At the close of the previous decade, San Francisco’s housing crisis seemed poised to go on forever. Dozens of proposals to spur cities to allow more housing were thwarted by the state legislature in 2019, including the sweeping SB 50. The 2020 session, which had been dubbed “the year of housing production” in Sacramento, also ended in failure, even though it looked like the pro-housing advocates had the momentum to pass several measures.
Setting aside the finger-pointing and pleas for patience from lawmakers, though, there has been a shift among some San Francisco housing developers — particularly those in the affordable housing sector who are savvy about shepherding projects through the the city’s byzantine process — who say it’s actually easier than ever to make new housing happen.
In the past, highly desired 100 percent affordable housing projects could take an indefinite amount of time to break ground and get built. It didn’t even matter if it was housing for low-income seniors. Take 1296 Shotwell in the Mission district: The city acquired the parcel in 2013 and picked a developer two years later. (Neighborhood NIMBYs blew their tops, calling it “the Great Wall on Shotwell.”) Construction began in 2018 and finally opened to tenants in late 2020. Is it any wonder our housing crisis just keeps rolling along?
In the past, getting permission to build from bodies like the Planning Commission or Board of Supervisors could take months or sometimes years. “In some cases, we’ve been able to reduce the time for approval down to 30 days, so we feel very good about that,” Cynthia Parker, the president and CEO of Bridge Housing, tells The Frisc.
There isn’t any one single change that slashes through the Gordian knot of San Francisco development. Instead, many seemingly modest tweaks to state and local laws in recent years are combining to chip away at the problem and allow new housing to warp past institutional hurdles and become a roof over people’s heads.
A case study conducted by UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation this month cited the example of 833 Bryant, a 145-unit supportive housing project in the South of Market for the formerly homeless. It’s exactly the kind of building that persistent NIMBYism could have stymied in the past. (Note how cathartic it was for the city to open a Navigation Center along the Embarcadero.)
For 833 Bryant, developers had the benefit of SB 35 (signed into law in 2017 and introduced by the prolific state Sen. Scott Wiener, author of SB 50), which blocks the use of hurdles such as the dreaded CEQA review and neighborhood challenges that, even if unsuccessful, can add months or years to a a timeline. You’ll find more details below.
SB 35 wasn’t the only law that paved the way for the project’s success: “For 833 Bryant, we had been looking at a couple of different underutilized sites in SoMa,” says Rebecca Foster, CEO of the SF Housing Accelerator Fund. The problem, she recounts, is that affordable housing developers tend to shop for the cheapest land in town, like old industrial parcels or parking lots. Yet SB 35 only applies to land already zoned for housing, which is usually too plum to acquire.
“So we worked with then-Sup. Jane Kim to make a minor change to the zoning,” Foster says, so that 100 percent affordable projects would count as being zoned for housing already.
The 833 Bryant project is slated for completion in the summer; Terner researchers estimate that it cost 25 percent less and was built 30 percent faster than it might have otherwise. What’s more, dozens of other SoMa sites are eligible for accelerated construction using this same combo, according to Foster.
‘Sometimes it’s luck’
Even during this crisis of scarcity and affordability, housing bills typically see nasty, brutish, and short lives in the California legislature. Those that survive often make it through in truncated and watered-down forms. However, these beaten-down bills can still be powerful tools in the hands of shrewd parties, who stack them up to achieve previously unattainable goals. Last year in Marin City, developers combined SB 35 with a different state law, AB 1763 (see below), to produce a 74-unit project that wouldn’t have stood a chance in Marin County just a few years ago.
SF-based Assemblymember David Chiu admits that this punching combination applied to housing is only partially by design. “Sometimes you think about what to do to build on the work of others. Sometimes it’s luck,” he tells The Frisc, pointing out that even he is sometimes surprised by how often some laws come into effect.
The state has passed dozens of new pieces of housing legislation the past five years, far too many to encapsulate here. Still, here’s a sample of potentially critical changes in the last couple of legislative sessions:
- SB 35 (2017): It might not sound that remarkable on paper, but this is the Big One. Under SB 35, cities that are not on track to meet their Regional Housing Needs Assessment, or RHNA, must allow buildings with a certain volume of affordable housing — as little as 10 percent in the case of cities that are way behind RHNA goals — to skip most bureaucratic hurdles, as long as the project meets basic zoning requirements. The crux of it is that almost no city in California is building fast enough to be exempt from SB 35’s streamlined process.
