| CALA Foods Market Story |
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| Sunday, 05 July 2009 | |||||||
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June 2009 Calvin Welch, HANC Housing and Land Use Committee The May, 2009 announcement (see chronology, below for full text Business Times coverage of the announcement) by the developers that the 205,000 square foot, seven story mixed use project for 690 Stanyan Street was abandoned because of financial reasons complicated by the long delay and fees imposed by the City was the final act of a three year neighborhood battle that like many other aspects of the dispute, is less than fully accurate. The following narrative and chronology of the controversy is an attempt to offer a more comprehensive and accurate recounting of events which show that it was the developers insistence on a huge, out of scale project and their inability to address legitimate concerns about the impacts of that development that delayed and then doomed the project. Size Matters The primary neighborhood concern with the proposed project was its massive size. The proposed project had a 34,000 s/f food store on the ground floor, some 62 market rate condo totaling 81,000 s/f on the next three floors and 181 parking spaces on three below grade parking levels which totaled 90,000 s/f . This proposal was 13 times the size of the of existing 15,000 s/f food store and 42 surface grade parking spaces. By far the most concern generated in the neighborhood centered on the 90,000 s/f of parking for 181 cars. City code required that the project have a total of 134 off street parking spaces for both the housing and the store. But the developer insisted on adding an additional 35% more parking than required and never gave any justification for this increase. That concern over the auto impacts was shared by regional air quality regulators as well. The project was so massive that it triggered regional standard which required a full EIR on any project that produced more than 2,000 car trips a day (see "Notice of Preparation of an EIR", Department of City Planning, July 7, 2007, p.39). Had the developer not demanded such a huge amount of parking there would have been no EIR done at all as it is San Francisco policy not to require EIR's of residential projects in residentially zoned areas such as this site. As the attached chronology shows it was the developers inability to assess and quantify in a timely manner the traffic impacts of the project that slowed down approval of the EIR which added full year to the approval process. This was a slowdown directly caused by the developer inability to provide data on traffic and car impacts the large size of projects off street parking garage created in the first place. |
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