to the past, would we rather see places boarded up with graffiti or would we rather see a design firm on the ground floor? i'm arguing for the design firm on the ground floor. and you know, when times change and if they get better, people can always change the code again. right? but i think at this time, that's something we're advocating for right now because we're just seeing we. need more options of who can go into these. otherwise it will

continue to be the oversaturation of restaurants, limited restaurants. right. and i think we've also heard hear people saying that maybe that's too much and we need a mix. but thank you, commissioner diamond . um let me start with a couple of other topics that haven't been raised yet. so ozone rum raised an issue that i've been in discussion with you, director tang and mr. star about, and i want to have that discussion more publicly. so i, like many others, have enjoyed during the pandemic, the outdoor patios that have been opened, restaurants. but as i've sat in them and gazed upward, i've been worried about what the noise impact is on adjacent apartment buildings. and so i have been questioning you all about what regulates the noise. and i understand from our conversation oceans that if there's amplified noise through entertainment or if there's alcohol, then abc or the entertainment commission get involved in regulating some of

the noise. but separate and apart from that. so we've got outdoor patios where there's not entertainment, so it's not under the purview of the abc. and excuse me, the entertainment commission, and there's no alcohol served. so it's not under the purview of the abc. what sets the noise standard. thank you, commissioner diamond, corey teague for the planning department, as you mentioned, noise is regulated in different ways across the city with responsible parties spread throughout different departments . and so just to start with our own house first in the planning code there are kind of general nuisance requirements that are fairly vague and one of them includes noise. but there's no specific parameters of what what is excessive noise for eating and drinking establishments. we do have location and operational requirements in the code that apply to all and basically good neighbor policies, and that also includes some noise provisions

there. but again, there's not real specific metric. it's obviously when conditional use authorizations come before you for eating and drinking uses one of the criteria under there includes the potential for noise. and the planning commission has the ability to adopt conditions of approval related to noise. that's definitely happened in the past . the primary source of noise regulation in the city is the noise ordinance, and that's in the police code and as it as it relates to kind of fixed noise from a mechanical equipment that's more regulated and implemented and enforced on by public health and for more kind of just ambient. noise like people noise beyond kind of entertainment commission area of noise, that's primarily the police department and to some degree the planning department. and that's where there are specific kind of decibel level requirements. as you can imagine, it's a challenging thing to regulate because noise is kind of ephemeral. it's not

constructed and static. but that kind of explains the kind of the regulatory network on noise in general. so let me get very specific. if i'm understanding the proposal correctly, what you're doing is legalized existing outdoor, your rear yard restaurants that have been in operation for at least ten years and that they don't have to get a conditional use permit. they what process do they need to go through to be legalized and where is the opportunity for our neighbors who have lived with this noise for ten years but are unhappy about it? what is their opportunity to say, hey, we need a condition, a standard, something so that this can continue in a way where we can, you know, live as adjacent neighbors without being disturbed by this noise. sure and correct me if i'm wrong, but my understanding is that the zoning administrator has to determine that the outdoor activity area has kind of continually existed for like the last ten years. and if that

determination is made, an administrative approval, which would be through a building permit process, is how that would be legalized. and i don't believe there is a notification requirement like a 311 notice requirement. there if i'm correct. okay. yeah. so there would that that process would require a determination that it has existed for the ten years. but there's no additional process. essentially to notify neighbors or any additional. so there is no opportunity for neighbors who have lived with this for the last ten years to say, hey, there's a problem. right. if they if they're aware of it, obviously there's that opportunity. but if there's not any required notice to those neighbors for that process. okay. i you know, i'm generally very supportive of this ordinance, but i would say i think it would be useful to think within the planning department about a way to deal with that specific problem because it feels to me like it's a potentially a burden on the adjacent neighbors and that if

there's a way to mitigate that, then we should try to figure out how to do that at and i don't know whether that means a change in the process to notify the neighbors before you the issues a determination. but it feels like it's unfair. to the adjacent neighbors who live with the noise if it's succeeding, if we don't have a standard. i mean, if we had a standard, that would be different. but if we don't have one, how do we determine what's enough? so i think there ought to be some thought given to how you could look at that in more detail. second question has to do with the letters that were just recently received from three areas of the city that raised concerns. either one of us to turn this down, put it on continuance or had specific suggestions, and that was chinatown, the pacific avenue neighbors and the telegraph hill dwellers. i see that you've dealt in various ways with proposed amendments to deal with issues that were raised by jackson square and other

neighborhoods. how how do you think about the issues that were raised by those three neighborhood groups as there are really a variety of things that we look at. so some of the things include looking at the existing commercial vacancy rate in a particular neighborhood. so, for example, jackson square is actually doing really well right now. and so we do understand their concern lines and have pulled back some of the changes that we had proposed also, and i don't want to call out any association names or anything like that, but there are some neighborhoods where there are different associations that have different opinions. so we also do take those into consideration in addition to looking at a particular corridor and its needs. so whether it's the mix, the vacancy rate and so forth and so do you anticipate additional discussions as this ordinance works its way through the process on these three issues raised by these three

groups? we are happy to continue to have discussions all the way through the board process. okay um, and then lastly, to deal with the issue that you raised, commissioner tanner. so at the moment, offices like design professionals, accountants, lawyers, where there's foot traffic, people, clients coming in and out all day long, are they permitted to be on the ground floor or are not permitted to be on the ground floor? so i mean, it depends. i will defer to staff, but currently my understanding is if you're non-retail professional service, so if you don't have people generally coming in and out of your storefront, then you are actually not permitted throughout the entire city. but again, i will defer to my colleagues here at planning. you know, we have 47 different zoning districts, so i can't speak our neighbor commercial district, so that's a bit hard. but there is a different definition for design. professional so because we have over 110 different uses in the code that regulate use and those

are a design professional. whether it's open to the public or not, is allowed on the ground floor in in c one, two and three. zoning districts. and i assume that's consistent throughout the name neighbor commercial districts as well. so that's a separate use a design professional than the others. but but sorry, just about the lawyer and the accountant, though. does it depend if they are b2b or does it depend if they're also open to the public? if a lawyer or an accountant is open to the public, they're a retail professional service, so they're allowed on the ground floor. if they are not open to the general public and just do b2b operations, then they're not allowed on the ground floor. so, you know, how do we define open to the public? you know, if clients are allowed to come in and out, is that open to the public, general public? so anyone can come in off the street? it's not a business to business transaction. so i will say i am somewhat persuaded by the argument that director chang raised that retail the nature of

retail is changing. and just because in the past the way we curated neighborhoods allowed for, you know, a very specific vision of storefronts and active storefronts, i believe that we are in a different world right now and that the people, whether they're open to the public or not, if they are going to business in these going to work in these storefronts, it's likely they're going to purchase coffee at the place next door, go out to the sandwich shop at the place for lunch. that's down the street, you know, buy dinner at a takeout shop that's, you know, further down the street. right. and that i would prefer to have that than have every place be a restaurant or a coffee bar. and so i am in favor of a change that would allow for that scenario right now to weigh into this discussion and debate. so those are my thoughts. i am, as i said, generally supportive

of the entire package. i would encourage you to continue to have conversations as you move to the board of supervisors with the other three neighborhood groups that raised concerns. and i would want to see see these these professional services be permitted to occupy storefronts to diversify the kind of uses that we see in these neighborhood commercial zones. okay. thank you. director hillis. did you want to respond to that? just i mean, i think to share some of our thoughts on this, we had a lively discussion about it internally. i think the problem is the flip side of this, where our professional services could be very much like office right? your larger law firm, mckesson, you know, salesforce, for instance, could be you can argue that's professional services and we're kind of controlling it by the space like will they won't they won't want to go into a space that's a couple, couple thousand

square feet. and that may be the case. but i think we're we're a bit kind of rolling the dice on that. and i get it like retail establishment in our retail corridors are less about sales of goods and services. i mean, goods in there, more service oriented, whether it's medical professional, you know, doctors, dentists, offices, accountants, like an hr blog where you can go in and kind of talk to somebody. we get it. we want to be flexible in that. but i think we can be too flexible and it could go more towards an office use that nobody is going in. it's up to the employees who are who are working there in and, you know, currently propose there isn't really a limitation on that in a commercial corridor and i think you know san francisco has done well in keeping active commercial corridors that are more about goods and services that people can use. and you can go into stores. it's kind of what mr. radulovich said, like we know the types of uses. sometimes it gets a little tough to define them and we draw this

line whether you're, you know, open to the public or not, in that line is sometimes a bit blurry, but it's generally worked. and i think if we allow kind of the more office professional services, we may get more office type uses on the ground floor, although, you know, in light of that, you know, i do think commissioner tanner, your suggestion about a size limitation may be an appropriate criterion to think about to preclude massive invasion of neighborhood commercial spaces by large office uses or commissioner bronze suggesting like you limit the amount in a quarter but it starts down i think we weren't prepared for that. we can look at it with with the director in and you know kind of work through some of those ideas but just opening it up broadly to professional services i think we thought went too far. maybe i'll just say one comment before i call on you, commissioner pearl, just on this topic. i mean, just listening to the discussion, i would support either maybe, maybe both exploration by staff and ms. tang and others of a

size limit if we do merge the definition so that there is some kind of size limitation. and i think we can look to other parts of our code that have size limitations for our retail corridors. and then also just the retail workspace definition. i think could be made more flexible. i think we can stop trying to curate so much how the retail workspace is set up and a third the first, third of this and that. the other thing like just get rid of that. just let people have retail workspaces as make them maybe principally permitted instead of conditionally permitted in some areas of the city and allow that use to flourish, perhaps not only in conjunction with a eating and drinking establishment. if that's good for their business, they'll have eating and drinking. but we know eating and drinking is one of the most expensive things to open up. opening a restaurant or a cafe is extremely expensive, so tables and chairs and internet, that's a lot less expensive, right? if you want to just open up a real shoestring kind of, you know, co-working space, you probably have more than just that. but you know, you could get started. so i think refining that retail workspace definition and then allowing that more and then

having size limits, if we do merge the definitions could be perhaps a middle ground that we hopefully get the best of everything. so i'll let maybe staff can think about that while i go to commissioner imperial and we can hear some some comments on those two ideas. commissioner imperial yeah. thank you. and yeah, i mean this legislation is, is one thing that struck to me when reading this and was that how it's robust and also very citywide you know and we have different corners like what mr. stars mentioned there's about 72 commercial corridors in here in the city. one thing that really struck out to me is that i think it's a big you know, for me, it's an issue, but it's the expansion of the community business priority process and program, and that is allowing more bars and nighttime entertainment and my the thing is that, of course, i support the nighttime entertainment. and

i think, you know, but i think it's like what makes san francisco unique is that as well the you know, the diversity of the commercial corridors. i do have issues in terms of expanding that the bars and nighttime entertainment. i think perhaps probably can be more expanded, perhaps in the downtown area. but the thing is that i would again, in this process of like, you know, in this planning commission and receiving letters, what struck me is also the diversity and the letters that i've received from different area of the city that i think we this kind of legislation need to be looked over more thoughtfully. and one thing that struck me was the jackson square association. they weren't really, you know, in the letter, they weren't really supportive of expansion of the

kb £0.03 and i guess, you know, as part of this legislation, what makes me think is like, yeah, jackson square is actually thriving not the downtown area, but they are thriving thing. have you also looked into what other commercial corridors that are actually thriving and why are they thriving? you know, like, can you like the jackson square? i've been there, but at the same time, like, you know what what kind of like comment that you've received received from this area as well? yeah. and just speaking to my observations, again, i know there are people on the ground who work in these communities who do incredible work to really build a community. but i think i spoke to a sort of earlier question really the mix of the types of businesses. some areas you have a smaller footprint, right? so it's a little bit easier to kind of curate and create a sense of community when you have longer stretches. let's just take clement street. you've got inner clement, you've got outer clement, you've i mean, there's probably middle clement.

