Bayview-Hunters Point too was changing. San Francisco had embarked upon an ambitious program, Hope SF, to rebuild the district's crumbling public housing. The Hunters Point Naval Shipyard began a long and troubled remediation and redevelopment process. Despite the heated real estate market of San Francisco, a quick sale was logistically not feasible; the site was encumbered with operational assets, transmission line easements, paper streets, 5 public trust claims and unresolved title issues. The property was expected to remain vacant as these various matters were cleared and the substation modernisation project completed. Given the project timelines, it would be the mid-2020s before the site would be available for redevelopment. The operational focus of PG&E revealed that the old way of doing business was increasingly less suited for cities and communities in this post-industrial era. Districts which had traditionally sponsored these facilities had changed. Facilities and systems that supported heavy industry (armaments construction, shipbuilding and power generation) were being replaced with a civic infrastructure of the commons – a reclaimed waterfront, open space, health care and educational institutions. This shift was not solely the result of the changing land-use patterns of a post-industrialised economy but also the product of years of community activism. As a result, the siting and operation of infrastructure began to be critically examined for its impacts on surrounding communities. approach Planning the next chapter of the Hunters Point Power Plant property was, and remains, complicated. On its surface, it is a victory – a polluting power plant is closed after years of community struggle and agitation. A closer examination revealed that moving quickly to redevelop the site did not align with the company’s operational priorities, nor was it feasible. Instead, we re-framed the discussion around site disposition. What followed was not a traditional planning process per se ; rather, it was an effort to coordinate the primary areas of work – remediation, land planning and substation modernisation, into a cohesive site strategy. A key tactic was the proposal of a series of built and programmatic interventions that, when aligned with required remediation processes, reconnected the community to the site, changed perceptions and catalysed future development. Each discrete intervention, NOW Hunters Point, Hunters Point Shoreline, Substation Modernisation and Hunter's Point Vision Document, was meant to be greater than the sum of its parts, laying the foundations of a redevelopment strategy. 3 https://sfenvironment.org/news/press-release/pge-shuts-down-hunters- point-power-plant 4 PG&E’s approach to buying, selling and holding property focused on fulfilling operational functions. Once a property or facility had reached the end of its working life, it went through a bureaucratic process to 'surplus' the property before being warehoused or sold. The utility had no strategy to oversee the decommissioning of an infrastructural asset and the eventual return of a property to the public realm 5 A 'paper street' has been planned and appears on official maps but has not been built. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_street
2010
remediation and site strategy On May 15, 2006, after more than two decades of community activism and struggle, Hunters Point Power Plant closed. Pacific Gas & Electric had committed itself to remediating most of the site to residential standards. 3 Urb-in joined the team just before the start of the remediation process in 2010. I had recently finished a graduate degree in architecture and re-entered the workforce during the great recession. In 2010, PG&E had no capacity, or desire, to think about long-term plans for the site. They simply wanted to remediate the site and move on. Any substantive site planning would be addressed once the remaining substation was replaced. 4 Understanding that the utility was simply in a holding pattern, we looked at the projects that the utility was compelled to complete and offered solutions that we felt might advance the eventual site redevelopment. I was hired to consult with the remediation and public affairs teams on short- and long-term strategic planning. In my naïveté I thought that the path to eventual redevelopment of the site would follow a linear and logical trajectory. Instead I learned that the actual remediation was simply one, albeit critical, step toward eventual disposition. The path was not clear – in fact many hurdles would need to be overcome from operational imperatives, bureaucratic inertia and budgetary constraints. The closure of Hunters Point Power Plant in 2006 and the shuttering of the Potrero Power Plant in 2010 had left San Francisco without power generation; all sources of electricity came from outside the city, from the south or east. The utility’s key imperatives were to remediate and shore up its existing infrastructural systems, which meant replacing the aging transmission and distribution substation remaining on three-acres of key waterfront site. Power Generation Plant remediation, from 2010 to 2017, spanned the tail-end of the 2007-2009 recession and a long period of growth fuelled, in large part, by the technology sector. As San Francisco emerged from the recession, the redevelopment of the southeastern waterfront accelerated as large portions of the southern waterfront transformed into new mixed-use districts, and others moved into planning stages.
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on site review 41 :: infrastructure
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