Havin Gavgasi would love more foot traffic. Her bright Ro Café on Geary Boulevard sits just west of Masonic Avenue, lit by large glass windows that also muffle the whoosh of cars speeding through the tunnel that burrows under Masonic and Presidio.
Gavgasi, who came to the U.S. in 2008 from a town in southeastern Turkey (called Amed in Kurdish, Diyarbakır in Turkish), bakes her own sweet and savory pastries. She adds Kurdish elements like cured beef and pomegranate sauce to omelets and salads. It’s not your average bagel and coffee joint.
But few people pass by. Students from the University of San Francisco are the core customer base; summer can be slow at the Ro.
With restaurant-size ambitions, Gavgasi hoped that the decrepit Lucky Penny diner, idle for years on the corner of Geary and Masonic, would have become a multistory residential site by now, with hundreds more potential customers just steps away from her door. But after years of wrangling and approval last year, the project still has not broken ground. Gavgasi says she might have to pursue her more ambitious dreams in a different location.
For a lot of merchants on Geary and elsewhere in the Richmond District, more customers could be a lifeline. But there’s a big problem.
San Francisco’s western neighborhoods — sleepy, foggy, practically the suburbs — are mostly single-family homes and mom-and-pop commercial strips. The past two decades, as South of Market, the Mission, and other neighborhoods have grown and changed (and struggled with that growth and change), the Richmond and Sunset have sidestepped development, to say the least. In the table below, the Richmond is District 1, the Sunset is District 4:
Out here, holding development at bay is business as usual.
Fast food and housing delays
Cutting through the heart of the Richmond is Geary Boulevard. No other stretch of the western city better exemplifies three generations of just-say-no to change. The 50-plus blocks of Geary in the Richmond, from Gavgasi’s cafe all the way out to the ocean, are mainly lined with one- and two-story buildings. Banks and fast-food joints often squat in the center of their own parking lots, utilitarian tableaux more befitting suburban and exurban places than a city where space is at a premium.
Based on current zoning, though, everything along Geary could go up to four stories. If no one objected, that is.
That’s the catch. People have objected and will continue to object. Small businesses might get disrupted. (It’s hard for them to shut down and then open back up when new buildings are ready.) Owners may be loath to sell. Developers might not want to buy. All the while, the Richmond watches other neighborhoods absorb the brunt of development.
Some change is coming. The city’s busiest bus line, the 38-Geary, will have bus-only red lanes from Masonic to Arguello. When those are ready — perhaps in 2020, according to the official estimate, but don’t bet your xiao long bao on it — Muni will break ground on separate lanes in the center median from Arguello to about 25th Avenue. (We might not see completion until the middle of next decade.) The final product will be a light version of bus rapid transit, meant to be a cheaper, lower-hassle version of a train or subway line — except nothing new or urban in the Richmond is lower hassle. (The Frisc has written with exasperation about the BRT saga.)
Even watered down, could BRT break the density stalemate along the Geary corridor? Faster, more efficient transit is supposed to go together with denser housing like peanut butter and chocolate. Like Peaches & Herb. Like avocado and toast. (Or, if you’re at the Ro Café, like tortilla chips and pomegranate sauce in the Kurdish-style nachos.)
It will be difficult to muster momentum if the Richmond’s supervisor doesn’t lend weight to the effort. Elected in 2016, Sandra Lee Fewer acknowledged the housing crisis during her campaign and told Hoodline after the election: “I’m looking at sites right now where we can possibly do [development]. Some people have spoken out, saying that we don’t need development in the Richmond. But we do need to invest in a denser Richmond District to create affordable housing, support our small businesses, and keep the vibrancy of the neighborhood.”
Critics say that’s lip service. “She hasn’t shown much appetite for identifying even modest goals she laid out in the campaign,” says Jane Natoli of Grow the Richmond, one of many pro-housing neighborhood groups in the city aligned with the YIMBY (“yes in my backyard”) movement.
The Frisc asked Fewer about development opportunities and to point out potential sites. Other than mentioning 600 units of student housing that USF is about to build, which will indeed ease a bit of the pressure on neighborhood demand, Fewer kept details vague in a statement relayed by an aide: “My office is always looking for active sites to build more housing in my district, especially affordable housing that will not displace existing tenants. We are in active conversations with developers and the Mayor’s Office of Housing on potential housing sites that I have identified throughout my district. We are also reaching out to every property owner of a vacant storefront in my district to see if there is any potential to build housing there.”
When The Frisc asked how many units might be feasible along Geary in the next couple of decades, there was no answer.
A political shift?
More people are waking up to realize that the twin crises of housing and homelessness in our city and beyond are about, well, a lack of housing and homes.