they all have different characteristics to them, right? and so sometimes when you have a longer stretch, it it does take a little bit more work to kind of curate what that experience might be for a visitor, a resident, it, you know, customer . so it's really dependent on each corridor. but i would say when you are able to address the neighborhood needs, for example, i think about west portal where there's pretty much everything, right? you've got, you know, you could drop off your packages somewhere, you have a hardware store, you have dry cleaners, restaurants, coffee shops, shoe cobbler, you name it, right? living corridors. so. yeah, not one answer for every not the same answer for every corridor. yeah. yeah. thank you. and you know, and that's the reason, too why, you know, earlier in the for more on, you know, it's part of the cb £0.03 and you know, so that's something that i'm sorry that, you know, i feel like it's appropriate, but i think i just wanted looking into different corridors in the city. the

involving the bars and nighttime as we have mentioned also in the outdoor activities. also my concern is like when the pssas determining the you know determining determining the outdoor activity, is there an appeal process on that, you know, or, you know, i don't think that is that being considered addressed as well in this legislation? and how is this when it comes to outdoor activity? i'm sorry. i'm not sure if i understand the question about outdoor activity areas. if you wouldn't mind. restating kind of is so when the wsa determines for the outdoor activity. to, you know, to approve, will there since we are eliminating the public notification where will that be when it comes to for the public to raise issues on outdoor activity? will the wsa whole will they go to the board of

appeals? is that what's going to happen? thank you for the question, commissioner imperial . essentially, yes. the appeal options would be the same as any kind of standard building permit right now, which is if again, if someone is aware of it, there is the opportunity to request discretionary review if it's before planning has approved it, if it's after planning has approved it and it gets issued, then you can appeal that permit to the board of appeals. and it could be on the grounds that, you know, it wasn't actually there for ten years or etcetera. okay thank you. and yeah, i think that's also my concern as well in terms of the public notification and the is probably we're going to eliminate by this legislation another thing that stuck out to me is the question of flexible retail and i do think that flexible retail need to be in specific neighborhoods , but not citywide. or is that something that, again, i know

commissioner diamond has questioned you in terms of having an open conversation with other stakeholders, but as it is, it's being proposed as a citywide have you have you done any kind of analysis or questions in terms of where will it be more appropriate? so flexible retail use currently, as i mentioned, is permitted in about half of the city. and i think that if you saw in the staff report, there are very few single digit number of flexible retail uses that have been established in the city, i think partially because it's actually a widely unknown use. so what people probably end up doing is either establishing accessory use or or what we're trying to clarify through this legislation is you can actually establish multiple uses. it's just that if you ever wanted to change to a different use, let's say you're a barber shop and you also sell clothes and then maybe you get rid of the clothing shop aspect and you want to change to

something else. maybe you want to bring in arts. you would right now, you'd have to go through the additional permitting process through the city, right? so it's costly. it costs time and money. so that's the, i think the beauty of flexible retail use and what it offers is that within the six defined uses, you can switch between those six and have to at any given time right? at least two. so we would like to make it consistent citywide so that people have that option. what we heard time and time again is that businesses want flexibility and what they're able to do and a lot of times, i mean, just just to be very honest, people are just going out there and doing their thing. and they probably, you know, there's no complaints. and so people aren't aware that maybe they're not doing something that that should have been permitted. right. but we're seeing out there that people are being very creative and they want to combine uses. they want to pair up with different businesses and bring that experience for customers. so i would say even if we didn't expand flexible retail use citywide, the clarity around

establishing multiple uses is something we're still going to continue to advocate for citywide. i mean, it's actually already existent. we're just clarifying that that is the case here. and in the in terms of that, that means that it would allow different businesses to partner with one another. but i guess they also the issue is the process in itself. would that how would that be played out? so as it looks like there are two two businesses or two spaces, i believe that's flexible retail, it would be one space and we actually see this quite a bit already. so you can have two business owners doing two different uses or you can have one business owner doing two different uses. so it could be a mix and that would be when it when it comes to the square footage, is that something that's also considered? there's no there's no size limitation for flexible retail or even again, what's currently allowed, which is establishing multiple

uses in one space. i see. okay. yeah. i think that's something that, you know, in a way i think like you said, you applies to other cities or applies to other areas of the city. but in some it may not be. i mean, my thing for the flexible retail is the square footage itself. i mean, you know, if it allows more space, there was one comment or one letter that we received that part of the reason that there opposing to this is the confusion or disorganization when the when such business is like that, how do you respond to that kind of response? i'm not sure i understand the question about the size issue with flexible retail. yeah and i'm talking about in, let's say one, you have a barber shop and let's say a coffee. you know, i think the comment that i was hearing or that i received is more like how those two businesses kind of like try to operate, you know what are you know, so the way

i'm thinking of it is also the square footage. how would that square footage take place in terms of the confusion, the layout when someone comes in? you know, i think that's where the general public is kind of like trying to think when it comes to the flexible retail, how when you move into the space and when you move into the building, how how would you recognize the differences and how would those, i guess, different operate was, you know , distinguish those customers or. yeah, i think it's more of that. it's more of the practicality. be sure. i highly encourage you all to go to sacramento street and go to a shop called button down and they sell clothing bags and then in the back there's a barber shop and they're very distinct, but in the same space. and that's one example. there's also on haight street, a place that sells coffee and plants and some of it is blended in together, some of it is very distinct. you can have all sorts of different models. i think the key is if on

the practical level, if you do have two business owners, it'll be incumbent upon them to have a great strong lease agreement in place delineating what each is doing and where. but i think for the customer, it's really interesting regardless of how the setup is, whether it's blended or if it's distinct. okay, thank you. that's yeah, i mean, the idea of flexible retail is very interesting to me and i and i think it's true to have like the foot traffic between the businesses is going to be helpful. one thing that i do appreciate about this legislation is the icu the commercial use in each one and orange two, which i think is good. but but yeah, i mean, that's something that i highly supportive. and one thing that i also support in the planning staff recommendation is the distinguish between the retail and the retail professional and non retail. and i think that's you know, reading the letter of

the chinatown and you know, the of course the historic, the historic background of the chinatown and the way that it doesn't want to be expand into an extension of downtown. i mean that's something that i think they're trying to, uh, to preserve as well. so yeah, so those are the my comment is again, once stick out to me as an issue is the, is the expansion portion of the cb £0.03 yes. and i also want to bring up my colleague ben van houten from the office of economic and workforce development to speak a little bit more to the expansion of nighttime entertainment uses in cp three. p okay, great. thank you. director tang. good afternoon, commissioners. ben van houten from wd the ability to expand cb £0.03 to cover a broader use of nighttime business purposes would be

really invaluable to the nighttime small business community. obviously the requirement would still be there. there would still be the planning commission hearing, there would be pre-application outreach required as a part of it, but by setting predictability around the hearing timeline, that's really the first part of a much longer process to open a nightlife business. so before or before being able to receive a liquor license or in fact move forward with liquor license application, you need that determination from planning about the zoning and any conditions that planning attaches to that. so at the outset, you know, three, three months to get a hearing after filing for your your, your cue with cb £0.03 then kicks off a 4 to 6 month process to get a liquor license under the best case circumstances which really only after getting those two determinations is that's really the only time you can comfortably start doing t improvements and investing money and moving forward with the space. often leases are ideally , leases should be contingent upon getting those planning and liquor license approvals. so really that's, you know, that's

already 9 to 10 months at the outset before even doing t any work. we can do to shave a little bit of time off and build a little bit more predictability is really critical to small businesses and nightlife. thank you. does that answer your question? commissioner, bureau great. thank you. commissioner braun. um i have a just small side question. it came up a little bit earlier about the design nine professional category and the many different categories of uses that we have . i noticed that there are places in the legislation in which the professional services is has a different status from design professional in terms of whether it's a permitted use or conditional use or so what's the reasoning behind that? because if i mean, again, i'm i'm leaning towards not merging the retail non-retail professional services or finding some path forward on that. but but regardless i am curious why design professional is treated

differently in even in some of this legislation. who has a reason why we're treating them differently by, you know, design professional was created through a zoning effort. i think in the eastern neighborhoods, districts and then through the code reorganization effort, it was it was added to all zoning districts. the idea was to all uses would be accounted for in every zoning district. so it's probably just sorry, a legacy of piecemeal zoning. okay. but we can definitely we can definitely look at rationalizing that. but i don't have a better answer for you than that. but we can definitely look at sort of rationalizing the two uses depending on how this works out . yes. yeah. i don't know if i want to open that can of worms, too, but it is a little it might be worth a look, though, at the fact that it's now it's still treated differently. so um, but let's not go there unless

another commissioner wants to. so so, uh, just circling back on, on some of the ideas raised about the, uh, like the idea of possibly retaining the retail professional service and non retail professional service categories, um, actually, no, sorry. let me back up. going to the idea of potentially allowing that there is a single category for professional services as is put forward in this legislation . and you know, the idea has been raised potentially of limiting the size of spaces that could be used for that or maybe some sort of district level quantity limit. and i like the idea of having some sort of guide like that because i just would hate to see a situation in which this thing that we were talking about is enlivening the street by bringing some foot traffic. actually becomes the only thing on the street. and maybe there's one coffee shop that's doing great, but otherwise there's not a lot going on because it's all office space on the on the ground level. and so i'm curious to

hear any reactions from planning department staff or director hillis as to, you know, if we were to make sort of a broad recommendation on about what those limits could look like or a way to approach that, what is there anything more specific we could say in terms of a model for looking at that? do you do you mind if i add to that? because i've been mulling this as we've been talking, and i would i was thinking of a 2500 square foot size limit, perhaps per each use that is authorized so that it does limit that or to your point, like a district level, which obviously is not contemplated today. but we could we could if we approved this with recommendation that a size limit and or overall, you know, quantity be established. but i curious what staff would think of that and if that is in line with what maybe something you would be open to and i'm happy to speak to that kind of at the technical level. you know, in our neighborhood commercial districts, we have use size limits and all of them, there's

a wide range. it's everywhere from 2000ft!s to 10,000ft!s. ana lot of uses go into existing spaces, though. and i mean, if you're already a non-complying, we actually have a good number of spaces in our districts that are quite large. just kind of legacy. um, and, but we can we typically don't in districts, but we can just separately have use size controls on specific uses like beyond, just like the overarching use size. so that's something we can i mean it's technically something that can happen. i think that's probably easier to implement than kind of more geographic type control tools to try to determine how many uses you have and how many there are in a block or kind of overconcentration controls. those tend to be more challenging and kind of time consuming to implement. so that's definitely a possibility . i do think it's important. i mean, just to touch on that a little bit more and going back to what ms. flores was saying originally, is that we when the controls were first developed, you know, most of those

corridors were c two. they were already commercial districts. they just weren't neighborhood commercial districts. and it was really in response in a lot of ways to the to a lot of the growth that was happening in the 70s and 80s. and there were these types of, you know, office type uses that were downtown being forced out into the neighborhoods. and the key was really to have the ground floor be for neighborhood, neighborhood serving goods and services and for these types of uses. the business, the business services to be off the ground floor to help serve the businesses there. but really can have the ground floor reserved for the more active neighborhood serving goods and services and kind of going back to the intent and the rationale and, you know, our commerce and industry element in the general plan right now has very specific language on this about this intent of taking the b2b services and keeping them off the ground floor. so again, just kind of going back to the original intent and the rationale behind our recommendation on that. thank you. any further comments or thoughts, commissioner brown, or questions? i guess my other

question to staff would be, i mean, the recommendation from staff has obviously been about just maintaining the difference, the distinction and the retail non-retail professional services categories, um. so the, the other way i could see us going maybe is saying that maintain that distinction but look at expand finding the locations in which non-retail professional services are allowed on the ground floor. it's kind of vague guidance, but that could be a recommendation and i'm curious about your reactions to that recommendation. sure. we can we can look at it. i mean, i think it's going to be hard to come up with recommend foundations maybe that respond to some of the concerns we've heard today. but you're right. like would van ness be a more appropriate location for additional kind of , you know, of those uses versus hayes valley or irving or clement street, which we've talked about? yeah, maybe. but i

think that's going to take some some work to determine it. i think we just believe combining them and you see it even with the retail professional services in some cases they act a little more like office and they're less active than than other other types of retail spaces in it's somewhat limited by the fact that you've got to fall into this category as as retail professional services. i think if we open it up to provide general and retail professional services, there's just more demand for that space. so we can think about it, we can work with the small business commission on on ideas to kind of come at some of the concerns that that you all have. and we have. and they do to broaden kind of those uses that could go into commercial corridors or where they are the limit in the size of the space or the amount per corridor. but i think that's going to take a little bit of work. sure okay. i'm curious to hear what commissioner moore has to say.

