The years 2020 and 2021 were dominated by COVID, sharpening debates over San Francisco’s future. Even with a few folks leaving, housing scarcity and the city’s affordability crisis remained unchecked. This year will be no different. But while battles over proposed development continue from the Sunset to South of Market, the conversation around housing has changed.
In Sacramento, legislators such as Sen. Scott Wiener, who represents San Francisco, helped pass significant bills that seek to curtail the local ability to block housing, which SF and many of its neighbors have done for years.
These laws, including SB 9 and 10, allow homeowners to take a parcel zoned for a single-family home and build up to four homes on it. (That’s where the “legalized fourplex” label comes from.) In addition, they streamline the process for cities to allow up to 10 units per lot in transit-rich and urban areas. In essence, they relax onerous zoning and development rules that cities and towns use to limit housing and growth.
The state is also keeping a closer eye on cities that don’t make good-faith efforts to meet the latest mandated housing production goals. San Francisco’s bar has been set at 82,000 new units by 2031. It also seems like the new California attorney general Rob Bonta might actually enforce the rules and regulations. His office put SF’s supervisors on blast for killing two housing projects last fall, and recently growled back at the exclusive Bay Area enclave of Woodside, which cited mountain lion protection as a reason not to build housing.
With the new top cop in Cougartown, SF leaders are scrambling to put their own stamp on how the city should add density — however modest — to its semi-suburban neighborhoods. We’re now at three supervisors and counting with competing visions. The first was Sup. Rafael Mandelman’s proposal to allow fourplexes on corner lots. Late last year, the Planning Department said his plan was a good start, but his colleagues on the board haven’t applauded it, to say the least. “I guess people really don’t want Black people and other communities of color in this city,” District 10’s Shamann Walton said to the SF Chronicle.
Recently, Gordon Mar and Ahsha Safaí, who represent low-rise districts away from the eastern areas of the city, like South of Market, the Mission, and the Dogpatch, where the bulk of development has taken place, have come up with their own proposals to have lot splits and fourplexes.
Let’s explore these and other recent housing matters further.
Mar’s stab in the fog
The District 4 supervisor, elected in 2018, defended with passion and principle a 100% affordable housing project in the Sunset amid a hateful NIMBY outcry, but is taking heat from the pro-housing side for seeking a scaled-down “compromise.”
Late last year, he tried getting ahead of the debate by floating a plan to allow greater density in his neighborhood of mostly single-family homes, relaxing what’s permissible to up to four dwelling units per lot, excluding accessory dwelling units.
There are plenty of catches:
- Each new “bonus dwelling unit” added to a lot must have at least two bedrooms. (In other words, no family-unfriendly small apartments.)
- New units would be governed by rent controls. The limit would be 100% of area median income (AMI), and increases would also be capped. (SF AMI is about $106,500 for a household of two people and $133,000 for four people.)
- The new units would have to conform to existing rules on building heights and yard sizes. (Combined with the two-bedroom minimum, this effectively means don’t make them too small or too large.)
- The properties would be subject not just to rent control but to sale price control, with a “maximum price” that must be affordable to a buyer at 100% AMI.
So the proposal says you can turn your single-family home into four units in the Sunset, as long as the rent is low; the building is not tall or wide; and at sale is guaranteed to have no upside. (Reminder: Owning property has real carrying costs like taxes, insurance, and maintenance. Then there’s inflation; a dollar today isn’t what it was last year.) In short, this is not a realistic prescription for adding housing.https://twitter.com/zachlipton/status/1460732514578751493
Ironically, if San Francisco and the western neighborhoods in particular had allowed for more housing production, perhaps some property transactions or leases would close below market prices. But Mar is throwing so many flaming hoops to jump through that his plan cannot be expected to spur much interest.
Safaí’s affordable effort
Down in District 11, Safaí is also jumping into the fourplex saddle, though this isn’t the supervisor’s first housing rodeo. In the same spirit as Mar, Safaí wants to “immediately remove barriers to building housing for low- and middle-income residents and working families,” according to his legislation. Sounds reasonable, right?
Again, the agony is in the details. Safaí’s density proposal has following requirements:
- A project may not be located on a lot smaller than 2,500 square feet, and may not exceed the zoned area’s height limits.
- Up to four units may be built. With four, two units must be affordable to households with an AMI of 110 percent (rental) or 140 percent (sale). If three units are built, at least one must be affordable under the same rubric.
- At least two units must have at least one bedroom.
- The affordable unit or units will be “restricted” to the rent and sale price controls listed above, for the life of the project.
There are other restrictions on minimum size, window placement, and short-term rental use. It’s quite the checklist.
