This is what the future of the bulk of the Bay Area’s housing development looks like: higher-density multi-family projects near transit. In this case, Developer, BHV CenterStreet Properties LLC, is working on a 178-unit project called the Landing on 1.78 acres adjacent to the Walnut Creek BART Station.

Blanca Torres
Reporter- San Francisco Business Times

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With much-debated, frequently derided Plan Bay Area now approved, our region is officially on notice that it needs close to 200,000 new housing units over the next few decades. Next question: Who’s going to build it all?

Planning for new housing is great and all, but only time will tell if developers bite and actually build the housing the way the plan advises — high-density and near transit.

Plan Bay Area sets out growth and development guidelines to accommodate a 30 percent population increase, 2.1 million new residents, and 33 percent more or 1.1 million job increase in the Bay Area through 2040. The plan’s goals involve steering away from sprawl, building housing for all income levels and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

“Theoretically, (Plan Bay Area) is a good idea,” said Paul Menzies, founder of Laconia Development, a multi-family developer. “The issue with the plan is that bureaucrats are imposing rules on the rest of us who are trying to be creative and trying to make money.”

Development is a business, he said, but one that involves input from the developer, the community and city officials, so the better the cooperation, the better the project and the better cities and regions become.

Plan Bay Area could be a boon for development, Menzies said, if the policies make it easier and less expensive to develop projects either by streamlining the entitlement process or providing some financing tools.

The plan’s main backers, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and Association of Bay Area Governments, along with congestion management agencies have about $28 million to fund local planning efforts such as creating specific plans that guide development for a neighborhood or environmental impact reports. In some cases, cities establish plans and zoning to comply up front with California Environmental Quality Act regulations.

Blanca Torres covers East Bay real estate for the San Francisco Business Times.

Article source: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/real-estate/2013/07/plan-bay-area-a-boon-for-housing.html

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By Jason Henderson

Last week’s adoption of Plan Bay Area by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission was a watershed moment in regional planning. The plan links regional planning to state policies mandating reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and aims to limit future sprawl by accommodating 2.1 million people, 1 million jobs, and 660,000 housing units largely within the existing built-up areas of the nine-county region.

Newly designated priority development areas (PDAs) will enable modest-density, walkable development in city and suburb alike, while preserving both existing single-family neighborhoods and open space. In a time of urgent need to address global warming, the Bay Area has once again proved a leader by enabling compact housing around transit, and its supporting studies expect the per capita greenhouse gas emissions from driving to decline by 15 percent in 2040.

This will not save the world and it’s not without some challenging byproducts — such as preventing displacement of low-income residents from San Francisco and other urban centers — but it is a start. And in a nation hell-bent on denying the urgency of global warming, it is refreshing and inspiring that someone, somewhere, is trying to do something.   

Yet the transportation component – the lynchpin and impetus of Plan Bay Area, according to many local leaders –is mediocre, uninspiring, and inadequate.  Despite land use policies enabling compact development, 80 percent of all travel in the Bay Area will still be in cars in 2040, not much different from today, and far short of the real change that is needed in this time of urgency. With 2 million more people, this is a recipe for gridlock, inequity, and ecological disaster – not sound public policy. 

 It should be no surprise that a big part of the problem is funding. The MTC, charged with assessing future regional transit potential, identifies just $289 billion between now and 2040 for roads, bridges, and transit — far short of what’s needed.  At $10.3 billion a year that may seem like a lot, but upwards of 87 percent of this is already committed to maintenance of existing roads and transit– not transit capacity expansion.  New homes and jobs might be focused around BART and Caltrain stations, but because there’s no real capacity expansion, the current iteration of Plan Bay Area can’t even reach its own modest goal of 74 percent of trips by car in 2040. 

With 2 million more people, cumulative emissions from driving will actually increase by 18 percent because so few new residents will be able to squeeze onto our already crowded transit systems.  Today BART is breaking ridership records but it is crowded. Extensions to far flung suburbs might be worthwhile but they don’t expand capacity in the system’s core. What we need is a second BART line and/or Amtrak service between San Francisco and Oakland, but this is absent from the plan. Meanwhile, most mainline Muni buses and railcars are currently jam-packed, yet San Francisco is somehow expected to absorb 92,000 housing units in Plan Bay Area.

Supervisors David Campos and Scott Weiner, representing San Francisco in the Plan Bay Area process, are to be commended for drawing attention to the transit problem and for asking MTC staff to show how to meet future funding gaps. By broaching the subject, they show that San Francisco might be poised to lead on this critical issue. But Campos and Weiner, working within the “fiscally constrained envelope” as framed by MTC planners, were only seeking to cover deficits for existing service – not visionary expanded service.  In the end, there was no real vision for adequate transit capacity expansion.

This foretells a troubling transit future – and one that will likely be more and more private. While many San Franciscans decry the proliferation of Google buses and other private corporate shuttles hogging Muni stops, these buses do lay bare the transit conundrum in the Bay Area. Without well-funded, visionary capacity expansion of public transit, those with the means (and high wage jobs) will shift to private buses while everyone else is left to duke it out on crowded highways, buses, and trains.