great commissioner moore. thank you, director chain, for taking this on. this is an extremely complicated matter and i am personally overwhelmed by the size and the extent of this endeavor. while this is a city of roughly 800,000 people, i have more perceived the city through the entire time that i've lived here as a grouping of smaller neighborhoods with their own individual characters and fortunately also with their own strong community voices has successfully expressed in neighborhood commercial districts, which over the least 2030 years have differed greatly developed voices of how to guide themselves. and i am speaking in support of self guidance and

community process or community driven process for those neighborhoods, some of whom have driven written us very persuasive letters. that is chinatown, that is telegraph hill dwellers, that is lower polk, that is jackson square, the golden state, golden valley, etcetera. and i like to see suggest that because these neighborhoods, not only have curated themselves successfully for many, many years and i think are still capable of finding their own way how to move into the future, that they would be exempt under this particular legislation. but that is to say that as a neighborhoods who do not have that type of a guidance would greatly benefit from the variety of opportunities that your legislation offers. so there is a support for those who don't have mature neighborhood

self determination and guidance in their ncds. those as those who do have that. and the reason why i'm saying it as i follow very closely, was out interjecting my own thoughts into the discussion from public comment as well as from commissioners. i believe that the magnitude of this particular endeavor is too much of one size fits all. i'm not only talking about the issues that ccdc touched on, on the particular cultural, historic and ethnic makeup of chinatown and the protection it has developed for itself, but i talk also about the physical, significant physical differences between the type of buildings that form our neighborhood commercial districts, those are small parcels. sometimes non-compliant, substandard parcels, i.e. no speech,

etcetera. but then also looking at potential for larger building sites out in the richmond out in clément. et cetera. et cetera. i believe that there is clear evidence that the mature ncaa legislations we have for a number of neighborhoods have created this desirable results to the extent that they have become specific tourist destinations aside from serving the neighborhoods in which they occur. that for me is enough evidence to say that zoning in those changing zoning in those particular districts really doesn't matter, and it will not change that. there are a few vacancies. i think it will unfortunately unleash an unbridled competing with existing processes and alliances that the neighbors have among themselves and. again, i believe

that the one size fits all does not work. that comes particularly clear when we look at reactions, even in the discussion by commissioners. excuse me, i have a kind of a cough. sorry. definition of flexible retail. expand eligibility criteria for prior to processing retail professional service versus not versus non professional services as non-retail professional services as the whole discussion about outdoor activity, limited commercial limited. what is this here? commercial? yes corner uses, uh, and formula retail. i think in each neighborhoods in each neighborhood, corridors, they are specific solutions that work and then there are other

aspects that don't work. and so while i'm supportive about your general approach, i would be specifically protect of those neighborhoods and those neighborhood commercial districts that have voiced their concerns about about what they have done in the past and what has worked. and by making these types of radical changes, at least for some of them, i would basically hold back and let only those neighborhoods participate who really choose to do so. so that is a compliment. but that is also a cautionary comment. thank you. great. thank you. commissioner koppel. i think we've had a very thorough discussion today and want to just keep things moving a little bit. i very do you highly agree with you that we do need to get as creative as possible with filling the spaces with that said, i still just for our own sake, would feel better about just for keeping it simple, moving forward with the planning department recommendations,

knowing this is going to go to the board and it's going to get rehashed and sorted out there as well too. so i'm just going to make a motion to approve with the planning department's recommendation as second commissioner koppel would you be comfortable of letting the comments and sub recommendations? i president tanner, what i was just saying be at least as comments passed along. oh, 100. i think that is extremely important to me because otherwise i would categorically say no, no, no. i highly value all of our comments. i want them all included. but we could be here just talking, talking it to death all night. so i'm going to needle just one one little bit further on what commissioner morse said, which is specifically with staff recommendation. i think it's number three that staff and the legislator would would look at adding a size limit if the definitions are combined and then just a second, what

commissioner morse said about the supervisors working with their districts. thank you. and all the other districts that had specific things. i think that's something that i think i look at us as a citywide body as well. and so i think folks can work with their supervisors if there are specific carve outs that like with cdc that are very thoughtful and very specific that could be included. so i'll be able to support that motion. um, as proposed, yeah, i'm not trying to cut anyone off or, or snip anything, but i just do want to keep things moving. i think the size, size that president tanner just repeats is extremely important. sir. sorry, we're having this item. the next item will be called when we're concluded with this one. the size limit. i think mr. radulovich made a very important comment about dimension and size in particular areas. we don't have 2500ft!s for anything, so let's be realistic, particularly when we have 25 foot storefronts. they would require the whole depths of the lot or more in order to achieve 2500. so here we go. absolutely.

great. so we've got a motion, we've got a seconded. are you comfortable? you got captured the motion, i think. well i believe so. we're just we're we're well, let me rephrase it. so yeah, maybe. maybe i don't have it right. but i have a motion that has been seconded to approve the proposed legislation with staff's modification options and then passing along. commissioner comments. okay. very good on that motion. commissioner braun, a commissioner diamond i, commissioner imperial high commissioner coppell high, commissioner moore and commissioner president tanner i so move commissioners. that motion passes unanimously 6 to 0. thank you all for your patience. we're going to take a very short restroom break for the commission. we'll be

so yeah, we still be talking. okay. good afternoon. and welcome back to the san francisco planning commission hearing for thursday, september 7th, 2023 commissioners, we left off under your regular calendar on item 16 for case number 2015. hyphen 012491 env for the san francisco gateway project at 749 tolan street in 2000. mckinnon avenue. this is a draft environmental impact report. please note that the environmental review officer has extended the public comment period. written comments will now be accepted at the planning department until 5 p.m. on october 16th, 2023. thank you. can you please bring up the slides? commission secretary thank you. thank you. good afternoon, president tanner. members of the commission. i am jessica range planning staff and environmental review supervisor for the sf gateway project. i'm providing this presentation on behalf of liz white, eir coordinator for the item before

you is review and comment on the draft environmental impact report or eir for the sf gateway project. no approval of this document is requested at this time. um, the purpose of today's hearing is to take public comments on the adequacy, accuracy and completeness of the draft eir pursuing it to the california environmental quality act or sequa and san francisco's procedures for implementing sequa staff will not be answering questions concerning this draft document at today's hearing. instead, comments will be transcribed, received and responded to in writing in a responses to comments document before taking public comment, the project sponsor will provide a brief overview of the project description. i'll then summarize the draft eir findings. describe the alternatives studied in the eir, and then provide a summary of the environmental review schedule. and now i will turn it over to courtney. courtney bell from prologis, the project sponsor. thank you, jessica.

good afternoon. president tanner. director hillis was here and commissioners, my name is courtney bell. i'm a director of development at prologis and i'm excited to be here today to introduce the san francisco gateway project. first, i would like to thank planning staff and staff for their hard work and collaborative efforts on the project to date. prologis is a san francisco based company and proudly headquartered in the city for over 40 years. we specialize in what we call logistics real estate and what san francisco calls production, distribution and repair, or pdr . we own build and operate pdr buildings in 19 countries. our customers are include retail, logistics firms, distributors, medical supply companies, food production, all sorts of makers with a single common thread. our customers support the needs of daily life and all of the communities we work in. over 1 million people work under a

glass roof each day. with our scale, we are an experienced leader and are committed to driving the industry forward towards an efficient and sustainable supply chain. in san francisco. over the past 20 years, traditional pdr buildings have been converted to other uses, shrinking available space and shifting pdr businesses and the jobs they provide out of the city. the city has identified the importance of preserving pdr space to reverse this trend. our vision for the san francisco gateway project is to rebuild and reinvest it in san francisco. pdr we aim to use innovative multi story design to efficiently accommodate both small and large users and to allow that space to adapt over time. we believe that creating a state of the art facility in an infill location and in one of the last remaining pdr zones will improve the area's functionality, bring back pdr jobs, provide benefits to the bayview community and increase the resilience in the city's supply chain to provide critical community services. the

project's design prioritizes sustainability through on site renewable energy, innovative stormwater retention and electric vehicle infrastructure . the san francisco gateway project is proposing to replace four older buildings with two multi story buildings totaling two point 1,000,000ft!s. each building is 97ft tall, half of the square footage is dedicated to active pdr. uses include a ground floor makerspace with accessory office and a small retail component. the other half of the project area is pdr support, such as logistics, yards, parking and vehicle and pedestrian circulation. while businesses while many uses are permitted in pdr, we are focused on the subset shown here. the two buildings are designed to accommodate a variety of pdr businesses as the needs of the city and community evolve over time. the approvals we are seeking include a special use district as an overlay to the

existing pdr two zoning a height and bulk map amendment and a development agreement. thank you for your time today. should you have any additional questions? i am here and my team is here. we look forward to bringing the project back for entitlements in the coming months. thank you. all right. thank you, courtney. i will now provide a high level overview of the approach to the environmental analysis. s so given that there are no identified tenants at this time, the draft eir describes and analyzes a mix of pdr uses that are likely to occupy the facility based on the project sponsors familiarity with leasing trends for pdr facilities in san francisco and the bay area, and that represent reasonably conservative assumptions about possible tenants that would yield greater environmental impacts. the term proposed project means construction and operation of the sf gateway facility, the operation of which is based on

the analyze tenant use mix and related streetscape improvements . the analyze tenant use mix for purposes of the project's environmental review is shown on this table here and includes light manufacturing, parcel delivery, wholesale and storage, pdr support space and retail and as courtney mentioned, the project sponsor team is seeking a special use district. the sf gateway special use district will establish a consistency review process to determine whether the impacts of future tenants in the facility have been adequately evaluated as part of this eir or a further environmental review is necessary. before summarizing the project's impacts, i'd like to acknowledge the historic context of the bayview-hunters point neighborhood in which the project site is located. this brief timeline is not exhaustive , but rather intended to provide historic context and illustrate

how past actions and decisions shaped and continue to shape the physical, environmental conditions that people in the bayview hunters point neighborhood experience. today, the neighborhood has a long history of industrial use, with the dry dock constructed in 1866, the navy purchased the dry dock, and during world war two transitioned to working on atomic defense issues. also during world war two, black workers settled to the area to work at the shipyard and following the end of the war, black communities continued to grow as a result of redlining and displacement of many black families from the fillmore and western addition neighborhoods. in 1991, the navy decommissioned the naval base, leaving behind health and environmental hazards. the industrialized nature of the area continues today and has influenced the existing environmental conditions in the bayview neighborhood. one example of this environmental legacy is air

quality. this map shows san francisco's air pollutant exposure zone, which are areas with elevated levels of pollutant concentrations and includes much of the industrialized area of the bayview hunters point neighborhood, including the project site. these physical environmental condition issues form the baseline conditions against which the project's environmental impact is measured . i will now briefly summarize the project's impacts and mitigation measures. the environmental analysis one second. the environmental analysis contained in the draft eir and appended initial study find that the proposed project could result in significant wind impacts and operational noise impacts and significant criteria. air pollutant impacts. specifically nox emissions from the operation of heavy duty trucks that will use the facility. the project would also have significant impacts to palo anthological archeological and tribal cultural resources impacts to other topics would be

less than significant mitigation measures identified in the draft eir and initial study would reduce all project impacts to less than significant levels, and there would be no significant and unavoidable impacts of the project. for example, the draft eir identifies nine individual measures to mitigate the project's air quality impacts, such as all yard equipment and transportation refrigeration units are required to be electric, a prohibition on the use of older model year trucks. a compliance with calgreen tier two building standards in implementation of an operational emissions management plan to ensure that all project emissions remain below thresholds. and the others listed here on this slide, i will now summarize the project alternatives studied in the eir . the eir evaluated the required

no project alternative in addition to three other alternatives. the no project alternative maintains the existing buildings with primarily parcel delivery use on the site. this alternative would avoid all of the project's significant impacts. the code compliant alternative would construct two buildings to the existing 65 foot height limit. this alternative maintains the same use mix as the proposed project, but scaled down. this alternative would result in similar impact impacts to below grade resources and noise as the proposed project, but would have reduced air quality and wind impacts. the last two alternatives would construct two new buildings similar to the proposed project, but fleet management or parcel delivery use would be the primary uses under these alternatives with a mix of other pdr uses, there would be no maker and manufacturing or retail uses under these alternatives. the fleet management use mix alternative would avoid the project significant air quality impact and no air quality mitigation measures would be

