Sunnydale Project Receives Conditional Approval of LEED ND Gold Plan

Project Description: The Sunnydale community, originally built as a visionary housing solution for wartime ship builders, is now a dilapidated assembly of disconnected buildings. Its leftover spaces are difficult to police and difficult to access. The new Sunnydale will be redeveloped incrementally to create a network of streets that connect with the surrounding neighborhood; create a variety of housing types for a mix of incomes and provide carefully scaled park spaces and recreational opportunities lined with public facilities. Principles of sustainable “green” development for the neighborhood and greater community will be integral to this transformation.

Check out the plans here.

Vision: Redesign Sunnydale into a mix of uses typical of other San Francisco neighborhoods, including housing, services, community facilities, open space, and neighborhood-serving retail.

Project Requirements: To replace all existing public housing units with minimal displacement and to reintegrate the community to the greater neighborhood.

Conditionally Approved LEED ND Gold Plan: VMWP's Sunnydale HOPE SF Master Plan application for LEED ND Stage 1 certification has been submitted and approved by the US Green Building Certification Institute. It is the first United States project to receive conditional approval at the LEED Gold level, one of three major checkpoints on the path to certification as a LEED for Neighborhood Development project and one of the first three submitted in the world.

The LEED for Neighborhood Development Rating System integrates the principles of smart growth, urbanism and green building into the first national system for neighborhood design. LEED for Neighborhood Development is a collaboration among USGBC, Congress for the New Urbanism, and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

LEED-ND certification provides independent, third-party verification that a development's location and design meet accepted high levels of environmentally responsible, sustainable development.

Superfund City

From Spot.us,

Alice Griffith Housing Project is part of a redevelopment plan called HOPE SF, which has been underway for the past five years. The program seeks to transform San Francisco’s most distressed public-housing sites into thriving mixed-income communities. The staff at HOPE SF says it will rebuild every housing unit but says not everyone will get to come back. 



“By the time they begin the moving, at least 60 percent of the residents will have been moved out because of gang injunctions or not having the correct paperwork or just plain misinformation,” says Grace Martinez, a grassroots organizer at Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, or ACCE, formerly known as ACORN in the Bay Area.

 Read more at spot.us

San Francisco public housing shouldn’t be left hopeless

From the SF Examiner,

It was 2007 when then-Mayor Gavin Newsom launched the ambitious Hope SF initiative, making a promise to the residents in eight of San Francisco’s most-dilapidated public housing projects that help was arriving. The unlivable conditions arising from years of underfunding and deferred maintenance would be addressed with the old buildings being torn down and new mixed-economy community would be built.

But after all the grand fanfare, with impressive deals made in anticipation of city funding contributions and millions of dollars raised for design and preliminary development, the harsh reality of the national housing meltdown brought the dream crashing to a halt. Public housing residents who have been repeatedly disappointed are back in limbo, living day-to-day in homes that — in many cases — are vermin-infested, lack heat, have broken walls, ceilings or windows, and are consistently rated as dangerous and life-threatening.

Read more at SF Examiner