SEATTLE PLANNING CHIEF JOHN RAHAIM named new permanent director of San Francisco Planning Department
10 September 2007
John Rahaim
BY PAT MURPHY
Sentinel Editor & Publisher
Copyright © 2007 San Francisco Sentinel
Mayor Newsom today confirmed his choice for permanent director of the San Francisco Planning Department is Seattle planning chieftain John Rahaim.
Rahaim informed Seattle officials today that he has accepted the San Francisco appointment.
San Francisco has been without a permanent planning director since November 2004, in a compact world City where land use is coin of the realm.
The department was tarnished with the perception and the reality of patronage politics under Planning Director Gerald Green when Newsom came to office on January 8 2004.
A holdover from the Willie Brown administration, Green’s pro-development stance, and a personal style described as arrogant by a progressive majority elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 2000, left Board working relationship with Green confrontational. Green resigned under pressure from the mayor ten months into Newsom’s first year in office.
The administration turned to a seasoned hand, Dean Macris, to lead the Planning Department on an interim basis as search began for a director equipped to keep San Francisco well positioned in an exploding global economy and a projected California population boom, while also fluent in the language of neighborhood preservation, expanded open space urban livability, and acknowledgement of low-income resident need to remain in the San Francisco they helped build and loved for generations.
Finding that combination of capacity and skill took longer than expected.
“I told them I’d stay the remainder of the year if need be,” Dean Macris said in 2004 as he took the interim position. Macris knew his task having served as Planning Department director from 1980 to 1992.
A review of Rahaim’s history indicates he shares much of the Newsom Administration perspective on competiting urban land use needs.
“If we’re going to encourage a housing boom, we don’t want to negatively affect views from other parts of the city,” Rahaim said in 2005 as Seattle Planning Director.
Seattle urban livability design.
“It’s not just about making buildings work, but making an environment work,” added Rahaim who took the Seattle position in August 2003.
Writing for Arcade magazine in October 2001 (a magazine he helped found), Rahaim noted, “The shared zone between public and private space in America is being debated with increased vigor as cities grow and become denser and as technology changes the ways we interact.”
“The increasingly blurred lines between the public and private sectors are fueling the debate as American cities continue to change,” Rahaim continued.
“The concern about the effects of an increasingly privatized physical realm is not new. It is probably true that the lines between the public and private sectors in American cities have always been unclear, as several of our contributors to this issue suggest.
“Nevertheless, our hypothesis is that the shared zone between the public and private realms has grown, and the boundaries have become more indistinct, as our cities become more complex, and political and budgetary realities loom. With this in mind, we believe the need for public space and a truly public realm is increasingly acute, and the effects on our cities profound.”
Rahaim was the founding executive director of CityDesign, Seattle’s office of Urban Design founded in 1999; and the executive director of the Seattle Design Commission, the City’s primary design advisory panel for public projects and related urban design initiatives.
He sat on the board of Consolidated Works, a contemporary arts center, and remains on the editorial committee of Arcade.
Prior to his tenure in Seattle, Rahaim was with the City of Pittsburgh Department of City Planning, where he served as associate director in charge of development review and the rewrite of the Zoning Ordinance.
Rahaim received a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Michigan, and a Master of Architecture from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He was born and raised in Detroit.
PAT MURPHY
Sentinel Editor & Publisher
In his youth, Pat Murphy worked as a General Assignment reporter for the Richmond Independent, the Berkeley Daily Gazette, and the San Francisco Chronicle. He served as Managing Editor of the St. Albans (Vermont) Daily Messenger at age 21. Murphy also launched ValPak couponing in San Francisco, as the company’s first San Francisco franchise owner. He walked the bricks, developing ad strategy for a broad range of restaurants and merchants. Pat knows what works and what doesn’t work. His writing skill has been employed by marketing agencies, including Don Solem & Associates. He has covered San Francisco governance for the past ten years. Pat scribes an offbeat view of the human family through Believe It or What.
THE INSIDER JOURNAL REACHING THOSE WHO MAKE THINGS HAPPEN IN STAGE, FILM, FINE ARTS, POLITICS AND GOVERNANCE
CREATE YOUR ADVERTISEMENT NOW
See Related: SAN FRANCISCO SENTINEL TEAM MEMBERS ACKNOWLEDGED AS EXPERT IN THEIR FIELD
One Response to “SEATTLE PLANNING CHIEF JOHN RAHAIM named new permanent director of San Francisco Planning Department”
January 30th, 2008 at 2:21 PM
Commenting on a story from September 2007:
SEATTLE PLANNING CHIEF JOHN RAHAIM NAMED NEW PERMANENT DIRECTOR OF SAN FRANCISCO PLANNING DEPARTMENT
10 September 2007
John Rahaim played no role in the founding of ARCADE magazine 26 years ago. He was on the editorial committee for a year or two in early 2000, and contributed some content, but that was the extent of his involvement.