required and all other impacts of this alternative would be similar to the proposed project . the expanded parcel delivery use mix alternative would have similar impacts as the proposed project, but and would have reduced air quality impacts. but mitigation measures would still be required in addition, for the reasons described in the eir, the air considered but rejected from detailed analysis. five additional alternatives. next, i will provide a brief overview of the timeline before finishing up with information on how to review and comment on the draft. eir the sf gateway project's environmental review schedule is shown here in addition to publishing a notice of preparation and holding a scoping meeting in march 2022, the environmental review team has been part of outreach efforts to the bayview-hunters point environmental justice response task force to inform community members about the environmental review process and

answer questions about upcoming opportunities for public comment . so i'd like to mention here that due to an error in the email address on one of the five types of notices we provided notifying the public of the draft eir, the public comment period has been extended from september 18th to october 16th, 2023, and a corrected notice has been issued after the close of the public comment period on october 16th, the department will prepare written responses to all relevant, written and verbal comments received and publish those responses in a responses to comments document. not more than ten days before a planning commission hearing to certify the eir. in addition, planning staff will be scheduling an information hearing on this project later this fall or winter and before any project approval hearings. the informational hearing will provide more details on the project's design. public benefits approvals, including the special use district and development agreement. today,

the department is seeking comments on the adequacy, accuracy and completeness of the information contained in the eir for members of the public who wish to provide verbal comments, please state your name for the record and speak slowly and clearly so that the court reporter can make an accurate transcript of today's proceedings. anyone who would like to comment on the draft eir in writing, may email comments to kpcb sf gateway project at sf gov. org or mail comments to liz white at the address shown here by 5 p.m. on october 16, 2023. you may also use the same contact information to request a hard copy of the draft eir or a copy of the written responses to comments. this concludes my presentation and i respectfully request the commission open public comment. thank you. okay.

members of the public. this is your opportunity to address the commission on the draft environmental impact report. i'll remind you that the comment period is to accept comments on the accuracy and adequacy of the report itself, not the project. yeah, if you go ahead and line up on the screen side of the room for those persons in the chambers, whoever wants to go first, come on up. great. you'll get three minutes. greetings, commissioners. my name is camilla elam. bay view hunters point, community organizer, community leader. long term impacted resident and a daily asthma survivor. you are looking at over 500 years of bayview hunters point living experience . it is gravely important that you, even though you're not making a decision today, but

that you oppose any approval to ensure that the environmental review for the sf gateway project is both accurate and adequate. cumulative impacts need to include past present and future projects beyond and a quarter mile from the proposed project site. the environmental impacts should include the communities experience before and after the project is constructed and mitigation measures need to have alternative analysis. bayview hunters point. community groups need to need to be included when developing the range of alternatives for the project and mitigation measures can community oversight needs to be required regarding the deferred plans, prologis is required to submit an any future plans, particularly since the project is expected to operate for more than 100 years. the

environmental environmental review lacks adequate and accurate implementation of local hire and advancement provisions as translation of the environmental review needs to be adequately accessible for bayview-hunters point, residents . as a notice of as the notice of preparation, the nlp and initial study 300ft is inadequate proximity of accurate notice to impacted bayview hunters point residents. project description leaves out specific details uses are undefined, allowing wide range of variations of unknown users for over a century, the environmental review lacks consideration of community knowledge of the cumulative impact range is not far enough for accurate and adequate impacted community considerations as the impact aq three needs to include the cal enviro screening data for the

environmental review fails to adequately and accurately explain the demolition process, including asbestos and air quality impacts. the environmental review lacks adequate and accurate explanation regarding how trucks will be electrified by 2050. in bayview-hunters point, the environmental review lacks adequate and accurate explanation of electrification impacts, as the environmental review needs to include existing and surrounding polluters. and lastly, the environmental review fails to adequately and accurately explain that the project, the project sites, sits in an air pollution exposure zone. thank you so much for having us today. good afternoon, commissioners.

president tanner, commissioner koppell and the rest of the commissioners. my name is ami morgan and i'm a san francisco resident and i spent a lot of time in district ten as a rep with operating engineers, local three and we think the draft eir the environmental impact report is important as it outlines potential impacts of construction on this scale. and i believe the report is adequate and the project sponsor has shown their commitment to work with stakeholders to realize this important build. there may be concerns raised today and that's not a bad thing. ng and we welcome ongoing discussions, as you know, in the building trades. so and so we're seeing this project. we'd like to see this project move forward and to

create a lot of good jobs for you know, working class people to earn a living wage and enhance our apprenticeship program. um, and, and, you know, create revenue for the city and , and i think that's a good thing. and we support the draft environmental impact report findings. thank you for your time. all right. good afternoon. my name is leotis martin. i came to san francisco in 1966. i was six years old, moved across the street from the shipyard at the hunts point boys club right there. i lived there for many years. i was there even when they shut the shipyard down. we used to play over there in the shipyard. we used to climb the fence. we thought it was fun. we didn't know how much danger we was in, but let me tell you about the impact of this. when

they closed the shipyard down, it was closed for many years. then we had a fire. the fire had to burn out. why had to burn out? because there's too many different toxic they couldn't put it out. okay all this stuff growing up in bayview, our lifetime span. this is a 15 to 10 year difference than the people that live in nob hill. you want to talk about impact? i got a mother that's gone. i have a twin brother that died from enlarged heart. i have a nephew that's gone and we all lived in bayview. that's some impact right there. you know, i have friends right now today that have cancer. i have a young lady came up to me two days ago and said, leo, i got cancer, you know, and she'd been living in bayview. and the reason why they come to me and they talked to me because they knew i'd do this environmental work with green action and, and when i before i was able to do this, i didn't care about it. tessie and marie harrison. tessie esther, marie harrison brought me into this one day, and i've been doing

this for 18 years now because this is the way i get back to my community, because we are dying out there. i don't care if these people want to work. that's fine and dandy, but we don't work to kill ourselves. we work to support our family and to have a righteous life at the same time , we have to care about the community that we working in. thank you. okay. good afternoon again, commissioners roan with san francisco land use coalition. i cannot agree more with the previous speaker. all i have to say is one thing. bayview hunters point deserves better. the history of this neighborhood is. is replete with all kinds of shoving it under the carpet when it comes to toxicity, when it comes to environmental cleanup. lennar project wasn't, you know, like although maybe it was in the past century, but we're not

talking about 50 years ago. it hasn't been cleaned up yet. so when it comes to an eir, i totally understand the community's sentiment and the activist sentiment. people like myself as to whether or not we should trust this so i would like to propose those to have a more thorough eir, in particular with respect to all the possible issues, noise like pollution, environmental safety that was actually brought up, i was actually pleasantly surprised that it was brought up that these are the issues and this is how we're going to mitigate it. now is the mitigation going to take care of these issues? that's what we need to focus on, and that's why i'm here to encourage, urge to postpone any kind of affirmative action on this, any kind of approval of this, and have a more thorough

look into that particular this is the first thing after you have come back from your recess . i think the community, once they find out the impact, they are going to be just as as pissed off as my fellow residents of san francisco that you just saw here. thank you. good afternoon. my name is sandra dratler and i am here today speaking on behalf of the environmental justice group at faith in action at saint james episcopal church in the richmond district. haven't we subjected the bayview to enough environmental injustice, lack? last years, civil grand jury called out the lack of transparency leading to untold harm in the supposed cleanup of the hunters point shipyard as the state as we continue to have

rising water levels due to climate change that are going to move us further into disaster, our i really don't i can't say it as well as the residents, but from my perspective of today, we have an instance where we need to dig deep into the eir to find the impacts. this proposed project will have, particularly on the air in the bayview with at the very least 5000 additional person vehicle trips per day. granted, some of that will be people driving to work since the area is badly served by transit. but my guess would be that much of the traffic will be diesel trucks and gas powered vans coming and going to bring in and bring out parcels as it's more than just the bulk of the building. when we're looking at

environmental impacts, this is in a neighborhood that the eir freely admits has an alarmingly high incidence of asthma and other diseases that are linked to car and truck exhaust. bayview hunters point out with 93 e.r. visits per 100,000 population for asthma is over twice the rate of san francisco as a whole. and i spent my career in public health, and i've seen these impacts exacerbating already vulnerable populations. asians careful consideration and study need to be given to this project in its impacts. you have touted your commitment to racial and social equity. here is your opportunity to put those values into action . a continuation would give us time to do this is. thank you

for your consideration in. hello. my name is anne khalid and today i'm speaking on behalf of the san francisco grape panthers in support of the testimony. given by the residents of bayview hunters point. we stand with the residents of the bayview neighborhood as you take public comment on this purpose built polluting facility, not only is it a polluting facility, but it attracts polluters as. and we don't even know exactly what because they're not really saying what it is. because because they don't know. i guess this is in an all already burdened neighborhood as as you've heard testimony. an area with incidence of asthma related

to emissions. the this project is enormously out of scale. i mean, the size of it alone on both sides of the freeway. i mean, i've never seen such a thing. i know. and it only pretends badly for what will follow. please engage the community experts and address all of their concerns. thank you . okay. seeing no members of the public in the chambers coming forward, let's go to our remote callers. good evening, commissioners. members of the public appreciate the opportunity to comment. rudy gonzalez with the san francisco building and construction trades council. while we will have plenty of time to debate the merits of any proposed project, including a tenant, when the developer figures that out, i think it's important to look through. i know it's long. it's like 407 pages, but many of our

craft unions and policy folks have actually looked through it. and i think there's some important notes to make because there have been catastrophic failures on behalf of the community there that were imposed on them by the federal government, the state government, and with the complicity of the city. and we cannot allow those injustices to continue again. so i echo brother morgan's comments. we want to have those conversations. some of the issues around today's comments really have to do with whether or not there's adequate and accuracy in this report. i think there is, and there's a couple things i want to draw your attention to. one is a building and construction model that is going to be leed gold. so there's going to be a high level of mitigation inherently in the long term lifespan of the building. but in the construction phase and in the operations phase, there are also substantial efforts being made here by the project sponsor to deal with dust deal with noise. i also want to quickly refer to

the report as it relates to the vehicle traffic. i think that's a really legitimate issue as it relates to transit and just general well-being and health for people in their families. this is a fully electric operation with restrictor zones on those very types of trucks and the years and restrictions on what kind of trucks can go in this facility. we're talking about massive opportunities to decarbonize our projects and our construction electronic vehicle charging infrastructure. i think overall the systems will include stormwater management for systems that will collect rainwater. i mean, you name it. this report has covered it in the initial if you don't have time for a 407 pages, the dash 20, 21, 22, all those pages pretty succinctly lay out the charts and the determinations of less substantial. i think,

really encompass most of the findings. when you get into the mitigation efforts. i think that's where we need the commissioner to show some leadership. we should have some thoughtful discussions. we should keep engaged with the bayview-hunters point community advisory committee. there's probably no single one project that can undo the systemic racism and redlining that have plagued our city. but i'll tell you, those shipyard, when they were active, provided thousands of black workers the opportunity to a middle class wage and the surrounding economic impact for the community. when the government ripped those jobs out , they left behind a workforce. we're committed to making sure that workforce has a chance to be in our building trades and supporting them with good careers, a good health care and good opportunities in the city. so we think the thank you, sir. that is your time. hello. planning commission. my name is dan torres. i'm a san francisco

native and a business agent for sprinkler fitters local 483. i find the draft eir adequate and accurate. i support having the staff continue to review the project. thank you for your time . mr. mr. hardiman, are you there ? yeah. hello good afternoon, commissioners and staff. my name is greg hardiman. i'm with the elevator constructors, local eight. i live and work in san francisco and i'm a for district 19. i'm calling to support. i'm calling to voice my support for the draft environmental impact report. the draft eir for the san francisco gateway is a comprehensive assessment of several key factors that we must consider under ceqa. the findings are solid. i think we

