City plans Hunters Point redevelopment without the 49ers

If the San Francisco 49ers move to Santa Clara, city officials are ready to move forward with redeveloping Hunters Point without of a stadium and instead hope to draw greentech businesses. (Mike Koozmin/Special to The Examiner)

SAN FRANCISCO — While the idea that the 49ers may be relocating to Santa Clara is spreading melancholy among San Francisco-based football fans, it’s also creating uncertainty for The City’s largest planned redevelopment project.

A new stadium demanded by the football franchise has long been planned as the anchor of a massive redevelopment project at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. The plans aim to construct office and research space, shops and up to 10,500 homes in a 770–acre swath of southeastern San Francisco.

And with more than a decade of construction scheduled to begin at the shipyard next year, the question hanging over the project is what to do with the 25-acre lot set aside for a stadium if the Niners decide to move out of town.

As a backup, city officials and developers are drafting contingency plans, which will be put in place if the team decides not to accept the shipyard playing venue.

One of those proposals is to build research and office space, especially for small companies that do business in emerging fields.

But the idea is not to draw just one large company into the area to replace the stadium as the project’s anchor. So-called anchor projects can help redevelopment projects succeed by attracting visitors, vitality and industry.

A UC San Francisco campus is widely credited with helping ensure the success of the biotech- and housing-focused Mission Bay redevelopment project.

Egon Terplan, policy director at the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, said the shipyard redevelopment project could succeed without a large anchor.

“This is a very different kind of project from Mission Bay,” Terplan said. “The 49ers stadium shouldn’t be seen as analogous with the UCSF campus, because it wouldn’t be used with the same frequency. I think the project would work without a specific anchor.”

Instead, master developer Lennar Corp. and The City hope to attract multiple institutions to establish headquarters and operations at the site to help create a greentech industry hub, under one of the two stadium-free alternatives being considered, according to Michael Cohen, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s chief economic adviser.

The fast-emerging greentech sector, which is sometimes called the cleantech sector, is filled with startup and diversifying companies that are developing technologies to help address environmental problems, such as climate change and freshwater shortages.

Demand for such technologies is being driven largely by the introduction and proposed introduction of environmental laws, such as caps on carbon emissions, in the U.S. and elsewhere.

A smaller greentech hub is planned at the shipyard if the stadium is built.

“We would love to get a number of regional universities to come together — our strategy is to put together collaborations,” Cohen said.

“You can’t micromanage it. The market and technology is going to be pushing in directions you can’t even imagine now.”

Even with the stadium, the greentech industry will likely be a large part of the redevelopment.

Existing plans include more than 2 million square feet of office and research space targeted at companies in the greentech and related high-tech sectors.

Without a stadium, one of the two alternatives being explored by Lennar would see the office-and-research space doubled to 5 million square feet, according to Lennar Vice President Kofi Bonner, who is overseeing the project.

“There’s a tendency for those kinds of companies to want to come together in a campus-like setting where they can exchange ideas,” Bonner said. “We would create a series of minicampuses divided by green space.”

The proposal is attractive to the greentech sector, but San Francisco faces stiff worldwide competition from other cities that are courting the same companies, according to Dallas Kachan, a journalist and marketing director at the Cleantech Group, an industry research and investment giant.

“The Bay Area continues to have an important mix of capital, talent and research that makes it a hotbed of innovation,” Kachan said. “But it’s not the only hotbed of innovation.”

As a result, discounted leasing rates and other attractive commercial terms would be critical to ensuring the success of the proposal, according to Kachan.

Bonner agreed. “The City would probably have to put in some incentivized programming to attract these kinds of businesses,” he said.
If the attraction of businesses to the shipyard site does not pan out as a viable option, there is also the plan to build houses on the stadium site.

That proposal would see 1,350 homes currently planned at the current Candlestick Point site would instead be built sooner than planned at the proposed site of the new stadium, according to Bonner.

Environmental cleanup of the 25-acre proposed stadium site has been prioritized over surrounding shipyard land, and it’s expected to be ready for infrastructure and grading work next year.

The other alternative being pursued would see building heights and density reduced in a southern chunk of the redevelopment project.

“You don’t add to the number of homes — you just reduce the number on this [Candlestick Point] site,” Bonner said.

As a result, homes could be more spacious and expensive than they would be if they were built according to current plans.

If the Niners decide to not take the shipyard stadium, there is also one more question of land — an area that cannot be built on.

The proposed shipyard stadium provides an innovative use for surrounding land that’s not considered developable because of radiation issues.

The radioactively contaminated land is proposed to be used for stadium parking, with grass parking lots used on nongame days as sports fields.

If the stadium is not built, sports fields are still planned to be built in that area, according to Bonner.

A major project

Latest redevelopment plans for the shipyard and Candlestick Point:

$2 billion
Estimated cost of project

770 acres
Development area

11,900
Housing units slated to be built

700,000 square feet
Planned retail space

300 acres
Parkland and trails

Source: Singer Associates Public Relations

Homebuilding ready to begin in Parcel A

Construction of new homes in the first patch of the shipyard that’s slated to be redeveloped is expected to begin in the coming months.

Most of the former Navy shipyard still requires extensive environmental cleanup before the Navy will transfer ownership to The City for redevelopment purposes.

The cleanest slab of the shipyard, however, which is in the middle of the site and is known as Parcel A, was relatively uncontaminated and it has already been conveyed to The City.

Construction of 1,400 homes on the 66-acre Parcel A is expected to take up to five years to complete.

Lennar expects to complete preparatory work on Parcel A by the end of this year, and then it will commence construction of 83 homes that will constitute two neighborhood blocks within the project, according to spokesman Jason Barnett.

Those homes might be ready to be lived in by late 2011 or in early 2012, according to Barnett.

Stadium or no stadium?

The plan is to build a new stadium at the old Hunters Point shipyard, but there are also plans ready in the event the team moves away.

Preferred plan:
New 49ers stadium built in the heart of the shipyard on a 25-acre block of land called Parcel G

Alternative plans:

• Office and research space built on Parcel G to increase overall commercial space in the redevelopment project
• Homes built on Parcel G to reduce building heights and housing density elsewhere in the project

Source: Lennar Corp.

Transportation, pollution still sticking points for the Niners

A low-rate for a new stadium at Hunters Point may not be enough to overcome the area’s biggest problems — pollution and transportation.

In a bid to woo the 49ers to the shipyard instead of Santa Clara, The City is offering a $1 per year lease of the proposed stadium site, while master developer Lennar Corp. is offering to funnel $100 million of anticipated redevelopment profits into stadium construction efforts.

Santa Clara voters are set to decide early next year whether their city should spend $114 million to help build a $937 million 49ers stadium in time for the 2014 season next to the Great America theme park — the team’s stated preferred new home.

The team’s training and administration facilities are already located in the Silicon Valley city.

Additionally, the franchise has long been telling San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom that the shipyard ranks low on its list of potential new Bay Area homes because of transportation and pollution problems.

“As you know,” team owner John York wrote Newsom in a Jan. 2, 2007 letter, “we undertook a detailed study of Hunters Point (Shipyard) a couple of years ago, and concluded that the site had two serious problems.”

The problems, York said, were the proposed site’s long distance from existing roads and freeways, as well as uncertainty over the Navy’s ongoing cleanup of the heavily polluted former shipyard.

In a more recent letter to Newsom, dated May 13, 2009, York commended the ongoing shipyard cleanup work, but he said “the transportation concerns that we outlined two years ago remain unresolved.”

Those concerns could also plague any large development aimed at businesses that are proposed to be a backup if the stadium is not constructed in the redevelopment project.

jupton@sfexaminer.com