The Planning Department’s decade-long effort to re-zone the eastern neighborhoods of the City, including the Central Waterfront and lower Potrero Hill, has been bedeviled by so many stalls and frustrations that it’s difficult to remember the heroic citizen action that started it all. In 1998-99, a group of residents and business owners in Dogpatch established the Potrero Central Waterfront Committee; they held community meetings that drew more than 200 people, and developed a set of land use recommendations for their neighborhood’s future. To this day, those recommendations are still at the core of the Planning Department’s proposed re-zoning of the Central Waterfront area; and the process that led to those recommendations directly inspired the department’s Better Neighborhoods and Eastern Neighborhoods community-based planning programs.

Simply put, we need to do now what Dogpatch did then. After six years of watching the Planning Department’s fumbling attempts to create and follow a community-based planning program, we believe it’s time again to take matters into our own hands. The success of the Eastern Neighborhoods re-zoning process depends on it. The neighborhoods of Potrero Hill have a wealth of educated, committed residents who are savvy about land-use issues and supportive of smart development in the area. But our efforts over the years have only been sporadically recognized by City planners, and we are still far away from getting the comprehensive area plans that our neighborhoods desperately need. It is critical for Potrero Hill to have a dedicated effort within its own communities to collect and develop neighborhood recommendations on land use issues, and to present a plan for the entire area much like the Central Waterfront did in 1999.

To that end, four local neighborhood associations, including the Boosters, are teaming up with two community centers, the Thick House and the Potrero Hill Neighborhood House, to organize a new, thorough program of community planning, with these goals:
• A stronger, more responsive, and more credible community-based planning process
• Better definition of neighborhood needs and goals for public benefits in area rezoning
• Faster development and adoption of complete area plans for Showplace Square and Dogpatch
We’re launching this program at the Potrero Boosters meeting tonight, Tuesday November 28, and at two workshops at the Potrero Hill Neighborhood House, December 2 and 16. Check the December Potrero View for some more details, or email president@potreroboosters.org; much more infor will be posted here in the coming weeks.

Given the Planning Department’s history of missed deadlines, and their current plans to hold only three public planning workshops for Potrero Hill, the odds are extremely high that their lack of community engagement will lead to further delays in the official community-based planning process. Our workshops can help reduce that risk, and lead to a faster and better planning process. We hope you will join us and support our work to complete area plans for our neighborhood.