The Treasure Island Development Authority has a new executive director. On Thursday, San Francisco City Administrator Carmen Chu announced the appointment of Sheela Jivan to the role overseeing the ongoing redevelopment of Treasure Island and neighboring Yerba Buena Island.

Jivan will start in June after an extensive search to replace long-time director Bob Beck, who retired this January.

Jivan currently serves as associate director and chief operating officer of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at University of California, Berkeley, a research and policy center dedicated to creating solutions for affordable and equitable housing. At the center, Jivan has led finance, operations, strategic planning, communications, and human resources for one of the nation’s leading housing research and policy organizations.

“As San Francisco works to stand up more housing so that the next generations of San Franciscans can afford to stay in the city they love, the success of Treasure Island will be critical to meeting that need,” Mayor Daniel Lurie said in a statement, adding that the Treasure Island redevelopment project will play a major role in expanding housing opportunities in San Francisco.

Treasure Island is in the process of a total transformation. New buildings, with green energy and water systems, are being built along a new street grid. The north edge of the island will be broken down and sunken to become an artificial wetland to absorb storm surges. In the end, the island will be able to better withstand earthquakes and 4.9 feet of sea level rise.

There will be 8,000 new homes, with 27% of them permanently affordable. The Treasure Island program represents 10% of the overall housing development goal for the city of San Francisco, according to Beck, the former TIDA director.

New apartments are being erected on land that has been elevated to accommodate for sea level rise on April 18, 2025 on Treasure Island in San Francisco. (Ruth Dusseault/Bay City News)

Jivan’s 30 years of experience in mixed-use urban development, affordable housing and community planning includes major Bay Area projects including the Downtown West development in San Jose while at Google, and the Concord Naval Weapons Station reuse project, a proposed 13,000-unit master-planned community similar to Treasure Island in size, complexity and scale.

Jivan spent two decades in San Francisco at Mercy Housing California, where she led the development of 12 affordable housing projects and executed 13 land acquisitions and renovations across the state. Jivan holds a dual master’s degree in public health and city & regional planning and a bachelor of arts in anthropology, all from UC Berkeley.

TIDA is a nonprofit public benefit agency dedicated to the economic development of Treasure Island.

Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.