Redeveloping Hunters Point and Candlestick Point - achieving a great park for southeastern San Francisco

The redevelopment of the Hunters Point Shipyard in southeastern San Francisco is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to address some of the longstanding environmental, social, and economic needs of one of San Francisco's last African-American communities. A waterfront park here can dramatically improve the quality of life in the whole Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood. Like Crissy Field at the city's opposite corner, the park could combine recreational opportunities and wildlife habitat to serve neighbors and attract visitors from afar. It can also be the glue that integrates new housing, jobs, and business opportunities, and links them with the existing community.

Environmentalists worry, however, that the park may be subordinated to a redevelopment plan driven by other priorities, and that the park may be squeezed into pieces of land left over after the plan has accommodated a stadium and its parking, some housing, and a high-tech business park.

From Pollution to Parkland (see sidebar) is a study of the possibilities and benefits of a generous waterfront park on the southern side of the Shipyard. It compares possibilities ranging from a narrow strip covering just 60 acres and offering basic shoreline access, to a 170-acre contiguous waterfront park district creating synergies among recreation, habitat, and economic development. This largest option can reconnect the community to the Bay. It would include varied open spaces for sports, large public gatherings, and quiet enjoyment of nature. It would additionally offer opportunities for new-business development and employment. Through creating wetlands, it would provide for treatment of stormwater runoff and expansion of wildlife potential.

Cleaning up the landfill

The threshold issue for a Shipyard park, at any size, is clean-up of the Shipyard's heavily contaminated 20-acre industrial landfill. In a protected location adjacent to Yosemite Slough, this site has the greatest potential for wildlife habitat of any part of the Shipyard. The landfill, however, was created without any of the protections required today. In 2000 the landfill caught fire, possibly due to spontaneous combustion of an underground mix of chlorine gas and wood chips. After a long delay and much prevarication, the Navy extinguished the flames by placing a clay cap over about 80% of the site. For weeks, meanwhile, area residents were exposed to toxic smoke. With the new cap, the landfill continues to vent methane gas, creating an ongoing fire and health hazard, and the community is deeply anxious about the site's hazards. In particular, there are concerns that the weight of the cap may be forcing underground gases to its perimeter, where more than a dozen grass fires have occurred since the cap has been in place.

Unless the site receives a thorough clean-up, future uses must be limited. If the site is merely capped, it can be used only in ways that minimize the risk of a breach. It can be covered with cement or grass, but it can have no trees or bushes with deep roots, or heavy uses that would disturb the cap. In our seismically active area, at a spot that hosts burrowing owls and other digging animals, the effectiveness of any cap is iffy. Another problem with capping would be the continuing release of landfill toxics into the Bay. The Navy and regulatory agencies are considering building a barrier to hold back the contaminants, but this technology is not reliable. Far preferable to leaving the pollution in place would be excavation and removal of the contaminants, and creation of wetlands.

The Navy is supposed to propose a remedy this year. The community has already weighed in - with overwhelming support for removing the toxics and low-level radiological pollutants.

Lennar's proposal for Candlestick Point/Hunters Shipyard

Lennar Corporation, the company chosen by the city to redevelop the 500-acre Shipyard, is now proposing to develop an enlarged site that includes the city's Candlestick Point property. Current plans call for redevelopment of 771 acres of public land extending from the southern boundary of Candlestick Point State Recreation Area northward to China Basin. The city has endorsed that concept as the basis for an Environmental Impact Report, now being written.

Lennar's new proposal dedicates 97 acres to a new 69,000-seat football stadium plus parking configured for tailgate parties. Lennar hopes that the 49ers will build all this at the Shipyard. The stadium would sit between two housing developments: 6,500 units to the south on the site of the existing Candlestick Stadium, and 2,500 to the north on Parcel B of the Shipyard. Retail would be concentrated to the south (585,000 square feet), research and development to the north (two million square feet). Lennar is proposing to build a six-lane bridge to link these lobes to one another but insists that this very expensive undertaking would carry cars only on the 10 or so football days each year and that it would otherwise be limited to pedestrians, bicycles, and public transit.

If the 49ers reject San Francisco's overtures, Lennar proposes to substitute a research-and-development business park. It has not yet provided details.

