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Greenbelt Alliance In the News

December 30, 2003

Environmental Groups and Developers Join Forces to Promote Infill in San Francisco

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To find out more, Breakthroughs spoke with Janet Stone, Livable Communities Director of the San Francisco-based Greenbelt Alliance. A leading land conservation and urban planning nonprofit, the Alliance saw a tremendous need for affordable housing in the Bay Area, and decided to make a name for itself as “The organization that doesn’t just say no to sprawl, but says yes to good infill projects.” To bring this theory into practice, 12 years ago the Greenbelt Alliance launched a program to endorse suitable infill developments within the 9 county-109-jurisdiction San Francisco Bay Area. A dozen years after the program’s inception, here are few of the key lessons learned, along with a brief description of how the program works.

The Review Process

Developers voluntarily submit infill development proposals to the Alliance for review and, hopefully, endorsement. The Alliance has approximately 12 volunteers who are each assigned one or two proposals each year to review. These volunteers include architects, land use attorneys, bankers, and planning interns. Volunteers research each project to see if it meets the following seven criteria:

• Is it located within an urban area and within less than ½ mile of a transit facility?
• Will it help reduce automobile dependency?
• Does it have a minimum density of 20 units per acre?
• Contain at least 20 units?
• Does it employ good design features?
• Is it being developed with community input? …and
• Does it incorporate at least some affordable housing units? (The Alliance has refused to endorse a development simply because it offers only high-end housing.)
  

If a project is approved, the Alliance provides the developer with a letter of endorsement and sends a copy to the appropriate local government. More importantly, representatives from the Alliance attend local meetings and express support for the proposal. According to Stone, “We will offer active advocacy at local government hearings for endorsed projects”.

Project Endorsements and Infill Advocacy

The Alliance recognizes that reduced impact fees, expedited processing, tax waivers, and other types of incentives are very effective methods by which local governments can promote infill and affordable housing development. To disseminate more information about these practices, the organization published an Infill Guide for people interested in reforming rules and regulations governing infill development. While group members are strong advocates of smart infill, they separate advocacy for these types of general regulatory reforms from individual project endorsements. In some cases, the endorsement of a particular development may include a statement that parking requirements should be waived for a development in a transit corridor. On a few occasions, they have even supported a density bonus to provide additional affordable housing in a development.

Some Tough Obstacles

According to Stone, the greatest barrier developers face with infill development is NIMBYism. Many residents continue to oppose redevelopment because they fear the resulting architecture will not fit into the neighborhood’s character, will create overcrowded conditions, or will result in increased traffic. The Alliance has found that advocacy on its part early in the process is critical to a given project’s success. Unfortunately, only ten percent of developers submit their projects to the Alliance early in the review process. Most send them to the Alliance less than a month before the first local government hearings.

Alliance members have two other concerns relative to the current infill development process. First, they say that developers downsize the scale of a project to obtain local government approval before submitting the proposal to the Alliance. Stone says that they would be willing to endorse and support higher densities if other safeguards are in place, but they are reluctant to encourage developers to increase densities. She also says that Balkanization of the region continues to hurt consistent decision-making. Trying to obtain consensus among 109 jurisdictions in the region on any type of infill development process is next to impossible.

Successful Results

Even in the face of these fairly daunting obstacles, Stone says neighborhoods, developers, and the Alliance have benefited from endorsed projects. Since 1990, the Greenbelt Alliance has reviewed 125 different projects and endorsed 93. These 93 projects account for almost 18,500 housing units in the Bay Area. In addition, the organization also has endorsed 17 plans that propose construction of another 30,000 units. Stone estimates that the local governments have approved over 66 percent of the endorsed projects.

In addition to directly impacting specific developments, the Alliance’s endorsement program has created a new atmosphere in the region. According to Stone, local governments are now asking developers if the Alliance has reviewed a given proposal. In addition, some developers have included affordable housing in their project as a way to secure the Alliance’s endorsement. The program has also spawned sister organizations in four counties in the region and has influenced the creation of similar bodies in San Diego and Washington, DC.

Because the organization does not charge for its services, most people see it as an independent third party that lends credibility to endorsed projects. Funding for this activity comes from the organization’s general revenue, which is derived from member organizations (30 percent), corporate sponsors (30 percent), and foundations (40 percent). Stone reports that the program has proven to be a very popular concept with foundations, as these organizations consider new and innovative ways to positively shape inner city development.

For more information, check the Alliance’s Web site, or email Janet Stone at jstone@greenbelt.org.

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