Hats off to Christopher VerPlanck for speaking up on behalf of preservation in San Francisco and not buying into the developers' propaganda.

Don’t destroy historic Bay Area neighborhoods to solve housing crisis

https://www.marinij.com/2024/01/13/opinion-dont-destroy-historic-neighborhoods-to-solve-housing-crisis/ Without preservation we would have no Palace of Fine Arts, Alamo Square, Tonga Room, Alcatraz or Paramount Theater In recent years, historic preservation has come under intense fire from state Sen. Scott Wiener and his YIMBY (yes, in my backyard) allies for allegedly interfering with housing production. However, the regional housing crisis can be solved without destroying historic neighborhoods. I am a San Francisco-based architectural historian and historic preservation consultant who has been active in the Bay Area for 26 years. I am a committed urbanist and a lover of open space. As a Bay Area native, I remember as a child watching the last stone fruit orchards of South San Jose being bulldozed to construct endless tracts of one-story ranch houses sequestered behind beige sound walls. Today I see the same thing happening in the outer reaches of the Bay Area and the Central Valley. I despise low-density, auto-dependent sprawl. I believe that our cities should become more “urban,” not only to preserve our farmland but also to encourage a pedestrian-oriented way of life that is common in much of the world, including a few parts of the United States. Yes, you could call me a YIMBY. On the other hand, I love many of our region’s historic pre-war neighborhoods and commercial districts. Although they only comprise about 9% of the urbanized Bay Area, neighborhoods such as Dogpatch and Liberty Hill in San Francisco, Downtown Petaluma, Alameda’s East End, Old Oakland and Palo Alto’s Professorville — to only name a few — are characterized by a combination of features, including walkable streets, picturesque old buildings, mature landscaping and legacy businesses that evolved organically over a long period of time rather than springing forth, fully formed, from a developer’s master plan. Older neighborhoods also often provide a wider range of housing that supports residents of varying incomes. Contrast this to most new housing developments that focus exclusively on the affluent. Much of what the YIMBYs accuse historic preservationists of doing is either exaggerated or out of date. It is true that after coming of age in the late 1960s preservation focused on properties associated with the nation’s elite. However, this has changed as the scope of what society thinks deserves protection has broadened. For example, did you know that San Francisco’s Tenderloin is the city’s largest historic district? As a newly minted preservationist in the early 2000s, I nominated San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood to be the first historic district to focus on blue collar heritage. I have also listed properties associated with the region’s Indigenous, African American, Latino and Asian-Pacific Islander communities. Preservationists are not the bad guys; we protect the diverse places that all of us love and that give our region its identity. Without historic preservation, we would have no Palace of Fine Arts, no Alamo Square, no Tonga Room, no Alcatraz and no Paramount Theater. The list goes on and on. There are many places in the Bay Area where new housing could be built. Low-density, commercial corridors such as Geary Boulevard or El Camino Real are good places to start. Surface parking lots and non-historic buildings in downtowns across the region should be replaced with new buildings, as well as converting existing office buildings into apartments or condominiums. I also fully support building accessory dwelling units and replacing non-historic single-family homes with smaller multi-unit buildings. If preservation laws had existed before the 1960s, we could have saved many of the country’s historic urban neighborhoods, such as San Francisco’s Fillmore District, from being destroyed. Instead, we were able to save only a few scraps of that incredibly rich heritage. Let’s not go back to those times. Christopher VerPlanck is an independent, San Francisco-based historic preservation consultant.

Pic from SF Rec & Park, GG Park. CA state law protects these amazing creatures. If you see one, you can report it to SFACC - https://www.sfanimalcare.org/living-with-urban-wildlife/coyote-sightings/

Businesses Named SF Legacy Businesses

Mike Malcanas of New Kensington, PA shows us that it is possible to preserve the old and revitalize a city.

Woody LaBounty, President and CEO of San Francisco Heritage pictured outside the Alexandria Theater marquee. The org is spearheading a historic landmark ruling for the building.

SF Oddities: Cow on House - 1 South Hill Blvd, San Francisco

PBS documentary - San Francisco: The Way It Was

San Francisco Panama Pacific International Exposition 1915 (25 min)

About the San Francisco Estuary

https://www.sfestuary.org/our-estuary/about-the-estuary/ The San Francisco Estuary is the largest estuary on the west coast of North America. Its watershed extends from the ridgeline of the Sierra Nevada mountains to the strait of the Golden Gate, including almost 60,000 square miles and nearly 40% of California. Half of the state’s surface water supply falls as rain or snow within this region. The Estuary’s waters and wetlands are a biological resource of tremendous importance, providing critical winter feeding habitat for over a million migratory birds, a productive nursery for many species of juvenile fish and shellfish, and a year-round home for a vast diversity of plants and animals. For thousands of years, humans have also lived and thrived along this rich hydrologic corridor, from the Ohlone, Miwok, Southern Pomo, Wappo, and Patwin peoples who first stewarded this land to the diverse international community that inhabits the region today. See the SFEP Indigenous People’s Acknowledgement for more information about these Indigenous groups and the role they play in managing the Estuary today. Regions of the Estuary San Francisco Bay is made up of four smaller bays. The farthest upstream is Suisun Bay, which includes a vast area of marshes. Suisun Bay lies just below the confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers. Suisun and its neighbor San Pablo Bay, sometimes called the North Bay, are surrounded mostly by rural areas, and are strongly influenced by freshwater outflows from the rivers. The Central Bay is the deepest and saltiest of the four bays. Cities and industries occupy most of its shores. The more shallow South Bay extends south into quiet backwaters surrounded by restored marshes, salt ponds, and office parks and lagoon communities. Upstream of the Bay, the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta is a 1,000 square-mile triangle of diked and drained wetlands. Small remnants of once-extensive tule marshes still fringe the channels that wind between the flat, levee-rimmed farmlands of the Delta’s myriad islands. Before it was diked and drained, the Delta gathered in the fresh waters of the Sacramento, San Joaquin, Mokelumne, and Cosumnes rivers and moved them all downstream through a complex array of channels into the San Francisco Bay. Today, the Delta, with its rich farmland, is the engineered junction of one of the nation’s largest plumbing systems, where much of the available fresh water is diverted to supply California’s population centers and Central Valley Agriculture. How Healthy Is The Estuary? The upper Estuary is in fair to poor condition and getting worse, while the lower Estuary is in better health but jeopardized by climate change Human activities have severely altered the physical processes that create and maintain estuarine habitats The impairment of critical physical processes is intertwined with habitat loss, degradation, and fragmentation These losses of physical processes and habitats have reverberated through biological systems, contributing to unproductive food webs, smaller and declining native fish and wildlife populations, and the dominance of invasive species The State of the Estuary Report, updated in 2019, provides a comprehensive report for the Estuary. What Will It Take to Achieve a Healthy Estuary? A healthy Estuary needs more freshwater flows through the system, more flooding in the right places, more space for habitats and species and connections between those spaces, more sediment moving through watersheds, and less hardscape, among many needs. A healthy Estuary also needs more monitoring of estuarine conditions, as well as funding to learn from and adapt to what works and doesn’t work in restoration and intervention. The 2022 Estuary Blueprint provides four long-term goals and 25 immediate priorities for achieving a healthier Estuary.

St. Francis Wood earns historic designation

Balboa Theater Presents - Drag at the Oscars

LANDS END: THE FORMER CLIFF HOUSE IS TRANSFORMED BY 27 INTERNATIONAL ARTISTS IN EXHIBITION ADDRESSING CLIMATE CRISIS 11/07/2021-03/27/2022 (Photos by Andrea Jesse)

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