The Treasure Island special report is now fully online!
You can read some of the special report funded by community members like yourself through the links below. Our editorial partners - the SF Public Press did a thorough job. You can help support their efforts by taking our latest community-focused sponsorship about Net Neutrality which is worth $7. Just click the link that says "Earn Credits" above the "Fund this Story" pitch. It'll take you a few minutes - but it'll create real funds for the SF Public Press and their reporting efforts - the fruits of which you can read below.
• Can Treasure Island realize its ecotopian dream?
• Uncertain about the rising seas, developers using mid-range estimate to build up island
• Sand and silt require $137 million fix for Treasure Island
• Pollution: experts concerned about Treasure Island cleanup as seas rise
• Financial upside for developers is long-term and risky, city says
• Through two mayors, connected island developers cultivated profitable deal
• Treasure Island residents face choices for relocation
Residents of Yerba Buena and Treasure islands are divided on the relocation plan city officials have presented to the public. While many Yerba Buena residents expressed concern over maintaining their quality of life through more than a decade of construction, Treasure Island residents tended to express more support.
Joanna Luddington lives on Treasure Island. She endorsed the redevelopment and the relocation plan after a community meeting sponsored by the Treasure Island Development Authority Thursday.
“I’m looking forward to it,” Luddington said. “I’m not too worried.”
But Nate Yeakel, an eight-year resident of Yerba Buena Island, had questions about the phasing of the construction, and suspected that it might get bogged down, making the relocation of residents premature.
“We’ve really developed a sense of community,” Yeakel said. “I find it a little sad that that community is going to be dispersed.
We’re being forced to move without a lot of transparency and due process.” The process of relocating the residents has reached its early stages. The authority has begun to inform residents of about 1,000 households about their relocation options and transition benefits.
SEE YOUTUBE VIDEO OF RESIDENT AGAINST RELOCATION
SEE YOUTUBE VIDEO OF RESIDENT FOR RELOCATION
• Homebuilders Lennar uses federal taxpayer funds to balance its books
In 2006, things were looking good for Lennar, America's second-biggest homebuilder. That year, before the U.S. housing market's epic collapse, the Miami-based giant pulled down $15.6 billion in revenues and closed sales on 29,568 homes. The ink was just drying on a massive and potentially lucrative deal to transform Treasure Island with new housing complexes, and the well-connected Lennar already had secured a deal to develop the Hunters Point Shipyard that the Navy was turning over to San Francisco.
Business was booming and Lennar's books looked good — but the financial page was about to turn to a depressingly long chapter that Lennar and other homebuilding corporations helped write.
Before the deluge, Lennar parlayed its profits — and considerable political capital — into securing the trust of San Francisco leaders, who have bestowed two major military base redevelopments on the corporation. But substantial evidence suggests that Lennar's finances, much like Treasure Island itself, are not exactly resting on bedrock.
An examination of Lennar’s financial documents, and a raft of well-documented critical reports, suggests the company suffered especially deep wounds from a home-mortgage crisis that Lennar and other builders helped fuel through speculative over-building and their widespread issuing of subprime loans through subsidiary underwriting firms. Then, in a calculated bid to shore up its balance sheet, Lennar turned to Congress, the tax code, bank regulators and high-risk debt for financial salvation.
Posted by Spot. Us on 07/07/10Our editorial partner The SF Public Press has been publishing some of its special edition paper via the web.
And that means the informative special section on the Treasure Island development is starting to appear as well. Remember: If you've donated more than $10 toward this pitch you can request a copy of the paper be mailed to you. (Email Lila AT sfpublicpress dot org for details).
Meanwhile - slowly but surely we are approaching the 3k mark raised! If you haven't taken the latest "Community-Focused Sponsorship" SaveTheInternet.com - please do so! Just login/register (upper left hand corner) and click "Earn Credits."
And now - for the news. The following three pieces were written by Victoria Schlesinger, Alison Hawkes and Bernice Yeung
Financial Upside for developers is long-term and risky, city says.
The developers of Treasure Island stand to earn a potential 20.6 percent return on their investments if the 18-year, phased construction plan and land sales proceed as they predict. That does not include possible future real estate sales.
But San Francisco officials say the potential private upside is laced with long-term economic risks — only some of which are calculable — that will be borne mostly by the partner firms in Treasure Island Community Development, and their investors.
The massive and long-term project is complex and inherently uncertain, with homes and businesses to accommodate up to 20,000 people. Much of the uncertainty centers on the inexact science of predicting property values, as amply demonstrated by the recent housing bust.
