Over twenty-five hundred pages of public comments on the Draft Environmental Impact Report for the Golden State Warriors’ proposed Mission Bay Arena Project, and the City’s responses, have just been released in three volumes numbered Four (comments and responses), Five (comments and responses continued), and Six (appendices).
In addition to specific environmental, traffic and transportation concerns, general concerns raised include project financing and potential liabilities, quality of life impacts for the neighborhood and surrounding areas, and the potential for “urban decay” around Oakland’s Oracle Arena if the Warriors move.
The public hearing to either certify or reject the report will be held on November 3, 2015.
And having been deemed an Environmental Leadership Project by Governor Brown, if the Environmental Impact Report for the Arena development is certified, the timeline within which any EIR-based legal challenges will need to be resolved is capped at a little under a year.
Crony capitalism. This project is greased and will skid through. Despite the lack of transportation infrastructure and no significant plans for seriously improving it anytime soon.
It will win this vote. The initiative to block it that will follow – I am not so sure.
Any initiative to block this will fail miserably. The arena, to the disappointment of some, enjoys wide support in SF
How is it crony capitalism? This is one of the few examples of a stadium project being done right in this county. All of the construction cost will be funded with private money, and they have agreed to put millions of their profits beyond simply paying taxes directly into the transit system.
“The potential for “urban decay” around Oakland’s Oracle Arena if the Warriors move.”
It’s probably not fair to hold the GSW project proponents accountable for this one – they should have the freedom to move out of a bad neighborhood – but yes – it is pretty much inevitable that losing the Warriors means that already poor area around the existing Oracle Arena will deteriorate that much more. The reality is no one in SF City government cares about helping out Oakland. Never have – never will.
Stadiums don’t help the poor. Oakland can redevelop that land for housing and give their people what they really need. Housing security.
“Oakland can redevelop that land for housing”
With what money?
Have you ever driven through Oakland? Oakland already has plenty of vacant land available for housing. Plenty. There is no shortage of vacant land in Oakland. None what-so-ever. What Oakland doesn’t have is money to develop with. Money it will have even less of after this move.
Again – not really the Warriors problem – just the sad reality of our poor regional land use decisions.
Oakland has snagged a bunch of entities from San Francisco: the Sierra Club, Lennar Urban, the Worker’s Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, CoreLogic, a big chunk of Uber’s workforce, and a big chunk of Brown & Toland’s workforce, among others.
We could say the same about people in Oakland government. I doubt they felt any concern about taking so many jobs and tax revenue from San Francisco.
San Francisco has over 109 million gsf of office space. Oakland has about 16 million gsf of office space.
San Francisco office space rent per square foot are $$ double of Oakland’s rent per square foot.
San Francisco has half the vacancy rate in office space than Oakland.
Yes, Oakland has snagged a couple of entities from San Francisco – But No, saying Oakland is doing well at San Francisco expense has nothing to the do with economic reality. Nothing.
I for one will vote against the Giants Prop D/Mission Rock and will encourage as many people as I can to vote against it. Aside from the fact the Giants want to build 11 buildings 9-24 stories of really boring architecture, the real failure here is the Mayor’s and Planning Depts.
The Warriors Arena should be built where Mission Rock is and the Giants can build their housing with 40% BMR at the currently proposed arena site. This arrangement would make more sense on so many levels (transportation and traffic). But the Mayor couldn’t get the two sets of billionaire ownership of the Giants and Warriors to get together and build something that would benefit the City of San Francisco and not just their bottom lines. Mayor Lee: Fail!!!
Both developments will benefit the city of SF. Honestly the best plan was to put the arena out on the pier much closer to Bart but we saw how that went. They now own the land and it seems that there is little possibility of stopping the arena from being built on the site so your desires are moot. Voting against Mission Rock at this point does a major disservice to the city at large for something that will not come to pass anyway.
This is a really bad idea. The city is only concerned with its bottom line. With Giants and GSW games, this will mean year round traffic in Mission Bay, Potrero and neighborhoods near the 101/280 and 80 freeways. Despite the Giants stadium being close to Muni and Caltrain, fans still choose to drive to games.
UPDATE: City Approves Warriors Arena Impact Report, But Challenges Remain.