Plan Potrero Hill SF

At the April 14th meeting, we made good progress toward consensus regarding the neighborhood hubs on 16th and 17th streets.

With the help of Google’s 3D map tool, there seemed to be agreement on the following:

16th street:
-A green space loop with neighborhood commercial opportunities along their borders:
The loop would go in one direction from Jackson Square Playground, along 17th or Mariposa streets, to Mariposa and Indiana (where a new park is planned), and then continuing to the southern portion of Bayfront Park.
The other side of the loop would be from the short block of Wisconsin St between 16th and 17th Streets (next to Jackson Square Playground), through the small lot where Wolfe’s Lunch stands (16th and 8th), and then on to connect to the proposed Mission Bay open space at 7th street.
-There was much discussion about closing the short block of Wisconsin to car traffic, for better pedestrian and retail use.
-Also, the streetscaping of 16th street from Wolfe’s Lunch, along the edge of Mission Bay to Bayfront Park deserves special attention.

17th street:
-Several competing visions were discussed for neighborhood commercial hubs, including:
-4th street in Berkeley: attractive density, but a reliance on formula retail.
-24th street in Noe Valley.
-24th street in the East Mission (between Harrison and Potrero Ave).
-the new Octavia Boulevard.
-Hayes Street (contemporary/post-freeway removal)
-West Portal.

-Johnny Jaramillo of the Planning Department was asked to provide some info. about relative densities for these models, which he will do.
-The Potrero Hill Merchants who worked on a proposed neighborhood commercial district , promised to discuss these concepts of commercial hubs with their membership.

General:
-Joe Boss is formally requesting from Planning that we get their baseline population goals for our neighborhoods, showing the differences between daytime population and residential.
-It was asked if we could better define what makes a neighborhood hub: would it include schools, centers for kids and families, safety, elder care, open space? Thus far, we’ve been using the general idea that it is a place for people to gather and do things, and that has services.
(At the Planning Department’s Eastern Neighborhoods and Better Neighborhoods websites, there are good discussions about neighborhood hubs; see especially, Eight Elements of a Great Neighborhood.

- California College of the Arts began their participation at this meeting, and was represented by David Meckel, Director of Research and Planning. David let us know that CCA’s strategic plan is available on their website.
- David also noted the absence of, and need for, sidewalks in the Showplace Square area. The room agreed to address this. David went on to say that last fall, a CCA student did a project that resulted in new crosswalks on 16th Street.

At the next meeting, Saturday, April 28th 9.30am – noon at the NABE, we’ll look again at sidewalks, finish up this discussion and move on to what we want neighborhood hubs on south side of the Hill – especially Dogpatch - to look like.

A pdf of Recap of the April 14th Meeting - drilling down on 16th & 17th Street Hubs, can be found here: Apr14_hubs

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 24th, 2007 at 8:47 am and is filed under Uncategorized.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.