With the release of the HDMT in March of 2007, priority was next placed on applying the HDMT to appropriate land use opportunities. The Executive Park Subarea Plan Health Impact Assessment summarizes the results from the first pilot application of San Francisco's Healthy Development Measurement Tool to a land use development plan.

The subject of this first application of the HDMT is the Executive Park Subarea Plan, which proposes to build 2,800 units of new residential housing on a 71-acre area in the southeastern corner of San Francisco. Our analysis evaluates the Plan against 84 community health indicators and 87 related targets for healthy development.

Based on this evaluation, chief strengths of The Plan include:

• The goal of becoming the first sustainable neighborhood in San Francisco
• Design guidelines that promote green building and access to open space
• The creation of an impact fee to fund community benefits in the surrounding neighborhood

The evaluation also highlighted a number of improvement opportunities, including:

• Increasing specificity (e.g., in implementing actions) to achieve Plan goals and policies
• Attending to the area's geographical isolation by improving transportation systems and access to goods and services
• Coordinating the Plan's objectives with other area development projects, such as Schlage Lock, the Bayview Transportation Improvement Project, Candlestick Park and Hunters Point Shipyard

The HDMT Sustainability Spider Diagram provides a visual representation of our evaluation of the Executive Park Subarea Plan against HDMT objectives. This diagram illustrates that the Executive Park Subarea Plan, as written, would achieve roughly 50% of the analyzable HDMT minimum development targets and 20% of the analyzable benchmark or maximum development targets for the six HDMT elements.

HDMT Sustainability Spider Diagram

For more information about the HDMT Sustainability Spider Diagram, please page 19 in Chapter 3 of the Executive Park HIA Report.

In an effort to improve the Plan and mitigate potential impacts, our evaluation identifies 134 recommendations. Some of these can be incorporated directly into the Executive Park Subarea Plan and others can be addressed after the Plan is adopted, during the environmental review process and/or through broader City policy.

This first pilot application of the HDMT to a land use plan has demonstrated that it is possible to comprehensively and constructively assess development plans with an eye towards promoting healthy, equitable, and sustainable communities. This application also revealed various strengths and limitations of the HDMT and identified ways to improve its content and the application process.

Key considerations in future HDMT applications include reducing the amount of staff resources needed to complete an application, standardizing the depth of analysis across HDMT Elements when collectively analyzing a plan, efficiently obtaining public information that may be needed to achieve a thorough evaluation, and gaining the requisite familiarity with a project area and surrounding neighborhoods. The report identifies a number of recommendations to address each of these needs, and subsequent HDMT applications have been structured differently to address lessons learned from this pilot application.

Download the complete Executive Park Health Impact Assessment Report (9.3 MB).

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