Imagine walking around AT&T Park in the year 2100. Things might be different: For one, you might be protected from a greatly risen ocean by glass barriers of 3-4 feet.

That's just a tiny example of the catalogue of design concepts put forward by a study of the effects of sea level rise on Mission Bay. The work's findings, more "imaginative" suggestions than concrete plans, were highlighted by the Chronicle's architecture writer John King.

The $200,000, 80-page document was created by the consultancy groups Arcadis US, Inc. and CallisonRTKL. SPUR handled the report from the city's end, and five municipal agencies including the Port of San Francisco and the Planning Department were involved. The Bay Conservation and Development Commission would have final say on any idea from the report, which was begun in 2014 and came out yesterday.

Rising tides, the product of climate change, are expected to change nearly every coastal landscape. As such, the study presumed the "most-likely" sea level rise scenarios of 11-inches for 2050 and 36-inches for 2100. Considering those circumstances, ideas include levees, seawalls, and even artificially separating Mission Creek from the bay, turning it into what appears to be the equivalent of a lock. Each idea comes annotated with pros and cons, carefully considering the implications of sea level rise on important infrastructure elements, such as the Third Street Bridge. Observe:

via Spur.org

“It’s important for our people to expand our own minds, and for people to understand they needn’t be afraid [of the future]," Larry Goldzband, the Bay Conservation and Development Commission's executive director told the Chronicle. “That doesn’t mean the ideas will become reality tomorrow, or without a lot of community review and discussion.” Mission Creek, with its low-lying developments, was selected as a case study for the rest of San Francisco, not to mention port cities the world over.

A lot will happen between now and the year 2100, and imagining oneself on a jaunt that year around the ballpark takes some effort. That's the trouble with making long-term considerations for climate change. It's easy to get hung up on the little things and miss the big picture. Will it still be AT&T park, one wonders, or by then will AT&T have gone the way of Pac Bell? Who's to say! I do, however, trust the Giants will be pretty good.

Related: Got Dirt? To Fight Sea Level Rise, Bay Area Marshland Projects Seeking Lots Of Mud

Literally drawing on the housing crisis, California College of the Arts students have a new exhibition of somewhat fanciful and often preposterous but visually intriguing designs that would add housing units to San Francisco. Sure, development projects take years to wend their way through a complex pipeline, but that's just reality. Co-curators Antje Steinmuller and Christopher Roach led CCA students to ignore all that, and render a city magically endowed with the 100,000 units that, in 2014, the city's chief economist once said were needed to make a dent on housing costs.

Their vision, called The City + The City: Housing the next 100,000, is now on display at SPUR Urban Center, 626 Mission Street. The exhibition is also the subject of a piece on Fast Company's blog. Co-presented by California College of the Arts Urban Works Agency and the San Francisco Planning Department, it runs from September 9 to April 1, so you've plenty of time to catch it.

To achieve density, students filled in any possible gaps between buildings with housing — including parking lots — and treated themselves to all possible density bonuses. This allowed for — "the potential expressions of a lateral internal densification of San Francisco," according to the language of the project. A bit more on that:

The exhibition ranges from the redefinition of the room as the most basic element of domestic space and its aggregation into collective forms of living and working that take on the "precarious worker" as their subject to the form of the "unbuilt city” of unexploited zoning over the existing city.

"We started talking about underused capacity in the city, and this myth that San Francisco has no place to build and that's why we have a housing crisis," co-curator Christopher Roach, an architect and adjunct professor at CCA, told Fast Co. "If you know, for instance, that large sections of Mission Street are zoned for 65 or 85 feet, and you walk by a little one-story shoe shop or auto body repair shop, you're just like, 'Oh my gosh, we could build housing on top of this thing.'"

But why put forth ideas that feel so unlikely to become reality in a city where development appears systematically stymied? "We feel like our job, because we are somewhat insulated from the politics, is to push the boundaries, and maybe provoke people a little bit to think beyond the kind of constraining image of the city that they have right now," Roach said. "In a way it's a thought exercise to get us out of the kind of paralysis that we're in in terms of addressing density in San Francisco."

