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Planning staff lays out Eastern Neighborhoods zoning controls for parking, retail, arts and SROs
Summary
Planning Department staff told the San Francisco Planning Commission that the Eastern Neighborhoods rezoning would replace parking minimums with parking maximums, keep formula-retail restrictions, bolster protections for arts and require replacement of demolished PDR space; staff also proposed revised SRO standards and additional design review for larger projects.
Planning Department staff on June 19 gave a detailed briefing on zoning controls proposed under the Eastern Neighborhoods plan, saying the package is intended to preserve industrial-serving PDR uses while encouraging housing and neighborhood-serving retail where appropriate.
Ken Rich opened the overview and Steve Wertheim led the zoning details. Staff said the plan replaces many current parking minimums with parking maximums and targeted caps that vary by district: for many South of Market mixed-use districts staff proposed 0.25 spaces per dwelling unit as the default, with commission discretion to allow more for larger units, and higher caps in less transit-rich urban mixed-use (UMU) areas. For office uses the plan would permit limited office floor area as a share of gross floor area and set different parking rules for parcels near and farther from core transit.
On retail, staff said neighborhood-serving streets will generally require ground-floor retail and prohibit curb cuts on many priority shopping streets (examples: Valencia, Mission, portions of 6th and 4th streets), while larger-format retail would be limited and, beyond a district threshold (25,000 sq ft in core South of Market districts), would have to be part of a mixed-use development. Formula retail controls (chains with 11+ stores) will keep conditional-use review in many neighborhood commercial areas and staff proposed extending that control into some UMU and MUG zones at community request.
Wertheim said the plan includes explicit protections for the arts by permitting production and performance space throughout mixed-use and PDR districts, preserving PDR demo controls that require replacement of demolished PDR space and limiting office expansion where necessary to reduce displacement pressure on studio and making space.
The presentation also covered single-room occupancy (SRO) rules. Staff proposed SRO definitions and new quality controls: exposure requirements, larger private/open-space minima (raising the per-unit open-space requirement from about 12 square feet to roughly 27 square feet), and clearer rear-yard and amenity standards. Where SLI (South Beach/SLI) rules previously allowed market-rate exceptions for SROs, staff proposed requiring SROs in SLI to be affordable at 80% of area median income.
Commissioners asked staff to return with more detail on adaptive reuse and the proposed "innovative industries" special-use districts that would relax some office controls for digital media and life-science uses. Staff said some topics will be revisited in follow-up sessions next week.