can all agree that with the climate change storms are going to get worse each year and this project will address some of those concerns with stormwater management and we look forward for this project to move forward. thank you very much. am i there? go ahead. pretend i am commissioners. my name is alex lansberg. i live and work in san francisco. in fact, i live in bayview hunters point and have for nearly half of my life now i'm just calling to express my support for the draft environmental impact report. we believe. that that that is a thorough assessment, that it really did take a look at a number of the factors that are going to be that are of great concern to baby hunters point residents, both people who breathe as well as pretty much anyone who lives in the neighborhood. and we look forward to seeing this project

move forward, as mr. gonzalez said, there is still a lot of work to do to iron this project out. but this is an important first step that we need to take. thank you very much. i'm josh dallas. i'm a business rep for local 104 sheet metal workers and i primarily work in san francisco. i'm calling in support of the draft of the eir for the sf gateway. it is a thorough assessment of the various factors that we must consider under sequa. the findings are sound and i wish to record my support for the draft eir we look forward to the staff continuing to review this important project and to see this built as a benefit to our city of san francisco. thank you . good evening. my name is rj ferrari, business rep for local 38 plumbers and pipefitters. my union has a training facility

for the plumbers and pipefitters and techs and welders in district ten. we have received the eir and support the mitigation factors outlined in the tables. the project sponsors has identified feasible ways to deliver the project and reduce the impact of construction. we look forward to this project moving ahead in the future. thank you very much. rj ferrari, local 38. oh last call for public comment. so seeing no additional. okay we got one more caller. my name is sue hester. i'm going to submit written comments, but want to basically flag two issues that

are very important. one, this is a 2,000,000 square foot building that's a huge six. and the whole thing about parcel delivery services has a much greater impact on the area around it and throughout the city. i live in bernal heights and i go through this area a couple of times a week. i'm very familiar with toland avenue. what we have right now in bernal heights and areas that have narrow streets is parcel delivery workers. just stop in the middle of traffic at and deliver packages. we have we had a discussion session of retail sector about an hour ago. the retail sector has been shifted to parcel delivery services because of covid and the delivery of these packages

is has a huge impact, right? the trucks buzzing around the neighborhoods on traffic and throughout the area around. so that is one of the issues that that needs to be brought up on % but i appreciate the people from hunter's point. they raised questions and there is a lot of issues around hunter's point being not taking care of by the city for the past. but i want to say 50 years, more than 50 years. thank you very much. by okay. final last call for public comment. not seeing no additional requests to speak commissioners public comment is closed and this then the draft eir is available for your comment. thank you. i'll call on commissioner moore. i will mostly focus on adequacy and

accuracy. however, in this particular case there will be a couple of comments that will go slightly outside because i think we have a very high bar here in order to respond to this project , i'd like to simply say that the readability of this document is impaired by the typeface that is being used. it is such a horizontally quite outing typeface that you have to almost read three times in order to realize where is a word ending and i'm not sure if you have a paper copy in front. i have not looked at it on the web. i find the typeface unacceptable for this year. it's the first time that i ever said that and i've commented it on quite a few errors. the second thing is, under three a in that entire section, i believe that the size of the maps with no enlarge should focus on the community. exactly where it occurs is deficient together with dimension and radii. i'm picking

up on the comments made by the community. me using a 300 foot radius in an area where the sizes are so large that we only touch on very few people. and the reason why i'm saying it, this area has construction companies and other large indoor estriol purveyors who will be affected one way or the other given that it creates street changes and construction that will be in effect more than three years, i would suggest that the notification be expanded by far, far beyond the typical 300ft that we use in residential neighborhoods. i think it is mandatory for more people to participate. i am interested to see much stronger daca augmentation of visual impacts. we have an area of 65 foot height limit at the top of freeway, lies at 55ft. that is a

280 freeway which will be straddled on both sides by a 97 to 115 foot high buildings sitting literally on top of the freeway with already many times commented on the impact of mission bay, completely obscuring the long views to downtown. and while this is an area specific project, this is also a citywide impacting project. and in the same breath i would like to suggest that the parcel delivery service as will be examined with their impact on downtown, the numbers of trips increase by building a facility of this incredible size right here is going to be impacting every neighborhood in downtown. i believe that the current delivery services and they're really unruly behavior is already creating too many problems, not just on particular

times of the day, but day in, day out, week, day in, weekend out from morning to late at night where it becomes dangerous in our neighborhoods to safely be maneuver around these battleship sized buildings, battleship battleships, ice delivery trucks, and still find my way home and be safe. i'm not want to talk about any other vehicles that shouldn't be there at that time. i'll spare that for this for this year. i would like to get a better insight and that is going beyond an era perhaps why we need a special use district for a single use project. and i would like to know why we need to develop an agreement. in my own experience , they are particular multi use projects that that require suds

sud and special development agreement. in this particular project, i like to see a significant amount of larger accountability when this project comes on site. it's basically one large building for all intents and purposes, and i do believe that there could be too many missed opportunities to properly track and observe the implementation of this project. this project is too consequential in more than what we perhaps even address in the eir, which gets me to the point about that vulnerable community impact that i believe that the neighbors stated the impacts on bayview-hunters hunters point eloquii deftly and convincingly , and that will be part of the public record. what i am asking is we are already in an air pollution exposure zone. everything is already colored there. how could we possibly mitigate on top of an already existing unaccept circumstance

when this project is indeed causing major, major pollution and noise impact? this is a question that baffles me and i find it actually somewhat ludicrous that we are even entertaining that there is mitigation possible. the people already described the health effect and we already know that it's not working. i leave that for other people to also comment on. i wanted. to acknowledge the community having spoken eloquently, and i do believe that the comments made by other people who called in have have to remind us of our racial and social equity of allegations. and i was shocked. and i am now referring to this document, which is in front of us on page . one second. what is this page?

there is a comment that twice to actually tell me that social and economic impacts and changes aren't really under my purview. so i not sure why that in this document i found that comments threatening and unfortunately i cannot at this very second find it, although i have many stickers on my book. oh, it's actually under on. page 3a61, two, three, four. fifth paragraph. i would like everybody to read that and i find that comment somewhat inappropriate because i have not seen any arbitrary reminds me of that. and in this particular circumstance, to remind us of our obligations, i find it questionable in the context of this book. thank you. thank you. commissioner moore, commissioner

coppell. thank you, president. as far as the air is concerned, i do agree with you that the type is a little difficult to read other than that, i do think that the document is accurate and adequate. but i'm also thankful that the comment period has been been lengthened for more input. let me speak to some of camilla's concerns around local hire and is as far as the construction portion of the project is concerned. i don't have real purview on who might be employed after the construction is done but just to put some context into things, i am an electrician and i used to work on the job sites. i started working in the office and one of my first projects that i came here speaking in favor of was the original phase one of bayview-hunters point at and there was a lot of neighborhood participation, a lot of neighborhood commentary and the

neighborhood let me know like, hey, you're not from here. like i live in the sunset and yeah, i'm not from the bayview-hunters point and i, i took those words seriously and i said, well, i'm going to do what i can. and so since then, it's been my professional passion to make sure that women and brown people have better access to jobs and have careers that are especially that grew up here in the city so they can stay here living in this city. so that's that's a big deal for me. so hear me, i'm with you on this one. okay. and i've taken it even farther than that. there is a building down on evans in the city college campus. it's called city build that is put on in conjunction with the office of economic and workforce development and the building trades. and so when you hear these these trades people speaking in favor of this project, i know that. people from the 904 to 9 four one, two four that have signed up for city build and have showed up

and gotten a b average, they've gained access into our trades and they've gotten into our apprenticeship programs. our a lot of our apprenticeship programs are here in the city. a lot of our contracting businesses are all up and down the third street corridor. a lot of our material and tool supplier warehouses are all up and down the third street corridor and a lot of our i think about 34 of our residents in our union live in the nine four, one, two, four. and i go to every semester at city build and speak to the class. and it's almost all brown people, a lot of single moms and they're just they just want a chance. right they just want a chance to go to work. stay here in the city, not have to travel far and be able to put food on the table for their families and so i have gone there every semester for the past. what 15 years and talk to those kids and said, keep trying. if you don't make it in this first time, sign up again. go. go back and try again. we

can't just let anybody in. but those who actually show a little wherewithal, sign up for the program, show up and graduate. they get accepted into a trade and they get to have a career where it's not just they're going to go to work on this one job. they're going to be accepted into a program whether it's local three with commissioner, army morgan or local six or local 38 or 104. they're they're adopted in and they have a career now. so it's not just a one job deal. it's a it's a lifetime deal. once you're in, you're in. and so i want you to know that i'm up here really advocating for you guys, too. and as far as we're concerned, this is a huge project. so yeah, you should be taking it very seriously. it's a really, really big project. so you guys, i'm glad you showed up today and told us what you were thinking, but that's that's where i'm at and that's what i'm thinking. so i think we're on the same page. you know, this is just the starting of this process. so we'll be here to talk throughout it. but i just want to make you guys know that

that you're on our radar and we're trying to get you guys in on as much of this as possible. and a lot of those residents that live in the 941, two, four, four, they're going to be working on these jobs close to home and they're going to be spending their money close to home and keeping those businesses in business. so, you know, you haven't seen the last of us. we'll see you again here next time. and you know, this is just the start of the process, but i want to let you guys know that that we do care about what's going on down there. okay thank thank you, commissioner copple, commissioner imperial, thank you. my comment on the eir , i do think that it is adequate . i do appreciate that the eir also correlates or tried also try to correlate on the on the housing element eir as well. so and one thing that struck me that i think in the as part of the comment process is the statement around the projected project health risks in years

2035 to 20, 2050 around cancer risks and the air pollutants which i think also address in in our housing element. eir but one sense here struck me that i think that should be elaborated more is that the decreased cancer or the decrease in cancer risk and concentrations from 2022 to future 2035 is attributed to the assumption that vehicles will become lower emitting in future years. so i hope that that the department can address on the assumption what is the basis of that assumption in terms of the especially in in the areas of the delivery, the and i and i think the mitigation measures is trying to address that prohibiting all the model year of trucks. but what are the basis for the assumptions that perhaps the delivery system will be also electrified or lower

emitted? i think that would that would also although the eir also address that it would be less than significant if even if there's 50% increase. but but i think that we owe it to the public to make sure that the cancer and the air pollutants since this is actually identified in the map, in the housing air before that, this area is again an air pollutant receptive. so i would like to have that for the department to put that in the comment as well. so thank you. thank you. i would just i just have a few comments. i make it then i'll call on you. um, you know, i think that the eir as an environmental document is adequate and appropriate. i think what is raised through this discussion today is more about the policy and the decision making process and the process and the approval that comes after this. and how can prologis propose a project that does better than needed to that raises the bar on the standards

of what we allow to be developed? and how does the city, through the different processes that this project has to go through, study, development agreement, etcetera. what do we ask and demand and require of the projects, including, you know, not just like some more electrification or reduced emissions? i don't know why we aren't going with the climate collapse or seeing too like this should be like a zero emission project, not only the building itself, but also all the things that are coming in and out of it every day. i don't know why we would build a 2,000,000ft!s of space that is causing any pollution. we have the technology. we have the know how, we understand how to reduce that. so we should just go ahead and do that. i just don't really see. so i think the eir is fine . but again, what is we as a city demand and require from this project and i hope that the folks that are here, the folks that called in support, can be supportive of that vision as well, so that we're really doing better than needed to not just for the neighborhood, but really for the entire planet. i mean, not to make it. it's obviously one project in the scheme of the world, but that's the direction

we really should be going with these larger projects that are being developed in the city. so maybe with that director hillis and miss gibson, you could just share a little bit about what the processes going forward so that members of the public can understand the different interlocking pieces. there's the eir portion, but there's also other approvals. so folks can kind of keep their ears out and their eyes out for things that will be coming forward with this project. and then they can plug in and advocate in those appropriate places. so maybe what's next after the eir and then maybe director hill is on the study and the da. hi, lisa gibson environmental review officer. so we're in the process now of taking comments on the environmental impact report and we will be then at the close of the comment period compiling all of those comments and then working on a response to comments, document. and we anticipate that prior to the release of the responses to comments document, there will be

