Editorial: Another round of SOFA struggle emerges

There is more activity in that part of Palo Alto than any reasonable neighborhood or commercial area deserves.

After decades of benign neglect -- when city officials ignored repeated requests to take a comprehensive look at the core area bounded roughly by Forest Avenue, Alma Street, Cowper Street and Addison Avenue (spilling toward Embarcadero Road on the westerly side) -- the city launched the original SOFA study in 1997.

There was initial optimism: "The challenge here is to leave a legacy for other people," Addison Avenue resident Carol Malcolm said in April 1998.

And there was cynicism: By creating the SOFA coordinated area plan, "you have perverted the most lineal, equitable land-use process into a nightmare," developer Chop Keenan, who has offices in the area, warned city officials at the time.

Following a lengthy wrangle over how to develop the 9-plus acres formerly occupied by the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, the study became the SOFA 2 study for the area west of Ramona Street.

The SOFA Working Group started with 13 members and eventually grew to 18. Three planning directors and several planning staff members came and went as the study alternately lurched and plodded forward. Residents and property owners were involved in months, now years, of meetings. At one point there was an eight-month gap between meetings, hardly conducive to a healthy momentum.

Some initially, and naively, believed the study could be accomplished in a year or so. Now it seems as if the better part of a decade will pass with the region's future still unresolved. Tracing the history of this study would make a terrific Ph.D. thesis for some future planning official -- a case study of how wrong, and long, a process can go.

This is a sad testament to a mixture of muddled leadership at the city level; turnover of key personnel in the city planning department, which was overloaded with other projects at key times in the study process; conflicting views and power struggles between residents and within the University South Neighborhood Group (USNG); and intransigence on the part of commercial property owners.

By late 2001 it was becoming clear that there were irreconcilable differences among the various components of the group -- residents, commercial interests, housing advocates. Things have gone from bad to worse since.

Once again, the situation bespeaks a community where people are far more expert at asserting personal positions than they are at knowing how to listen and compromise.

But it is also a testament to the inherent complexities involved in planning for the future of a historically mixed-use area, a border zone between residential and commercial uses.

The border wars are now heating up again, fueled by a major fight over the size and scale of the proposed housing development at 800 High St. that will almost certainly wind up on the election ballot next November.

The emergence last week of an alliance of commercial property owners -- kicked off by a dinner at Spago's restaurant hosted by developer Jim Baer -- will bring the divisions even more into the public eye in the next few months. The bottom-line position of the group is to fight for the status quo in terms of zoning for the area, rejecting the SOFA Working Group's proposals as having been dominated by residential interests.

That is an unfortunate position. It's the death of dialogue and a sure route to a bitter political season leading up to the November election.

The Weekly has long supported the concept of balancing interests in the area, and a process of compromise to arrive at such a balance. If the property owners and developers succeed in blocking any recommended changes supported by the Working Group or the Planning and Transportation Commission, it will mean the entire investment in the SOFA study process will have been a complete waste of time, energy and money.

It is becoming one more failure of leadership, process, compromise and tolerance to add to Palo Alto's growing list of such failures -- a chronic inability to create anything positive out of the rich mix of resources and talent the community boasts.