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7.A Attach rrRaago 48 Bair Island Road to the south,would also be designated to accommodate significant new residential development. Specifically, under the New General Plan, most of the Syufy site would be designated Mixed Use — Waterfront, which would allow the development of approximately 450 new residential units and possibly more with a density bonus, and the remainder of the site would be designated Commercial—Regional. Under Alternative � g 2,the entire Syufy site would be designated Commercial—Regional,precluding any new residential development on the site. Alternative 2 would implement all the transportation and infrastructure improvements proposed under the New General Plan. The differences between the New General Plan and Alternative 2 described above would result City-wide tin less residential development and less available housing City wide under Alternative 2 as compared to the New General eneral Plan. Moreover, the overall FAR reductions under Alternative 2 would result in less intensive commercial,job-generating development throughout the General Plan area than the New General Plan. Specifically, Alternative 2 would result in approximately 1 percent less housing and population growth, 3 percent less employment growth, and 5 percent less non-residential development growth than the New General Plan by 2030. Alternative 2 would be expected to result in slightly less severe direct impacts relating to groundborne vibration, aircraft noise, population and housing, public services, park and recreation facilities, utility services, and energy usage as compared to the proposed New General Plan. (See DEIR at p. 5-34 to 5-35 (Table 5-4)) However, with the exception of those impacts considered to be significant and unavoidable (see below), all of these impacts would be less than significant under the New General Plan after implementation of the mitigation measures described in the DEIR. In all other impact categories, Alternative 2 is expected to result in similar levels of impacts as the New General Plan. For those impacts which may be slightly less severe under Alternative 2, the reduction in severity is deemed to be the result of the slightly reduced level of growth anticipated under Alternative 1 These impacts normally correspond directly to the quantity of population growth anticipated to result from the project; in scenarios where population growth is expected to be reduced, these impacts are usually also incrementally reduced. It is this incremental reduction in the severity of these specific impacts that provides the basis for the conclusion in the DEIR that Alternative 2 is the environmentally superior alternative. Arguably, however, the concentration of new, higher density growth in an existing urban center contemplated by the New General Plan could be considered environmentally superior to the alternative of lower density growth in the same area, because the incremental difference in growth under lower density alternatives may then be pushed outside the dense urban areas to less densely-developed suburban areas, exacerbating undesirable `sprawl' and increasing the costs of providing infrastructure and services to such growth. While the methodology employed in the DEIR and its focus on the General Plan area are designed to identify and compare the relative impacts from quantitatively different levels of new growth within the Plan area,they are not well-suited to identifying and comparing the potential regional advantages of concentrating high ATTY/RESO/RESO.2055/ATTACHMENT1.A 34 1 0/6/1 0