Editor’s note: As San Francisco moves to change development rules and allow more housing density across the city, The Frisc is examining what’s in store for a handful of neighborhoods. We’ll start in the Haight-Ashbury.
The Haight-Ashbury has it all: colorful Victorians, great parks and views, and hip small businesses, only some of which lean on tourist-oriented counterculture nostalgia.
It’s also ground zero for San Francisco’s historic resistance to new housing. But change is coming. Both the city and the state have singled out several neighborhoods, including the Haight, as prime possible locations for new housing as part of SF’s herculean goal to build more than 10,000 homes a year, more than half of them affordable, this decade.
Some of those homes will amass as part of larger build-outs in areas like Treasure Island and the Central Waterfront, but many of them must fit into neighborhoods like the Haight. City legislators have some leeway to craft new zoning rules, but if they don’t make a real effort, state regulators could bring harsh penalties.
In the city’s new Housing Element blueprint, which the supervisors passed unanimously in January, planners cited “historic inequities in planning and zoning” and said “well-resourced neighborhoods” — with better transit, schools, and amenities — will be slated for more density. All eyes are on January, when the citywide rezoning proposal is due. While we don’t know which neighborhoods will be singled out for the greatest potential alteration, the Haight fits all of the conditions for a likely candidate.
It’s a neighborhood where for decades, activists and lobbyists have long wielded tremendous influence. Most of the Haight, along with nearby Cole Valley and NoPa, is designated RH-3, or up to three units per lot. While that’s more than, say, the Sunset, which has been overwhelmingly RH-1 for generations, SF Planning estimates there are still only about 9,000 homes in the neighborhood, with the average Haight structure dating to 1954.
In a city often known for flux, the Haight is an oasis of stasis. The average homeowner moved in back in 1988, and the average renter has been there since 1996, compared with 1995 and 2005, respectively, for the city as a whole. Planning also estimates there were zero new units constructed in the Haight-Ashbury last year, with only 18 new homes added through additions to existing structures.
“You have a split [in the Haight] between people who are all for more housing of any kind,” says San Francisco historian Woody LaBounty, and people who remain “deeply distrustful of government and urban planning and general zoning ideas.” But while the neighborhood may be split, one flank of it has called the shots for more than 50 years.
Preservationists may fret about the gentrification risks in other neighborhoods, but it’s a done deal in the Haight, which was gentrified more than a generation ago. In 1970 some 40 percent of Haight residents were African-American, but it’s now less than 4 percent Black. Meanwhile, the Haight’s white population has ballooned to more than 75 percent, with a median household income of more than $184,000.
This has coincided with downzoning, which began 50 years ago across the city in the wake of the freeway revolt and other responses to destructive development and segregationist planning. “The [city’s] first major downzoning came in the Haight in 1972, at the urging of the [Haight-Ashbury] Neighborhood Council,” Berkeley urbanist Stephen E. Barton wrote in 1985. That’s the same Haight-Ashbury Neighborhood Council that still drives Haight housing politics today, and whose members deny that there’s a housing crisis.
Barton also credits HANC with driving anti-segregationist politics in the Haight in the 1950s and keeping the neighborhood redline-free. (HANC representatives initially agreed to speak with this reporter for this story, but ended up not offering comment.)
“There was a shift in the late ’70s, and architectural appreciation was so attractive,” says LaBounty. ”You bring in people with money, it becomes a fad, and you suddenly have a neighborhood that’s a lot more homogeneous.”
Character assassination
In short, damage the activists once feared has, in other forms, come to pass, and now they defend the status quo with a quiver of tactics. One term often deployed is “neighborhood character” — abused so much in the service of blocking new SF construction that state housing regulators recently demanded its prohibition.
The Haight-Ashbury certainly has a distinct and arguably irreplaceable atmosphere, with its matching rows of stately Victorians and historic storefronts. HANC housing chair Calvin Welch calls it the most San Francisco of San Francisco neighborhoods, and while Welch has said some outrageous things, on this he’s not wrong.
As city planners feverishly draw up new rules, perhaps altering the look and feel of various SF cityscapes, can they revitalize a classic like the Haight while maintaining its essence?
