Neighborhood Lockdown

If all goes according to plan, a few of the young and wealthy in the Mission soon will be able to avoid the always disagreeable prospect of tripping over a bum on their front steps when they leave for work in the morning. A local landlord is planning to build the first upscale gated community in the Mission, not to mention one of the first in San Francisco.

Edward Litke, who owns dozens of buildings throughout the city, has come up with designs for an enclosed little square of town houses and apartments -- 44 units in all -- called Park Dolores at 19th and Guerrero streets.

The property on which Litke plans to build is one of only a few in the city that extends far into the interior of a block, a little less than an acre tucked in behind the buildings running along 18th, Guerrero, 19th and Oakwood streets. Building on the property will be like filling in the hole of a doughnut.

If Litke's dream is realized, tenants would enter the enclave through an underground parking lot on 19th Street, and ascend to a cloister of houses facing each other across a courtyard, insulated from the outside world by the surrounding buildings. Access to the houses, through the garage or a street-level gate on 19th, would be locked to the public.

Although Michael Stanton, the project's architect, objects to the "gated community" label -- he says it's typical these days for multibuilding developments to limit public entry -- he concedes that few projects are as fortified as his creation. "I recognize that this is controversial, but I'm proud of our design," he says. "What I see here is a unique opportunity to build new housing, to fill in this broken tooth on the block. And I believe it's consistent with the needs of the neighborhood. Do the neighbors want the space left open, allowing people to crawl into their back yards?"

Judging from the property's history, it's a miracle that anything fruitful should come from this unique piece of land, an eyesore and the focus of contention in the neighborhood for years. If Litke succeeds in building his garrisoned enclave (he still needs approval from the Planning Commission), it could be seen as a fitting end, a final insult to an already injured little slice of the city. This property has been the subject of so much acrimony, and so much red tape, that it serves as a good example of how San Francisco has become something of a gated community itself. Gated communities are, after all, the manifestations of a siege mentality, an us-vs.-them approach to urban planning.

"They're contrary to the whole spirit of living in a city," says Planning Commissioner Dennis Antenore. "They change the politics in a neighborhood, separating people and keeping them disconnected, and that really bothers me."

Litke and previous owners of the property have gone head to head with the neighborhood for decades, trying to build condominiums on the site, only to have their plans rejected by the Planning Commission over one technicality or another.

For many years, a huge, crumbling warehouse occupied the land, and neighbors always had a complex relationship with the concrete monolith. Once an auto repair garage, later a Bob Ostrow meatpacking plant, the warehouse was often at odds with its surroundings simply because it was an industrial building in a residential neighborhood. The neighbors used to file complaints about the warehouse with the Department of Building Inspection, especially when it began to collapse, until they realized that the sagging structure was better than the alternative: a towering condominium project blocking out the sun. So the neighbors switched tactics and fought to keep the thing standing.

Then Litke wised up, they say. Rather than trying to ram his condo projects through, Litke, and another landlord who owned the building for a short time, simply allowed the warehouse to fall apart. The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake helped it along quite nicely. Following the earthquake, the building was hit with numerous citations for unsafe conditions, from both building inspectors and the Fire Department. The building owners repeatedly promised to shore up the walls, repair the ceiling, and remove the oil trap and underground gas tank left over from the auto shop, but didn't do much to fulfill their promises, the neighbors say. And the city let the situation slide until 1997, when building inspectors issued an emergency order for the warehouse to be demolished, sparing Litke some of the technicalities that stood in the way of his development plans.

"The owners intentionally let the building go to hell, so that the city would have no choice but to declare it a hazard," says Daniel Gundlach, an artist who lives next door. "Litke's been a real scofflaw." Litke did not return numerous phone calls to his office.