Like Mar, Safaí says he’s working for more “missing middle” housing and density in the neighborhoods while appeasing NIMBY/progressive gripes against development. And like Mar, there’s a Goldilocks conceit that homeowners or mom-and-pop developers will pony up for new housing without adding height, too many studios, or upwardly mobile tenants, and without ever having price caps off parts of the property, on and on. That is a big ask.
To be clear, it’s not just people on Twitter that are saying so. San Francisco’s own Planning Department has vetted the Mar and Safaí plans and found both wanting. A report was first presented at a Planning Commission hearing on Feb. 3 and will be heard again today Thursday:
The Commission supports the overall goals of Supervisor Mar’s and Safai’s ordinances and recognizes the need to increase density in areas of the city that have historically seen little housing production while also producing more diverse and importantly affordable housing choices. The question then becomes whether these ordinances will accomplish the supervisors’ and Department’s shared goals. Unfortunately, as currently drafted, and under current market conditions, the Commission finds neither ordinance would succeed in creating new affordable housing units, and potentially stymie the densification of the city’s [residential] districts.
(UPDATE: On Thursday evening, the Planning Commission heard from Safaí and Mar aide Li Miao Lovett about their respective plans, as well as from staff. On the whole commissioners were loath to support them, given that they may be changed. Commission president Rachael Tanner also used the metaphor of decorating a Christmas tree. Everyone loves ornaments, but add too many and the tree falls over. If local fourplex programs aren’t feasible, she said, property owners will fall back on what the state’s rules now allow. By a vote of 5 to 1, they disapproved the proposals, putting the ball back in the supervisors’ court. The Frisc live-tweeted the hearing, starting here.)
The crux of the issue is that we don’t have enough housing, and the way to address that is to have more of it. The fact that folks don’t like that means we waste time and energy puttering around the edges, debating proposals that aren’t going to work.
Anybody home?
Speaking of the edges, last week at the Board of Supervisors’ Land Use and Transportation Committee, many ears perked up when the Budget and Legislative Analyst reported that an estimated 40,000 units in San Francisco are vacant.
Sup. Dean Preston — a longtime opponent of market-rate development and Twitter responder — said that without factoring in empty units, our housing supply debate is an “incomplete conversation.” But as The Frisc and others have reported, the vacancy number depends on what is meant by “vacant.”
Here’s how the Budget and Legislative Analyst, which works for the board, defined a unit as vacant:
After much discussion of all these categories — with “Other Vacant” getting complicated — the analyst and Preston calculated that 4,460 units, not the 40,000 originally cited, could be “activated” over two years with a vacancy tax. Landlords and property owners would pay thousands of dollars a year, depending on the tax structure, to nudge those units into occupancy.https://twitter.com/suldrew/status/1491110975193624576
During a scarcity and affordability crisis, every little bit helps. The revenue could add to the coffers for affordable projects, and the voters might go for it. But let’s not get distracted from the larger picture. The state is demanding 82,000 more units in the next eight years. SF added 100,000 people over the last 12 years, pandemic “exodus” blip notwithstanding. Rents are down due to COVID, but not by much and still nowhere near cheap.
The recurring issue is despite the efforts of supervisors and others, there isn’t a way out of this housing shortage that doesn’t primarily involve building more housing. And the main reason we’re still in it is we keep getting in our own way.
Cutting the line
It just so happens that Mayor London Breed has tried not once, not twice, but three times to make it easier for San Francisco to build more housing. Her most recent attempt was introduced with Sup. Safaí in December as a ballot initiative to go before voters in June.
Under the proposal, projects that were either 100% affordable or included more on-site affordable units than currently required would be exempt from City Hall’s byzantine bureaucracy. The housing would also have included at least 25 units, adhered to existing zoning, and hired union labor for construction. The past tense is appropriate here, because two supervisors, Connie Chan and Aaron Peskin, killed the effort in committee last week.
Rafael Mandelman, the lone supporter, was still apprehensive about giving up the supervisors’ ability to control projects. That need to limit supervisorial control became obvious last fall, when Mandelman and seven colleagues nixed 495 homes, including dozens of affordable units, on a valet parking lot South of Market, citing at best weak and at worst disprovable reasons.
This is one of the two stalled projects that caught Attorney General Bonta’s attention. We don’t know yet what will come of the state’s inquiry into the supervisors’ actions, but we do know that as long as the city and its political players keep torpedoing housing, the housing shortage will continue with downstream impacts of affordability and displacement — the very things that run counter to San Francisco’s public values of inclusion and diversity.
Let’s hope in 2022 we come out of the pandemic for good and also start making room for more neighbors, instead of fidgeting with ineffective proposals, placating price controls, and a few vacancies.
Anthony Lazarus is executive editor of The Frisc.
