Last week, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors undercut planned housing towers by slapping limits on building heights in two historic districts in the northeast corner of the city.
The 8–3 vote, likely immune to a mayoral veto, followed arguments by board President Aaron Peskin that the new developments would spoil bay views and the historic character of those blocks, which are tucked into his district between the Financial District, Chinatown, Telegraph Hill, and the Embarcadero.
[Update, 3/26/24: The Board of Supervisors has voted by the same count, 8–3, to override Mayor Breed’s veto.]
No, you haven’t accidentally stumbled onto an archived news story from 2013 or the 1960s. This is 2024, and the new bill was approved last week even though San Francisco lawmakers, including Peskin, pledged more than a year ago to kick some deeply ingrained habits of blocking new homes for all kinds of reasons.
That pledge, made under pressure from state regulators, is supposed to make way for 82,000 new units in the coming years. A major test of the new blueprint, called the Housing Element, is coming soon: relaxed height and density limits in several neighborhoods, mostly on the west side. A final map will go before the supervisors later this year.
But neighbors complained about two Sansome Street proposals, a 24-story tower at 955 Sansome, well over 200 feet tall, and a 17-story project at 1088 Sansome, that would provide up to 240 homes combined. They would replace a two-story parking garage and a three-story office building.
Originally, these lots were capped at 84 and 65 feet respectively, but legislation from Peskin himself raised those limits — not to mention the ire of groups like the Barbary Coast Neighborhood Association, who in a letter to Board members complained of “supercharged” high-rises near the waterfront.
Peskin said last week he’s only fixing his previous mistake. But the vote to rewind to lower limits in the Jackson Square Historic District and its extension, as well as the Northeast Waterfront Historic District — both within view of Telegraph Hill, Peskin’s longtime power base and home base — might have opened a Pandora’s box and provided a counter-blueprint to oppose SF’s new mandate. At least that’s what one of the dissenting supervisors said in the run-up to the vote.
“If one district can carve out an area, others can as well,” said Sup. Myrna Melgar last week. So what’s to stop all supervisors from wielding a scalpel for their own neighborhoods? Could this vote threaten to nullify the city’s new housing plans entirely?
The answer depends on who you ask.
‘Guardedly optimistic’ about growth
Let’s start with the Housing Element itself. The blueprint mandates several things, including a feasible plan for 82,000 new homes in coming years, more than half of them affordable. It also protects lower-income and neighborhoods of color such as the Tenderloin and the Mission from looser development rules. In exchange, so-called high-resource neighborhoods that are rich with single-family homes, better schools, and other amenities are expected to build denser housing after decades of resistance.
Within that framework, the plan allows some flexibility. “The Housing Element has only as many teeth as the Board chooses,” SF Planning chief of staff Dan Sider says via email. “Despite the give-and-take nature of any legislative process, progress thus far makes us guardedly optimistic” about lawmakers’ commitment to real growth.
If one district can carve out an area, others can as well.
Sup. Myrna Melgar
An odd twist is that the exemptions came about because of Peskin’s own misunderstanding. He teamed up with Mayor London Breed in 2023 on a bill to make it easier to convert old commercial buildings into new homes but evidently didn’t realize how encompassing the law was. “Once we realized this unintended consequence” — taller buildings on the land in question — he crafted this carve-out, he said at last week’s hearing.
This careful maneuvering is typical of Peskin’s many years at City Hall, and of his political roots as a neighborhood preservationist going back to his first election in 1999. In a Frisc profile last year, Peskin emphasized the times he has approved sweeping housing projects, such as the Hunters Point Shipyard and the Eastern Neighborhoods Plans.
But he almost never says yes in his own backyard. His District 3 features some of the lowest-growth neighborhoods in SF, especially North Beach, which he once called an “urban paradise.” (Peskin did not return requests for comment on this story.)
His moves have frustrated pro-development San Franciscans, but at least one group doesn’t see a threat of other neighborhoods following suit. “The only places they could downzone are places they had already upzoned,” says Housing Action Coalition director Corey Smith.
Smith is no fan of the legislation, but he says his group won’t challenge it.
Other housing hawks aren’t so sanguine. Sup. Matt Dorsey said last week that the city risked “backtracking on efforts to promote adaptive development” — conversion of business space to residential — and called Peskin’s housing limits “cynical” and “arbitrary” via text message.
YIMBY Law attorney Brian O’Neill alleged in a letter to the supervisors that the vote violates state law SB 330, which forbids such downzoning “except when the new standards are issued concurrently with other changes to ensure that there is no net loss of residential capacity.” It’s unclear if the move represents a net loss or not, because Peskin’s original bill with the mayor loosened restrictions downtown and other areas as well.
Whether O’Neill’s allegation leads to legal action, and what defense the city may offer, is yet to be determined.
‘This is an active matter’
The biggest unknown so far is what the California Department of Housing & Community Development (HCD) thinks of Peskin’s move.
Last year, HCD finished a first-of-its-kind audit of SF’s housing practices. It resulted in sweeping directives for the city to fix its broken development system or face possible state takeover of the process. In an email to The Frisc, HCD spokesperson Alicia Murillo says, “This is an active matter that HCD’s Housing Accountability Unit is currently evaluating” but has yet to reach a conclusion. She adds that HCD “will investigate” any potential violation of the city’s housing pledges.
“Fear regarding HCD’s possible reaction should indeed worry all citizens,” says Lori Brooke, spokesperson for the residents’ group Neighborhoods United SF, which supported the measure. “State oversight of our housing is a significant concern.”
Whether or not the northeast carveout violates the spirit or letter of any law, there’s yet another consideration. SF’s Housing Element itself contains a “circuit breaker” — if a certain number of new homes are not in the works by 2027, more aggressive rules to ease development will kick in.
The provision, which HCD urged when SF planners were crafting the Housing Element in 2022, was considered a potential antidote to the risk of relying on “phantom units” in the housing pipeline. It was particularly contentious; neighborhood activists called it a “dirty bomb.” It could be triggered by supervisors taking too many liberties with exemptions for their own districts, says YIMBY Law executive director Sonja Trauss: “We all have that experience of someone in your life where you’re like, ‘You said you were going to party less,’ and they’re like, ‘Oh, I am — but I’m just going to go out this one night.’”
Perhaps other parts of town can absorb development shunned by these neighborhoods, but then again, maybe not, Trauss notes: “It is true [supervisors] have latitude, but they have a really big job in front of them.”