Though many of the details have yet to be worked out, the Treasure Island Development Authority says that much of the payback from land sales will occur in later phases of the project, encouraging the developers to stick with it for the long haul and follow through with hundreds of millions of dollars in up-front investments before making a profit.
“In the first phase, they will not get their return,” said Jack Sylvan, redevelopment director for the Treasure Island Development Authority, the city’s agent negotiating the public-private partnership with the developer consortium. “And it’s likely that in the second phase they won’t have been able to get their return. Their ability to get their return is by being successful over a very long time period. Unless they hit some massive upswing in the market.”
Through two mayors, connected island developers cultivated profitable deal.
In the next six months, local officials and a consortium of private developers will begin to finalize legal papers for Treasure Island’s future as a high-density eco-city. Renderings of the gleaming towers, parks and gardens suggest harmony and community. Yet the promise of an urban Treasure Island, one of the most complex and risky redevelopments in San Francisco’s recent history, has for more than a decade been wrapped up in a process driven by power and influence. The mayor got neartotal control. Political friends got plum jobs and contracts. Critics were exiled. City and state conflict-of-interest laws were waived. Independent inquiries and the will of voters were nakedly rebuffed.
Big projects naturally draw big money. Treasure Island, currently slated for $6 billion in residential and commercial development, was an unusually large prize. But companies with political and social ties to two mayors won the two major projects related to the redevelopment — with the master development drawing only one serious bid.
The winning bidder was a group that included Darius Anderson, an influential Democratic Party lobbyist and fundraiser for both outgoing Mayor Willie Brown and incoming Mayor Gavin Newsom.
One partner was the Miami-based homebuilder Lennar, then the second-largest in the nation, also now leading the concurrent $7 billion Hunters Point Shipyard redevelopment and the conversion of the former Mare Island Shipyard in Vallejo. Other companies, backed in part with public employee pension funds, have also joined the team now known as Treasure Island Community Development.
Over the years, few have been outwardly critical of the contracting process. An exception was former city supervisor and mayoral antagonist Tony Hall. During his brief tenure as head of the Treasure Island Development Authority he raised allegations — not all borne out by facts — of missed deadlines, unpaid developer fees and a “sweetheart deal” in the making.
In 1998, San Francisco voters attempted to wrest power from Brown and install good-governance practices for Treasure Island. But supervisors never implemented many of the provisions in the ballot measure, which passed easily. Even today, some current and past city supervisors say they had to pick their battles, and Treasure Island has been a remote concern.
Posted by Spot. Us on 07/02/10
Our editorial partner The SF Public Press has been publishing some of its special edition paper via the web.
And that means the informative special section on the Treasure Island development is starting to appear as well. Remember: If you've donated more than $10 toward this pitch you can request a copy of the paper be mailed to you. (Email Lila AT sfpublicpress dot org for details).
Meanwhile - slowly but surely we are approaching the 3k mark raised! If you haven't taken the latest "Community-Focused Sponsorship" from Hacks/Hackers - please do so! Just login/register (upper left hand corner) and click "Earn Credits."
And now - for the news. The following three pieces were written by Victoria Schlesinger
Most of Treasure Island will be inundated by the end of this century, if the documented progression of the ocean’s rise caused by climate change continues as predicted. Studies foresee sea-level rise ranging from as little as five inches to as much as six feet. The lowest parts of Treasure Island lie just four feet above the Bay’s low tide.
To buffer the island from the Bay, project officials say they have hit upon a solution that protects the development from ever-changing climate change assumptions.
They will build up the ground on 100 acres of the island to accommodate as much as 36 inches of sea-level rise, set back development from the shore and leave room for future levees or other adaptations.
The currently planned work, including geotechnical improvements, is estimated to cost $137 million. If the developers are wrong, and sea-level rise is more extreme, the costs would climb higher.
“There are projections that range all over the map,” said Jack Sylvan, redevelopment director of the Treasure Island Development Authority, which oversees the island’s transformation for the city. “The challenge is, how do you actually plan for something that you don’t know what it’s going to look like?”
Pollution experts concerned about Treasure Island cleanup as seas rise
Many Treasure Island sites have been decontaminated through soil removal or capping, which entails covering the remaining toxic soil with a clay cap. But there is growing concern that coastal sites once considered sufficiently remediated may become problematic as sea levels rise. Contaminated soil could come in contact with ground water as the sea pushes it higher. Bay Area scientists and regulators are beginning to explore the problem given the large number of former military sites in the region.
