PG&E Remains Obstacle to Affordable Housing

For all the delays caused by the Planning Department backlog, once construction begins it is PG &E that has angry builders gritting their teeth. Allegedly due to prioritizing its resources in the Central Valley, PG &E continually finds itself unable to fulfill its mandate to provide electrical connections and infrastructure assistance to those building housing or upgrading service in San Francisco.

Consider the ongoing fiasco at 7th and Brannan.Streets.

In the space of only one hundred feet, PG &E has two utility poles that violate the Americans with Disabilities Act by failing to give adequate space for wheelchairs to pass. On of these poles is smack dab in the middle of a curb cut for a wheelchair ramp.

Adjacent to the illegal poles is the future site of 56 affordable housing units to be owned by the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, publisher of Beyond Chron. While removing the poles would be legally required under any circumstances, their prompt undergrounding is imperative so as to allow full construction at the property to proceed.

The Clinic assumed that if we informed PG & E of the illegal poles, and explained that their presence was holding up a unique affordable apartment building set to house current SRO tenants, that the publicity-conscious company would diligently move to rectify the problem. We could have simply sued the company to remove the polls, but wanted to give PG& E the opportunity to solve the problem in a collaborative fashion.

At a March meeting arranged by the Department of Public Works to resolve the situation, PG& E representatives committed themselves to a prompt solution. The project’s builder offered to pay much of the cost for undergrounding the polls despite PG& E’s liability, and noted that he had sent the company a check in September 2004 to cover the cost of engineering plans for PG & E’s portion of the project. The company’s representatives had no knowledge of the check, but said they would look for it.

Five months later, the illegal poles remain in place, the builder had not heard back from PG& E, and major construction at the site is delayed. Letters and calls to the company go unreturned, raising the obvious question: how could the process be any worse if San Francisco had public power?

Unfortunately, PG& E’s conduct toward 785 Brannan is no aberration. Delays in utility hook-ups are now figured into construction schedules, and it takes at least four months for PG&E to dig the trenches necessary to complete electrical upgrades.

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