By Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt

A dramatic change in the use of a longtime neighborhood and community planning process is about to happen; can the supes do anything about it?

Nothing is sacred to Senator Wiener.
If re-elected he will continue the land grab.

When the Board of Supes considers an appeal of a housing development on Sacramento Street Feb. 6, the main issue at hand whether turning a former medical library into housing will damage an historic resource.

But what’s really at issue here is a much bigger question.

For decades, San Francisco environmental and community activists have used the California Environmental Quality Act to challenge development that was damaging to the community. Some of the most important cases in city development history, including one that set new law around the requirement for the analysis of cumulative impacts of multiple projects, involved CEQA…

The statute the city is citing is Government Code Section 15183, which is part of CEQA. It states: “ CEQA mandates that projects which are consistent with the development density established by existing zoning, community plan, or general plan policies for which an EIR was certified shall not require additional environmental review, except as might be necessary to examine whether there are project-specific significant effects which are peculiar to the project or its site. This streamlines the review of such projects and reduces the need to prepare repetitive environmental studies.’”…

So this could mean the end of CEQA review for potentially hundreds of projects.

As I said in my first story on this, that’s a Yimby dream—but it’s also a huge policy change.

It gets worse: If the supes go along with this appeal, on a project that predates the Housing Element EIR, the developer can just come back and say: State law has changed. I can make this even worse.

San Franciscans need to be ready for what Sen. Wiener and his allies have wrought: destruction of historic resources, large-scale demolitions of existing housing, and a profound limitation on what the community can do on a local level to fight back.

All in the name of more market-rate housing, that won’t do anything at all to solve the current crisis, which is entirely a crisis of affordable housing…(more)

Please read the rest of the article, comment where you can, and send your concerns to your supervisors and whoever else you feel should take actions on this appeal.