Nearly two weeks ago, the Board of Supervisors shot down plans for a building that would replace a South of Market parking lot with nearly 500 homes, 73 of them below the market rate. Fees from the project would have paid for another 57 affordable units elsewhere in the city.
The 27-story tower at 469 Stevenson Street would have been a short walk from major transit and downtown workplaces. It also would have given hundreds of union tradespeople long-term construction work.
But that wasn’t good enough for the eight of 11 supervisors who voted against the project, even though District 6’s Matt Haney — the “host” of the project, if you will — supported it. That kind of kiss-off doesn’t happen often. Speculation bubbled about political payback, because Haney is running against former supervisor and progressive stalwart David Campos for a newly vacated state Assembly seat.
The backlash to the housing rejection, stemming in part from The Frisc’s live reporting via Twitter, was immediate, including from politicians up and down the state. The SF Chronicle later reported that state investigators would be looking into whether the vote flouted California’s housing rules. (Attorney general Rob Bonta recently created a housing “strike force.”)
In the aftermath, some supervisors issued lengthy justifications for their no votes. Meanwhile, the developer, BUILD, must draw up new planning documents if it wants at least a shot at future approval in a year or two.
We’ve decided to focus on the rationale posted on Nov. 1 by Sup. Rafael Mandelman, because he’s not reflexively against market-rate housing and also has taken some stabs at housing reform. He touted these bona fides when justifying his rejection of 469 Stevenson.
So let’s dig in. (We’re including most of Mandelman’s tweets; you can read the full thread here.) We’ll do what we did last fall in our supervisor candidate questionnaires: apply context, check facts, and attempt to offer a better understanding of what went down with 469 Stevenson. I also followed up with Mandelman about several of his tweeted comments. (His additional responses are part of the text below.)
Pardon the jargon, but it’s important: “ABAG” is the Association of Bay Area Governments, which is responsible under state law for setting a housing goal for our region every eight years. The goal gives the state some power to penalize local governments if they don’t push hard enough to build necessary housing, determined by a formula known as the Regional Housing Needs Allocation, or RHNA.
Mandelman is right that SF has already exceeded the RHNA market-rate goals for 2015 to 2022. (Scroll down to page 15 of this document if you want the chart.) Yet exceeding these goals hasn’t put a dent in our housing crisis, because over the past decade the city grew in population and added hundreds of thousands of jobs — 8.5 new jobs for each new unit of housing produced between 2010 and 2018. What’s more, we need more than 82,000 homes this decade, according to the new RHNA numbers — nearly three times the 2015–22 total. (See page 24 here.)
Pandemic hiccup aside, prices have gone way up, and people with limited means must compete with well-paid professionals. And the more workers have to commute in from the suburbs and exurbs, the more we invite greenhouse-gas emitting cars in a town that talks big about fighting climate change.
Of course we need more affordable housing (see Mandelman’s next tweet), but let’s not lose the headline here: Our city is in crisis, and a lack of housing is at the core.
Indeed, something is “seriously wrong.” Vast swaths of SF have almost no affordable housing and not much planned (see tables 1a and 1b in this document) in part because a) projects like this one and this one always turn into hand-to-hand combat with angry neighbors — and the city’s rules allow it; and b) the supervisors in those areas don’t fight enough for projects, or for broader changes. Sup. Connie Chan just wrote that the bar for new housing in her district, the Richmond, should be set even higher.
Also left unsaid here: The less market-rate development, the less money goes into the city’s affordable fund via the inclusionary housing program. And when projects like 469 Stevenson are killed or delayed, the connected affordable housing is killed or delayed too.
To follow up, I asked Mandelman if SF can meet its affordable housing goals without including market-rate projects that include affordable units, like 469 Stevenson. His response, in part, was that we need to boost the ratio of affordable to market-rate housing “by maximizing the number of onsite affordable units in large new developments, and making it much easier to build affordable housing.” The barriers, he said, are “funding and sites” that scale up to hundreds of units in “resource- and transit-rich areas,” and neither are easy to come by, Mandelman added. (He thinks 469 Stevenson should be reimagined as 100% affordable housing.)
Yes, it’s imperative to find other funding sources dedicated to affordable housing, like this and this, and boost the percentage across the city.
But the inclusionary system that taps into private money is still important. Housing that’s affordable to rent or buy isn’t affordable to build at more than $700,000 per unit. (The $600 million affordable housing bond approved by SF voters in 2019 will cover construction of roughly 800 units.)
It might have fallen short of other projects, but this is like saying, “You paid for your $10 burger, plus a $2 tip, but the folks at the next table tipped $5. Sorry, pal, we’re saving your burger for a bigger tipper.”
