Demolition of Central Freeway Coming; New East-West Route Could Take Years

By Carol Dimmick

San Francisco is launching a $45 million plan to replace the Central Freeway, damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake, with a model that attempts to tackle the larger problems of transportation, housing and pedestrian safety in transit-intensive neighborhoods.

Although the Market and Octavia Boulevard Plan was designed for the Hayes Valley community, it will be closely watched in neighborhoods throughout the City that sit along transit corridors where issues of pedestrian safety, parking and affordable housing have festered for years.

Several components of the comprehensive plan are sure to generate controversy, even among Hayes Valley residents, even though many of them support the plan and were intimately involved in a two-year planning process as part of San Francisco's Better Neighborhoods Program. At the heart of the ambitious plan is a package of policies that create new land use districts, change the city's planning codes in the districts and enact new urban design guidelines, all to further the goals of providing much-needed housing, pedestrian-friendly streets and promoting a transit-first policy.

John Billovits, a staff member at the SF Planning Department who spent the last two years working on the plan with Hayes Valley residents, thinks of the neighborhood-generated plan as a model that provides a framework for a positive urban environment, which he hopes will be duplicated in other neighborhoods. Although Billovits says the plan was designed specifically for Hayes Valley, he believes it has the potential to become a precursor for change in other neighborhoods.

"This is a policy plan. The real news story is that we are starting to address things as a real urban place," Billovits emphasized.

New Land Use Districts are Foundation of Plan
The foundation of the plan rests on creating three new land-use districts and making revisions to several existing districts in the Hayes Valley neighborhood. The new districts provide a way of implementing the plan's goals by introducing new planning controls, including carefully prescribed building envelopes and the elimination of housing density limits and parking requirements.

At the intersection of Van Ness Avenue and Market Street, the plan carves out a new Downtown Transit-Oriented Residential District (DTR) that would encourage the development of a transit-oriented, high-density, mixed-use neighborhood. Developers would be encouraged to build tall residential tower-like structures ranging from 160 to 400 feet tall.

A second district, called a Transit-Oriented Neighborhood Commercial District (NCT), stretches along areas adjacent to the DTR district and runs along the Market Street corridor. According to the plan, this district would have planning controls that encourage transit-oriented, mixed-used development of a moderate scale. Developers could built up to an 85-foot height limit in this district.

The third district, named the Transit-Oriented Residential District (RTO), would have planning controls that encourage infill throughout the plan area of moderate density in scale with existing development. Major Changes to Planning Code in New Districts To encourage more affordable housing, one of the plan's main goals, the plan recommends amending the city's planning code to limit the number of residential units built only by the volume of the building. The idea behind the change is to encourage more density while allowing more flexibility in design.

"Now the number of units allowed determines the building forms that happen. Under the new regulation the limit is a function of the building's volume," Billovits explains.

By the Planning Department's own calculations, the maximum capacity of net residential housing units allowed under the new planning and zoning laws would double from 11,439 to 22,582 units. Another proposed change in the Planning Code would eliminate the requirement that developers include one parking space for each residential unit they build.

According to the plan, this would make housing more affordable, make sidewalks more pedestrian-friendly and encourage more attractive design elements.

Plan Features Tree-Lined Boulevard with Walkways
The seeds for the ambitious plan were sown in 1998 when voters approved Proposition E, which required tearing down the elevated freeway north of Market Street which was destroyed in the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake and replacing it with a wide boulevard that will carry traffic to Oak and Fell streets, two of the cityÕs major east/west traffic arteries.

The freeway's on-ramps and off-ramps will be rebuilt south of Market. This would be accomplished by creating a wide four-lane, tree-lined boulevard beginning at the intersection of Octavia and Market streets. According to officials from the San Francisco Transportation Authority (SFTA), one of a dozen city and county agencies involved in the project, a surface level boulevard along Octavia Street will be capable of moving commuter traffic throughout the Hayes Valley neighborhood with relative ease.

"The freeway concentrated all the problems in one area. We are taking advantage of the natural street grids," explained Jose Luis Moscovich, executive director of the SFTA.

The boulevard plan consisting of four "workhorse lanes" and two to four "quiet lanes" for local traffic and pedestrians. The lanes are separated by a landscaped median.

Six-Year Project Begins in February With Freeway Demolition
According to Caltrans officials, the first phase of the plan, which includes demolishing the Central Freeway from Mission Street to the Fell Street off-ramp, will begin in February and is expected to be completed by September.

In phase two, which will begin after the demolition is completed, construction along Octavia Boulevard and the surrounding neighborhood will take place. According to city sources, this phase is expected to take several years to complete.

Phase three, which would begin after construction of Octavia Boulevard has been completed, will include reconstruction of the freeway, including new ramps south of Market Street. This phase will also include paving Van Ness Avenue and several other ancillary projects. The entire project is projected to take six years.

Beginning in January, Systan, Inc., a public relations firm which coordinated the publicity campaign for the demolition of the southbound section of the freeway, will spearhead a public awareness campaign to educate commuters and residents about the plan. Part of Systan's challenge will be to get the word out to the public about a traffic management plan for commuters during the construction phase.

The SF Department of Parking and Traffic has identified detour routes using the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Ninth street off-ramps to Turk, Hayes and Fell streets to provide alternate routes during construction. DPT will also re-time traffic signals at critical junctions to make the commute as smooth as possible.

Sale of Lots to Finance $45 Million Plan; New Zoning to Impact Value
To finance the $45 million the project, the City will sell about half of the 23 parcels of land it received from the state. The property is in the Central Freeway's original location. While many of the parcels are encumbered by long-term leases, as many as 12 parcels could be sold immediately.

However, according to several sources close to the project, the City will wait to sell the 12 parcels until zoning laws governing the lots are settled. This will enable the City to maximize the price it is asking for the land, particularly if new zoning and planning laws favorable to developers are adopted.
As part of the land sale, approximately half of the units developed on the parcels will be deemed affordable.

Plan Would Eliminate Discretionary Review, Conditional Use Permits and "Fast Track" Permits
A proposal the Planning Department considers vital to the success of the plan is sure to raise eyebrows among residents who have used the discretionary review process to overturn design elements approved by the department in the past.

According to Billovits, eliminating the discretionary review process, Conditional Use Permits and expediting the permitting process all ensure that the plan the community designed will be the one it gets. It will also provide certainty for developers, he said. "(Eliminating the discretionary review process) provides certainty of expectations.

The plan represents an agreement we made with the community," he said.

Richmond Residents View Plan as Precursor to Geary Corridor
Although a draft for public review of the Market and Octavia Neighborhood Plan will make its public debut before the SF Planning Commission on Feb. 13, reaction to the plan is beginning to be felt in neighborhoods throughout the City.

Ron Miguel, president of The Planning Association for the Richmond (PAR) believes the plan will be a precursor to what could happen along Geary Boulevard, where a light rail transit system is planned in the near future. While Miguel likes the plan's comprehensive approach to land use and transportation issues, he is skeptical that the plan will meet the challenges of the Geary corridor, where fine tuning is a block-by-block challenge.

"There should be the use of a fine line in determining things. Go block-by-block and take a look at what is there," he said.

Miguel warns that while the Geary corridor from Fillmore Street to Stanyan Street could take higher height limits that encourage density, the west end could not.

"Six-story buildings do not go with the neighborhood," Miguel said.