This conundrum demands that progressives in the Bay Area ramp up their transit politics to lead locally and nationally. The debate about transit finance needs to be redirected – away from regressive local sales tax measures (which often include more roads) back towards more progressive measures, such as transit assessment districts – which could require developers who profit from Plan Bay Area’s growth incentives to adequately finance transit expansion.

The debate needs to move away from demonizing public transit employees to a discussion of the role and responsibility of corporate health care, banks, and the real estate industry in causing economic instability (which has harmed public transit finance more in the last decade than a bus driver expecting a living wage and healthcare). The debate needs to move away from creating new roadway capacity, such as exclusive toll lanes, and focus on how to convert existing highway lanes into transit-only lanes with fast, frequent, reliable regional bus service open to all.

Plan Bay Area is a living document, a work in progress. Within the next four-five years it will need to be revised and can be improved.  The current version of the plan, weak on transit funding, has been dominated by a loud, irrational mob of Tea Party cranks bent on sabotaging anything that hints of progressive ideas. They were successful in diluting Plan Bay Area. While a smattering of progressive transit activists showed up and attempted to shape the plan, next time the plan needs a broader progressive movement — including housing, social justice, and environmental activists — to demand a truly visionary transportation plan.

Jason Henderson is a geography professor at San Francisco State University and the author of Street Fight: The Politics of Mobility in San Francisco. We’ll be sharing his perspective regularly in the Bay Guardian.

Article source: http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2013/07/22/street-fight-plan-bay-area-falls-short-worthy-goal

Sounding the Waters: Is the Bay Area Prepared for Sea Level Rise?

A new documentary attempts to find the answer

Sea level rise will irrevocably change life near the San Francisco Bay. That’s the premise of RISE: Climate Change and Coastal Communities, a documentary that starts airing this week on KQED Public Radio. Producer Claire Schoen sets the stage on a personal note.

Jan Sturmann

Climate scientists predict that sea level rise and extreme weather will cause flooding of San Francisco’s Financial District by 2050.

By Claire Schoen

“Mom, can you please can it with the climate change lecture  – just for once,” my children complained. At ages 22 and 26, my politically correct, Berkeley-raised kids are well educated in all things scientific and political. But… “Enough already,” they cry.

And I confess that their complaint has some validity: I can bring up the topic of climate change in pretty much any conversation.

But really, what other topic is there?

I do care deeply about war, immigration and famine. But all of these are affected by climate change which is a major cause of increasing drought, which in turn will create more and more wars to be fought over less and less arable land, pushing greater numbers of people to become environmental migrants the world over. This is not science fiction. And it is not the future. It is happening right now and it is being meticulously measured. The scariest part is that scientific estimates and predictions of the rate and intensity of climate change continue to be proven too low. It’s all happening bigger and faster than the models have shown. And it will get worse if we don’t radically slow our greenhouse gas emissions worldwide and figure out how to adapt to the impacts of climate change that are already too late to halt.

This past year has certainly been an eye-opener in the U.S., with a record-breaking number of record-breaking weather events:

• The Mississippi and Missouri Rivers both experienced catastrophic floods this year, affecting cities and towns along both waterways. There were evacuations in Memphis. The Corps of Engineers was forced to breach levees on the Mississippi, intentionally flooding one area in order to save a more populated one.
• Chicago has experienced two intense storms classified as 100-year events – in the last three years.
• 14 states are experiencing one of the worst droughts in U.S. history. The entire state of Texas which is now in its 6th year of exceptional drought, has been designated a natural disaster area.
• Tropical storms in Vermont devastated inland towns.

Since when is Vermont located in the tropics?

While no specific weather event can be attributed to climate change, the pattern of increasingly extreme weather is exactly what climate scientists are predicting.

So what does this mean for those of us living around the lovely San Francisco Bay?

We have relentlessly filled in the edges of the Bay – 40% of it – transforming wetlands into real estate and then covering them with homes, shopping malls and industrial parks. Climate change threatens this land, once considered a 100-year flood plain, with flooding every 10 years, every year, perhaps every high tide, as rising sea levels and extreme rain, wind and waves come together to form a perfect storm – again and again.

Upon embarking on the RISE project, my first act was to print out sections of a map of the Bay coastline, provided on the Pacific Institute website. It identifies those areas that are part of the 100 year flood zone. Pieced together, the map covers an entire wall of my studio. I quickly pinpointed my house. Whew – I’m safe.  But not really, as my bank, airport, highway, sewage system and the houses of many of my friends are situated in the flood zone. Truly we are all in this boat, together.

Will Travis, of the Bay Conservation and Development Commission provocatively suggests that what we need to build today are not houses, but campgrounds. Our stay at the edge of the rising tide is a temporary one. Yet, foolish animals that we are, we make big plans, instead, to develop entire new communities, the Redwood City Saltworks and Treasure Island, both sitting at sea level. Today’s sea level.

So, if not campgrounds, then what? The hard truth is that we don’t know what to do. But it’s time to come together to figure it out. To this end, I’m going to keep talking. Cause kids…it’s all about climate change.

Part 1 of RISE, entitled “Sounding the Waters,” airs on KQED 88.5 FM on Thursday, December 8, at 8 pm. Parts 2 and 3 air January 12 and February 9, respectively.

Article source: http://blogs.kqed.org/climatewatch/2011/12/08/sounding-the-waters-is-the-bay-area-prepared-for-sea-level-rise/