The AIDS Housing Alliance held a press conference yesterday to attack Hastings Law School’s plan to build a 450 space parking garage next door to an apartment building housing people with AIDS. The event comes nearly three years after civil disobedience and arrests broke up a Hastings Board meeting where an 885 space garage was subsequently approved. After former State Senator John Burton successfully persuaded Hastings to rescind its approval, a Blue Ribbon committee was created and the garage proposal was redesigned. It now looks like a major fight at the Planning Commission is brewing over the revised plans.
All has been quiet on the Hastings Law School front for the past two years, as the school’s revised plans for its site at Golden Gate and Larkin awaited approval from Hastings’ new partner in the venture, the Central YMCA. During this time, however, a new owner purchased the Rainbow Flag apartments at 324 Larkin, and the buiding is now a key referral site for the AIDS Housing Alliance.
The prospect of an eight-story parking garage abutting a building housing people with AIDS is already arousing grassroots opposition. As Brian Basinger of the Alliance stated yesterday, “The Rainbow Flag apartments are right next to the garage. That’s where the AIDS housing alliance puts its disabled members with AIDS. I know four people living there right now with cancer and AIDS. There’s going to be tailpipes fifteen feet from these people’s windows – these are housebound people who are going to have to breath exhuast 24 hours a day. There’s just now way we’re going to let this happen.”
Transit advocates also oppose the garage. Jeremy Nelson:of Transportation for a Livable City observed, “upwards of 90 percent of the people in this neighborhood don’t own a car. Not only that, but 40 percent of the UC Hastings students, faculty and staff commute to campus without a car. What the community needs is more housing that is affordable to the neighborhood.”
Although many believe that Hastings is exempt from San Francisco’s land use laws, this exemption does not apply to the garage because it does not serve an educational purpose. This means that the Planning Commission and potentially the Board of Supervisors will ultimately decide whether San Francisco really needs a competing facility for the nearby city-owned Civic Center Garage.
Protestors at UC Hastings College of the Law’s plan to build a 500 car parking structure. Photo by Kristina Barker
