August 2008

Building Boom Puts Painful Parking Pressure on Dogpatch

By Lori Higa

Situated at the eastern foot of Potrero Hill bordering the Bay, San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood bears little resemblance to the community featured in Al Capp’s comic strip of the same name, which was “an average stone-age community nestled in a bleak valley, between two cheap and uninteresting hills, somewhere.”  In the City’s Dogpatch real estate is neither average, nor cheap.  But like Capp’s “tarnip” farmers who watched a plague of termites descend, locust-like, to devour their crops, today’s Dogpatch residents are witnessing commuters gobble-up scarce parking spots before hopping on Caltrain or Muni’s T-Third line to jobs in Silicon Valley or the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), Mission Bay complex.

According to Susan Eslick, president of the 325 dues-paying member Dogpatch Neighborhood Association (DNA), “People are really frustrated over parking. And with the Homes on Esprit Park development of 147 units on Minnesota Street, it will have even greater impact.”  DNA has formed a subcommittee to investigate obtaining parking permits, which will give priority to residents over commuters.  “On weekends you can see the difference,” said Eslick, a Tennessee Street resident who commutes two hours daily to her creative director job at a Petaluma sticker company.  

“Our association meetings are well-attended, by home and business owners alike, from Yield, the wine bar, to The Ramp, the historic waterfront restaurant,” Eslick said.  Figuring out how to address parking problems is a thorny thicket in the charming mixed-use neighborhood of historically significant pre-Victorian era worker housing, schools and warehouses. “A lot of business owners are also property owners,” Eslick said, which means different interests must be balanced.  While the T-Third has brought parking-hungry commuters to the neighborhood, the Dogpatch Saloon told Eslick that it’s seen a 40 percent increase in business since the Muni line opened.

Most of Dogpatch is parking permit and meter-free.  And, according to the City, with the “approved and impending development of 21,000 parking spaces at Mission Bay,” which “will consume virtually all street capacity in the area,” Dogpatch residents are squarely facing, to put it mildly, a parking nightmare.  “Dogpatch used to be a little rough and tumble, but now we have four-star restaurants and the owners of the high-end bistro A16 are planning a new restaurant in Homes Esprit,” said Eslick.  

Residents are examining different parking permit scenarios. “The easiest thing would be for us to join an existing residential permit area, such as that of Pennsylvania Avenue,” said Minnesota Street resident David Siegel, who’s leading DNA’s parking subcommittee. “More than 50 percent of the households in a given neighborhood need to sign a petition in order for the City to grant a residential parking permit,” said Siegel. Before a residential parking permit area is approved “the City sends inspectors out to make sure that at least 80 percent of the legal on-street spaces within the proposed area are occupied during the day, and that the number of permits issued matches that,” added Siegel. The process can take up to a year and a half; once adopted permits would cost $68 a year.

A key factor in the parking debate is UCSF, which, according to Siegel, is “the 800-pound gorilla.  UCSF bought the building on Minnesota and 19th at the edge of Esprit Park that will house 120-plus employees. Of course, they’re saying they will bus the employees there from parking lots at Mission Bay,” Siegel said.  UCSF also plans to build a women and children’s hospital at Mariposa and Third streets, and ultimately move their Parnassus campus to Mission Bay. “This doesn’t even start to take into consideration all the development planned for the central waterfront, Bayview-Hunters Point, a stadium and all the rest,” said Siegel.

When Siegel, a businessperson involved in real estate investment, and his wife, a nurse, bought their home in Dogpatch 20 years ago, “parking and crime were never a problem.  That’s why I moved here.  It was more laid back.  Everybody knows everybody.”  Today, the former blue-collar area is “trendi-fied,” said Siegel. “Dogpatch has become the new it neighborhood.  That is both good and bad.  Good because property values go up, the quality of restaurants and prices go up, but bad, because that brings an increase in crime and quality of life problems.”  

Both Eslick and Siegal describe DNA’s efforts to work with UCSF to mitigate parking and traffic pressure as successful. “We got them to use cleaner-burning fuel for its jitneys and create other incentives.  They’ve asked us what can they do to be a good neighbor,” said Eslick.  But, according to Siegel, the City has not followed-through with its transit-first policy.  “It’s one thing to say you’re transit-first, and another to actually be on-time and have enough to meet the need,” Siegel said.  “The City needs to do public transportation the way cities I’ve lived in, like Portland and Seattle, do it…by offering it for free in the downtown areas.”

Eslick, who’s served as DNA’s president since the turn-of-the-century, shares Siegel’s frustration with San Francisco’s public transportation system.  “My 19-year-old daughter takes Muni every day to attend a program at UCSF on Parnassus.  It takes more than an hour each way to get to school.  There’s always an issue on Muni; one day it’s a knife fight, another day a man running through the tunnel.  There’s no guarantee Muni will get anywhere on time.”

Eslick, a Buffalo native, fell in love with San Francisco while attending the San Francisco Art Institute in 1978, living near Dolores Park.  In the mid-1990s moved to Dogpatch from Shipley Street, where her “car was broken into 11 times.”  She became a neighborhood activist during the live-work loft boom, when then Mayor Willie Brown, wanted to place a 300-bed homeless shelter at 20th and Illinois streets.  “It brought the neighborhood together and we made our mark on City Hall.  We said, we’re willing to take a 50-bed shelter, but then other neighborhoods have to do the same.”  DNA was organized in 1998 as a vehicle to obtain historic designation for the neighborhood.  “They said we couldn’t do it.  But we did,” Eslick said proudly.  

The historic designation helped put the brakes on uncontrolled building of boxy condominium lofts and concomitant destruction of Dogpatch’s distinctive architectural treasures.  The neighborhood features the City’s oldest collection of intact worker housing, much of which survived the Great Quake of ‘06.

More recently DNA helped form the nonprofit Green Trust to procure funds to support open space in the neighborhood. “We worked with the City to purchase Esprit Park, when we heard rumors that Esprit Corp. was going to sell it off,” said Eslick.  And DNA wrested concessions from Muni during the construction of the T-Third line.  “They had no intention of ever planting trees on the street that were in the drawings for the light rail,” Eslick said.  “We got them to put in trees.”

After decades of slow growth, Dogpatch is now in danger of being loved to death.  “The population of Dogpatch has doubled over the past 10 years and is set to increase dramatically again,” Siegel commented.  “With the extra added pressure of high gas prices, there’ll be more pressure on people to take public transit.  If we aren’t proactive, the City will come in, see potential money-making opportunities, do what they want, put in meters, god knows what else, none of us want that,” Siegel sighed.  But not all Dogpatch residents favor parking permits.  “Some are opposed because they don’t like government, the less bureaucracy the better.  People who have a garage and parking, they’re not interested in helping those with no parking.  It’s the old ‘I…me…mine’ syndrome,” said Siegel.

 

 

 Subscribe to The Potrero View

All rights reserved. Copyright © 2006 The Potrero View.

Content on this site may not be archived, retransmitted, saved in a database, or used for any commercial purpose without the express written permission of The Potrero View or its Publishers.