Also, this project is not part of the Central SOMA plan, so that’s irrelevant.
Let’s take Mandelman’s next three tweets together:
An environmental impact report (EIR) from the planning department is required here by California law. Criticizing the review was a main theme of the Oct. 26 hearing, and of Mandelman’s reasons here. Despite his claim, potential impact on the Mint-Mission district is in fact discussed on page 87 of the review. Mandelman told The Frisc that he disagreed with the report’s conclusion.
The review addresses seismic questions, starting on page 185, but in follow-up comments Mandelman reiterated parallels to the Millennium Tower, which is sinking and tilting. (For what it’s worth, the Millennium Tower is twice the height and square footage as 469 Stevenson.) Mandelman’s concerns echo those of John Elberling, executive director of South of Market affordable housing nonprofit Todco, who appealed the project to the Board of Supervisors. The Planning Department addressed Elberling’s seismic complaints on page 58 and elsewhere in this document.
Mandelman also makes it sound like the tower plan had surreptitiously grown to twice its allowed height. That’s not so; it got that way because of a state “density bonus” law that allows for bigger projects if they include a certain amount of affordable housing. (“I don’t like it, but that’s state law,” he wrote in our exchange.)
But there’s a broader issue at play. The California code states that social and economic change — like gentrification and displacement, which Mandelman and others brought up repeatedly last week — should not be a primary factor in an environmental review:
“Significant effect on the environment” means a substantial, or potentially substantial, adverse change in any of the physical conditions within the area affected by the project including land, air, water, minerals, flora, fauna, ambient noise, and objects of historic or aesthetic significance. An economic or social change by itself shall not be considered a significant effect on the environment. A social or economic change related to a physical change may be considered in determining whether the physical change is significant.
The law says that by itself, “economic or social change” can’t be regarded as having a significant environmental impact. However, that last sentence gives legislators an opening: “social or economic change related to a physical change may be considered” in assessing a project’s potential significant impact. (Italics are mine.)
So gentrification and displacement can enter through the side door, even if there’s no hard evidence for them. (More on this further down.)
If more of SF, like the western neighborhoods, weren’t so allergic to new housing, perhaps there wouldn’t be so much pressure on SOMA. And while Mandelman name-checks a few opponents of the project, he doesn’t mention that plenty of community groups voiced support, something Haney highlighted after the “no” vote.
Let’s have a real, robust plan for tens upon tens of thousands of new affordable units across the city, not lip service.
I asked if the groups in opposition were more important those in support. Mandelman replied that their opposition was “not relevant to the adequacy of the EIR, but concerning to me.”
Also, remember how often we’re told that San Francisco progressives are the champions of labor unions? Not this time.
Perhaps some construction workers who might not be able to build that building could have lived there if they could have built that building.
Mandelman is citing one study. There are many others, and to combat academic cherry-picking and misinformation, we’ve written about this fairly often. The upshot: More housing is good, but the field of research is nascent and there’s room for disagreement. Mandelman makes it seem like there isn’t.
Yes, compared with many of his colleagues, Mandelman is trying. He has also voted for several big housing projects, including this one and this one. The Frisc has covered his modest fourplex proposal. But discussing the plan earlier this year, Mandelman himself didn’t hold out much hope for it.
Mandelman is positioning himself here, as housing people like to say, in “the missing middle.” Sensible. Thoughtful. Committed to analyzing each project on its merits.
But let’s step back a second: Eleven politicians analyzing each housing project is a dysfunctional way to run a city. There are rules, as complex as they might be, that govern the planning approval process. Those rules go out the window when a project is appealed all the way up to the full board. “Merits” can be basically whatever the politicians say — as Mandelman and others’ statements show.
The supervisor should be commended for his respect, for sharing his views, and as he points out, for trying to nudge policy with his fourplex proposal. But pushing something that most of his colleagues panned or ghosted isn’t the same as combating a crisis. If Mandelman and others don’t believe a mix of market-rate and affordable housing is the answer, then let’s have a real, robust plan for tens upon tens of thousands of new affordable units across the city, not just in a few neighborhoods.
Unless that happens, the supervisors’ fight against climate change and socioeconomic inequality will basically be lip service. Until supervisors like Connie Chan, Gordon Mar, and Myrna Melgar, whose sprawling low-rise districts encompass nearly half the city, actively back more a lot more apartments across their neighborhoods, we will continue to see rents and home prices rise as we have for some 30 years.
Denying a project that would deliver more than 100 affordable homes and allow hundreds of people to live near jobs and transit — with reasons ranging from easily disproved to disputable — is not an acceptable outcome. It’s not how we make San Francisco a better city.