The Lennar proposal shows 437 acres of open space:

• 157 acres of state-park land (although this number is in question because it includes the 20-acre landfill, which the State Parks Department is not willing to acquire);
• 97 acres for the stadium and surrounding parking, much of which could be used as playing fields on non-football days;
• 183 acres of grade parking and streets, a chain of small parks around the Shipyard providing shoreline access, athletic facilities, and parks serving the new neighborhoods.

Additional confusion is created by the 300 acres of open space referenced in the Lennar initiative appearing on San Francisco's June 3 ballot as Proposition G.

The new open-space plan for the southern portion of the Shipyard, the area studied by From Pollution to Parkland, is somewhat smaller than that study's smallest (60-acre) alternative.

Would Lennar's plans adequately realize the potential of the project site? We fear that the plans do not address the needs of current Bayview residents. They would not expand and enhance existing wildlife habitat. They would not create a regional destination.

The pressured circumstances of the current discussions raise further concerns. Under ordinary circumstances the public, the developer, and the city would have had opportunities to explore a variety of alternatives. Instead, in competition with the city of Santa Clara to host the 49ers, Lennar and San Francisco are simultaneously conducting public discussions of their proposal while campaigning for a related, but very confusing ballot measure. Environmentalists are worried that approval of this measure could appear to endorse the plan before there is adequate discussion of alternatives, tradeoffs, and opportunity costs.

Lennar and the city have said that their plan is open to revision, even after the election. Whether Prop G wins or loses, important changes to the plan are essential.

Some are already on the table.

• Prop F, also on the June ballot, would increase the proportion of affordable housing.
• The bridge across badly polluted Yosemite Slough would degrade the slough's wildlife potential and impair environmental remediation efforts currently being undertaken by the state recreation area. Planners need to spell out an alternative transportation plan, possibly a landscaped parkway around the slough, to open up economic-development opportunities along the route and to provide better connections for the two lobes of the new project - with each other, with the rest of Bayview-Hunters Point, and with downtown.
• The 2,500 residential units that Lennar is planning on the Shipyard site are not enough to support an array of neighborhood commercial services within walking distance. An alternative needs to be explored that moves them closer to the 6,500 units at the site of the existing stadium. Bayview/Hunters Point is one of the only communities in the city without a major supermarket or other large retail center. Consolidating the new housing would help generate the critical mass of shoppers to support needed community-serving businesses.
• The 49ers will choose a San Francisco stadium only if Santa Clara voters reject them. In that case, it should be possible to negotiate a reduction and more efficient configuration of stadium parking.

WhatYouCanDo

Regardless of the voters' decisions in June, the course of redevelopment will be set through many separate decisions, including those on the stadium, the bridge, clean-up, affordable housing, the site plan - and the size and configuration of a waterfront park. It is critical that Sierra Club members track all of them. To join in the effort, contact conservation organizer or call (510)848-0800, ext. 304

For the text of From Pollution to Parklands, see http://arcecology.org/HuntersPointWaterfrontPark.shtml

For more information about it, contact Eve Bach of Arc Ecology at (415) 643-1190, ext. 303, or email evebach -at- arcecology.org

Additional information about Lennar's plans is at www.sfgov.org/site/uploadedfiles/sfra/Projects/CPHPS%20PAC_2007_11_15_final.pdf and
www.sfgov.org/site/uploadedfiles/sfra/Projects/BayviewNOP.pdf

From Pollution to Parkland

From Pollution to Parkland lays some of the groundwork for a Hunters Point waterfront park.

Published a year ago (prior to Lennar's current proposal), it is the product of a community-based planning process led by Arc Ecology, an environmental group that has provided technical support to the Bayview-Hunters Point community for more than two decades, working with a broad-based collaboration of environmental organizations. Funding and active involvement by the Coastal Conservancy enabled the study to provide the community with a site analysis and overview of opportunities for a park district by Hargreaves Associates (a world-renowned landscape-architecture firm) and wetland engineer Roger Leventhal. Bayview organizations Literacy for Environmental Justice and Bayview Hunters Point Community Advocates participated, using a variety of tools to solicit community views on a spectrum of park-development concepts.

Arc Ecology is currently engaged in a follow-up engineering study on creating wetlands on the site of the badly polluted Hunters Point Shipyard - both for treating stormwater and for wildlife habitat.