an informational hearing at the planning commission here where the there will be an opportunity to discuss the project in greater detail prior to the issuance of the environmental document, which will then be brought before the planning commission for certification of the eir. as to the approvals, i will turn that over to our director and folks can add to. but there is good you know, this requires a change to the zoning that would happen through an sud and a da to address concerns by the community. others et cetera. so it's a fairly complicated, you know, it's not a normal entitlement process in that this will require a da and an sud to build as as contemplated. so there's a lot more to do on that effort. there's obviously design work, but community work working with ewg on what is in the suite of community benefits that are that are in the sud. so we will

come back to you and have a more detailed discussion on the project in an informational presentation on the project. so you'll start to hear what those are contemplated to be. get your input as well as allow the community to voice their comments and opinions on the on the proposed da and sud so that we can go back and change and refine those documents. so typical with the da, it's us working with ewg and other agencies mta on on the issues that come out of the eir and other issues that that you and the community may have. great. and just on that point, just to ensure that we have that hearing here soon enough that we can have real input, we don't want to get it at the point where everything's already baked and you're looking for approval and we can't give it because it's not meeting some of the standards that we haven't even gotten to voice yet because we haven't even gotten to hear from each other or the community fully on this. this particular project. so just to schedule appropriately so we have adequate time and we were hoping

to have that even before this hearing. but i don't think there's as much there's enough detail to provide to you about the da for you to opine on it. so, okay, well, we can give some opinions without a lot of information, as you know. so yes, we may we may be able to have that hearing yet. commissioner moore i wanted to have a process question to director and to ms. gibson we are under a mature moratorium for last mile distribution sites at the moment, and that was that moratorium started in at the end of march 2022, and it addressed indeed some things similar to what we're having here in that particular moratorium. there was a specific name in this one. there isn't that could pop at any moment. i am curious to see how that discussion or that moratorium affect us. and as to whether or not any other further discussion are coming out of that moratorium. i don't have the details on the moratorium,

but i mean, all this will need to be addressed in the study. and the da, right. the use how we regulate that use right. of icu is required for parcel delivery. and part of this is parcel delivery. you'll need to address that for, you know, set the set the requirements that if a cu would be needed later or that cu is going to be part of the approval you make during during the entitlement of this project. so that will all happen when you when you are are are when you're asked to entitle this project. i hope that's the questions that caused the moratorium will be indeed flushed to the irr. perhaps ms. gibson needs to revisit some of those questions and concerns. it was a different site. it still was in the city limits of san francisco and so i want to make sure that the reason for the moratorium is properly reflected and how we report impacts as it goes through this particular

year. to the extent they're not or it's not necessary to address them in the eir, you will address them as policy questions when the project comes before you for entitlement respondents to stay attuned to whatever those issues were. indeed. thank you, commissioner moore. i don't see any other commissioner hands up. so i think we may be concluded with this item. very good. commissioners with that, we can move on to the final item on your agenda today. number 17, case number 2022 hyphen 012051 ca for the property at 7920 eighth street. a conditional use authorization. i'm sorry. good afternoon, commissioners.

toy department staff the item before you is a request for conditional use authorized to construct a three story rear and horizontal addition to an existing three story single family dwelling with an unauthorized unit at the ground floor. the subject property is located on the south side of 28th street and guerrero street and dolores street. within an rh two zoning district. the central neighborhood's large residents special use district and a 40 x height and bulk district. the expansion will accommodate two dwelling units, including an existing legal unit and one net new legal unit. the primary unit will exceed 3000 gross square feet, thereby requiring a conditional use authorization pursuant to planning code 249 .92. the project site was originally developed as a single family dwelling in 1907 and presently contains the three

story single family dwelling with one unauthorized unit. there's also one off street parking space at the ground story. the rear addition is proposed at all three stories with varying widths and depths at each level. all as a result, the existing 1870 eight square foot primary unit at the upper floors will expand about 1470 three square feet, resulting in a gross floor area of 3351ft!s. additionally the 700 square foot unauthorized dwelling unit at the ground story will be legalized and expanded approximately. 795ft!s at resulting in a gross floor area of 1495ft!s in including in this total included in this total increase in gross floor area per unit is the expansion of the existing 340 square foot one car

garage to a 620 square foot, two car garage, which is shared between units within the existing structure and the expanded area. the project proposes a full interior remodel which will convert the primary unit from a two bedroom, two bath to a three bedroom, three and a half bath with expanded living and dining spaces. the unauthorized unit at the ground story will be legalized and upgraded from a one bed from a zero bedroom, one bath to a one bedroom, one and a half bath, providing enhanced exposure and direct access to the code compliant rear yard shared amenities between the two units include two class one bicycle parking spaces and two off street parking spaces at the ground floor. finally the project proposes to remodel all the building's front and rear facades as prior to the

submittal of the project application. in the project sponsor conducted and completed a pre-application meeting on october 17th, 2022, several members of the public attended the meeting and expressed concerns regarding light and privacy, noise, transmission and storm water management. since the initial pre-application meeting, the sponsors have conducted additional outreach via email and individual meetings with neighbors and neighborhood organizations. the project sponsors held a meeting with adjacent neighbors, conducted a meeting in the community in june 2023, where neighborhood organizations were invited and also held a meeting with former tenants of the property. in august 2023. to date, the department has received correspondence from ten people, all regarding the proposed project. one correspondence requesting additional information, two in support of the project and seven

correspondence in opposition of the project. opposing members of the public expressed interest in increasing staff awareness about a previous act enacted by the former owner in 2019. an an and increased staff awareness about the presence of the unauthorized dwelling unit. additionally, these correspondence disagreed with staff regarding the project's demolition calculations and the fact that it does not constitute a demolition per planning code 317 lastly, opposing members of the public expressed concern about replacing two affordable units with two higher end units, citing the project size as a main concern in on balance, staff finds that the project complies with applicable requirements of the planning code meets the residential design guidelines and is

consistent with the objectives and policies of the general plan . the department recommends approval with conditions for the following reasons. the project maximizes the permitted density on the lot by legalizing the unauthorized unit. the project complies with all the requirements of the central neighborhood's large residents. special use district, including the retention of rent controlled units and the proportion of unit size. the project enhances and preserves the immediate neighborhoods. character and scale and the project provides a use that is compatible with the rh two zoning district density and height, resulting in a project that's necessary, desirable and compatible with the surrounding neighborhood. this concludes staff presentation and i will pass it to the project sponsor who will continue with the brief presentation. thank you. project

sponsor. you have five minutes. i think this one talk. the mouse is not working. oh yeah. i just think about. i ask for overhead

. good afternoon everyone. i'm marianne norsigian, representing ora arc and i want to explain a little about 7920 eighth street project. so so. so the property was purchased on april 20th, 22 with the approval permit. the approved permit mentioned the property as a single family unit with 3017ft!s of residence, all gross floor area. there was a there was an ellis act on the

project invoked with the previous owner, which was done january of 2019. being a first time homeowner. mariam and nabeel, the homeowners did not know much about the complex complexities around and ellis act and also the previous owner did not disclose the complexities around the history of the project. this is the previous permit approved permit that they purchased the property with. it shows that the building only has one unit. with 3717ft!, gross floor area. so the project owners initially intended to remodel the project and immediately move in, and they were planning to do just some over the counter revisions like include a deck and do the construction and move in. but

after evaluating the project and realizing that they going to be more than ten feet above the grade, we realized that they had to go through this 311 and it will take so much time. so that's when they considered this house as their permanent house. and they're considered their future needs for their growing family and their aging parents who ultimately are going to move with them. so they decided to expand the project and build two units through this process. they just realized that there is actually an illegal unit in this house. so it is not one unit with 3717ft!s, but but two units with that. this square footage splits between them. so the they're just understanding, you know, the implications of ellis act and an illegal unit we came to planning department multiple times to ensure that this this project is possible and we took

all proactive actions like staying in the demolition calculation threshold to not lose that one unit control rent controlled unit and also just knowing that ellis act has a lot of complexities. so we were very careful and we were in infrequent communication with the planning department. but this is so after understanding the about the illegal unit, they decided to legalize the existing unit and expand it and improve it. and this is what it has turned to. so their vision is they like valley. they have found a school that they like for their son and they chose that neighborhood as their permanent house and they are planning to make the primary unit as their permanent house. and eventually when the aging parents join them, they will be

in the second unit and just because of the complexities of the ellis act now, bill has reached out to the previous tenant multiple times, offering the lower unit with a rent controlled rate in case it goes out to the market for rent until the parents move in. but we have not heard back from him. he he offered to talk to his lawyer and get back to us, but we didn't hear back. we try to keep full transparency throughout this process. we have had to. official pre-application meetings. we have met with the adjacent neighbors here. their concerns took action to satisfy them. and nabeel and mariam have met with individually met with all the neighbors in velocity, explained the process, and they the neighbors, the neighbors are

actually in support of the project because this lot has been vacant for so many years and it has a really we not likable history and they want a new development there. so he has gotten 29 letters of support from the neighbors. we have had ongoing communication with the evicted neighbor. this is the project timeline that shows all the efforts and dates. thank you, ma'am. but that is your time. the commissioners may have some follow up questions for you. okay with that, we should open up public comment. members of the public, this is your opportunity to address the commission on this matter. if you're in the chambers, please come forward. if you're calling in remotely, you need to press star three or raise your hand via webex. thank you. how much time do we get? three minutes. oh, great. i prepared two versions. that's fine. good evening. george is there are many issues with this project

due to the ellis act eviction and the many years it's been vacant. the ultimate outcome of the occupancy and the tenure of the main unit and the legalized icu needs a full deliberation. as i wrote in my september 3rd email. but that's in the commission's hands. there are two alteration permits issued to the llc in 2020 and 2021 sold with the project. there was a contingent sale in october 2021 that must have fallen through and the ultimate sale with the two permits by the llc to the current project sponsor in april 2022 for 2.2 million, the scope of the current plans are similar to the original 2016 plans from the llc that were withdrawn on august 29th. i sent interior photos of 7920 eighth street from the web ad when sold in 2016 to the llc. i think it is important to get a sense of the lives that were lived there and

were disrupted by the eviction in 2019 for a speculative project. i think the commodification of this house, home to long term tenants, could have possibly, perhaps maybe been forestalled if the never adjusted demographics had been adjusted even once, never mind twice since 2009, and that is the fundamental issue today, at least for me. there was a speculative frenzy in past years as i was here fairly regularly talking about the issue of extreme alteration is that were really demolitions and the huge price increase, as with creation of mega mansions, using the loophole of the never adjusted demo calcs in response in 2017, when the ret was created, followed by the peskin legislation, both. failed the demo calcs were recently in the news, somewhat obliquely, with the mention of 125 crown terrace . in the past i have mentioned joe ashkenazi's 2012 article,

which has quotes from developers crowing about the demo calc loophole for this 28th street project. there should be a warning letter if the calcs are exceeded during the work, it should return to the commission as a cour not just allowed to get revision permits from debbie . both shakespeare and faulkner famously wrote about the past. the past is why we're here today. the calcs for this project are very close to the tantamount to demolition thresholds, and this project is another example of why the commission should adjust the calcs as empowered to do by section 317, b two, d and here is what i just said. for all of you. thank you very much. and i don't have a problem with these people. i just want to say that parenthetically, my issue is not with them. my issues with the whole history, as i said, the past. and that's what i think you have to reckon with today as well as all the considerations.

but that's your bailiwick, not mine. thank you. good evening. my name is sandra dratler. i'm here today representing faith in action at saint james episcopal church in reviews ing the staff documents for this project, i was struck by the absence of anything resembling an analysis of how this project measures up to your recently adopted racial and social equity action plan. given the importance you placed on the action plan's development, should there not be something that takes into consideration the fact that this property came to be because an elderly couple was wrongly evicted under the ellis act, their low income housing unit has disappeared. as a family unit is proposed closed. in essence, the house will be a

single family home, a unit of affordable housing has been removed from our greatly lacking city inventory. this backdoor way of creating single family mega homes where formerly two affordable units existed, seems to be a pattern around the city . in my own neighborhood, the richmond i see real estate listings for single family homes that have been approved to include an adu with the commitment to provide it as an affordable unit by the developer. the home is then sold and the buyer may have no knowledge such such as our people here. the applicants here today of the commitments made and no penalty is found. there's not follow up. i see that here. the property was passed from developer to developer here and along the way the ellis act commitments have been erased.

