On Mayor London Breed’s first day in Room 200 — if you don’t count those other days she spent there — it was fitting that the regularly scheduled Planning Commission meeting, up on the fourth floor, featured the city’s latest housing report, which planners say will lead to an affordable housing strategy in 2019.
Fitting, because Breed is going to be the housing mayor, come hell or high water. She made it abundantly clear during the truncated campaign, and her opponents tried to paint her as the pawn of greedy developers. (It didn’t work.)
“The politics of no have plagued our city for far too long. Not on my block. Not in my backyard. I plan to change the politics of no to the politics of yes. Yes, we will build more housing,” she said in Wednesday’s inauguration speech.
Thursday’s Planning Commission meeting (watch the proceedings here, especially item 12) was an augur of the next round of development debates. A direct consequence — and hot-button topic — will be pressure on the western and southern neighborhoods, mainly zoned for single-family homes, to build more and build higher. (The Frisc will be expanding on this subject next week. You don’t want to miss it, so please follow us.)
Pro-housing activists like Laura Foote Clark, executive director of YIMBY Action, are taking Breed’s ascendance as a shift in the political winds. “Outlying neighborhoods can do more to approve more housing,” Clark said at the planning meeting, pushing the commissioners to adapt with the times. “And this body will have to change the way it thinks about housing.”
It’s not just YIMBYs who are sick of neighborhood intransigence. In the lead-up to the March to Save Mission Street in January, Mission anti-eviction attorney and march organizer Carlos Bocanegra told The Frisc: “We think the Mission is doing more than its share. If you look at the Sunset, there are places like that are more residential, a little bit more organized, more connected — they have maintained that sort of stability.”
Data in the new report drove the point home about affordable housing, which is stacked to the city’s east and south, like cargo containers that have slid to one side of a listing ship. The Western neighborhoods have a shockingly low number of places for low- and middle-income San Franciscans.
The city’s low-rise to high-rise patterns look basically the same, with the density stacked in one corner. Commission president Rich Hillis, whose day job is executive director of the Fort Mason Center, said the city report “puts in stark numbers what we’re hearing every day.”
“We think we’re doing a lot, but it’s clear we have to ramp that up and do more,” he said after the city planners finished their presentation. (One concrete proposal on the table: Make it easier to build housing in undeveloped sites currently zoned for service and light industrial uses.)
The report traces the arc of San Francisco housing picture from 1990 to 2015 through a variety of factors: our types of housing stock, its ownership status, economic and racial demographics, and much more. One statistic that stood out for some commissioners was the city’s loss of families. Households with children, particularly with more than one child, have declined, while the regional rate has climbed. The city has become — no surprise — wealthier and more childless. When children leave a neighborhood, schools and the children who remain behind are affected, according to commission vice president Myrna Melgar (who is also executive director of the Jamestown Community Center).
This will be a flashpoint in upcoming development fights: The low-rise neighborhoods have opposed density by invoking family friendliness. Should the city demand that new housing projects accommodate bigger footprints for families — that is, more than just studios or small one-bedrooms? Or will an increase in small-unit supply ease the demand on multi-bedroom units? (Think fewer three-bedroom apartments with five tenants carving up the space and fighting over the dishes in the sink.)
Another thread in the struggle for San Francisco’s development soul surfaced during the meeting, although it wasn’t directly about housing. Two supervisors stopped by: Katy Tang, who represents the Sunset, and Ahsha Safaí, representing the Ingleside and Excelsior, spoke to promote their legislation to cut red tape for local merchants. “We need to attract more businesses to our commercial corridors,” Tang said, and cited the business-killing lack of foot traffic in the outer neighborhoods.
Planning Commissioner Milicent Johnson, a Richmond district resident, chimed in. “Every time I walk down Geary or Balboa I see one of our legacy businesses” turned into an empty storefront, she said — a problem that the district has just begun to address.
Local merchants have stymied efforts to improve public transit in the Richmond. While retail vacancy rates in San Francisco are among the lowest in the U.S., they’ve begun ticking upward. The discussion Thursday left open this question: Will merchants in districts opposing density support more housing if they hear the message that more housing means more customers around the corner, across the street, even right over their heads? Turns out there are local data on this; 85 percent of people hitting the Polk Street commercial corridor get there without a car, and a 2017 SFMTA survey found the percentage of carless customers is even higher along Geary.
One way or another it will be a political battle. One planning commissioner, however, didn’t seem eager for a knife fight in his kitchen, so to speak. After an afternoon of talk about the housing crisis and whether neighborhoods should build their fair share, commissioner Dennis Richards worried aloud that upzoning would displace longtime residents.
He suggested that pro-housing advocates, gesturing toward YIMBY Action’s Clark in the back of the room, put on the ballot a measure to upzone the western city, where going higher than four stories is now nearly impossible.
Perhaps he was serious — let the people decide — or perhaps it was a dig at the recent unsuccessful YIMBY effort to place a let’s-speed-up-affordable-housing proposition on the June ballot. (Clark’s reply to Richards: “Are you going to pay for it?”)
Whatever his motives or level of seriousness, punting such matters to a public vote feels like an abdication of responsibility. At the very least, we’d get a clearer sense of how much the political winds really are shifting.