Welcome back to the housing crisis. It’s not like it ever went away, but with San Francisco’s pandemic exodus ebbing, the temporary dip in our world-leading housing costs could be kaput as well.
The timing is bad. At the end of 2020, SF had more than 69,000 new units in its housing pipeline, homes that the city has approved but that won’t be constructed for years. Even if every one of those homes magically appeared tomorrow, the city would still need nearly 13,000 more to satisfy California’s demands, per the latest draft of a regular assessment of the state’s housing shortage.
Supporters of denser housing, which requires significant rule changes, hope that upzoning will eventually drive down costs and redress historic wrongs for residents of color, who bore the brunt of racist 20th-century practices such as exclusionary single-family zoning and neighborhood redlining. (Berkeley, Sacramento, and Minneapolis have vowed reform citywide, and in Oregon, the rezoning is statewide.)
However, San Francisco and its formidable bloc of “housing supply truthers” remains deeply resistant to change. And as The Frisc reported last month, some community organizers, fearing greater density may drive gentrification, have joined wealthy homeowners to counter even modest efforts.
So which is it? Will zoning reforms make SF (and other cities) more inclusive and equitable? Or will they make things worse?
We don’t have years of nationwide data to turn to. Until recently, America was mainly all-in on single family housing, and there wasn’t much upzoning to study.
“Upzonings started to be implemented in earnest in the mid-2000s and even 2010s, so researchers interested in the long-term effects would want to give it a little more time,” Jenna Davis, an urban planning PhD candidate at Columbia University who has studied New York City zoning, tells The Frisc.
But as academics accelerate their efforts, housing watchers might hope that the lens of scholarly research can dispel personal biases and reach objective conclusions.
So far, not so much.
Universities and peer-reviewed journals are not oracles that deliver spotless truths from on high. But even potentially useful insights these days are getting caught up in the ugly politics of housing and unfortunate cycles of misinformation.
A more complex body
The existing body of research often emphasizes building more housing and doing it faster: An oft-cited 2014 study blamed SF’s shortages on overregulation, and in 2018, famed Harvard University economist Ed Glaeser co-authored a paper concluding, in somewhat weary tones, that our land restrictions “result in a smaller stock of housing, higher house prices, greater volatility of house prices, and less volatility of new construction.” Several other peer-reviewed studies reached similar conclusions.
However, recent findings have injected more nuance into these perspectives:
- In 2019 study, then-MIT PhD candidate in urban planning Yonah Freemark found that after upzoning a few areas of Chicago, land values rose as much as 5 percent over the next five years, but there was “no increase in the number of housing units built compared with equivalent areas that were not upzoned.” His study suggested that the upzoning possibly drove land speculation but didn’t spur construction in the short term.
- A paper published last month by Columbia’s Davis indicated that in New York City, upzonings between 2000 and 2010 coincided with traditionally Hispanic neighborhoods becoming whiter, “suggesting that neighborhood upzonings might accelerate, rather than temper, gentrification pressures in the short term.”
- Iowa State University planning professor Daniel Kuhlmann’s February paper about Minneapolis’ elimination of single-family zoning found that “the plan change was associated with a [3 to 5] percentage point increase in the price of affected properties” almost immediately, and that prices spiked higher in conventionally inexpensive neighborhoods and properties.
Talking to them about their work can be frustrating, because they are loath to come to broad conclusions, emphasizing that their studies only describe short-term results in a relatively small sample size.
Freemark’s study found no hoped-for development increase over five years. That’s bad news for density boosters, but Freemark is quick to point out this does not mean more new housing would not eventually appear — only that it hadn’t yet.
The point of the study was that “the difference between zoned density and actual density is fundamentally different,” he tells The Frisc. “Zoning may lead to outcomes, but it may not.”
Kuhlmann reports that his research, which showed a spike in Minneapolis prices, was “about what we’d expect to see” in the short term — and to an academic “somewhat obvious.” But he admits that to laypersons “it’s somewhat counterintuitive, if the plan is meant to moderate housing prices.”
Davis’ finding that more white people moved into key New York neighborhoods seems ominous. But she’s quick to caution that no single study can prove the connection between development and gentrification: “I’m not sure it would be fair to say it makes the neighborhood less diverse.”
Ideally, we would want to see hundreds of peer-reviewed studies over many years. But that takes more time, more study, more patience — all things our housing debates often can’t abide.
Weaponized
Reaction to new housing research is often loud, volatile, aggressive, and misleading. In 2019, Freemark became so annoyed by NIMBY factions using his paper as a political truncheon in California’s density fight that he penned a 3,000-plus word rebuttal in The Frisc correcting their errors.
This sort of outsized reaction is not an isolated incident. After UCLA professor Michael Storper and a coauthor produced a 2020 paper arguing that housing insecurity in SF and elsewhere was more due to economic inequality than restrictive regulation, “some of the tweeting got pretty bizarre,” Storper tells The Frisc. “One scholar compared us to that St. Louis gun-toting couple and lots of Trumpy racist people.”
‘Let’s pause the housing we’re not doing yet’ may be the most fundamentally San Francisco sentiment ever manifested.
The truth about housing may be too complicated and inconvenient for SF politics, right at a time when the city can’t afford eternal debate without action. “We don’t have a ton of research, it’s all emerging,” Sylvia Morse, co-editor of the 2016 book Zoned Out, tells The Frisc. “Obviously we need to build more housing, but where do you build, and what kind? It’s going to be a series of experiments.”
This perspective is more pressing than ever, as a critical Planning Commission hearing in April demonstrated. Planning staff and commissioners spoke at length, with an attempt at realistic nuance, about a key topic — the need to reform old rules, build more housing, and do it all with equity and antiracism at the center.
In spite of this radical new reality, what proceeded was more than three hours of public comment featuring the same arguments you’d have heard a year ago, five years ago, or in some cases generations ago. It was a surreal pageant of rhetoric versus reality: 20th-century housing politics, unthawed like a microwave dinner long buried in the back of the freezer.
The city needs to craft a plan, or “element,” to meet the state’s updated demands, known as the Regional Housing Needs Assessment, which now say San Francisco should build more than 82,000 new homes by 2031. Multiple speakers asked for the new housing element to be “paused” even though the plan, which must be presented to the state by the end of 2022, has neither been designed nor implemented yet.
“Let’s pause the housing we’re not doing yet” may be the most fundamentally San Francisco sentiment ever manifested.
Meanwhile, on the lawmaking side of City Hall, Sup. Rafael Mandelman is trying to midwife an extremely modest change to decades-old housing bans, which could qualify as one of author Morse’s “experiments.”
“This is a change that we would expect to see play out over the next 50 years, not the next five years,” he told The Frisc last month. But he’s now finding even this may be too much to bear. “Everyone is either opposed or annoyed,” he told the SF Chronicle recently.
In San Francisco, objectives at rest tend to stay at rest. If new data, new policy proposals, and even pressing new demands at a state level only lead to greater inaction, then we end up doing the only thing that all the research indicates will not fix the city’s problems: nothing at all.
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.
