Since December, dozens of Potrero Hill residents (between 30 and 70 neighbors at every meeting so far) have been working to come up with a stronger, more responsive, and more thorough community-based planning process.  These workshops were convened by the Boosters, the Dogpatch Neighborhood Association, the Potrero Hill Association of Merchants and Businesses, and Save Potrero as a way to improve the long-term rezoning process that has taken the City’s Planning Department most of this decade to develop.

Just in the past couple of months, our workshops have brought new ideas forward and important stakeholders together; very few of us can remember seeing the Planning Department, the Port, and UCSF in the same room at the same time, and yet each of these agencies has a planning process going on right now that will greatly affect our neighborhood!

The next phase of Plan Potrero Hill is a great time to start getting involved, if you’ve been quietly observing the community-based planning process from a distance, or if you haven’t been involved yet at all.  Because now, instead of sweating too much about the limitations of existing zoning – or what we perceive those limitations to be – we are focusing on shaping the neighborhoods we want.

•    What parts of our new neighborhoods should stay the same?
•    What parts of our new neighborhoods should change?
(What should those changing areas look like?)
•    Where are the new neighborhood hubs?
(What should those neighborhood hubs look like?)
•    Where are the new industries, the new housing, the new parks?
•    What do you want to see more?  Or less?

This question of new neighborhood centers has become especially important over the past couple of months.  As we know, future development will likely double the population of Potrero Hill over the next couple of decades.  Where do we expect those new residents to go for shopping, for parks, for child care, for schools, for community services, for the arts?  Generally speaking, such things should be within walking distance of your home in a well-planned neighborhood; that means about a quarter-mile, or 1500 feet. Can you walk to these kinds of things now on Potrero Hill?  Can 10,000 more people on and around the Hill walk to these things in the future?

That is why we need careful and thorough neighborhood planning right now.

We will be updating the Boosters membership about the Plan Potrero Hill process at our next meeting on Tuesday night, March 27.  After that, we will be updating the planpotrerohillsf.org website so it’s easier for anyone to jump into the process.  And over the next few months, we will discuss these questions about new neighborhoods and neighborhood hubs, with pictures and images, to create a tangible vision of what we want.

Plan Potrero Hill’s future meetings may be about a particular new neighborhood or neighborhood hub, or about a particular need of our new neighborhoods (housing, infrastructure, arts and community centers, open space, etc.)  As the workshops continue, we will form small working groups to draft sections of a report based on the consensus of our community.  The working groups will delve deeper on the specific area or topic, (via research, online discussions at planpotrerohillsf,surveys, etc.) and make additional presentations to  the group as the draft takes shape.

In other words, there are lots of ways to get involved, to create the core of our community land use recommendations. With a strong vision and recommendations, along with the tools we have from the Planning Department and the Health Department’s ENCHIA process, it will be much easier to assess what zoning and development supports our vision or, what may need to be created or changed to support that vision.

Let us know if this all makes sense.  We hope to make planning recommendations that the City will take seriously for a long time to come.