The Land of the Lost

A court decision is being made that will decide the fate of one of San Francisco’s most historical areas.

On April 28, California non-profit organization, Save the Laguna Street Campus, filed a public interest California Environmental Quality Act lawsuit against the city of San Francisco according to Cynthia Servetnick, a member of the non-profit group.

She says that her organization is currently waiting for a decision to be handed down regarding the zoning of an already built-upon Hayes Valley lot, which after, they will have 60 days to file for an appeal.

The goal of the lawsuit, according to Servetnick, was to challenge the Board of Supervisors’ final decision last spring that called for a “mixed” zoning of 55 Laguna St., meaning that the area will be used for commercial, public, and private use.

“It’s been in public use for over 150 years,” Servetnick said. “The Board of Supervisors made the wrong decision in zoning.”

The 5.8-acre site, surrounded by Laguna, Buchanan, Haight, and Herman streets, has been an active area of San Francisco since the Gold Rush era according to Helene Whitson, an Archivist Emeritus at San Francisco State University.

She says a Protestant orphanage occupied the lot during the 1800’s and after the 1906 earthquake, San Francisco Normal School moved to the Laguna Street location.

In the early 1950’s, San Francisco Normal School changed its name to San Francisco State University and considered moving its campus to the university’s current location near Lake Merced according to Whitson.

“The campus was declared a surplus to SF State in 1957,” Servetnick said. She says that UC Berkeley acquired the site in 1958 for the purpose of creating an extension campus.

“The Attorney General granted UC ‘state agency status’ for the purpose of acquiring the site, but said UC did not have to comply with the same real property disposition process state agencies are required to go through in order to dispose of the site,” Servetnick said. “UC made a unilateral decision to ‘cash out’ in 2003 and moved the extension to its new downtown location at a cost of about $2 million per year.”

Servetnick says UC Berkeley awarded A.F. Evans Development the right to negotiate for the development of 450 units of market-rate housing on the campus in 2005, following their relocation of the extension campus.

“The UC doesn’t care,” Servetnick said. “They’ve always wanted to sell it and make money off of it.”

Servetnick says negotiations broke down last winter when the San Francisco Board of Supervisors agreed to provide money for the development of 100 units, instead of 450 units of housing that would be affordable to people at 50 percent of median income that is welcoming to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender seniors; the remaining housing units will be 15 percent affordable to all other demographics.

“We think housing--especially market rate housing--can be built anywhere, but this campus is unique architecturally and from a land use standpoint,” Servetnick said. “The Market and Octavia Area Plan will double the number of housing units in the neighborhood and won’t have the parking requirements creating significant development pressure on historic resources and creating a demand for more open space, recreation and cultural uses.”

Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, whose district five encompasses the Laguna Street Campus says his constituents in Hayes Valley have voiced concern over the Mixed Use Project.

“We don’t want a suburb in Hayes Valley,” he said. We want to see something with merit that will benefit the people who live there.”

Mirkarimi says he wants to see the site used for educational purposes that will help the public.

However, Servetnick says she is concerned over the ramifications from zoning the site for mixed use.

“Our group’s main mission is to preserve the public use and historic resources of the Laguna Street Campus,” Servetnick said.

She says the main issues in the Board of Supervisors approved, Mixed Use Project for 55 Laguna St. were that the city of San Francisco, UC Berkeley, and A.F. Evans Development did not provide substantial evidence showing that preservation alternatives were economically infeasible, and the analysis of the 55 Laguna St. Mixed Use Project's affects on the use of historical buildings were inadequate.

“We want to see the historic district maintained,” Servetnick said speaking on behalf of the historically recognized buildings in the lot. “This project will destroy it.”

“The Mixed Use Project proposes to demolish two of the five contributory buildings on the site,” Servetnick said. “It’s unnecessary to demolish these structures.”

She says the Planning Commission previously voted not to landmark the site and the Landmarks Board itself appealed their decision to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors who voted to landmark only the three buildings the developers wanted to keep.

