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September 23, 2015

Rodney Fong, Commission President

Cindy Wu, Commission Vice President

Michael J. Antonini, Commissioner

Rich Hillis, Commissioner

Christine D. Johnson, Commissioner

Kathrin Moore, Commissioner

Dennis Richards, Commissioner

San Francisco Planning Commission

1650 Mission Street, Suite 400

San Francisco, CA 94103

Re: Opposition to the Project at 790 Pennsylvania Avenue and 1395 22nd Street

Via Hand Delivery

Dear Planning Commissioners:

The Potrero Boosters Neighborhood Association (the “Boosters”) has been engaged with the

developers of the project at 790 Pennsylvania Avenue and 1396 22nd Street (the “Project”) since

2011. Throughout the last four years, we have advocated for changes to the project that would

better reflect the character of the Potrero Hill and Dogpatch neighborhoods. Our concerns and

suggestions were formally communicated to the Project sponsors following a meeting with our

Development Committee in April; in June the project sponsors presented to our full membership.

On the basis of that presentation and the advice of the Development Committee, the general

membership of the Boosters voted overwhelmingly in August to oppose the Project.

The concerns expressed by the Boosters reflected those regarding the Project’s height and massing

expressed in the 2011 Preliminary Project Assessment. In that document, Planning wrote that “a

major redesign of the project is necessary to produce a project that is compatible with context

and topography of the site, the neighborhood, and the general City pattern.” While the design

presented in April included a slight reduction in height, we believed that it did not match the intent

of the 40X zoning, and did not break the building into a “series of discrete 4-5 story buildings”

that step up the hill. The Project exploits the planning code to create the visual appearance of a

ten-story building of five hundred feet in length, with no relation to the street grid or other

elements of the neighborhood fabric (indeed, the adjacent Sierra Heights complex is only 4-5

stories in height and a fourth of the total size). Rather than breaking up the mass of the building,

the project sponsor intends to use brown paint to camouflage the building’s bulk.

We discussed at length with the Project sponsor the need to provide housing for families and for

San Franciscan’s at a range of incomes; unfortunately, this Project provides only the bare minimum

of multi-bedroom units and contributes the minimum fee in-lieu of providing on-site affordable

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housing. And we know that the Project sponsors can do better; we see more family friendly

development from projects both larger and smaller than the Project, and have seen a stronger

commitment to on-site affordability at a range of incomes. The lack of on-site affordable housing

disserves special note; prior iterations of the Project included units meeting the minimum below

market rate requirement. Recent changes to the Project ensure that, of these 250 units, exactly

none of them will be affordable to working-class San Franciscans.

The Project proposes to build a landscaped public stairway connecting Potrero Hill and Dogpatch

via the upper and lower portions of 22nd Street. We find this stairwell to be attractively designed

and it has been well received. The Project sponsors, however, insist that the City pay for a

substantial portion of that stairway with the impact fees generated from the Project. Whether the

City would accept such an in-kind agreement is far from guaranteed; the public benefit of this

Project selling point may be illusory, with the stairway serving only the Project itself. We have

worked with other developers who are eager to contribute to public space in amounts above and

beyond their impact fees. As a result, we feel that the reliance on public funding for this benefit is

in bad faith.

Since our membership vote in August, the Project sponsors met again with our Development

Committee, offering superficial changes to the external design of the building while ignoring the

fundamental design problems of scale and massing identified above, and making the aforementioned

change from on-site affordable units to the payment of the in-lieu fee. The Development

Committee again felt as if we were spinning our wheels with respect to the Project.

As you know, the Boosters have concerns about the current state of the Eastern Neighborhoods

Plan, ranging from the absence of meaningful design guidelines to the failure of infrastructure

investment. With the approval of several large projects in the coming months, we also see the

pipeline running against the ultimate projections of the Eastern Neighborhoods environmental

impact report. That said, of the projects coming before you in the next several month, only this

Project has so thoroughly failed to heed neighborhood concerns. We ask to meet with you

individually, at your earliest convenience, to discuss our objections to this project and our need

for better standards for projects in the Eastern Neighborhoods.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

J.R. Eppler

President

CC: John Rahaim, Director of Planning

Richard Sucre, Planner