the way i see it, the evicted family has first dibs over the parents that i'm glad to hear that you've been trying to get in touch with them. remember that housing is a right and a matter of social justice. good afternoon, commissioners. ozzy rowland with san francisco. land use coalition. i personally have been involved with this project since 2018 and because. of the elderly mexican american long term tenants, 30 plus years, i think about it, 30 plus years, some of you probably have parents at that age. and i just want to put up a picture of them overhead. please so you would not think that i'm talking about. imagine ordinary people. these folks were ellis acted

eventually by the developer who was, for the lack of a better definition. he was a total schmuck and to clarify what miss shirish mentioned about the withdrawal of the permit, he did withdraw his planning permit, but he did go to the dbe and pulled an over-the-counter permit for just the remodel. and that's where mr. samad is. comes to picture when he actually bought the house with the permit, it was not a planning permit. it was an over-the-counter permit. and as usual, the schmuck developer had lied to fbi with no consequence, presenting it as a single family home. so so there was never a plan to merge units. this thing never came to the purview of the planning. i want to repeat the same thing as other speaker.

others talk about in particular, miss rattler. if we do have any focus on racial and social equity, this is a perfect project to actually exemplify that. where is it? racial and social equity. if we're going to have long term elderly tenants unlimited income being kicked out so we could replace it with , you know, luxurious, spacious condos that are going to be sold at a profit and i appreciate the fact that the current owner has reached out to connie and michael juarez and offering them the unit below, but on a temporary basis until the parents move in. i don't think we want connie and michael to get ellis acted again. so that offer is to me is not much of an offer. so i'm here to urge you to reject this project, because if racial and social equity matters and if it is a new focus per your new housing element,

this project does not fit the bill and does not stand out. so i still have 205 seconds. mr. ionin so, so, so that that is the important thing here that this is a travesty. this is not the pattern that we want to continue on if these people were just some young yuppies, you know, so that they could move on somewhere else, i would not have so passionately defended them and have spent five years, you know, talking about the same folks and trying to save them from eviction. thank you. okay. if there are no other members of the public in the chambers that wish to submit their testimony, let's go to our remote callers. good evening, commissioners. i'm anastasia of annapolis. a district eight tenant and san francisco tenant union member.

i'm coming at this from a different slant aside from all the things that have been said on march 1st, the san francisco board of supervisors unanimo voted for an ordinance introduced by my district eight supervisor, rafael mandelman, to combat ongoing trend of large, luxurious single family monster homes, replacing small or older homes that are more affordable to middle income residents, this mandelman said in a statement. we've done a really good job of building housing for millionaires and billionaires over the last decades when we should be building housing for the middle class. commissioner you're reminded of this phenomenon every week. the ordinance to curb the construction of luxury monster homes in district eight created a new central neighborhoods large residential special use district for glen park, noe valley, dolores heights mission. dolores diamond heights, twin

peaks and eureka valley. subjecting new construction and residential expansion projects within those neighborhoods to new requirements, including a conditional use approval from the planning commission for residential units that are over 3000 gross square feet. the upper unit at 7920 eighth street exceeds 3000ft!s. and that is wy you are having this icu hearing. it's a stretch to say that the project that complies with the eight priority planning policies in planning code section 101.1 b that maintain maintains that the city's supply of affordable housing be preserved and enhanced. the tenants union rejects planning's claim that this project promotes housing affordability by increasing housing supply. the project

cannot hide the fact that it doesn't add any new units. this project replaces two rent controlled, modest unit units with two luxury units afford able to a very few aside from the property owners unprincipled behavior, the tenants union opposes this project and urges you to vote no. thank. good evening, commissioner. this is rasheen eisner, director of activism and operations at the san francisco tenants union. i think it's quite clear that this case should not move forward if we approve it today, we're essentially saying that our laws don't matter. this kind of bad behavior shouldn't be rewarded by allowing the construction of already restricted monster homes that are not functionally multi unit housing. this is an incentivization of exactly the

kind of fraud misuse of laws like the elvis act and displacement causing crisis conditions in san francisco. i also think it's worth considering the address on clipper street that the owners also have an and i have some real doubts about the narrative being presented today. you know, who among us doesn't have aging parents? i commute clear across town my kids to school. i sympathize with that. and even though all of that is true and not financially a speculative narrative, i don't i wouldn't expect to have the right to build a restricted home after a history of fraud and displacement and misuse of laws . i don't know why we would make an exception in this case when we should be doing the opposite. thank you so much for your time . okay last call for public comment. if you're in the chambers, please come forward. if you're calling in remotely, you need to press star three or raise your hand via webex. seeing no request to speak, commissioner's public comment is closed and this matter is now

before you. so i thank staff, thank you for the project sponsors and all those who called in or who were here in person to give testimony. you know, i think it's somewhat complicated case, but also simple case at the same time. and unfortunately, one we've experienced quite a bit of. i feel like the last year or so of, you know, someone purchasing a home. there were some poor behavior before it was purchased and then now what do we do as a commission with the challenges of it as far as the building itself and the project, we can kind of look at that aspect first. certainly it's enlarging the home beyond the scope of requiring the q is part of why it's here, because of the size of the home. it's not very much over the amount of space that would kick it into. q territory. in terms of the primary unit becoming 3351ft!s, and it's additional 1000ft!s, and then having the second unit become, i think, a very livable unit, something that often we struggle

to see, quite frankly, is the second units not being just tiny kind of studios that are shoved into the back a lower part of a unit. so from a design standpoint and reviewing the plans, i think the plans for the home are appropriate and they seem to be well thought out. they seem to be in context with the neighboring buildings in terms of the heights and kind of how they match up with the other buildings on the block. so from the just the building itself, i don't have an issue approving the project. i think where it gets more complicated is thinking about it not so much the use, which is to my case, the having it be a two family dwelling, but the users and all the history that's related to this project, how do we handle it? i think part of what we're we're asked to do is to try to have a deterring effect on future bad behavior by not approving this project. and that's why i went into if we were to not approve this project , what are we left with? it's still a building that has two units. one which was illegal. and so whoever would to purchase or to renovate this building would still need to come to us

to maybe not come to us, but go through a process to legalize the second dwelling unit or come to us to remove it. and we'd have to be faced with that conversation so we could certainly shape the building if we thought it should be smaller . the second unit should be smaller to have it be more affordable or things like that. but either way, they're coming to planning either through this body or through over the counter and kind of ministerial work to do something with this building, to have it be legally occupied. and certainly for years being vacant, certainly to renovate it and to make it habitable again. one thing i think i was well armed to hear, but i agree with ms. rome that offering the unit to the couple that was evicted for an unknown temporary time period is certainly a great effort, but i can certainly see why they may not be interested in it. it made me wonder. director hillis and ms. waddy around again, kind of our connection to our tenant programs and things like that. i don't know if there is a right of first refusal in this case where other laws that are maybe this is for you, ms. connor in

terms of state laws, when people have are evicted and renovations occur, they have a right to return. obviously, they were evicted under the ellis act and not under renovation. but i'm just wondering, certain the project sponsors reaching out. do we have any verification that that happened or is there a way that we can do something so we know what the conversation was or if there are even any laws that apply to what is supposed to happen in that relationship? in a case like this, i'm not sure who wants to take that, but it's kind of a complicated one. okay, connor planning department staff, so i can speak a little bit to the ellis act eviction. so there was an act eviction back in 2019. and so there's basically three different constraint periods when you're looking at an act eviction. there's two years where none of the units can be re rented. and, you know, when you're subjecting something or going through an act eviction, you're removing it from the rental market. so those first two years, it cannot be re rented. then there is a five year period where not only is there a right of first refusal, but the unit needs to be offered

at the same rent that it was rented before and then there's the ten year period and that is just the right of first refusal to the previous tenant. and so that is in place for all those units. i think the thing to really kind of dig into a little bit with the ellis act is those re rental restrictions only apply to the unit that that the tenant was residing in on. and there is an exemption if it's going to be owner occupied. so the previous tenants were previously occupying 79 and so that's where the new owners are going to come in and have that be owner occupied. although 79 a is the, you know, the smaller unit, there is no legal requirement that it be offered. you know, by law to the previous tenants. the only kind of re rental restrictions on 79 a would be the two years not re renting it of the unit that the primary unit of both of both. okay okay both both units would have the two year restriction. so let me just repeat back. there are some restrictions but unfortunately they would not apply to the previously evicted

tenants because they would be being offered the second unit. that's now being legalized, which is not a legal unit. prior to that. yeah and this is something that we did kind of check in with the rent board to kind of make sure that we really understood all of the re rental restrictions. so it was really at the discretion of the property owner to offer the second unit for re rental to the, the evicted tenant. that is correct. okay. thank you very much. i don't know. director. miss, you had anything to add, but thank you, miss connor. so that just always leads us back to like, what do we do and what are the impacts of our decisions. and so i don't know. i mean, perhaps i can be persuaded if we were to not approve this project or to ask staff to change it and come back and work with the project sponsor. i'm certainly open to what folks would want to have it change to, but i don't know that we would get a different outcome than two units in this building thing, and the couple still having been evicted. i don't know that i'm not seeing a pathway for us to require anything unless folks are just interested in the building and the units being smaller so that they are more affordable by

design in. but again, in partly in that way, whether it's owner occupied or not to me is irrelevant because the building will be there long after these owners and they could decide in the next few years that they don't want to live here or who knows what. and so to me, it's not about the current users. it's about what do we want this building to be like and how do we want it to perform in the future? with that, i'll call on commissioner ruiz. i just have a clarifying question. so, mrs. connor, what you explained, and because we saw the correspondence between the current owner and the tenants who were affected of offering them the unit of right of first refusal, all but what you're saying is this information that was found out following that correspond since and so the owner and i stepped out during the presentation. i'm sorry. so the owner is currently not willing to offer to the unit that could potentially be rented? i think that the letter that i definitely have the planner also clarify, but the

letter that was submitted by the sponsor to the previous tenants is something that's completely voluntary. so there isn't an actual legal requirement for them to do so because the ellis act is really has to match the tenant to the specific unit and since they do not reside in 79, a and 79 is going to be owner occupied and there just isn't that legal requirement. so i think the letter might be a little bit confusing. there isn't actually that required under the act. okay. so we can just disregard that correspondence and i'll pass it off to someone else while i formulate my thoughts. com comments, questions, motions. commissioner moore there is an aspect that was concerning, concerning to me. the applicant apparently is or has been completely unaware or or unfamiliar with all the subtleties of regulation that govern approvals and alterations

to buildings in san francisco. so is the applicant here? right there? uh is the applicant willing to speak briefly about what what happened there is obviously a required real estate disclosure that during the sale that should have been part of the required documentation. and again, there is a huge loophole, particularly when you deal with somebody who is not familiar with any of this stuff. could you briefly speak to that step when you came to this country or to the city, whatever it is, and what happened to you during that time? sure. president danner and commissioners, first of all, i'd like to we'd like to extend our heartfelt gratitude for providing us this platform and to share our story. we're immigrants who came to sf around ten years ago, drawn to its promise of opportunity and could you just speak a little closer to the microphone? sure. so over these ten years, san francisco hasn't just been our home. it's

a place it hasn't just a place where we've lived. it's become our home, a place where we got married, where we welcomed our first child and where we aspired to establish our permanent roots. so know about the history of how we bought the 7920 eighth street. we bought it at the height of the pandemic bubble. this was the only house we were so before this we owned a condo, so we never owned a single family in the house in the city. so we really wasn't really aware of rental laws or the intricacies of the act when we bought it. our real estate agent, when we bought it, did mention that this has an lsac designation, which means we can't rent out the primary unit. but given that as we just saw, it came with approved permits from the previous owner, the remodel of the single family home, at that point, that really didn't seem concerning to us because we were planning on living in it ourselves. and it's just as much it's much to our disadvantage that we found out after the fact that, you know, the complexities, the act and

especially the speaking to the previous owner who did the eviction. we you know, after the fact of course like this is this has been a steep learning learning curve for us for that we found you know, the individual in person has been done other unsavory has evicted other tenants. so it's kind of like, you know, unfortunately, we did look at legal recourse, but at this point in time, it was just not a path we'd wanted to take because i think the individual is just adept at dodging lawsuits. i think there are several pending now at this point. and i mean, we're we've been swept into this controversy . but, you know, honestly, we're just looking to create a permanent home for our family as immigrants to this country. so i hope that gives you some clarity on how the evolution of the when we bought the property, were you aware about the 3000 square foot rule? we are kind of in a strange position. your neighbors

