Board of Supervisors on the Brink of Groundbreaking Discretionary Review Reform
3/4/2010 - John Kevlin
After a year and a half of research, analysis, community outreach and drafting, the Board of Supervisors’ Land Use and Economic Development Committee may be on the verge of approving true Discretionary Review (DR) reform.
Supervisor Eric Mar introduced a package of amendments at the Land Use Committee’s hearing on February 22 which were developed by a group of stakeholders and generally are intended to allay the concerns of neighborhood groups of losing their right to have a hearing before the Planning Commission for DR cases that they file.
Currently, anyone can file a DR application for any building permit…
[read more]
The Uncertain Future of Historic Preservation
2/25/2010 - Andrew J. Junius, Stephen R. Miller
There’s no doubt that historic preservation is politically popular in San Francisco: residents recently approved Prop J to create the Historic Preservation Commission (HPC), and grant it sweeping powers. But there were already solid protections in place. When people voted on Prop J, they probably didn’t know much about the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), which was the existing complex mechanism for dealing with historic resources, and how CEQA and the new Prop J represent alternate universes of regulation. CEQA and Prop J both try and protect historic resources, but they do it in very different ways, ways that were…
[read more]