Trees. Awnings. A lone cloud or a long blanket of fog. At one time or another, they’re going to get between you and the sun. Anywhere else, shadows are part of life. In San Francisco, we don’t let such things go.
Back in the 1980s, when skyscrapers such as the 695-foot tower at 345 California St. were sprouting downtown, housing advocates and anti-freeway activists were up in arms against what they called the “Manhattanization” of the city. Out of this ferment came Proposition K, the “Sunlight Ordinance” — not to be confused with San Francisco’s Sunshine Ordinance, which ensures more open government and easier access to public records.
The Sunlight Ordinance, which I’ll call the Shadow Rule for clarity’s sake, specifically aimed to protect public spaces under the jurisdiction of the Recreation and Parks Department.
Buildings over 40 feet, the ordinance says, “can only be approved by the Planning Commission if the shadow is determined to be insignificant or not adverse to the use of the park.” That is along with, we could add, the private outdoor beer garden.
Wait, what? How did the Shadow Rule, written specifically to protect public parks, apply to a private business?
Let’s look at the recent case regarding Zeitgeist, the long-running, grouchy, punk-rock bar and sticker showcase at the north end of Valencia St., which recently won concessions from the development right across the street. The oil-change business there now is slated to be razed and replaced with a five-story building with 28 housing units (16 one-bedrooms and 12 two-bedrooms), parking for cars and bikes, and retail space, just steps away from transit lines on Market and a few blocks from a BART station. Adding more housing near transit, near longtime businesses, without having to displace a single resident is a good idea. Right?
In theory, yes. In practice, Zeitgeist’s management contended its popular and legacy San Francisco business would be destroyed if the new building’s shade dampened the appeal of the bar’s sun-dappled outdoor beer garden. The operations manager for Zeitgeist, Gideon Bush, also told a local blog that although he doesn’t want to shut down the development, the proposed building was “a super-clean and super-modern type of complex … it just doesn’t fit in with the neighborhood.”
We’ll leave for another day the question how anti-establishment you can be if you’re protecting yourself with “legacy business” status, concerned about fitting in, and pining for sunshine and fresh air. What’s important is that Zeitgeist appealed to the Planning Commission, which ruled in February that the new building would have to be 5 feet shorter, which in turn would cast 2% less shadow, the equivalent of eight large picnic tables.
Gray area
On the face of it, this sounds like a win for everyone. The developer makes a tweak, San Francisco doesn’t lose housing (including four affordable units) it desperately lacks, and Zeitgeist drinkers get a few more minutes per day to flirt with skin cancer.
“San Francisco has the planning code, then there’s the discretionary-review process, where anything goes,” says Adam Phillips, a real-life shadow consultant. His firm PreVision Design provided shadow analysis for the Zeitgeist-adjacent project.
What he’s referring to is how our Planning Commission lays out the codes and guidelines for development, including land use, zoning, building permits, and so on. It makes sure rules like the Shadow Rule are followed. Projects meet requirements, papers are stamped, permits are granted, pretty straightforward. Then there’s this: A member of the public can fill out a firm, pay a $578 fee (which can be waived), and make the commission exercise “special power” over a project — make changes or reject it outright, beyond the normal rules and processes — when the parties involved can’t work out a dispute. So San Francisco has planning rules, and one of them is to allow anyone to have the city’s representatives bend them, break them, or make them up.
This is how, years into a housing crisis, disputes over heights, views, parking, over buildings that may look too clean and modern and therefore unwelcome, continue to delay and stymie projects that could add more units onto the market. Whether it’s market-rate units or affordable senior housing, “a lot of these environmental-impact and shadow studies become opportunities for debates to play out,” says Phillips.
Work in the dark
Phillips, who started doing shadow work in 2010, can crank out a full report in a week or two for a relatively small project if the shading only affects one park or parcel. He uses 3D computer models to compare the estimated shadows of a proposed project to existing conditions. “Downtown shadows can be 10 or 20 blocks,” Phillips points out.
It can be a challenge to squeeze all the information into a short presentation. At meetings, you might have just five minutes to present what Phillips calls a complex and dynamic data set. A snapshot of a shadow never tells the whole story, he says: “Shadows move, accelerate and decelerate at different times of day. … There aren’t standards out there that say this is acceptable or unacceptable. A sunny 46-degree day is quite different than a sunny 80-degree day in the use of open spaces. It’s a vast oversimplification to say ‘This is the real impact,’ but voters in their wisdom decided these [shadows] were factors, and now it’s part of the planning code.”
Nor are there standard tools to make the analysis cut-and-dry. “All of us who produce these reports become by necessity software engineers,” Phillips notes. “A few of us in the Bay Area made it even nerdier.” (At the same time, he acknowledges there is “a ton of software” for solar analysis, to tell where’s the best place to catch the sun for energy generation.)
When asked about San Francisco’s housing wars, Phillips keeps his comments in the demilitarized zone. He recognizes that “you get this sort of tension” between the urgency of more housing and opponents who see planners simply rubber-stamping projects. “Data can be used to show lots of conflicting viewpoints. As an engineer and scientist, I take great pain not to take on an advocacy role for clients beyond reporting information. … That said, I sit in on meetings, I’m privy to conversations between clients and opponents of projects. You put up a project, the sponsor says [the shadow is] ‘totally insignificant,’ and the opponent says ‘See, it totally destroys my park or business.’”
Setting aside Zeitgeister Gideon Bush’s spurious criticism about the project’s aesthetics, the bar folks seem to have been forthright trying resolve the dispute, and that likely helped them during the discretionary review, in which every proposal “becomes something of a beauty contest — how nice has the developer been, listened to concerns, done enough for XYZ,” Phillips says. “The commission really wants to see that effort.”
After looking over Zeitgeist’s documents on the matter, here’s a tip for developers navigating San Francisco’s planning process: Maybe it’s not helpful when corresponding with riled-up neighbors to feign concern and then send an email that says “we see no reason for any further discussions.”
It’s OK to be punk rock. Just don’t be a punk.