- AB 1227 (2018): Under this law, student housing can benefit from state density bonus laws for developers — a key issue in state Sen. Nancy Skinner’s hometown of Berkeley.
- SB 330 (2019): Among other things, this law sets a cap of five public hearings a city can hold on most new building projects. It also stops cities from rezoning most lots to eliminate housing as an allowed use. In addition, the law includes a moratorium on housing moratoriums. It’s better known as the Housing Crisis Act of 2019, and is also by Skinner.
- AB 68 (2019): SF-based Assemblymember Phil Ting is trying to spur construction of in-law apartments (“accessory dwelling units” or ADUs, in housing jargon) with this mandate, requiring cities to review permits within 60 days and nixing most local parking and floor plan requirements beyond what state law requires. The law also legalizes so-called “junior ADUs,” permitting in-laws in homes that otherwise might not have had room for them. Cities like San Francisco, which has sought to accelerate the development of these units, hoped that legalizing in-law apartments would greatly increase the apartment stock, but very little new construction has actually taken place.
- AB 1763 (2019): This Chiu-penned law is narrowly focused on 100 percent affordable housing, allowing these projects (such as the site where Haight Street meets Golden Gate Park) to increase density up to 80 percent over local limits. Projects near major transit lines also can add up to three additional stories.
- AB 2345 (2020): This measure boosts the density bonus up to 50 percent (from a maximum of 35 percent) if a developer increases the number of moderate and low-income affordable units in a project.
Most of these laws don’t have the high profiles that housing revolutions are made of, but they can add up. “It’s a difference of years” in savings for developing certain projects, says Sam Moss, executive director of Mission Housing Development Corp. He’s been in affordable housing development for 10 years, and market-rate development for seven before that, and he calls “the environment in SF right now is the best it’s ever been.”
‘In some cases, we’ve been able to reduce the time for approval down to 30 days, so we feel very good about that.’ —Cynthia Parker, Bridge Housing
It’s possible that some procedural hostility to housing has abated, given the economic slowdown from the pandemic lockdown. Nevertheless, it appears that market-rate developers are not as enthused about this new normal. “I can’t say for sure whether permitting has gotten faster or slower,” says Jon Dishotsky, CEO of developer Starcity.
Then again, there also are practical limits on just how fast anyone can build: “Not for nothing, but there will be tens of thousands of units built after Scott Wiener leaves the [state] Senate,” notes Moss.
Generally, it’s harder for market-rate projects to hit the affordable housing benchmarks favored by recent lawmaking. “Being 50 percent affordable, that just doesn’t apply to market-rate,” says developer Charmaine Curtis. “Not here or in Oakland or anywhere else in the Bay Area — nowhere I want to build.” Over a dozen other market-rate developers declined to comment.
Possibly market-rate developers will have an appetite for Sup. Rafael Mandelman’s legislative bid to end single-family zoning in SF, just as local legislators have done or are trying to do in Berkeley and Sacramento. The hotly debated proposal would radically change housing assumptions in residential neighborhoods. (Single-family zoning has a sordid history of racism and exclusion, given the perception that multifamily housing or other uses might diversify communities and lower property values.)
Mandelman’s effort — paired with a proposal to curb “monster homes” of thousands of square feet in San Francisco — would allow up to four units of housing on corner lots and on lots within half a mile of major rail stops (mainly BART and Muni Metro stations) in residential districts. “We’ve concentrated most of our recent development in just a few places, and this is a way for every neighborhood to do its part,” the District 8 supervisor said earlier this month.
At least one of Mandelman’s colleagues isn’t sanguine about the rezoning. Sup. Shamann Walton, president of the Board of Supervisors, told the SF Chronicle that such changes may displace residents of color from Bayview-Hunters Point, forecasting choppy seas for the proposal at City Hall.
Despite fevered opposition, the point remains that the housing shortage is not immune to legislative solutions. What remains at issue is whether the current set of targeted fixes can scale to meet the ongoing crisis.
Adam Brinklow has lived in and written about San Francisco for 13 years, covering local communities for outlets like Curbed SF, SFGate, San Francisco magazine, SF Weekly, and EDGE SF.