Not many people realize this, but NASA has a mandate to send humans to Mars by the year 2033.
The tools for such a mission already exist, but a plan to implement them, a budget for the enormous resources required, and the sheer will to pull it off are harder to come by.
In our own humble, terrestrial way, San Francisco is in a similar position: In a couple months, the city must show California housing watchdogs a plan to create more than 82,000 new homes by 2031, of which more than 46,000 must be affordable housing at various income levels. At more than 5,700 units per year, the new goals for affordable housing are 60 percent higher than what the city averaged for all homes across all income levels between 2010 and 2020. (Which in turn was a 40-plus year record high.)
“To hit those [new] numbers, it can’t be business as usual,” San Francisco Planning Department director Rich Hillis tells The Frisc.
The question is all the more urgent as two rival measures to speed up affordable housing, one backed by Mayor London Breed, the other by the supervisors, have likely gone down to defeat. (The mayor’s preference, Prop D, needs a miraculous late push among final ballots to win.)
The clock is ticking, and like the red planet, the distance to SF’s goal is vast and intimidating. The city might take one small step toward it with the Board of Supervisors’ meeting today to debate the current draft of the housing plan, known as the city’s Housing Element.
The Frisc reached out to a range of voices in the housing argument — those who stump for a full-speed-ahead approach for housing at all income levels, and those who want little to no market-rate housing built at all — to ask a key question: How will San Francisco plan for, let alone build, this record-smashing 46,000 units of affordable housing in the next eight years?
Can the city really shake off the dust of decades of bad planning and suddenly develop at warp speed?
Yes in everyone’s backyard
A bit of background: Between 2010 and 2020, SF’s housing inventory rose by only about 3,500 units per year — that’s for market rate and affordable housing combined. Our new targets are higher by a factor of three.
Nevertheless, those years saw a healthy amount of activity by local standards. Between 2000 and 2010, housing production never surpassed 2,400 new homes per year. Between 1990 and 2000, the figure was just above 1,200 on average, and the decade before that, it was fewer than 1,400 annually.
The more-housing effort in the face of a long-term shortage has pushed SF to this come-to-Jesus (or mission-to-Mars) moment, with most momentum coming from state laws. California cities must satisfy the state’s Regional Housing Needs Assessment or lose funding or even local control over housing rules.
SF has to redo some of its own rules as well. It starts with zoning, according to Matthew Lewis, spokesperson for California YIMBY, and a drive to fix the anti-density rules of the 1970s that kept more than half of SF in a low-rise, quasi-suburban state. “Imagine San Francisco is a character, and 40 years ago they made some bad life choices, and now things are crashing down and there’s real consequences,” he says.
The consequences have fallen disproportionately on SF’s eastern neighborhoods in particular, and the new housing plan aims explicitly to rectify that history with more density in northern and western neighborhoods. “The west side was downzoned in the ’70s to avoid people of color moving there, and it hasn’t changed since,” says Rachael Tanner, president of the Planning Commission.
Corey Smith, director of the Housing Action Coalition, another YIMBY-leaning lobby, says another change in zoning is needed to allow not just six units, but “six stories of housing” along busy western SF corridors and on corner lots whenever there’s a teardown.
Smith cites “100-year-old wooden buildings sitting in fog for a century,” but Geary Boulevard, one of SF’s busiest and transit-friendly streets, provides an even starker example, replete with one-story banks, fast-food joints, and other shockingly low-density sites.
All this talk about tearing down older houses and replacing them with midrise apartments is exactly what makes NIMBY blood boil, generating steam clouds thicker than summer fog rolling down Taraval Street.
Lewis says protests about neighborhood character are inevitable and soon to be anachronistic. “If you did a dozen seven-story buildings scattered across Noe Valley, is that going to destroy Noe Valley? Of course not,” he contends, noting these are the kinds of moves needed to meet the new state mandates.
The Frisc also reached out to groups that tend to be more skeptical about density — the Coalition For San Francisco Neighborhoods, Livable California, Sunset Forward, and the Haight-Ashbury Neighborhood Council, whose vice president recently wrote that there is no housing supply shortage — to ask how and where the city should build 46,000 new affordable homes in the next eight years.
So far, none of these requests has returned any comment. Local affordable housing developers — including TNDC, SF Housing Development Corporation, Mission Housing, TODCO Group, and Bridge Housing — all declined responses as well.