As a former military site, Treasure and Yerba Buena islands suffer from environmental pollution problems affecting their soil, water, air and existing buildings. Not only does the Navy have environmental remediation to complete – from the removal of DDT and petroleum products to PCBs and lead – but also the developers anticipate that additional clean up will cost them $33 million. But because the Navy is only required to remediate an area to current use standards, if the developers want to build homes where an auto shop once stood, more cleaning will be required.
Sand and silt require $137 million fix for Treasure Island
There is a high probability that a Loma Prieta magnitude or greater earthquake will shake the Bay Area during the projected 18-year redevelopment of Treasure Island. However, city development officials say the island will ultimately be safer than the liquefaction-prone areas of downtown San Francisco and the Marina.
Parts of the city’s shoreline and all of Treasure Island are manmade. The island was constructed in the 1930s out of sand and silt dredged from the Bay and held in place with a riprap retaining wall. When loose water-saturated soil is shaken intensely, it turns into a thick, unstable liquid, a process called liquefaction.
The city and developer plan to compact the 100 acres of soil that will lie beneath the new buildings and around existing ones, as well as reinforce the island’s perimeter. They estimate the geotechnical improvements will cost $137 million.
“The buildings should structurally perform well on such soil assuming they are built to code,” said Thomas Holzer, a U.S. Geological Survey research geologist who studied Treasure Island following the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. “The untreated open space area could be pretty exciting in a large earthquake with water and sand spouting out of the ground.”
Posted by Spot. Us on 06/30/10
What does the massive redevelopment of Treasure Island give to San Francisco?
First and foremost, it funnels public money into jobs for construction workers and profits for the contractors who will do the building. The project also promises to loosen up a housing market that has stayed tight through the recession, creating 8,000 new residential units, 30 percent of it affordable housing. Bonus: All those new residents (around 20,000) and businesses will add significantly to the city’s tax base.
But the Treasure Island redevelopment, which aims to be the most ecologically sustainable community in the world, delivers something else as well: a positive self-image of San Francisco as a forward-looking, avant-garde, socially and environmentally responsible metropolis. Nothing excites the utopian impulse more than a blank slate — and Treasure Island’s 486 acres have been semi-abandoned since the Navy shut down its base in 1997.
Thus the island provides an almost-ideal laboratory for the latest green building and urban design techniques. In fact, reading the Treasure Island redevelopment plan (which you can do yourself at www.sftreasureisland.org) instantly reminded me of Ernest Callenbach’s classic 1975 novel “Ecotopia,” which speculates what would happen if Northern California, Oregon and Washington separated from the United States and tried to develop an ideal “stable-state” economy and culture.
Branded by some as a hippie-dippie relic, the book holds up shockingly well in 2010—and it continues to be discussed after having sold more than a million copies in nine languages. Some of Callenbach’s wacky, far-out proposals — like requiring every Ecotopian household to sort waste into compost and recycling — are now the twenty-first-century reality in Bay Area cities. Other ideas — like carbon neutrality — have come to seem perfectly reasonable in the age of rising sea levels. The following laundry list could come from Callenbach’s “Ecotopia”— but, in fact, these items come straight out of the Treasure Island sustainability plan:
Open space planning that minimizes energy and water consumption, encourages native plant usage and promotes biodiversity.
Great. But will this vision become a reality? The funny, but predicable, thing is that Treasure Island’s Ecotopia has some big, big bucks behind it, an estimated $5 billion. A lot can happen over the course of the two decades it will take to build Treasure Island — and with that much money at stake, the Ecotopian vision might not survive the ground-breaking and ribbon-cutting. It’s this tension between big vision and big money that makes the project interesting — and reveals both sides of San Francisco’s split personality.
On one side, stand the visionaries — people like Ernest Callenbach, who’d like to see urban life restructured along ecological lines. On the other side, we find the big money and hardball politics that make the Bay Area one of the wealthiest and most expensive regions in the world. Massive developments like Treasure Island don’t happen in velvet boxes. As this issue’s report by Victoria Schlesinger, Bernice Yeung, Alison Hawkes and Christopher Cook reveals, it took a lot of backroom deals to make this Ecotopia possible — and the players wouldn’t have gotten in the game if they hadn’t smelled a profit.
