April 26, 2005

Potrero Hill Peppered with Vacant Lots

By Daniel Porras
Special to the Neighborhood Newswire

For a city short on affordable housing and long on homeless people, San Francisco seems to have plenty of vacant lots and empty houses. A walk around Potrero Hill, where property values have risen sharply in recent years, reveals scores of undeveloped lots growing weeds and unoccupied homes that are neither for rent nor for sale.

Take the big-as-a-city-block, fenced-off plot at Rhode Island Street and 17th, for example. Long-time Potrero Hill residents may remember the Ford dealership that used to be there, and wonder why the lot has sat empty for four years. After a short-life as MacroMedia’s planned headquarters, which was tubed by the dot.com crash, the site was approved for residential development in 2003, and is now slated to become ground-floor storefronts topped with 170 condo units.

Some long-time residents, like Dick Millet of the Potrero Boosters Neighborhood Association, welcome ‘live-work’ development projects like the one planned for the former Ford dealership. Millet says the creation of more homes will help tame the area’s inflated real estate market. Others, like The Neighborhood Coalition to Save Potrero Hill, a local advocacy group, decry neighborhood development as big box ‘strip-mall housing’ that will destroy Potrero’s small-town feel. For city planners, the trick is finding the balance between zoning for housing, which can increase a neighborhood’s tax base, and zoning for commercial or light industry, which may bring in jobs.

In trying to find a happy medium, city planners are shouted at from all sides, which helps explain a number of the vacant lots in Potrero, like the triangular plot below the Anchor Steam brewery at De Haro and 17th. Paul Lord, former Community Planner for the Eastern Neighborhoods Rezoning Project, said there was disagreement over whether to put housing on the lot. Anchor Steam brewer Fritz Maytag was concerned, according to Lord, that tenants might protest the late-night coming and going of beer trucks so close to their homes.

Aside from the diverging opinions of Potrero planners, residents, and business owners about what should be built, and where, State law requires that an Environmental Impact Report (EIR) be prepared before any rezoning can take place. “If a lot is in a part of the neighborhood that may change from light industrial into housing,” said Teresa Ojeda of the San Francisco Planning Department, “development may be held up until the EIR is completed.” Further adding to Potrero’s lots-in-limbo are staff shortages and budget cuts at the Planning Department, which currently warns callers of a six-week delay in reviewing building permits.

“Empty lots don’t do us any good,” said Phil De Andrade, proprietor of Goat Hill Pizza, a popular local spot on Connecticut Street at 18th. Like many small business owners in the area, De Andrade would like to see more housing in Potrero, which he says will translate into more customers. Unlike some of his counterparts, De Andrade also welcomes larger business developments, and doesn’t feel threatened by increased competition. “Let some big-box pizza chain try to come in here, they can’t compete with me,” he said. “I’ve got the locals on my side.” While he praised the City’s mixed-use plan for Potrero Hill, De Andrade is skeptical that all sides will ever be satisfied. Most importantly, he said, “the city needs to have a plan in cooperation with the neighborhood and hold to that plan.”