, other people have expressed the concern that because your unit exceeds the 3000 square foot threshold which was established during a very different time for very specific reasons, because we want to avoid oversize units, were you aware of the difference between what you are proposing or asking for and that limit? we were aware of the difference, yes. and it it didn't occur to us that it would be controversial because there are other projects which i think even last month, 35 valley street, which was approved as a single family home at 3800ft!s, i think, and then 5020 eighth street on the same block was i think both units are around 26, 2700. so comparable in size. so and then given that we have we want to grow our family. we were looking for a certain size of house which suited our needs. that's what ended up being over 3000. and if we look at the original permit, which the previous owner had, this was not like i think 10% over. if he had followed the

original plans, we would have lost both the rent control status of both units. it would have been then deemed a single family home. so when we became aware of all of the history, thanks to, you know, some of the neighbors we work with, we tried to at least make the best of a difficult situation, try to, you know, keep make sure that our our we're under the demolition limits and we make so we preserve rent control for both units. and the lower unit is rentable you know down when the time comes. thank you for your explanation. i'm curious. thank you so much. you answered my questions. i would be interested to hear from perhaps ms. vardi, what is the valley street approval? i have never heard about the valley street approval which is larger than what's supposed to be in that district. and is there indeed inconsistent sources of how that 3000 square foot threshold is being used? i am not prepared to penalize somebody when there's precedent at other buildings are going through, which are slightly over

3000ft!s. sure as it relates to the valley street, i'm not off the top of my head familiar with the project. i think this commission has seen a couple less than a handful of the central neighborhood's large home triggers and normally the threshold that we use at a staff level in deciding whether or not to support a project or recommend approval to you has a couple of different factors. one, it's looking at the surrounding context. you know, a big part of the policy intent behind that regulation was about neighborhood context and making sure that we weren't taking small homes off in inoue valley that were, you know, thousand square foot, 1200 square feet and making them these mansions that are disproportionate in size to their surrounding context, because we know block by block there can be very different sized homes and contexts. so one, we look at what is this specific project proposing relative to its immediate adjacent neighbors and its surrounding block context? so that's very important. secondly we look at often what's

the delta from the current home? we have seen some projects i can't remember off the top of my head if they've come to you yet or if they haven't, where the home is already over, but they're doing a really small addition, you know, 100 or 2ft!. and it seems like just sort of a modest remodel to an existing home. that seems reasonable sort of regardless of the final number. and then oftentimes it's also what is the density factor at play here? you know, are they adding an extra unit and trying to keep or add a nominal amount of square feet relative to what the existing home is? and they're adding a second unit, but they're still doing a couple hundred square feet. in addition, you know, kind of all of those three factors are the factors that usually go into our analysis when we're looking at the large home study. so i think when it came to this project, we looked at the previous approval size, which was a little over the 3000 square foot threshold already. and recognizing that that was their project intent was to have a home that was just over 3000ft!s. and the fact that

they needed to now factor in a secondary unit, how can they sort of get the size project that they thought they were kind of buying like a 3000 or so square foot home and add an additional unit? and i think when you look at the land use table here, if you were to net out the unconditioned space, it actually brings you, i believe, under the 3000 square foot threshold. that's not how we calculate gross floor area. but i think practice actually speaking, i think that's a relevant consideration as well. so i hope that gives a little color to our analysis. i think it was a great explanation. i really appreciate the thoroughness by which you were saying it. ultimate the building has to be in context and i totally take everything you're saying, but that would help us to be cognizant of the variation in approval. and again, i am i am in sending support to support this project. but there is so much wrong which is on the front end, including the pretense taking out of out of planning

overview directly to die for a site permit. that is where i renovation permit. that is where my anger is. and that is in addition to the acting with the injustice of the process lies. so i think i'm not going to take that out against people who are just trying to find their footing in all of this complication being in a foreign country, i'm not going to do that. second, i mean, i make a motion to approve. i assume it's with conditions. whatever it says here with conditions and looking forward, what my fellow commissioners have to say, second. thank you. commissioner koppell. yeah, who is this magic developer who just keeps selling projects illegally? good question. who chris. and so do we. do any checking up on these things? i mean, if we have a naughty list, i thought like we put people on, i, i think we're

all just sick of hearing these types of projects. sometimes every single week. and it seems like no one's even trying to get to the bottom of this. and so i know it's a bunch of i don't know how many, but serial bad players who keep doing this and i got no problem with this project sponsor here. but like it literally seems like no one's trying to solve these issues at all and it just keeps happening and keeps happening and keeps happening and it keeps happening. and we just keep saying, oh well, there's nothing we could do about it. when i think there's actually something we could do about it. i mean, like these are all public records, right? i mean, we could look into this stuff and find this stuff out. and we have like specific examples with actual name developers and wouldn't it be possible to find out how many other properties this guy's been selling and if these other properties have you know, pays submitted and they're trying to do the same thing? and why do we have to wait till five years later and it comes here and

everyone just says, oh, we had no idea this was happening. it sounds like a job for an investigative reporter. or maybe we can have a higher private eye at the department to look into it. i don't think i'm asking too much here. it's not i mean, it's really frustrating and that it usually is the same small group of bad actors, you know, wreaking havoc on families like this all over the city. if i can just add one note, at least the one of the previous people involved in the last iteration is actively on the there have at least been a handful of other projects and their projects are being tracked. so it's not flying under the radar. i think what's important to note is the enhanced compliance control, which is the official list word for the naughty list. it's a it's violations since that date of that ordinance. so we're legally not allowed to look at sort of unscrupulous work that happened prior to that date. but it's moving forward. and so the city both planning and dbe are taking very seriously new

violations that happen in a systemic way for various folks. and we are we are watching closely. maybe another question to attorney city attorney yang, and this may be where it's out of the purview of what we regulate as a city because it seems like there's been some illegal activity, certainly maybe permits, but also through the real estate transaction process, some not disclosure, which would seem to be a private party. they always declined to do a lawsuit. but does the city have any say over folks doing business against the different rules that govern those businesses within the city, like violating rules? i'm just curious, understanding we can't put them on this enhanced compliance list, but i'm just curious about, you know, other ways the city could approach those who are, you know, doing illegal practices in their realm of business. granted, it's with a private party. i think is part of the challenge, right? it's not with the city as like the we didn't buy the land from them. right. so deputy city attorney austin yang, that's the crux of it, is that these are largely representations between private parties. um the, the city

attorney's office, we do conduct investigations. we do frequently investigate private companies where we believe that there's a pattern of unlawful conduct. and we do work hand in hand with the department. both plan ing on investigations and enforcement actions. so there are a handful of ways that we can either go after bad actors. administrati li and or, or we sometimes will go to court and try to say that a certain company is violating the unfair competition law and try to seek penalties or attorney's fees from those entities. but it takes some time to work up a case. yeah, and it would need to be significant enough. so anyhow, we have we have commissioner imperial, your light is on. i know we're not going to solve. get to the bottom of all of it today. did you want to speak to this project? yeah. i just want to

add to the applicant to continue. i know you're not required by law, but to continue in good faith having conversations with the previous tenant. um, you know, again, ellis act is you know, is something that is a big concern in in the city and yeah i just would like to show you a good faith in terms of the previous tenants but but yeah, there's nothing we can do. unfortunately as of now. but i'm ready to vote. i think someone seconded. all right. yeah we did just just quickly, i just wanted to mention that housing element, although it's not in our purview, calls out the act and attempting to make reforms to the act. and one one in kind of idea is a holding period. you know, it may not be the elimination of the act, but a holding period where someone who buys property and wants to impose the act, there'd be a five year holding period before you can actually invoke the act

and use that to remove tenants. so it's a sensible policy. it's in the it's in the housing element. it's obviously got to change state law. so there's a lot from putting it into the housing element to actually changing state law, but it would help, right? it would you wouldn't have someone buying a property if the act was changed and being able to make that that eviction miss, i will talk to you after, but i will not call on you right now. i think we're going to do our vote. and you can you can tell me your comments later. ready? okay. commissioners, if there's nothing further, there is a motion that has been seconded to approve this matter with conditions on that motion. commissioner braun, a commissioner ruiz, a commissioner diamond, a commissioner imperial, a commissioner coppell, a commissioner moore and commissioner. president tanner. i so move commissioners. that motion passes unanimously 7 to 0. we are adjourned.

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and approval process. >> how does the program work in it applies to mixed use corridors in san francisco. and offers incentives to developers who provide 30% of affordable in projects. to reach 30%, 12% of the units must be affordable to low income household and 18% per minute nap to middle income households. >> in exchange developers will will build more and up to additional 2 stories beyond current zoning regulations. >> 1 huh human % affordable will be offered up to 3 additional stories beyond current regulations. each building will be required conform to guidelines ensuring meets with the character of the area and commercial corridors. this program is an opportunity to double the amount of

affordable housing and directly address the goals established by twenty 14 hosing element and prospect k paddled by voters last year. pacificly, prop circumstance established a goal that 33% of all new housing permanent to low and moderate incomes this program will be the first to prosecute void permanent affordable projects that include middle income households. to learn more about the program visit >> it is one of the first steps families and step to secure their future and provide a sense of stability for them and their loved ones. your home, it is something that could be passed down to your children and grandchildren. a asset that offers a pathway to build wealth from one generation to the next. and you need to

complete estate plan to protect the asisets. your home, small business, air looms and more. you and so many communities, black, indigenous, latino and asian worked so hard to make yours but estate plans could be costly and conversations complex proud to partner to bring free and low cost estate plans to san franciscans. by providing estate plans we are able to keep the assets whole for our families, prevent displacement, address disparities and home ownership and strengthen the cultural integrity of the city. working with local non profit organizations and neighborhood groups bringing the serveess to you and community, to workshops focused on estate planning and why it's important. >> i'm 86 years old and you do need a trustee. you need a will and put who ever you want in charge of it.

>> that's why i wanted to be here today. that is why one of the first steps i took when become assessor recorder is make sure we have a partnership to get foundational funding to provide these resources to community. but even more important is our connection to you and your homes and making sure we know how to help you and how to protect them. >> if you don't have a living trust you have to go through probate and that cost money and depending on the cost of the home is associated the cost you have to pay. that could be $40 thousand for a home at that level. i don't know about you, but i don't $40 thousand to give up. >> (indiscernible) important workshop to the community so we can stop the loss of generational wealth and equity and maintain a (indiscernible) >> why are estate plans important? we were just talking before we started the program, 70 percent of black

americans do not scr a will in place. >> as mentioning being in community we had a conversation with a woman who paid $2700, $2700 just for revocable trust. what we are talking about today are free or low cost estate plans that are value between 3,000 to $3500. free or low cost meaning free, or $400 if you make above $104 thousand a year, and capped larger then that amount. because we want to focus on black and brown households, because that's whether the need is, not only in san francisco, not only the bay area but the region as well. and, >> i was excitesed to see the turn out from the western addition and bayview and want to make sure we cover all the different steps from buying a home to making sure homes stay within the family. >> work with staff attorneys to receive these free and low cost complete estate plans

that include a living trust, will, financial power of attorney, and health directive. >> that's why it is so important to make these resources and this information accessible. so we can make sure we are serving you and your families and your generations and your dreams. >> we insure the financial stability of san francisco, not just for government, but for our communities. >> on behalf of the office of assessor recorder, i'm thankful for all the support and legal assistance they have given that makes the estate planning program a realty for you in san francisco and are thank all the community partners like san francisco housing development corporation, booker t washington center and neighborhood leaders and organizations that help families and individuals realize their dreams of building wealth in san francisco from one generation to the next. to learn more about this program e-mail inquiries at har go.

>> shop and dine the 49 promotes local businesses and changes san franciscans to do their shopping and dooipg within the 49 square miles by supporting local services within the neighborhood we help san francisco remain unique, successful and vibrant so where will you shop and dine the 49 hi in my mind a ms. medina

we've united states of america and to the republic for which it stands. one nation under god, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. somebody is going to start it. good evening. this is the fire commission regular meeting, august 23rd, 2023. the time. is 509. this meeting is being held in person. members of the public may attend the meeting to observe and provide public comment at the physical