“Redevelopment in San Francisco has a bad reputation going to back to the ’60s,” says Chris Carlsson, director of the Shaping San Francisco oral history project, lead instigator of the Critical Mass bike ride and author of the 2008 book “Nowtopia.” “Without the strong public support, they don’t get permission to do it.” Indeed, the more one learns about the stake lobbyists and developers have in Treasure Island, the more one wonders if the Ecotopian vision isn’t just a way to sell development to a skeptical public.
Treasure Island isn’t the only, or even the first, eco-city under the sun. Other grand Ecotopias have not gone as planned: Critics like Christina Larson, writing in Yale Environment 360, argue that master-planned ecocities like Huangbaiyu, Liuzhou and Dongtan in China, which were all greeted by waves of fawning press, have so far fallen far short of their goals:
Dongtan and other highly touted eco-cities across China were meant to be models of sustainable design for the future. Instead they’ve become models of bold visions that mostly stayed on the drawing boards — or collapsed from shoddy implementation. More often than not, these vaunted eco-cities have been designed by big-name foreign architectural and engineering firms who plunged into the projects … with little feel for the needs of local residents whom the utopian communities were designed to serve.
But Treasure Island is in some ways quite different from those projects. Its commitments to stormwater wetlands and clean energy are legally binding, unlike in China. And unlike the Chinese projects, the Treasure Island redevelopment has been subjected to 15 years of intense expert scrutiny and public involvement. During a recent trip to Treasure Island, I saw signs everywhere advertising meetings for residents to give feedback on the project. When I asked one two-year resident if he’d had a chance to make his voice heard, he just laughed. “I’ve had too much opportunity!” he said. “I’m sick of hearing about it!”
Critics like Carlsson remain unconvinced, faulting the master-planned nature of the project. “The problem with master planning is that it’s a fantasy that you can engineer a good social life and sustainable living through architecture and design,” he said. And building a new city in the middle of the Bay is far from carbon neutral; two decades of construction will inevitably have a massive impact on the Bay’s ecology. It would be far better, Carlsson argues, for the island to become a laboratory and educational resource dedicated to “reintegrating the Bay as a food source and ecological resource for the community, not just something pretty to look at.”
But Carlsson emphasizes that even the most flawed development can be transformed by the people who live there. “I can imagine in 25 years people taking it back from the planners and turned it into a funky space where people live,” he says. Ernest Callenbach, ever hopeful, made a similar point, choosing to see Treasure Island as a process and an opportunity. "It's rare for a city to get the chance at spinning off a better self,” he told me. “Mitosis happens in biology. Now let's see if San Francisco can do it in ordinary life!”
In the end, the only thing we can do is watchdog the project as it unfolds over the course of the next 20 years, and try to hold developers and city officials to their promises — indeed, that’s why we launched our research into Treasure Island. From this perspective, Treasure Island stands to become a battleground, not utopia — and this shouldn’t surprise us. The word “utopia” is a Greek pun that simultaneously means “perfect place” and “no place,” suggesting that perfection is impossible. But the meaning of “ecotopia” is quite different: “eco” means home, and “ecotopia” is simply a human habitat. Treasure Island will never be utopia, but the plan does give us an ideal worth fighting for.
Posted by Spot. Us on 06/28/10
The SF Public Press pilot print newspaper has hit the streets! There is more than 50 stories lined up from reporters and more than two dozen independent and public media partners (including Spot.Us!) — so they expanded the paper from 24 to 28 full-size, broadsheet pages. That's 28 pages filled with news and features — and no paid advertising.
You can find a local seller of the paper here. If you donated $10 to this pitch you're entitled to get it delivered through the mail (contact Lila Lahood: lila AT sfpublicpress DOT org)
Content from the paper will slowly be released online at SF Public Press including a special section on Treasure Island development which we will publish on Spot.Us as well.
This pitch is halfway to its goal - and there is a new opportunity to earn $5 in credits from the latest community-focused sponsorship on Spot.Us. If you login/register at Spot.Us you can click "Earn Credits" take a quick survey and then earn $5 that can be put towards the pitch of your choice - including our Treasure Island story.
If everyone does it - we will be THAT much closer.
The Public Press would like to thank everyone thath as helped to put together this print pilot. Over 70 people contributed in some way shape and form - and some of them are represented on this pitch as well. It has been a great community effort.
Photo from Steve Rhodes
Posted by Spot. Us on 06/23/10Latest update from SF Public Press...
Posted by SF Public Press on 06/09/10Alison Hawkes' latest update from City Hall...
Posted by SF Public Press on 06/04/10
