In January 2023, San Francisco supervisors voted unanimously for an ambitious housing roadmap that planned for 82,000 new homes, more than half of them affordable, by 2031.
But the state’s housing regulators, aware that California cities have often ignored these blueprints, forced SF to add something extra to make sure city officials played ball.
Those who crafted the backup plan call it a “circuit breaker.” Those who hate it have countered with “dirty bomb.” Its official name, not quite as zippy, is Section 8.1.5, and if the city doesn’t show real progress toward its 2031 goal, it could make SF’s ongoing struggle to reform housing laws even more tempestuous.
Under 8.1.5 if SF doesn’t issue building permits for at least 29,049 new housing units by January 31, 2027, which is halfway through the current planning cycle, the circuit breaker kicks in. (Or, if you prefer, the bomb goes off.) The city would be forced to rezone, streamline, deregulate even more – whatever’s necessary to get back on track to the deeper density goal. The clause warns against “new governmental constraint” but doesn’t specify what measures to take. Those will be up to planners to decide.
California regulators overseeing the process “want us to make an honest and authentic rezoning,” says SF Planning director Rich Hillis.
In the year-plus since the blueprint, also known as the Housing Element, took effect, lawmakers have filled in the outline with a package of streamlining measures which include, among many things, the elimination of “neighborhood character” as an excuse to block or delay housing projects. Planners have also crafted a new zoning map that allows for taller buildings with more homes in low-rise neighborhoods.
All the while, the countdown to 2027 is on, and the numbers don’t look good. Right now, San Francisco has made little progress toward its housing goals. In the city’s latest Housing Inventory report, issued this month, the tally for 2023 housing permits came to just 3,039.
Enter the resistance
People pushing for more density say there’s good reason to hold SF to its recent promises. One supervisor who voted for the Housing Element, Aaron Peskin, only did so grudgingly. Peskin is now running for mayor and kicked off his candidacy with a Chinatown rally criticizing the construction of “luxury housing,” comparing it to the “trickle down economics” of the 1980s.
Peskin recently led the board to exempt two swaths of his own neighborhood from new rules that allow denser housing on commercial properties – rules that he himself cosponsored last year. One of his colleagues, who voted against the exemption, worried that the small change would open the door to other supervisors pushing for exemptions in their districts.
Hillis points out that the “circuit breaker” exists in part because what looks like radical change on paper doesn’t always translate in practice. He cited SF’s “fourplex law,” a broad relaxing of zoning caps that, for all the argument around it, hasn’t produced many more new homes.
And when San Francisco in 2017 legalized ADUs – backyard or basement additions sometimes called “granny flats” – then-Planning Commissioner Dennis Richards characterized this as a doubling of density in residential neighborhoods. SF has legalized fewer than 1,500 new units under ADU laws since 2018.
During Gilbert Williams’ confirmation hearing for the Planning Commission, Sup. Ahsha Safaí asked how SF should plan for 82,000 new homes. Williams did not answer directly, replying that “it seems like a monumental task,” and “I’m not sure how realistic that number is.”
While these laws have helped add to the city’s housing stock, they’re not the kind of sweeping change state regulators are demanding. “We’re not just rezoning in name only,” Hillis says.
The breaker is also meant to safeguard against the “phantom pipeline” phenomena. Many homes in San Francisco’s housing pipeline will not be completed for years, and some never at all. The last couple years have been particularly grim.
The phantom pipeline
State regulators have chided officials for relying too much on pipeline numbers when making housing plans. The goal of 29,000-plus permits by 2027 is about half of what the pipeline is predicted to produce by 2031.
“The idea was that if the units we counted in the pipeline didn’t move through at the estimated rate, then there would need to be additional [measures] to address that slowed rate of pipeline production,” SF Planning spokesperson Annie Yalon says via email.
Yalon emphasizes that the city is focused on enacting the Housing Element and avoiding the circuit breaker.
Doing so would certainly avoid a lot more drama, as the backup plan was as popular as poison with a coalition of neighborhood groups and housing activists called Race and Equity in All Planning (REP-SF). Citing the specter of urban renewal, slum clearance, and other tools of racist 20th-century housing politics, they claim the circuit breaker would also trigger demolitions across the city and usher dramatic gentrification into vulnerable neighborhoods.
It would “nullify every attempt at equity in the Housing Element,” said Gilbert Williams at a Planning Commission hearing in December 2022. Williams was speaking for PODER, a Mission neighborhood group. Now Williams – who used the term “dirty bomb” in the hearing – will help shape the city’s planning policy: he was recently named by Peskin to the commission itself.
No override
During Williams’ confirmation hearing in March, Sup. Ahsha Safaí asked for his “roadmap to achieve the Housing Element.” Williams did not answer directly, replying that “it seems like a monumental task,” and “I’m not sure how realistic that number is.” Williams repeatedly cited dangers to small businesses, adding, “I think the community should have a say.”
The Housing Element specifically forbids upzoning in what are called “priority equity” neighborhoods – historically low-income areas with large populations of elderly residents, immigrants, and people of color. Present housing expansion plans concentrate on SF’s wealthier, low-rise neighborhoods like the Sunset, Richmond, Haight, and Marina, while the Mission, Tenderloin, Western Addition, and Chinatown are all untouched.
At the December 2022 hearing, the planning department’s community equity director Miriam Chion said the circuit breaker would not override these restrictions. (Chion referred questions for our story to spokesperson Yalon, who confirmed the restrictions.)
Gilbert Williams, now a planning commissioner, could not be reached for comment for this story. But REP-SF founder Joseph Smooke says via email, “8.1.5 was a late addition to the Housing Element from the YIMBYs/HAC/SPUR,” citing three groups that advocate in SF for more housing at all income levels. “If you’re seeking to understand how it works, or how they intended it to work, you should talk with them.”
David Broockman, volunteer lead at SF YIMBY, acknowledges his group proposed 8.1.5 in 2022 and got state regulators’ approval because of the “obvious bullshit” in the city’s earlier Housing Element draft, which the state rejected for reasons including its overreliance on pipeline projections.
“It was equivalent to saying the city was already on track to triple housing production, even as housing production was slowing down,” Broockman says, and adds a warning shot: “I would remind anti-housing groups such as REP that the more housing they successfully block in the next few years, the more dramatic the provisions of the circuit breaker will need to be.”
As with so much of San Francisco politics, rhetorical framing in the housing debate is provocative, and the heat is intense. Planning director Hillis’s job is to keep the city on track to do what it has promised: build housing, and throw a little cold water on the fiery talk. He notes that the economic gloom has made development of any housing all the more challenging, and urges patience.
“We’re focused on the rezoning and the earlier term requirements, but if we do those in a way that’s genuine and the economy picks back up,” says Hillis, then “dirty bomb” debates won’t be necessary.