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UC Berkeley’s plan to convert its historic six-acre Laguna Street Extension campus in San Francisco into a private rental-housing development moved a step forward when the San Francisco Planning Commission voted against recommending it as a local landmark last Thursday. 

First used as a city orphanage from 1854 until the San Francisco State Normal School was established in the 1920s to accommodate public school teachers, the campus has also served as the original home of San Francisco State University. 

Citing prohibitive maintenance costs to bring the campus up to current seismic and disability codes, the UC Regents closed the UC Extension building in 2004, and it has been sitting empty since then. 

The move by the university to hand it over to developers AF Evans for private use met with opposition from local preservationists as well as neighborhood groups who want to retain public zoning of the site. 

The SF Planning Department, the SF Landmarks Preservation Advisory Board and the State Historic Preservation Officer agreed the campus was eligible for Local Landmark Designation, but the planning commission voted 4-3 to not landmark it. 

Cynthia Servetnick, co-chair, American Institute of Certified Planners, told the Planet that the decision would most like be appealed to the Board of Supervisors. 

She added that the five-building campus qualifies for the National Register of Historic Places. The proposed plan calls for demolishing Middle Hall and the administrative wing of Richardson Hall. Fifteen percent of the proposed 450 residential rental units would be reserved for low-income tenants and would also include an 85-unit facility for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender seniors. 

Ruthy Bennett, vice president of AF Evans, informed the Planet in a letter last year that the project had met with a large amount of neighborhood support. 

New College of California has appealed the Market and Octavia Neighborhood environmental impact report (EIR)—which includes the six-acre public site as the largest developable parcel in the plan—because it failed to analyze the impacts of the proposed UC/AF Evans project on the plan and vice versa.  

The college has submitted an alternate plan in the project EIR that would preserve all the buildings and the current zoning.