Is San Francisco’s Soil Safe for Your Kids to Play In?
I wanted to learn about whether our yard dirt was safe enough for the kids to play in. Here’s what I dug up.
It’s a well-recognized truth that children and YIMBYs love to dig, regardless of whether the dirt is healthy or full of invisible contaminants. If they can’t see it, it doesn’t exist, so why interrupt the fun?
Our family lives in an apartment within a Tenants-in-Common, and we share a mostly-concrete backyard. There is a tiny unpaved patch of dirt where my children recently decided to excavate. For what were they digging? Dinosaurs? Worms? Archaeological remnants of societies long past?
Why I Don’t Trust The Ground Here
All they uncovered was my deep-seated distrust of soil in San Francisco. Some neighborhoods are built purely from infill (trash) while others were purposely poisoned to study the effects of radiation on humans. Forgive me for being wary.
As any good crunchy, scrunchy, or half-awake mother would do, I put a foot down and halted their construction. It was time to look at the Maher Map.
In San Francisco, the conversation about building housing is steeped in a pernicious quagmire. We absolutely need more housing; there’s a philosophical question as to how and why. But the toxicity is inescapable. It’s as if the moment “construction” is uttered, alarm bells forewarn everyone from Senator Weiner to Twitter housing mercenaries to ready their battle stations.
One oft-cited enemy of building housing is CEQA, a cumbersome environmental review process that some say is weaponized by obstructionists to stop much-needed housing. On the local level, there’s also the Maher Ordinance to consider.
What is the Maher Ordinance and Why Does It Matter?
First, these policies don’t actively eliminate toxicity. Keep in mind that they exist to force people to mitigate the negative impacts.
I’m no badass like Erin Brokovitch but even I know that careless construction, industry, and redevelopment without sufficient oversight leads to cancer, asthma, and other documented health hazards. Environmental justice focuses specifically on neighborhoods with residents who have been historically disenfranchised, marginalized, ignored, experimented upon, and plagued by the material consequences of politicians’ bad decisions often made behind closed doors. Health Code Article 22A (the amended Maher Ordinance) exists to mitigate further health hazards related to construction.
The Maher Ordinance has roots in the 1906 earthquake and fire, known as the Calamity. It’s relevant to today because other cities like LA who are dealing with toxicity after major fires are going through similar challenges around soil testing.
According to the 2013 update on the legislation, “Health Code Article 22A and Building Code Section 106A.3.2.4 work in concert to provide an important City process for identifying, investigating, analyzing and, when deemed necessary, remediating or mitigating hazardous substances in soils within specified areas of the City and County of San Francisco (“City”).”
That means a developer needs to check in with the Department of Public Health to make sure they’re not kicking up toxic dust, building on top of soil that will leak hazardous vapors, or causing groundwater contamination.
Who Needs to Comply?
Even the City departments like SFMTA and SFPUC need to comply, filling out requests as they move forward with the old Presidio Car Barn and the Downtown Ferry project. These are all controls that ostensibly keep developers honest and make sure that the workers they hire are protected, as well as the neighbors around the construction sites and the future inhabitants.
Is it Effective?
But even though the map is arguably one of the most thorough examinations of potential environmental hazards, like all bureaucratic processes in The City there are workarounds and loopholes.
First, a lot of the decision-making happens behind closed doors. According to a 2018 San Francisco Chronicle op-ed piece, “there are no public hearings for Maher Ordinance plans, and this toxic-dirt shell game reduces public oversight of pollution mitigation.”
Even the public records request that developers and their agents file requests for are shuffled over to the Department of Public Health; the documents themselves aren’t attached to the FOIA and Public Records requests, so the nosy and concerned among us can’t see the results. It’s a bit shifty, isn’t it?
Waivers For Some
And second, developers can apply for a waiver under certain conditions. One is if the “project has been in residential use since 1921 [and/or] there is no evidence that the soil and/or groundwater may contain hazardous substances.” All you need is some Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps.
I wrote about ways to publicly access these using your public library card back in 2023 for a history magazine – they’re well worth checking out if you’re into history, especially if you want to know more about how redlining and racism continue to affect residents to this day. You can also pay the company who owns the copyright, LightBox. What a name for something paywalled and shadowy!
Circling Back
Back to the yard. The Maher Maps came out clean; my kids weren’t at imminent risk of lead exposure from the soil. No, they’ll get their toxins from living next to a busy road, playing in parks that are built on questionable lots, and attending future classes in buildings without green schoolyards.
It’s worth noting that a decade ago the Board of Supervisors decided to expand Maher Ordinance considerations to include:
- The original zone along the San Francisco Bay Shoreline
- Areas currently or historically zoned for industrial purposes
- Areas currently or historically utilized for industrial purposes
- Areas of Bay Fill
- Areas within 150 feet of U.S. Highway 101 and Interstate 280 and 880
- Areas within 100 feet of an Underground Storage Tank (UST)
But without sufficient transparency, these additions coupled with DBI’s notoriously shady practices on the local level and the Navy’s malfeasance in cleaning up their toxic mess in the Bayview mean that we can’t know for sure if the Maher Ordinance goes far enough as it stands.
I’ll still be checking the map before I let my kids dig around because I know about the health hazards of soil near former gas stations and infill. But as the housing conversation continues to veer into an almost comically bald, “Let’s remove all restrictions and make it as easy as possible to turn a profit,” I can only hope nobody literally loses their hair in the process.
Howdy! My name is Katy Atchison and I'm an Associate Editor for Broke-Ass Stuart.
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