Guaranteed failure.
That’s what Board of Supervisors president Shamann Walton predicted at a Tuesday hearing on the city’s new Housing Element, the critical and highly criticized plan to create more than 82,000 new homes in San Francisco and satisfy state housing watchdogs.
The nearly five-hour hearing, one of the last before the board must vote on whether to send the new housing plan to the state in January, illustrated at least two things:
First, many players in SF’s housing politics perceive this moment as an opportunity to realize their own long-dreamed plans for the city. And second, almost nobody outside of the Planning Department previously realized what kind of paces the state is about to put us through.
For those who missed the first two reels: Like all California cities, every eight years San Francisco is subject to the state’s Regional Housing Needs Allocation, an estimate of how much housing each metro must produce to keep up with demand.
Since there was never any penalty for failing to hit these housing goals, cities treated RHNA as neither an order nor a suggestion, but as more of a light buzzing noise that hardly anybody minded.
Now, however, new laws threaten dire consequences for those who don’t make an honest effort — namely, loss of state funding for affordable housing and transit, and perhaps almost all local control over development.
Earlier this year, SF submitted a plan for the expected 82,000-plus homes to the California Department of Housing & Community Development (HCD), which didn’t just reject the document outright, but also opened an investigation into the city’s notoriously cumbersome housing bureaucracy and red tape.
The board must vote to send the final Housing Element to the state in January and will not have another opportunity to amend it then; if HCD remains unimpressed, penalties could ensue.
Once in a lifetime
At this inflection point, YIMBY interests, like many people The Frisc spoke with earlier this week, see this as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reform San Francisco’s zoning, build more housing for all income levels, and essentially end the era of low-rise, suburban layouts in SF’s residential neighborhoods.
On the opposite side of the backyard fence, affordable housing hawks during Tuesday’s hearing demanded that any new plan should forgo any market-rate housing. (Editor’s note: The Frisc live-tweeted the entire event here.) One of their goals is to put a stake through the city’s practice of funding affordable housing primarily through market-rate development.
SF’s most progressive flank have never trusted market-rate developers, dubbing their products “luxury housing” that cater to the rich, smother neighborhood character, and gentrify BIPOC residents out of town (a point which came up constantly during the hours of public comment).
In most years, the city only produces a few hundred affordable units; 2021 was particularly busy and yielded nearly 1,500, great by SF standards but still just a drop in the bucket.
Now, with the state demanding that 57 percent of the new housing plan should be affordable units, interests like SF’s Council of Community Housing Organizations (a coalition of affordable housing developers and community groups) say it’s time for the production of subsidized homes, land banking, and development on city-owned properties.
While some parties Tuesday were busy ferreting out the opportunity in this crisis, others were just coming to terms with it. Board president Walton wasn’t the only one anticipating doom and “failure” in the city’s future.
The District 10 supervisor railed at the state, wondering where the city will come up with the funds (from $2 billion for $4 billion annually, according to planners’ and activists’ estimates) for all of this affordable housing.
As I reported in The Frisc, the new state mandates go so far beyond what San Francisco has ever produced in the past — more than 10,000 units annually, of which more than 5,700 must be affordable — that it staggers the imagination.
The numbers seem to have staggered the board as well, many of whom acted like they were reckoning with them for the first time. While their unnerved attitudes were reasonable, this has been a years-long process. Where has everybody been?
Tuesday’s hearing saw something like the Kübler-Ross stages of grief visited on lawmakers. Some raged, another was more in the bargaining phase.
Tuesday’s hearing saw something like the Kübler-Ross stages of grief visited upon SF’s lawmakers. Some of them, like Walton, raged; Sup. Dean Preston called the housing order “a joke” and “a setup” in the face of construction costs.
Sup. Hillary Ronen was more in the bargaining phase, pointing out that SF has produced “way more housing than any surrounding counties” over the past decade.
It’s true that the city averaged some 3,500 new units annually from 2010 through 2020, compared with 1,200 in the 1990s, and goosing that number was a big deal.
But frankly, so what? We’re going to need more than 10,000 new homes annually over the next eight years. Demanding more credit for a third of that in years past isn’t getting the city any closer to the new goal.
Others just marveled at the state of things. Sup. Myrna Melgar noted that she hasn’t seen a single new unit in her District 7 at all, and that the new housing plan doesn’t go nearly far enough.
Why, she wondered, does SF not have a real, independent office of housing, like many other major cities? (Right now a small branch of the mayor’s office oversees development citywide.) Why is no one suggesting one now? Is this a crisis, or isn’t it?
Sup. Catherine Stefani noted that even when the city approves housing, actual construction seems to just dribble along. SF can issue all the permits it wants, but at best that puts us years away from real roofs over real people’s heads, and these delays could land us right back in the jaws of HCD, she warned.
She is correct that there’s a big difference between approving and planning for housing, and actually building it. But at the same time: Where have you all been, exactly? Our supervisors are not really just noticing this worrisome trend at this late date, are they?
In perhaps the most surreal moment of the night, Sup. Ahsha Safaí asked if SF’s entitlements process is actually more complicated than other cities. This is like a NASA administrator asking whether the cold, lifeless void of space is in fact a bit nippy sometimes. “We’re off the chart” was the answer he got from city planners.
The new Housing Element includes many suggestions to increase housing capacity and budget that, in the right hands, might spur major new development.
But the political will must be there. The shocked reactions of SF lawmakers to the scale of the challenge is not an encouraging sign — not because they’re wrong, but because they appear to just be getting there now.