Sustainability is the fundamental principle of SPRAWLDEF. For humans to survive and enjoy and thrive in the global and local Bay Area environment, we must create an environment that protects habitat and wildlife so that future generations can experience and sustain the earth in all of its diversity. True sustainability is even more crucial in the context of climate change, including sea level rise, which threatens our local shorelines along the San Francisco Bay.
SPRAWLDEF is working on two projects with the goal of fostering a more sustainable environment on the bay shoreline, including:
Restoring Golden Gate Fields Racetrack (see map) to Wetlands, Transforming It Into a Resilient Shoreline
As of June 2024, the Golden Gate Fields race track closed for good. It was originally wetland and marsh before it was filled in to create the racetrack in the 1930’s. SPRAWLDEF, with ally Citizens for Eastshore Parks (CESP), have for years blocked attempts to commercially redevelop this site, preferring acquisition of the site to complete the McLaughlin East Shore State Park. This 140 acre property is a keystone property, bridging two active units of the McLaughlin Eastshore State Park, which are already connected — since 2020 — by a new segment of the Bay Trail.
During 2024, SPRAWLDEF and CESP commissioned Jeremy Lowe and Ellen Plank of the San Francisco Estuary Institute to draw up a Restoration Plan for the site, showing how it could be restored as a wetland and marsh to become a resilient shoreline. This buffer zone would protect the hardscape of highways and housing to the east from the effects of rising sea levels. While being restored over time, the site could be used for active and passive park uses, and would be an excellent example of how to create true resilient shorelines as an adaptation to global warming.
Zeneca Toxic Bayfront Site
SPRAWLDEF is part of a coalition working to demand proper, updated environmental review and to limit development on an extremely toxic 90 acre site currently known as the Zeneca property, which sits on the bay shoreline in Richmond, California (see map)
The site housed Stauffer, Inc., a chemical manufacturing facility beginning in 1897. For over a century, hazardous waste from Stauffer’s manufacturing processes was dumped, buried, or burned onsite. Residuals known to be present in the soil at this site include arsenic, copper, lead, nickel, zinc, selenium, mercury, and cadmium in the soil.
In 1997, Stauffer sold the property to Zeneca, Inc., a subsidiary of the multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology company AstraZeneca. Later, in 2002, Zeneca sold the site again to real estate development interests, who initially proposed to build a commercial building following limited cleanup of the site.
Then, in 2020, based on a “change in the market”, and despite the site’s high levels of extremely dangerous chemicals, the Richmond City Council approved a development plan for the site that would include up to 4,000 units of housing. The California Department of Toxic Substances Control’s (DTSC) cleanup plan relies on outdated sea-level rise data from 2011 and health risk assessment information from 2008, before the threat of sea level rise was well understood.
SPRAWLDEF and its coalition partners are pushing for a updated assessment of toxic risk at Zeneca, given the inevitability of sea level rise, including strong potential for contamination of adjacent properties and the bay ecosystem.