Sunday 11.27.16

Thoughts on a Misunderstood Land Use

Though the American presidential contest dominated the November election season, San Franciscans also voted for a number of propositions regulating urban land use. California’s ballot proposition system is a quirky institution, allowing a wide variety of measures to make it on the ballot for a direct plebiscite, and few elections occur in San Francisco without propositions addressing the city’s fraught and fractious land use planning system. This past November 8th, a particular proposition caught my eye – Proposition X, Preserving Space for Neighborhood Arts, Small Businesses and Community Services in Certain Neighborhoods. The generic name of the measure belied its import. If passed, Prop X would require any new real estate development that would demolish or convert space used for production, distribution, or repair (known as “PDR”) to replace that space with that same usage. Though California’s ballot counting process is notoriously slow and the results are not yet official, unofficial counts at the time of this blog posting project the measure passing with nearly 60% of the vote.

PDR is a term that has existed in the San Francisco planning lexicon for decades, deliberately replacing “industrial” or “light industrial” to avoid evoking major, “smoke-stack” manufacturing activities. Rather, PDR encompasses a broad variety of manufacturing and industrial functions that, while economically productive, can nevertheless coexist with offices and even be relatively proximate to residential uses. This includes activities like printing, garment manufacturing, catering, graphic design, warehousing and wholesaling, and auto repair – a wide range of functions that share a need for flexible building space, relatively modest floor plates, and cheap rents. Even in a tech-hub like San Francisco, a robust core of PDR has remained from the city’s industrial heyday. This is increasingly seen as desirable, particularly as macroeconomic transformations have shifted this scale of manufacturing to niche, high value-add, and high-creativity activities that enrich their urban surroundings as they attract creative talent, serve local customers, and provide a diverse economic bulwark against downturns. PDR expands the traditional understanding of mixed use; however, it also constitutes yet another target of gentrification, with high-end residential increasingly displacing PDR businesses. Affordable PDR rivals affordable housing in its importance to a healthy urban economy.

There are problems with Proposition X. I bristle against putting broad land use regulations up for a plebiscite, rather than channeling them through existing planning legislation. A ballot proposition is a very broad brush for a regulatory mechanism that requires much finer strokes in implementation. It is also unclear how economically feasible these replacement spaces will be for developers, particularly given other municipal requirements for affordable housing units and retail. Nor is it clear how suitable these spaces will actually be for the PDR users they are intended to serve. But the notion of putting affordable PDR space in the same policy league as affordable housing is compelling and heartening.

Reflecting on San Francisco has, perhaps surprisingly, informed my thinking on Downtown Cairo, where OHK is currently engaged in the development of an urban regeneration strategy. Downtown is an urbanized area that has experienced a long-term “infiltration” of PDR, in some cases taking the form of districts or clusters (such as the concentration of car repair shops along Champollion Street) and in other cases resulting from the questionably legal conversion of individual residential units within Downtown’s classic belle-époque buildings into light manufacturing. While San Francisco has “discovered” that PDR and other uses can coexist, Downtown Cairo has, in essence, known this for decades, with the original residential and high-end retail uses having given way, intermittently, to small production facilities. 

In the absence of robust land use control enforcement in Cairo, Downtown has not had to unlearn the segregation of uses that has impaired so many American cities’ livability (and that San Francisco escaped only by virtue of its unique geography). That is not to say that there are no problems in Downtown Cairo’s usage mixture. Light industrial can pose environmental challenges and threats, as evidenced by the car repair waste materials that spill onto sidewalks and gutters in the peripheries of Downtown. Moreover, many of the PDR forms that hold such promise in San Francisco (small design shops, digital workshops, and small batch manufacturing) have limited precedence in Downtown Cairo’s urban economy. Nevertheless, the natural diversity of uses can be an asset, particularly in light of the preoccupation with land use segregation in Cairo’s new urban communities.

To the extent that there is an official planning vision for Downtown Cairo, as evinced in strategic plan documents like Cairo 2050, it entails “purification” – a removal of existing uses to make way for what is variously described as a heritage zone, a tourism zone, a world-class business center, or even an open-air museum. Though these visions are largely conceptual, none of them sounds particularly amenable to the presence of PDR in Downtown Cairo. When approaching urban regeneration, we take existing economic activity as a critical baseline. In looking at the regeneration of Downtown Cairo, we at OHK are struck by how much of a departure it is from traditional urban regeneration efforts that struggle to revive derelict and disused urban cores. Downtown Cairo is, by contrast, a remarkable economic engine. Regeneration is a question of tuning this engine. In this respect, it is not altogether dissimilar from the challenges San Francisco sought to address with Proposition X.

While I personally have doubts about the efficacy of Prop X as a regulatory tool, the impulse driving it holds lessons for Downtown Cairo (and indeed other global cities wrestling with the challenge of encouraging economic growth while respecting and seeking to empower existing economic life):

• Adaptive reuse opportunities in dense urban cores (such as the conversion opportunities posed by public and ministerial buildings in and around Downtown) should endeavor to include PDR uses within the spectrum of development concepts, but taking the development as an opportunity to move towards a higher caliber of such uses. Whether Vienna’s MuseumsQuartier, Cape Town’s Watershed, or San Francisco’s Pier 70, examples abound of PDR-earmarked space catalyzing urban regeneration.

• City managers should encourage building resource efficiency interventions for PDR uses, which are typically overlooked by residential and commercial standards, even though these uses can be among the most energy-intensive in a building. Efficiency interventions constitute investments in the economic feasibility of PDR uses.

• Planners should acknowledge that PDR is not always the highest and best use. For instance, the profusion of car repair shops along Champollion Street in Downtown Cairo is at odds with the leisure, food, and beverage opportunities offered by the remarkable, tree-lined lane. The San Francisco approach of retaining all PDR space is not workable in Cairo (and may ultimately prove to be unworkable in San Francisco as well). It is thus essential to define zones in which PDR is, in fact, the highest and best use, and encourage it to thrive.