Related: Supervisors Stutter-Step Toward Development Density Bonuses With Approval Of Limited Measure

Supervisor Jane Kim today introduced a charter amendment with the goal of asking San Franciscans to rethink affordable housing requirements for market-rate developments in several ways. The most significant of which would be a doubling of the percent of mandated affordable units for developments of over 25 units in size. Supervisor Aaron Peskin is co-sponsoring the legislation.

The meat of the amendment, which would require a ballot vote in the June election before taking effect, would, as mentioned, increase the percentage of affordable housing for developments of over 25 units from the current 12 percent to 25 percent. However, the proposal would also temporarily exempt developments that fall in the 10 to 25 unit range says the Examiner. The idea being, apparently, that the BOS would eventually develop new requirements for developments that fall into that range.

At present, developers of market-rate housing of over 10 units must either have a percentage of affordable housing onsite, pay into an affordable housing fund, or construct an amount equal to 20 percent of their market development off site notes the Business Times.

Also, this charter amendment would make law what a 2014 ballot proposition only encouraged in a non-binding way — Mayor Lee and Kim notably butted heads that year over whether the city needed a 30-percent affordable mandate, which resulted in that non-binding prop.

“We can’t wait to act any longer," declared Supervisor Kim in a press released issued today by her office. "With the ridiculously high cost of living in the Bay Area, our middle class residents are also vulnerable to losing their homes due to skyrocketing rents they can’t afford or by being pushed out of rent controlled buildings by the landlord. And most of them won’t be able to afford another place in the City,” furthered Kim. “This is an urgent step we can and should take now.”

Supervisor Peskin echoed her sentiments, observing that voter approval of the Mission Rock Project — with a record 40 percent mandated affordable housing — is evidence that the people of San Francisco will support this proposed increase.

"The voters have spoken loud and clear: they want real solutions to the affordability crisis and they know that the development industry is part of the solution," said Peskin.

The Times reports that SPUR opposes Kim's proposal, going so far as to call it an "un-doing [of] the grand bargain" that led to the Affordable Housing Trust Fund in 2012.

If voters do get the chance to vote on changes to the inclusionary housing policy this June, expect it to be another contentious election with issue of affordability and housing at its core.

Related: Renderings: Giants Double Affordable Housing, Lower Heights For Huge Planned Development At Mission Rock

The Board of Supervisors is set to debate and potentially pass some new legislation this fall that would allow for so-called "density bonuses" in neighborhoods where not a lot of housing density currently exists. These bonuses would allow developers to build up to two stories taller on sites that are zoned for four or six stories, which due to zoning established in the 1970s represents the vast majority of San Francisco. In exchange, a developer would have to make 30 percent of the new building affordable — 12 percent to low-income renters or buyers, and 18 percent to middle-income people. But as the Business Times reports, simply making such new rules doesn't guarantee that denser housing will get built in neighborhoods like the Sunset, Richmond, or Marina, because we all know how difficult the NIMBYs can be about anything new (or tall) getting built near where they live.

Density bonuses are fairly common across the country, and in fact California has a density bonus law that San Francisco has been out of compliance with for years.

Essentially, the new legislation, drafted by the Planning Department, would allow not just extra height, but would allow for unlimited density within the building's volume. So, where a site might be zoned for 40 feet in height and one unit per 600 square feet, a developer could go up two stories and add multiple smaller units to the mix to make affordable unit construction financially feasible.

The blue areas in the map above show the "study area" for the density bonus, and as you can see it encompasses a huge swath of town including parts of the Mission, retail corridors of Sunset, big parts of the Richmond, and much of Russian Hill, Nob Hill, and North Beach.

Gabriel Metcalf of SPUR is pessimistic about the plan, however, because while he's all for more density, he doesn't see this as much of a fix when you have so many litigious, noisy neighbors looking to stymie every new project. "There’s nothing in this reform that will make it any easier to get permission to build housing," he says.

The Supervisors will vote on the legislation, which will involve an amendment to the city's planning code, this fall after it goes before the Planning Commission.

Previously: Should The Mission Have More High-Rises?

