Six months into the job, Mayor London Breed gave her State of the City address this week, a 3,000-word speech that touched on the challenges of San Francisco today. She asserted her administration was getting on with the work of municipal government — cleaner streets and neighborhoods, beds and services for 4,000 “currently unsheltered” people, a new approach to mental health, even getting to 100% renewable energy by 2030 — and made the case for her re-election to a full term in November. You can read the whole thing here, but I want to key in on the portion devoted to housing.
The Frisc has written extensively about how Breed has to keep campaigning and putting up results in response to the city’s housing crisis (among other city emergencies). Here’s what Breed said:
In 2018, the city built around 3,000 homes. That’s not nearly enough. We have to get better.
That’s why I have already hired a Housing Delivery Director to deliver projects faster, and implement policy reforms that cut the time it takes to permit housing in half. I have directed our departments to end the backlog of hundreds of in-law units and make it easier for people to build them going forward. And passed legislation to prevent the loss of thousands of units in the pipeline.
If we are going to be a San Francisco for all, we need to be a San Francisco that builds housing for all. That’s why we are moving forward with a $300 million Affordable Housing Bond so we can continue investing in badly needed affordable housing. Across our City, we have projects like the Balboa Upper Yards project in Supervisor Safai’s district, that are ready to be built. That’s 131 units that just need the funding.
But it is not just about investing. We have to break the barriers to building housing so our dollars go further and we get housing faster.
Today I’m announcing a Charter Amendment for the November election to make all affordable housing and teacher housing as-of-right in San Francisco. If an affordable housing or teacher housing project is proposed within zoning, then build it. And build it now. No more bureaucracy. No more costly appeals. No more not in my neighborhood. It’s simple: Affordable housing as-of-right because housing affordability is a right.
More funding, less bureaucracy. This is how we create housing for all San Franciscans.
A few things are worth highlighting. First, even though voters in the last election chose established antigrowth candidates and rejected almost every single candidate on the YIMBY slate to counter the so-called moderate Breed, it’s still far from game over for the YIMBYs, a nascent pro-housing political movement. Despite the setback, the mayor isn’t softening her position on building at all, and the pro-density, pro-housing movement built by local activists such as Sonja Trauss (who lost her bid last fall for the District 6 supervisor seat) and Laura Foote continues to frame the discussion around affordability, development, and the marked lack of each in San Francisco.
Second, Breed is hammering on the fact that the thicket of bureaucracy, appeals, and delays are affecting the pace and the price of projects. Finally, she is taking an “all of the above” strategy to deal with the crisis: She says we need to build in-law units. We need an affordable-housing bond. We need a charter amendment that will go to the voters in November to make affordable and teacher projects “as of right,” which means bypassing the seemingly endless, nitpicky opposition that even the most reasonable projects face from gadflys, NIMBYs, and skittish politicians.
The reactions from longtime non-leaders on housing, supervisors Norman Yee and Sandra Lee Fewer, came quickly. Board president Yee told the SF Examiner that “you still want to have the neighbors to be able to weigh in a little bit. There’s always a balance. When people do point out things, we need to mitigate it.” (Here’s what one person on Twitter thinks about mitigating.)
Fewer, for her part, purported that NIMBYism isn’t to blame, but the bureaucrats themselves: “For two years, I’ve been begging them to build teacher housing in my neighborhood,” she told the Examiner. “I have a site that is ideal and there has been zero movement.” The supervisor has been talking about potential sites in District 1, the Richmond, for a long time, but other than more dormitories for the University of San Francisco, such talk never gets specific.
When queried by The Frisc last summer, Fewer avoided details, just as she had in the 2016 election cycle. We do know that a Richmond District Strategy project has been going on for a few years, dozens of retail spaces remain empty in the neighborhood, and Geary’s bus rapid transit service is still nowhere to be found. (UPDATE: In response to The Frisc, Fewer’s office said the supervisor “would love to see” the Richmond Neighborhood Center at 741 30th Avenue developed into teacher housing, with the center at ground level and the teacher units on top. The Mayor’s Office on Housing, for its part, told the SF Chronicle there would be significant relocation and regulatory issues related with Fewer’s ideal site, and that the city would prefer to build on empty lots.)
Zero movement is the best way to describe the status quo in San Francisco — how we’ve been in the weeds with little change or improvement on one issue after another. But Breed, facing another accountability date with the electorate this November, doesn’t seem satisfied with begging and complaining. Later in her State of the City speech, she addressed this point head-on: “If we had started building more aggressively 20 years ago, we wouldn’t be in this situation today.”
