Consider the cluster of policies that just resulted in the 469 Stevenson St project, alluded to in the article, getting axed. As I understand it: * The projec

Consider the cluster of policies that just resulted in the 469 Stevenson St project, alluded to in the article, getting axed. As I understand it: * The project had been before the Planning Commission for at least a year. * The project had completed an final Environmental Impact Report that had been approved by the Planning Committee. Another regulatory hurdle of questionable value for a mid-city development. * An advocacy group, Yerba Buena Neighborhood Consortium, apparently run by a local affordable housing ownership group called TODCO, had their lawyers file an appeal to the Board of Supes opposing certification of the EIR. What could have been a pro-forma approval is now another potential place for roadblock. * The environmental reasons? Millenium Tower FUD, gentrification, and shadows on a nearby mid-city plaza. The scope of EIRs has apparently gotten massive if gentrification is included. (Whether a Nordstrom valet parking lot better serves the local low-income community than actual housing with an affordable housing carve-out is another question.) * The Board of Supes reverses the Planning Commission's approval. Back to the drawing board. Or... if you want to _sell_ that property you can't do anything with, I'm sure there's a local property owner that will take it off your hands if the price is low enough. ;-) We see here multiple stages way beyond zoning where a housing project can get torpedoed, and that these extra stages have grown in scope to cover just about anything local property owners might want to object to. And that's not even considering San Francisco's Discretionary Review process, which gives local groups even _more_ opportunities to delay or kill your project if they don't like it.