SF State political science Prof. Jason McDaniel agrees “there are absolutely things that are important in terms of preservation and culture, and I do think it’s possible to balance some of these goals” with new housing mandates in a neighborhood like the Haight. But he has zero confidence that arguments for preservation will be based in anything like good faith: “The desire to do historic preservation has become almost inextricably linked to homeowner self-interest.”
“We all love Victorians, but I don’t happen to be able to afford to live in one,” McDaniel adds, noting that San Francisco can no longer just shunt new development into less affluent areas of the city.
We all love Victorians, but I don’t happen to be able to afford to live in one.
SFsu professor Jason McDaniel
If an owner wants to tear down their Victorian and build a six-story, 20-unit apartment building — something that might be feasible under new rules — high-profile YIMBY volunteer Robert Fruchtman, a software developer well known for his live threads of public meetings, will shed no tears. “Frankly, a lot of them are not worth preserving” on account of neglect and the difficulty of restoration, Fruchtman tells The Frisc. “The ‘neighborhood character’ term is almost always associated with low-rise suburban [style] zoning.”
Looks matter
Ruth Todd’s job is to balance the demands of San Francisco past and future, and she agrees to some degree with the YIMBY crowd. “We think change and current nabes can coexist,” Todd tells The Frisc, because after all, “even the best neighborhoods have a touch of ugliness” that can afford to go.
She’s a principal at the preservation firm Page & Turnbull, which among other projects helped revitalize the Ferry Building years ago. “A lot of people have been asking us about this” topic of change, Todd says; her firm has collaborated in crafting historic resource surveys for districts like Hayes Valley specifically to address such anxieties.
Todd favors a “lot by lot” approach to new construction, redesigning or replacing structures in poor repair or that never looked good in the first place with new structures that can increase density. In fact, she has one Haight-Ashbury building in mind: a brick auto shop at 624 Stanyan.
That said, “lot by lot” might not lead to the density SF planners want to encourage. In 2022, planners identified vacant or underutilized lots across the city that could potentially host new units — nearly 60,000 homes, by their estimate — but they tagged only a dozen spots in the Haight.
But we do have one example of a denser Haight-Ashbury: The eight-story, 160-unit, 100 percent subsidized housing at 730 Stanyan Street, where Haight Street meets Golden Gate Park, which broke ground this summer. (Some neighbors argued for years about the height of the structure and many other variables.)
While the result is a big change for the block, it’s not hard to imagine a future Haight with a few more such buildings slotted into strategically selected spots.
After all, “now is history too,” urban designer Ben Grant tells The Frisc, who explains that future generations will judge SF not just on what we preserve, but also what we build.
Aesthetics still count, according to Todd. Like neighborhood character, design standards can be weaponized by NIMBYs against all new housing, but smart design can also be strategic in winning over naysayers. “It does matter what it looks like,” she says.
Architectural historian Christina Dikas, a Cole Valley resident, has her own examples of what works and what doesn’t. The circa-2004 building with a Wells Fargo at 1726 Haight is “clearly trying to replicate the style and the bay windows” of older buildings nearby, but “it’s too much, very busy,” she remarks, a kind of theme-park imitation.
On the same block, 1700 Haight looks, to Dikas’ eye, like a building “trying to fit in as best as possible without replicating” what’s around it in an apish way. “It’s fine to look modern,” she adds, so long as the building is sure to “call in some suggestions of the historic.” (The address has had quite a history, including a 1988 arson attack on an incoming drugstore, which paved the way for the current building.)
With careful design, newer and, yes, taller buildings can blend with a historic neighborhood and even inject new life with a touch of modernity, although Dikas acknowledges that the Haight is a difficult row to hoe. “There are a lot of quality buildings there that make it a little more precious,” she says. But the city has had success stories in the past, with neighborhoods like Mission Bay and Hayes Valley building higher and with greater density over the past 10 years.
Given its historic character and relatively small footprint, it might be tempting for planners and backseat zoners to give into the suggestion that we should just pass over a neighborhood like the Haight and concentrate future development elsewhere. But as many of the people we spoke to emphasized, since nearly every SF neighborhood has to some degree contributed to the current crisis, everyone will also have to chip in on building a better future — lot by lot, and home by home.