Last month in the Boosters newsletter, I wrote up a list of our neighborhood’s accomplishments at Plan Potrero Hill this year:
• We’ve built a growing consensus around a new land use map, showing the centers of our new neighborhoods, and locations for open space.
• We’ve contained bioscience uses and large offices in one large portion of the Central Waterfront.
• We’ve combined the Showplace Square and Central Waterfront neighborhoods, and added the Port, Mission Bay, UCSF, and public housing land to our planning area.
• We’ve added the Department of Public Health’s ENCHIA standards to our public benefits discussion.
• We’ve demanded that transit improvements have to be part of new developments in our neighborhoods.
• We helped develop one of the best Planning Dept. proposals in years for getting sites for affordable housing.
• We’ve revived discussion about legalizing in-law units.
• We’ve influenced the Planning Department staff consensus, changing their proposed zoning map and getting us closer than we have ever been to good planning for our new neighborhoods.
None of these things were true in December 2006.
As we finish working on Plan Potrero Hill, with a draft workbook due out soon, our success in moving the Planning Department closer to our goals bears repeating, along with our other successes in neighborhood advocacy this year.
• We built a rare City-wide consensus about our energy future, with the able assistance and leadership of the Potrero Power Plant Task Force. With approvals on the way for the Transbay Cable and the (smaller, cleaner, more efficient) peaker plants, Mirant has announced the closure of the Potrero Power Plant in the near future and is actively planning for a new use of that land that doesn’t pollute our neighborhood.
• We discovered (and stopped) a secret City plan to dump an unplanned and unsafe Halloween celebration in our neighborhood, forcing the City to concentrate on maintaining public safety at such events.
• We discovered (and stopped) an overlooked City deal to trade away Channel Street, one of our last potential City-owned sites for open space, to the garbage company; and in so doing forced the City to get to work finding new open space opportunities in our neighborhoods.
• We built a better working relationship with local concert promoters; Live Nation’s Rock the Bells concert in August was noticeably easier on the neighborhood than past concerts at the Port, and we hope that it set a standard for such events in the future.
• Most important of all, we’ve built a large and vocal community that is aware of neighborhood and City issues. Our crime meetings have had a clear impact on public safety and community policing; our two (or more!) helipad advocacy groups have definitely affected, if not stopped, plans for helipads on top of our local hospitals. If you add up all the neighborhood associations, block groups, homeowners associations, the Merchants and Parents associations and other volunteer groups, you’ll find that nearly 2,000 Hill residents belong to at least one neighborhood advocacy group. With a total Hill population of about 10,000, that is just an amazing statistic; other City neighborhoods envy our awareness and activity.
So where do we go from here? We are clearly on the verge of a lot of major successes, but we must continue to organize and share our volunteer efforts. And yes, this is now a pitch to renew your Boosters membership, and bring your neighbors into the organization as well. (click the link on this page!)
We’ve heard from a number of neighbors this year that it’s so hard to keep up – with what the City throws at us, or with the various efforts to improve the Hill. They ask, isn’t there a way to combine all of these various volunteer groups? On one level, there really isn’t, Hill groups value their independence; but we at the Boosters will certainly work in the next year to build stronger connections between the various active communities of Potrero Hill. We’ll upgrade our online resources and work actively to bring new and existing groups together on shared missions. Now more than ever, join us, and work with us!