Even in the Richmond, there have been signals. Two years ago, the city’s planning department and Fewer’s predecessor, Eric Mar, came up with a “Richmond Strategy” for future development. It was more a set of gauzy goals and principles than a strategy, but one intriguing part was a local survey of attitudes toward development. Here’s one question:
People say they want more housing, especially affordable housing, but add a grain of salt, according to Kristy Wang, community planning policy director at SPUR. “In San Francisco, it’s generally true” that people support housing, she says, “except when it comes to your own block.” Wang knows this too well. Her former employer, Bridge Housing Corp., built the six-story Institute on Aging headquarters near Geary and Arguello, at the site of the shuttered Coronet movie theater. Neighbors fought back, calling it “colossal.” The project prevailed and now provides 150 units to low-income seniors.
Not enough affordable housing is another sticking point. “The big tension is whether we build anything, or emphasize affordability when we build,” says Rachel Brahinsky, director of the urban and public affairs program at USF.
Current rules set the minimum of affordable housing per new project anywhere up to 30 percent, depending on the situation. If the city could wave a magic wand and make 50 percent — what Brahinsky wants — or even 100 percent of all new housing affordable, it might do just that. But without creative financing or massive subsidies, projects won’t pencil out for developers. And if the city and developers can’t make a project work, nothing’s going to get built, affordable or otherwise. (Call it greedy, call it capitalism, call it making a living. Call it what you will.)
Brahinsky acknowledges that raising the “affordability floor” will take creativity and major negotiation. Housing proponents are indeed floating creative ideas, as The Frisc reported earlier this year, but nothing has caught fire.
Enter the new mayor. “We need to build more housing, we need to build more housing, we need to build more housing,” London Breed said the day after she won, doubling — actually, tripling down on her campaign message. Housing was a highlight of her inauguration speech last week as well.
In the Richmond, Breed won almost 40 percent of the first-place votes, while Sup. Jane Kim won 34 percent and former state senator Mark Leno won 27 percent. (With ranked-choice voting, second- and third-place votes made the final tally a squeaker, with Breed beating Leno by less than a percentage point.)
At her inauguration last week, Breed stayed on message: Solving the housing crisis demands more housing of all kinds. So let’s get back to the question that Sup. Fewer didn’t answer: In the low-rise Richmond, which pro-housing advocates have put on notice to right the housing imbalance, what might be possible?
Homes instead of gas stations
We’re not talking about grand visions of reimagined cities — although a couple years ago, California College of the Arts students were asked to come up with ways to put 15,000 new units along Geary and other major corridors.
Dial back the imagination to reckon with the current zoning and planning rules. If the typical roadblocks stemming from public input, environmental review, and financial constraints were suspended, what might happen in the next two decades?
Let’s take the brand-new One Stanyan as a model. Until recently, it was a gas station on the corner of Geary and Stanyan. With 13 units and ground floor commercial space tucked into current height limits of 45 feet, or four stories, the soon-to-open building is exactly what a majority of Richmond residents in the Richmond Strategy survey said they supported.
If every block on Geary from Masonic to the Cliff House featured a single One Stanyan, it would add about 700 units, less than 20 percent of them deemed affordable. And what if the site is two or three times as wide?
Now expand the thought experiment. “You got 13 units out of that one little corner building. Just think what could happen if you could add one or two more 25-foot lots to that,” says Ron Miguel, a former city planning commissioner and president of neighborhood group Planning Association of the Richmond. Miguel was born and raised in the Richmond, and until 1991 ran a flower shop on 25th and Geary, which his father-in-law opened in 1939.
Expand some more. Instead of four stories, Miguel adds, how about six, or even eight?
That question leads to a 2017 law called Home-SF, which allows two extra floors of height if a residential project includes 30 percent affordable units. It has been slow to take off across the city, and revisions are in the works.
(Update: The Board of Supervisors approved the revisions on Tuesday.)
Only four projects under way are using Home-SF to add more density; other projects have opted to use the state’s density bonus program. (One of those Home-SF projects is nearly across the street from One Stanyan, an office building slated to be replaced with 41 units, 12 of which will be affordable.)
“Home-SF was the right idea,” says SPUR’s Wang, but she notes that the current law asks too much of developers, already wary of building in the Richmond, without enough benefits — especially when the financing required for a larger-scale project is harder to wrangle than for a 10- to 20-unit building.
Without substantial rezoning, Home-SF is the main way new buildings can reach six stories. (A few spots, like the area around Geary and Arguello, have special dispensation as well.) NIMBYs, like those who fought the six-story Institute on Aging, often say that’s out of character with the neighborhood. Except that the Richmond has its share of those buildings already, all built before the neighborhood was downzoned after World War II.
Miguel, who helped found the Housing Action Coalition in the 1990s and has decades of experience with NIMBY recalcitrance, says “six stories is more probable on larger corners, and certainly four stories mid-block and on many corners.”