Many San Franciscans who did not used to be millionaires, who perhaps even couch-surfed in your living room once in the last decade, are going to become suddenly wealthy if they happen to work for Twitter and have a nice stock package, once that IPO happens. Also, if they happen to work for any of a variety of startups that are being showered with VC cash these days. What this means for the rest of us is that housing prices are going to continue to go up, and pretty soon you will need to earn six figures to live in the fucking Tenderloin.

And they quote SPUR's Gabriel Metcalf saying that a splashy IPO like Twitter's will be, assuming it's successful, "the seedbed for further rounds of innovation and startup activity because people reinvest the money in new companies."

So it's a good thing, but a bad thing. Bad for many of us who would like to keep living here, good for the local economy and the City's bottom line, and good for tech in general. But bad bad bad.

[Bloomberg]
[ABC]

The wildly successful Yerba Buena Community Benefit District’s Arts and Dialogue series gets stoney on Thursday with a panel discussion devoted to the business of growing cannabis in San Francisco. What are the perks? The drawbacks? The legalities? The impending legislative reform? And more.

The panel discussion will be led by SF Appeal editor/founder Eve Batey who will moderate an intriguing discussion with Heather Donahue, (contributor to Los Angeles Magazine, The Huffington Post, Rodale and author of Growgirl: The Blossoming of an Unlikely Outlaw) and Chris Roberts (contributor to SF Appeal, SF Examiner, SF Weekly, and San Francisco Magazine), Stephanie Tucker (spokesperson for SF's Medical Marijuana Task Force, and Matthew J. Cote (co-creator of iStrainGuide, LivingCannabis, and the PhytoFund.

Fun fact: Heather Donahue, for those who don't know, was the girl in The Blair Witch Project with the iconically runny nose. Remember her? Of course you do. (We often wonder if she and her BWP cohorts enjoy the Paranormal Activity franchise.)

For more information on tonight's discussion, check out www.ArtsAndDialogue.org.

What: Growing Pains: The Business of Cannabis in San Francisco
When: Thursday, March 21, 6:30pm-7:30pm
Where: SPUR: 654 Mission (between 3rd & 2nds, on the 2nd floor)
Cost: FREE

SPUR came out with a report today outlining how S.F. can use the large influx of money that the upcoming America's Cup will undoubtedly generate as an impetus to make major, much needed investments to the city now.

Suggested improvements include

• Building the F-Line extension to Fort Mason to accommodate the anticipated 200,000 to a million visitors per day who will need reliable transportation to get to on-share spectator areas. (We need only look at Bay to Breakers and Outside Lands for examples of how well Muni melts down when trying to accommodate large events.)
• Implement SPUR's Embikeadero (PDF) plan, which consists of a separated two-way bike path alongside the Embarcadero that would enhance the safety of cyclists, pedestrians, and motorists alike.
• Get moving on the The Jefferson Street Redesign, which would “Europeanize” Fisherman’s Wharf, transforming an "aging destination into a place that San Franciscans and visitors alike will find beautiful and compelling, while investing in the one of the city’s most important economic generators."

Head over to SPUR to read more.

[Via Streetsblog]

Oh, sure, you've seen all the coverage of Jan Gehl's plan to turn Fisherman's Wharf into something tolerable. But wouldn't you like to know more? The excellent SPUR is holding a forum TODAY about the city's plan to alleviate pedestrian-congestion by updating the neighborhood's 1950s-style freeway-inspired urban design: widening sidewalks, installing benches, and adding bike lanes, injunction be damned. After all, be honest: when's the last time you went to Fisherman's Wharf? Probably when you had out-of-town guests.

SPUR's guest will be urban designer Neil Hrushowy, explaining the plan and answering questions. It's at SPUR's office at 312 Sutter St. (at Grant), Fifth Floor, from 12:30 to 1:30 pm. "Feel free to bring a lunch," says SPUR, which is a nice way of saying, "no we're not feeding you; what do we look like, a Waffle House?" It's free for SPUR members and $5 for everyone else.

And!

Don't miss their Thursday forum on high-speed rail! Rail expert Rod Diridon, Sr. is visiting. Says SPUR, "Let him lead you on a world tour of high-speed rail systems and then enjoy a spirited and informed discussion of the practicalities and politics of California's proposed high speed rail." Same time, place, and catering arrangements as before.