School District Considers Selling Site Designated Open Space

By George McConnell

A small piece of land in an obscure corner of the Sunset District is the focal point of an ongoing debate in the city about the loss of open space and how, or if, it can be preserved.

The 1.9-acre property is owned by the San Francisco School District and runs along Seventh Avenue between Lawton and Moraga streets. The Laguna Honda Reservoir is directly adjacent to its southern border. The lot has never been developed. It remains empty with just wildflowers, grasses and trees populating the site.

Once a year, vendors use the property to sell pumpkins for Halloween and Christmas trees.

The school district does nothing to maintain it, and area residents have been using it for years as an ad hoc park. People walk their dogs and stroll there after work and on the weekends, and children use it for play, according to Chooi Eng Grosso, one of the neighbors who wants it left as a public open space.

Declining student enrollment and the need to generate income prompted the school district a year ago to consider selling some of its surplus properties. The advisory committee formed to determine what properties should be considered surplus listed the Seventh Avenue and Lawton Street site on its final report, which was issued May 7.

At its meeting the next day, the board voted to accept the report. Sale of the site could trigger some tricky legal questions, however. Under the city's Master Plan, the lot is officially designated as open space, which means it is valued for its visual open space and protected from development of non-recreational uses. In addition, when the school district received ownership of the land after a series of deals between city agencies in 1997, there was a 30-year restrictive clause attached that stipulated the site must be used solely for school uses, or it remains open space.

Shortly after assuming ownership, the district considered building a child-care center there, but that fell by the wayside.

Grosso said the board talked about asking the City to lift the restrictive clause at its meeting on May 8.

One of the commissioners thought the site would be perfect for affordable housing for teachers.

"I reminded them that this was public open space and not just vacant land as listed in their report," Grosso said.

At the board meetings held in February and May, 25 people spoke about their concern for the loss of open space in the city. Although no one opposed anything specific because nothing had been proposed yet for the property, the exchange became testy, prompting one school commissioner to refer to the group as nimbys, according to Grosso.

Bill Wilson, chairman of the Recreation and Park Department's Open Space Advisory Committee and one of the speakers, said they were told they should consider themselves lucky to have had use of the property for 30 years and that they were just being selfish.

Efforts to get Rec. and Park to buy the site have been unsuccessful so far, Grosso said.

"We asked Rec. and Park to consider acquiring the land, but the mayor's office stepped in and got them to say they were not interested. But in their letter, they left open the possibility of reconsidering acquisition in the future," she said.

When Grosso attended a meeting of the District's Grounds and Facilities Committee on May 29, she discovered the district's real estate department had started to evaluate specific sites for affordable teacher housing. One of the sites on their list is the Seventh and Lawton property.

"If we are losing families and closing schools, wouldn't they have enough teachers already?" said Grosso.

The school district maintains it has to offer housing to attract teachers from other districts because they cannot compete salary-wise.

"We'll try and get them to consider other properties already developed for housing," Grosso said.

Peter Brastow, an open space advocate from the organization Nature In The City, said the school district thinks of the property as just a vacant lot but fails to consider its impact on the city's ecosystem and the quality of life here.

"The City should try and preserve open space because once all available open space is developed, it is gone forever. It will be too late," Wilson said.