The younger generation of housing proponents say that’s fine. “No one’s saying, ‘Let’s build skyscrapers all the way to the beach,’” notes Natoli of Grow the Richmond. “We have the space to welcome more people by allowing things we used to allow in the past.”
“I see a lot of people who like that neighborhood character and don’t want much of it to change. I respect that,” Natoli acknowledges. “Even modest changes [along Geary] will be in character with existing buildings.” (A point that Natoli is too polite — or savvy — to broach: Much of Geary has the architectural “character” of a San Fernando Valley strip mall.)
How many thousands?
Let’s get to the heart of the question: How much new housing might go up along Geary in, say, the next two decades?
Natoli says 10,000 units is the outer limit if density incentives like Home-SF boost many projects to six stories, but it’s “much more reasonable to expect 4,000 or 5,000 over the longer run.”https://blog.usejournal.com/the-path-to-a-more-equitable-san-francisco-must-include-the-western-neighborhoods-c29b982cf329
Miguel is more skeptical of political realities. He says 2,500 units is a stretch. He would be disappointed, though, if Geary didn’t add at least 1,500 more units over 20 years — an average of roughly 30 new units per block west of Masonic.
“That seems modest,” says architect Christopher Roach, one of the CCA professors who asked students to reimagine Geary. The 15,000 units they sketched out, he admits, is “a radical premise to provoke us to think beyond current constraints that would only allow 1,500 units.”
“I believe there’s something in between,” Roach adds.
So where to start? The city is asking the same question. The Office of Economic Workforce Development is mapping opportunities block by block in the outer neighborhoods, talking to property owners and others to nudge everyone toward new housing. (Part of the calculus for future housing is a 2016 law that legitimizes extra units such as in-law apartments, known as ADUs in planning jargon, that can be built on single-family plots. It has had little effect so far.)
OEWD project manager Crezia Tano barely has begun her Richmond assessment, but she’s already identified 40 sites along Geary and elsewhere in the district. Tano declined to share precise addresses but says in aggregate they could provide more than 1,100 new units under current zoning. With density bonuses like Home-SF, they could bump up to more than 4,100 units, she adds.
Wasted space
Obvious targets are one-story commercial buildings. Just for starters, there are at least 10 bank branches on this stretch of Geary, most of them standing alone. The space above them, not to mention in the parking lots around some of them, is miserably wasted.
How fast these properties turn into denser housing is in part a matter of carrots and sticks. Home-SF is one such carrot, though with few nibbles so far. But many property owners don’t want or need to do anything. Glenn Urban, who owns the Shell gas station and car wash on Geary and Cook, tells The Frisc that his property is more profitable to him with the car wash than converted into housing. Urban says he isn’t selling to developers anytime soon, despite their frequent overtures.
A Japanese restaurant owner shrugs when asked about a denser neighborhood that could boost business. ‘We’re doing OK now,’ he says. ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’
Urban is part of the Geary merchant faction that has fought bus rapid transit at every turn. (Muni’s BRT people know him well; at a recent public meeting, he wasted no time airing his grievances to project head Liz Brisson, who often responded with “As you well know, Glenn …”)
Can he and other anti-BRT merchants get on the housing train? He told The Frisc that BRT was obviously a prelude to development, but when we followed up with housing questions, he did not respond.
At a café near Urban’s Shell station, two more merchants railed against the city and BRT, fearing the loss of parking spots would crush them — a notion that has been debunked time and again.
These merchants, already running on thin margins, couldn’t care less. It’s not just memories of BART construction killing blocks upon blocks of Market Street in the 1960s, it’s anecdotes from more recent projects. “I’ve got friends on Taraval Street who lost their business,” says Lee, who runs the Japanese restaurant SQwers at 3015 Geary. (He declined to give his last name.)
When asked about a denser neighborhood boosting business, he shrugs. It’s too far in the future, and merchants rarely have the luxury of long-term planning. “We’re doing OK now,” he says, heading outside for a smoke. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
The Frisc also checked in with the head of the Geary Merchants Association, David Heller. He acknowledged there would many more people living in San Francisco in 10 years, but declined to answer questions about housing and density.
Proposition 13, the 1978 state measure that effectively froze property taxes, is also a huge disincentive to sell properties with steady income streams. Building at a scale that brings more affordable housing and a return for investors often requires stitching a few lots together. Furthermore, imagine that one of those properties is owned by a family trust controlled by a dozen bickering cousins — or, as OEWD’s Tano calls it, “complex ownership structures and owner dynamics.” Talk about herding cats.
All this, plus the long, long runway of mandatory public input, environmental review, and more, makes the math often unmanageable to build housing in the Richmond.
“Development doesn’t happen overnight,” says Tano. “Engaging property owners is a critical component of this work. If we can cultivate true partnerships with property owners, projects will be more successful in achieving neighborhood goals.”
In other words, Tano is trying to encourage housing in the Richmond one conversation at a time. Some conversations will be easier than others.
