Two Growth Measures Headed For Ballot

Two competing measures to control the city’s dot-com development boom appear headed for the November 7 ballot.

Mayor Willie Brown filed one of them this week, two minutes before the deadline. The rival initiative, backed by slow-growth activists, is called the “Daughter of Proposition M” in reference to the 1986 slow-growth measure that set the 950,000-sf annual cap on downtown high-rise construction.

Keeping the cap is one of the things the measures have in common, but there are several key differences. Generally, though, both are trying to widen the reach Proposition M, whose backers never envisioned a robust dot-com industry pushing the issue beyond downtown and into South of Market, Mission District and Potrero Hill.

“Daughter of Proposition M” would ban new offices in part of SoMa and the Mission and suspend construction elsewhere in those neighborhoods as well as in Bayview-Hunters Point. It would restrict office developments over 6,000 sf to fewer places, including downtown, port property, existing redevelopment project areas and the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard.

Brown’s plan calls for a two-year moratorium on large office construction only in the Mission and Potrero Hill, and would reportedly allow more construction to wend through the first year. Brown’s measure would also exempt government projects from the office cap and double to $30 the city fees charged to office developers.

Both measures would create incentives for developers to include space for nonprofit groups, which are being squeezed out of the high-priced rental market. Both would also deny dot coms of their reported efforts to be classified as something other than offices in order to evade the annual growth cap.

Meanwhile, San Francisco office vacancies are hovering around 1%, and for the first time in its history it is also one of the 10 most expensive office markets in the world, says a report by CB Richard Ellis Global Research & Consulting, a business unit of CB Richard Ellis Services.

The average annual occupancy costs in San Francisco shot up more than 26% to US $64.70/sf in the first six months of the year, placing it ninth on the world scale, according to the report. San Francisco is the first U.S. city to break into the top 10.