S.F. Man Fought, Beat CityHall / He blocked building of condo next door

Dan Levy, Chronicle Staff Writer
Published Monday, December 22, 1997
1997-12-22 04:00:00 PDT SAN FRANCISCO –

– The 2600 block of Sutter Street in the far reaches of the Western Addition isn’t remarkable by San Francisco standards. But anyone who saw this jumble of Victorian- inspired row homes would have to agree that the look is very “San Francisco.”In front, there’s a colorful medley of steep stoops, jutting bay windows and assorted cornices, balconies and pediments. In back, the yards are narrow, deep and separated by fences low enough that neighbors know who among them are the gardeners, sunbathers or cocktailers. It’s a familiar setup for tens of thousands of San Franciscans, which is why Sutter Street resident Steve Williams believes that people around town might understand why he endured a grueling battle against the city and a developer to beat back what he saw as a threat to neighborhood integrity.

Williams, a 40-year-old lawyer, may well go down as a folk hero in the annals of San Francisco’s perennial zoning wars. His quixotic one-man effort to stop a four-story, 7,000- square-foot condominium from rising on an adjacent lot culminated recently with Williams’ hauling Mayor Willie Brown’s vaunted planning bureaucracy to court — and winning.

“Isn’t it great?” Williams said with a weary but satisfied chuckle the other morning, reflecting on the qualities that make living in San Francisco such a distinctive experience. “That’s the thing these commissions and developers don’t realize. We’re not frivolous NIMBYs. We’re just trying to save the character of our neighborhoods.” Last month, complying with an extraordinary Superior Court order to reconsider city approval of the condominium project, the San Francisco Board of Permit Appeals vindicated eight months of Williams’ sweat and tears by revoking the building permit and killing the condo. The case was a fluke, since development battles usually are fought earlier on, at the Planning Commission. Still, the stunning combination of court intervention and the appeals board’s rare reversal — only its second overturning of a construction permit in 17 years, a deputy city attorney said — was enough to start a buzz among city planning watchers.

“This sends a message,” said Anita Theoharis, a Planning Commission member who was a
West of Twin Peaks activist before being appointed to the panel in August. “The judge said
that the Residential Design Guidelines are part of the city code, and they have to be
adhered to.” “I think neighborhood groups are ecstatic about the decision,” Theoharis said. “But I don’t think developers are happy.”

For underdog Williams, who challenged the combined resources of a developer, two law firms and several city agencies — not to mention the unspoken imperative of Brown’s drive to build — heady feelings have yielded to exhaustion and “post-victory depression.”

S.F. Man Fought, Beat CityHall / He blocked building of condo next door – SFGate
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He says he put in 500 hours of his own time fighting the city and condo sponsor Ashbourne
Construction, spent $5,000 in court and administrative fees and saw his personal life fray around the edges. He worries about unfulfilled obligations to his Oakland law partners and about meeting mortgage payments.

“If I knew back in March how much this was going to cost me, I might have moved,”
Williams said, seeming more a vanquished foe than the guy who beat City Hall. “It kind of
ruined my life. The developers’ mentality was so arrogant, and the city opposed every
single sentence of the judge’s order. I even got cited for contempt by the city attorney.
Thank goodness I’m a lawyer.”

But the gloom yields to fiery indignation when Williams thinks about what motivated him
in the first place. Catch him at the right moment, and he sounds poised for another battle.
“Developers today operate under a culture of maximization — they want to ‘build out’ as much as they can,” Williams said. “They feel they can’t be stopped. “I felt that our neighborhood was under assault,” he continued. “The condo would have put my garden in shade. It would have gone 30 feet past my neighbor’s house. It would have looked hideous. I would have walked outside, and there I’d be standing next to the cliffs of Gibraltar.”

The case turned on a September Superior Court ruling by Judge Raymond Williamson, which took the Board of Permit Appeals to task for failing to apply the city’s own Residential Design Guidelines to the condo proposal when Williams first brought his challenge to the board in May.
The design guidelines, near and dear to a generation of San Francisco neighborhood activists and historic preservationists, are rooted in the 1986 landmark Proposition M, which made protection of “neighborhood character” an official city policy. Among other things, the design guidelines are supposed to ensure that proposed new construction in neighborhoods is compatible with existing buildings.

Although the same five members of the Board of Permit Appeals had upheld the Sutter Street condo permit during their May hearing, on the court-ordered second review they found numerous design faults in the proposal for the 40-foot-tall condo.” It became clear that the project as proposed did not comply” with the design guidelines, said board President Carole Cullum. “The height, the mass — the building stood out too much. The developer has got to start from scratch and come up with a new plan.” A lawyer for Ashbourne Construction declined to comment on the doomed project, the court ruling or the company’s plans for the abandoned single-story Victorian house on the lot it still owns.

Williams, in better spirits on another day as he strolled through the lush overgrowth of his
back yard, said several neighborhood groups have inquired about his legal services in
recent weeks. “I’ve gotten at least six calls from people in the same situation, and at the last board hearing, three other people gave me their business cards,” Williams said, pointing to where
the alleged stucco horror would have stood. “It’s gotten so pro-development around here that maybe it’s beginning to swing the other way