New Draft Keeps Public Access Cuts Along the Working Waterfront
Industrial uses remain protected, but the plan insists on view corridors and a continuous path where feasible.
A new waterfront zoning draft tries to end a decades-long argument by protecting working industrial berths while requiring public path segments and view corridors where operations allow.
The draft, released April 6 and running 214 pages with appendices, covers 3.1 miles of shoreline from the grain terminal at the north end to the old cordage parcel at the head of the Second Basin. It creates three overlay districts. The first, covering 1.4 miles, is a working-waterfront priority zone where cargo, vessel repair, and seafood handling are protected uses and residential conversion is prohibited outright. The second, 0.9 miles, permits mixed use with a required public easement along the water’s edge. The third, 0.8 miles, is transitional and will be litigated over line by line.
Port tenants warned that continuous promenades can conflict with truck turns and security perimeters. Planners answered with “feasible continuity” language that admits gaps with clear signage to the next public stretch. Where a path cannot run along the water, the draft requires an inland route within one block and a signed connection at both ends, plus at least one public overlook per 1,200 feet of interrupted frontage.
Environmental groups want stronger shoreline habitat rules tied to any redevelopment.
The draft adds buffers but stops short of a full habitat overlay some advocates sought. A 30-foot vegetated buffer applies to redevelopment on unarmored shoreline, with a fee-in-lieu option where existing bulkheads make planting impractical. The Basin Waterkeepers coalition had asked for 75 feet and no fee-in-lieu, and its policy director, Ada Sorenstam, called the compromise “a buffer sized to what is left over rather than to what a juvenile salmon needs.”
Planning director Neve Achterberg does not dispute the science underneath the request. She disputes the arithmetic of applying it. “Seventy-five feet on this shoreline takes the working depth of most of these parcels below what a forklift needs,” she said. “The overlay that advocates want would, on our own parcel analysis, render eleven active industrial sites nonconforming. A nonconforming site does not become habitat. It becomes a site that cannot be reinvested in and sits there for twenty years.”
## Who speaks for the berths
The tenants’ case is not uniformly defensive. Kessie Vandermolen, who runs a 46-employee vessel repair yard on the Third Basin and sits on the port district’s tenant council, supports the path requirement and wants the transitional district shrunk.
“I am not afraid of people walking past my gate,” she said. “I am afraid of people buying a condominium across from my gate and then discovering that we grind steel at six in the morning.” She has watched the sequence elsewhere on the coast and describes it as one-way: the noise complaints arrive, the operating hours narrow, the yard loses the overnight haul-outs that make the numbers work, and within a decade the parcel is worth more as anything else.
The draft attempts a partial answer through mandatory notice-and-acknowledgment covenants recorded against residential titles in the mixed-use zone, plus a right-to-operate clause modeled on agricultural nuisance statutes. Vandermolen’s lawyers are skeptical the clause survives a determined plaintiff. Achterberg concedes it has not been tested locally.
Public comment remains open for thirty days, closing May 6. Two open houses are scheduled - one daytime for shift workers, one evening for everyone else - on April 22 at the net loft and April 29 at the Ledger Hill branch library. Written comment can also be filed through the planning department’s portal, which received 412 submissions in the first week, more than the entire comment period for the 2019 draft.
That earlier draft is the ghost in the room. It died in committee after eleven months, undone by a coalition of port tenants and shoreline advocates who agreed on nothing except that the plan was worse than the status quo. Councilmember Ruben Ostrick, one of two members still serving from that vote, says the difference this time is that the planners wrote the gaps into the text instead of promising to resolve them later. “Feasible continuity is an ugly phrase,” he said. “It is also the first honest one anybody has put in a waterfront document in my time here.”
The next hearing will tell whether the revised map is a genuine compromise or a device to run out the calendar. Housing advocates say they will measure acres and months, not adjectives. Their specific interest is the transitional district, where the draft permits residential at up to 65 units per acre with a 15 percent affordability requirement - a number the Harbor Housing Trust argues is set below what the parcels can bear and above what the port district will tolerate, and therefore likely to be traded away in either direction.
Lobbyists flooded the anteroom with one-pagers that recycled last year’s arguments in new fonts. Staffers sorted them into three piles: housing supply, neighborhood character, and process complaints.
Whatever passes will shape which parcels become hotels, which stay cranes, and who gets to walk the edge at sunset without trespassing.
There is already one place to test the idea. Behind the ice plant on Pier 9, a 340-foot stretch of public walkway was built in 1997 as a condition of a permit nobody remembers negotiating. It dead-ends at a chain-link fence with a padlock the port district says belongs to a tenant and the tenant says belongs to the port district. On a clear evening it holds maybe a dozen people - fishing, mostly, and one man who brings a folding chair and does not fish. Asked what he would like the new plan to do, he said he would settle for someone finding the key.
Reporting for this story was prepared for The Harbor Ledger’s politics desk. Tips:newsroom@theharborledger.com