A new report from the Race and Equity In All Planning Coalition, which includes some of the groups we tried to contact, calls for mandated affordable housing to be spread equally across all 11 city districts, with land banking one main strategy to secure locations.
But it also insists that market-rate development simply cannot serve as a vehicle for meeting affordable housing goals, and that streamlining the development process would shut out community voices.
What’s more, the report, called the “Citywide People’s Plan,” also casts doubt on the current housing element, charging that it will take San Francisco back to the days of disastrous, racially motivated “redevelopment” that swept through neighborhoods decades ago.
Who’s going to pay
The latest draft of SF’s housing element does include dozens of new ways to spur production, not just the major rezoning that YIMBYs and others consider critical. The path to 46,000 affordable homes also requires speed and money.
Right now the cost of building — roughly $1 million per unit, no matter what income level it’s for — is a huge albatross around the city’s neck, and direct costs like materials and labor are largely out of anyone’s hands. Meanwhile it’s getting more difficult to tap funding for affordable housing.
“The problem now is even if you follow every single rule, a project can be defeated, chopped in half, tied up for years,” state Senator Scott Wiener tells The Frisc. “We need to make sure everything is ministerial,” meaning the only review needed before issuing permits is to make sure everyone is abiding by the rules. “You set the rules ahead of time, and if someone checks all the boxes, they should just get the permit,” he says.
(Wiener, a former supervisor, backed Proposition D, the mayor-backed streamlining proposal for affordable housing, and developers told The Frisc recently that it could cut the lead time on some projects by as much as 75 percent. The last votes are still being tallied, but it seems doomed to fail, alongside rival Prop E. Yes, it’s likely that voters got tripped up by similar measures.)
In addition, Wiener suggests doing away with certain fees, particularly impact fees, to help save costs — another suggestion that could end up in the final housing element. He also supports the idea of public, or “social housing,” built by the city — an idea championed by Sup. Dean Preston and others — as a way to keep construction going even during a market bust.
Social housing is “not going to produce the numbers” SF needs, but it will help insulate housing production from macroeconomic woes, adds Wiener.
Whatever affordable housing gets built, it’s going to cost real money. To pay for those 46,000 units, the Planning Department estimates that San Francisco will need about $2 billion a year, every year, this decade. (The Race and Equity report estimates the need is $4 billion annually.)
Both HAC’s Smith and YIMBY’s Lewis say the ultimate dream would be for the federal government to reprise its role in financing affordable housing, as it did nearly a century ago. Without massive federal intervention, though, the burden would fall on the city and state. With costs running into the tens of billions of dollars, even California, practically the world’s fourth-largest economy, struggles to fund much construction directly. Tax reform — like overthrowing California’s Prop 13, speaking of equity — is still considered the third rail of state politics.
Without the state funds that changing Prop 13 could unlock, SF will likely remain shackled to the current system, in which market-rate development is the critical way to fund affordable housing — and not nearly enough for what Preston and others would love to see. “We’d need massive, massive, massive amounts of funding for social housing,” the Planning Commission’s Tanner says.
Still, she observes, local and regional taxes could be a lever to pull: Perhaps breaks for those who add more units to their properties, and hikes for those who don’t? “We see folks building very large homes, which is their right, and I guess it’s nice if you can afford it, but sometimes it sits on a lot that’s zoned for two or three units.”
We’d need massive, massive, massive amounts of funding for social housing.
Rachael Tanner, Planning Commission president
Tanner also thinks SF should consider tinkering with Prop K, the infamous shadow study law that holds up tall construction projects: “I can appreciate the rule about new housing to cast a shadow on our parks,” but since every little bit counts, “at the same time we could take a look at more housing near open spaces.”
Of everyone we talked to, Planning director Hillis is actually bullish about SF’s current goals, citing more than 68,000 SF homes in the city pipeline, tens of thousands of them entitled so that construction “could start construction tomorrow” if their project backers wanted to, Hillis says. (Of these, only about 4,700 are now being built; for the rest, developers must follow through on sometimes decades-long, multibillion-dollar plans like the Hunters Point Shipyard, which is why the pipeline is often considered a bit of a mirage; nevertheless, Hillis is technically correct on his point.)
Everybody agreed on one thing: The age of suburbanized San Francisco is coming to an end. Housing skeptics stalled the rezoning for decades, but the breaking point is finally here. The question is how, not if, the coming months and years reshape San Francisco’s neighborhoods.
