Rafael Mandelman
speaker
29,845 appearances
227 recordings
8 series
first heard Sep 2023
last heard 4d ago
Rafael Mandelman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 125 in all, peaking in Oct 2025 with 18.
Appearances
A resolution today and a hearing request.
Um First, I'm introducing a resolution to initiate landmark designation for the Rika Valley Commercial and Castro Village LGBTQ plus historic district.
Last December, this board passed the Family Zoning Plan, the most significant change to this city's housing rules in a generation.
I supported that plan as I have supported other efforts to ease and encourage new housing development because San Francisco needs tens of thousands of new units to combat the affordability crisis.
But contrary to the over the top reaction of some activists to this proposed designation, meeting our housing needs does not require sacrificing irreplaceable pieces of our city's history.
Most San Franciscans support building more housing.
Most San Franciscans also support identifying and preserving our most historically significant buildings, and most San Franciscans recognise that we can do both.
To that end, my office has worked with the planning department over the past year to identify the buildings in District eight that are truly irreplaceable.
This landmark district is a product of that work.
The proposed district includes Beaux Arts and uh Classical Revival bank buildings, Mediterranean Revival and Arts and Crafts storefronts, and Gothic Revival detailing, and recognizes two periods of significance.
The first is early commercial development from 1879 to 1932, when Eureka Valley grew from a scattering of farmhouses into a streetcar suburb.
The second runs from nineteen fifty three to nineteen eighty, when the Castro became the center of gay political and cultural life in America.
Of the sixty four buildings contributing to the district, thirty three of them carry both histories in the same walls.
Let's also be clear on one point.
Landmark designation protects the character defining features of a building.
But does not bar development or maintenance of a site.
San Francisco approves upper story additions to landmarked buildings routinely in the Dog Patch and Alamo Square Historic Districts, among others, so long as the new construction is compatible with the building below it.
And one more point I and others have made, but which bears repeating.
Just about one percent of San Francisco's approximately two hundred thousand buildings are currently locally designated landmarks or contributors in historic districts.
That's significantly less than the three to five percent of buildings that are designated landmarks in New York, Boston and LA.
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