By Richard Ivanhoe, HANC President
Our July HANC meeting began with an update from District 5 Supervisor Bilal Mahmood. The budget process has been completed. $400 million is being put into reserves. About 1,000 vacant City positions have been cut. With negotiations, 150 filled positions that were to be cut was reduced to about 40 positions that were cut. More money was sent to the City Attorney’s office to help defend against the Trump administration. Additional funding was also sent to the Public Defender’s office to hire more immigration attorneys. Food access at Booker T. Washington was restored. Not all advocacy was successful—many other program cuts were not restored and will need to find alternate sources of funding. There are plans for both a regional and a local ballot measure to help fund MUNI, but the details have not yet been worked out. Supervisors Chen and Melgar are working on legislation to protect residents and businesses from displacement due to upzoning. Rezoning should go to a vote some time after the August recess. There was a concern that the rezoning legislation will allow residences above the first floor in Neighborhood Commercial Districts (including the Haight Ashbury) to be converted to commercial uses, which is currently prohibited.
Next, Tia Lombardi from San Francisco Heritage spoke about the Doolan-Larson House on the northwest corner of Haight and Ashbury. The house was built in 1903, and raised one story in 1906 to accommodate six storefronts. In 2018 Norm Larson left the house and storefronts to SF Heritage because he wanted it to be preserved. A Request for Concepts was put out on August 1, with responses due by the end of October, after which a Request for Proposals will be issued by the end of the year. The building is open for visits and tours on Thursdays from 4 to 6 pm through October. You can sign up for a tour, take a community survey about the property or download the Request for Concept Proposals at https://haightandashbury.org/submit-proposal/ .
Our final speaker was Melanie Bishop, a Preservation Planner with the San Francisco Planning Department. She began by describing SF Survey, a program of the Planning Department to identify places and resources of cultural, historical, and architectural importance to San Francisco’s communities. These can be both tangible and intangible. The present focus is on properties that do not currently have a historic designation. There are about 120,000 properties that are old enough to be eligible for historic designation. Over the last several years, the project has been pushed to focus on racial and social equity, and is focusing on communities and sites that might not have been historically recognized in San Francisco. This project will likely last beyond 2027. She next discussed the Counterculture Context Statement. The project was originally intended as a National Register Multiple Property document, but was later adapted into a historic context statement as part of SF Survey. Historic context statements explain what aspects of history and culture significantly shaped the physical development of the community. The Citywide Historic Context Statement is a collection of written documents that provide an informed framework for evaluating and determining historic significance. It is divided into three major categories--—cultural, thematic, and architectural. Within these categories a number of context statements that have been identified based on significant events in San Francisco, architectural styles, and different communities.
The Counterculture Historic Context Statement is organized around properties associated with the counterculture movement, which the primary author defined as occurring between 1965 and 1975. Some counterculture themes include The Diggers, New Tribalism, Community Services, Fashion, Art, Literature, Theater, Entrepreneurship, and Counterculture Press, Food Systems, Religion and Spirituality, and Gender or Sexual Revolution. Some related properties include the sites of the Diggers’ Free Stores, the Good Earth Headquarters, the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, and Huckleberry House. All of the research and information for the Counterculture Historic Context Statement has been uploaded into SF Cultural Heritage, the database for Historic Preservation. A building or site has historical significance if it can be associated with a significant event, associated with important people, has significant architecture, or the potential to contain important archeological resources.
Historic Preservation has been surveying Neighborhood Commercial Districts. There has been a preliminary determination that there is potential eligibility for a Haight Ashbury Historic District, but the team is still in the research and collecting information phase, and doesn’t have anything specific to report yet.
More information is available at various websites: The SF Survey website is https://sfplanning.org/sfsurvey . SF Cultural Heritage can be found at https://sfculturalheritage.org . Information about sharing community stories can be found at https://sfculturalheritage.org/plugins/community-stories-form . A podcast about SF Survey, recorded by the Western Neighborhoods project can be found at https://www.outsidelands.org/podcast/WNP530_SF-Citywide-Survey . The SF Survey Team can be reached via email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .
The Planning Department slides from this meeting can be downloaded from HANC’s website. Because of the size of the file, they have been split into two parts, and can be downloaded at https://www.hanc-sf.org/the-voice-and-docs/Meeting-Slides/July-2025-Slides-from-Planning---Part-1/ and https://www.hanc-sf.org/the-voice-and-docs/Meeting-Slides/July-2025-Slides-from-Planning---Part-2/