! March 29, 2015 Dear LePort Parents, Ms. Heike Larson, Mr. Erin Hennigan, Mr. Jason Shulist, and Mr. Elston Soares, We have heard that there may be some confusion regarding the history of the 150 Van Ness project and the planning of the surrounding neighborhood. I am writing this letter in the hopes of clarifying some of this information. We understand that some parents have only recently learned of the Van Ness & Market Downtown Residential Special Use District (SUD) and the proposed development at 150 Van Ness, which is within that SUD and consistent with its policies and land use controls. Plans for a development to replace the dilapidated, structurally unsound, existing building at 150 Van Ness and the adjacent surface parking lots have existed, and been publicly available, for almost two years. As you may know, the existing eastern wing of the 150 Van Ness building is seismically unsound. This portion of the building is also referred to as 155 Hayes, and it is the portion of 150 Van Ness that directly abuts 50 Fell. If a major seismic event occurs, the eastern wing of 150 Van Ness will likely suffer significant damage, potentially causing a building collapse. This is one of the primary reasons that we plan to demolish the building rather than reuse it, as we did with the 100 Van Ness structure. We have submitted a demolition permit application to take down the building, but the City will not issue a demolition permit until a new project is approved for the site. This became City policy after SOMA was blighted with vacant sites for decades due to the site clearance practice of the early San Francisco Redevelopment Agency. In addition to 150 Van Ness, several other large-scale developments within a block of 50 Fell have been in the works for some time now as a result of long-standing community planning efforts. 50 Fell and 150 Van Ness are located within the Market and Octavia Area Plan. In 1998, San Francisco voters passed Proposition E calling for the removal of the elevated Central Freeway through Hayes Valley. For the next 10 years, from 1999 to 2008, the Hayes Valley and Market Octavia community held thousands of hours of meetings, workshops and exercises to formulate a vision for how their community would grow over the coming decades. The Market Octavia Plan and the Van Ness Market SUD were formally established in 2008 and are well known. A central organizing principle of the Market Octavia Plan was the recognition that the Market Octavia Plan Area occupies a unique place in the city and the region. It sits at the nexus of the city and regional transportation network. 35 transit lines, including all of the City's core subway lines, cross the plan area, most within a couple of blocks of the Market & Van Ness intersection.

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! The Plan also recognized that this unique transportation infrastructure should be leveraged by building dense, in-fill housing within a couple blocks of the key intersection. The Van Ness and Market Downtown Residential Special Use District was created within the Plan Area to explicitly encourage the development of a transit-oriented, high-density, mixed-use neighborhood around the intersection of Van Ness Avenue and Market Street. A handful of parcels within the small special use district were zoned for high-density housing at heights up to 400 feet. The Van Ness Market SUD is actually one of the few areas in San Francisco where high-rise, high-density housing is permitted. (See the attached Plan Area map. The SUD is shown in red.) 50 Fell and 150 Van Ness are both located within the Van Ness Market SUD. The SUD also contains several nearby sites that are slated for the development of 400-foot towers (One Oak, 30 Van Ness (directly across Fell Street from 50 Fell), the Honda dealership and the Goodwill site). 150 Van Ness is zoned at only 120 feet, the height of our proposed development. The plans for 150 Van Ness were initially submitted to the Planning Department on July 17, 2013. The building design with the T-shape located next to the 50 Fell property line has remained unchanged since that date. The Environmental Evaluation Application for the project was filed on October 21, 2013. The same T-shape plan appears in these plans as well. The project’s formal entitlement application package was submitted on April 22, 2014. All of these plans became part of the public record, and have been accessible on City of San Francisco Property Information Map website, since the time of filing. 150 Van Ness is the third project Emerald Fund has entitled on this block since 2012. During each process, Emerald Fund has reached out to and met with dozens of neighborhood stakeholders to discuss the proposed project. This list includes the Hayes Valley Neighborhood Association, the Civic Center Community Benefit District, Alliance for a Better District 6, the SF Bike Coalition, the Housing Action Coalition, SPUR, the Ballet, the Symphony, SF Jazz, Another Planet Entertainment, the Asian Art Museum, the San Francisco Unified School District, and all of the neighboring buildings and businesses (55 Polk, 45 Polk, Argenta, Academy of Art, Fox Plaza, NEMA, 77 Van Ness, Beer Hall, Twitter, Square). For 150 Van Ness, this outreach occurred in July and August of 2014. In addition to the outreach to all of these stakeholders, in August, 2014, Oz Erickson, the Chairman and Founder of Emerald Fund, met with a senior officer of the company that owns 50 Fell to review the plans for 150 Van Ness. Oz provided this officer with three hard copies of the development plans. As with our contacts with other property owners such as Essex REIT, the owner of Fox Plaza, it seemed entirely appropriate to provide the 50 Fell property owner with plans that could be passed on to their tenants and worked into any tenant improvement plans as needed. As of August, we were not sure whether a lease had been signed or not with LePort and whether a permit for the school would successfully be obtained. From our perspective, if the school did indeed proceed, we would be delighted as a school would be a good use for the neighborhood. Indeed, when we briefly discussed the possibility of LePort, we thought that the reason they were considering a move to the neighborhood was because of the Market-Octavia Plan, because of all the new people moving to the area, because of all the new residential construction. To our perspective, a sophisticated major school enterprise like LePort, with 12 campuses across California, had obviously reviewed the area zoning as well as the individual projects such as 150 Van Ness that had been in the works and on public record since July of 2013. The public notification and outreach concerning the development plans for 150 Van Ness has been The$Russ$Building$|$235$ Montgomery$Street,$27th$ Floor$|$San$Francisco,$CA$94104$|$(415)$ 777F2914$ !

! thorough and exhaustive. Now that LePort has moved into the neighborhood, we are very happy to meet with the parent community and discuss ideas about minimizing the impact of the construction and development on the school. The safety of the children is of paramount importance to us. Emerald Fund and its contractors, Plant Construction, Silverado Contractors and Clark Construction, collectively have well over one hundred years of experience with similar demolition and construction conditions, including construction in close proximity to a school. Among other things, we will be providing LePort with detailed assessments, and proposed methods of mitigation, for potential noise impacts and the generation of particulate matter. It is critical that the children’s health and safety be protected. Our team is well aware of this, and we will be taking the children into account at every step of the construction process. Thanks to the extensive 10-year planning effort conducted by the community, Market Octavia is becoming a thriving 24/7 neighborhood. A Montessori school is a wonderful addition that will be a resource for many of the new young families that will be moving to the neighborhood. We look forward to meeting with you on Tuesday evening and to being a neighbor to LePort for many years to come. Best regards, Marc Babsin Principal ! ! ! ! ! ! !

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Market and Octavia Area Plan | San Francisco General Plan

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