A.F. Evans wanted to demolish the same two buildings on the site, Middle Hall, and a section of Richardson Hall because they would cost too much to retrofit, Sarah Zahn, a former project manager said.

SF State Archivist Helene Whitson says many of the current existing buildings on the campus were built during the New Deal era using Spanish colonial architecture along with WPA artists and contractors.

“There’s wonderful artwork there,” Whitson said. She says Maxine Albro, the designer behind San Francisco’s Coit Tower and a protégé of Diego Rivera, created a mosaic from marble left over from the city’s 1915 World’s Fair, which can be found under the stucco in Woods Hall’s entry on Buchanan and Haight streets.

The 55 Laguna St. site is located in the heart of the Hayes Valley neighborhood, a district of the city that has gone through very positive gentrification since the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake according to Whitson.

In 2005, Octavia Boulevard was opened as a main thoroughfare in the city to replace the double-decker freeway that inhabited the area - a freeway that had been damaged by the earthquake and needed to be demolished.

“It used to be ghetto,” Natallie Mollaghan, an employee of Timbuk2, a bag store on Hayes Street said of the condition in the Hayes Valley neighborhood in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s.

“Hayes Valley is completely different from anything that was there 15-20 years ago,” Jasper Rubin, an assistant professor in the Urban Studies and Planning Department at SF State said.

Rubin says that the freeway’s disappearance in Hayes Valley made the neighborhood more attractive to small businesses.

The annexing of a place such as 55 Laguna St. for public use is important to the people of Hayes Valley given the neighborhood’s revitalization according to Whitson.

“We’re not a school for the wealthy, we’re a school for the working people,” Whitson said on behalf of SF State’s original stake in the educational origins of 55 Laguna St.

“The neighborhood is full of professional people. Working class people,” she said. “Why can’t this site continue to be what it was – it was designed for the public.”

Whitson says the people she has met in Hayes Valley really care about the effect that not having 55 Laguna St. as a public institution for education is going to have on their neighborhood.

“They’re passionate. They know how rejuvenated their neighborhood is from what it was,” She said. “They wanted to see that space remain educational and benefit the community.”

“The possibilities are unlimited,” Cynthia Servetnick said of how to use 55 Laguna St. for public use.

After she files for an appeal once a decision has been made regarding her and her non-profit’s lawsuit, Servetnick says she will continue litigation in order to turn site into a job training center and cultural facility to educate people and engage them in environmental remediation.

“The site could be used to develop and promote capital, trade and carbon credits, new materials and methods of green building, and job training for SF residents,” Servetnick said.

“It has to be used for education,” Whitson said of the site. “Job training is education.”

“There’s a lot of young people that live in Hayes Valley that could greatly benefit from having a public job training center,” she said. “So many people are getting laid off right now.”

The average age of a person living in Hayes Valley is between 21 and 40 years of age according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

“I want to see an area that has stores, housing, and public use, such as a school,” Ray Andersen said. “The people that live here already have places to shop, they need places to learn things too.”

Andersen says that the neighborhood has moved away from the blight it once had a little over a decade ago. He says it now needs to focus not on just making money, but making sure its residents receive skills to help them in the future.

“I can imagine people there, and being taught and being the future of California,” Whitson said. “That place has had such an impact on California, and it serves the needs of the people.”





Sources

Cynthia Servetnick
415-794-0566
Cynthia.servetnick@gmail.com

Helene Whitson
510-849-4689
hwhitson@sfsu.edu

Ross Mirkarimi
415-554-7630
ross.mirkarimi@sfgov.org

Jasper Rubin
(415) 405-3495
mjrubin@sfsu.edu

Natallie Mollaghan
415 252 9860
hayesvalley@timbuk2.com

Ray Andersen
415-436-9933
realgrooves@gmail.com

Sarah Zahn
510-891-9400
afeco@sfevans.com