San Francisco approved a wildly ambitious new housing plan on Tuesday, narrowly escaping a potentially disastrous state deadline and setting a course to add a record volume of new homes over the next eight years.
But Sup. Dean Preston, the city’s most prominent advocate for affordable housing, sought to poke holes in the plan even as he teed it up to pass, calling it a formula for failure and accusing both California’s state government and Mayor London Breed’s administration of shirking affordable housing goals. He also offered his own new law to push for even more aggressive development of subsidized homes — or else.
“We’re not seeing anyone putting together a plan to fund this affordable housing,” Preston said at Monday’s Land Use & Transportation Committee meeting, alleging that “the process is set up for the city to fail” by demanding billions in development that City Hall will struggle to finance.
In contention is San Francisco’s new Housing Element, the part of the city’s general plan that lays out how many new homes we expect developers to build over the next eight years. It also outlines the policies, such as changes in zoning, that the city should use to make the plan a reality.
Thanks to housing goals handed down by Sacramento, the Housing Element calls for over 82,000 new homes, of which more than 46,000 should be affordable housing at a variety of below-market-rate price points.
As city lawmakers realized (seemingly for the first time) in meetings last year — and as The Frisc has reported in the months leading to those hearings — 46,000-plus affordable homes is not only more on an annual basis than San Francisco has ever produced, it’s more housing of all kinds than SF creates most years at all.
While the ambition is long overdue, it’s not clear the city can put up housing that aggressively. With that in mind, Preston announced his new Affordable Housing Accountability Act almost immediately after the vote on the Housing Element.
Under his proposal, housing nonprofits could sue the city if SF falls short of its affordable housing goals. Preston alleged in hearings both Monday and Tuesday that the Housing Element does not do enough to encourage affordable housing development, even though those units are the lion’s share of what must be built.
“We cannot in good conscience approve plans that have no possibility of succeeding without also creating a […] remedy that forces the affordable housing we need,” Preston said in a statement Tuesday.
His initial announcement was light on details, such as what would constitute a sufficient dereliction of affordable housing to invite a suit.
This week’s housing votes — and Preston’s Accountability Act — really highlight how strange a place SF’s housing politics have come to.
A few years ago, the status quo would have seemed like a panacea: YIMBYs and housing hawks should be ecstatic that the city has vowed to build more than 10,000 new units each year, and market skeptics like Preston ought to be happy that more than 50 percent of the planned units are affordable housing.
“This Element presents the most marked change for the west side, places traditionally kept less dense on purpose,” Sup. Myrna Melgar, whose district includes the southwestern flank of the city, said at Monday’s hearing. Melgar called the Element a “right and just” response to historically racist and exclusionary housing policies in SF’s residential corridors — as clear an indication as any that power is slipping from the grasp of the NIMBY lobby.
While for the first time in generations it seems San Francisco decision-makers are of one mind that we must build more, suspicion and mistrust have poisoned any potential sense of comity.
On Monday, one community housing advocate called the Housing Element “state blackmail” and reemphasized fears of gentrification and redevelopment. Preston, meanwhile, accused Breed and the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development (MOHCD) of essentially conspiring against affordable housing plans, alleging “a willingness to completely renege on deals.”
In Monday’s hearing, MOHCD director Eric Shaw pushed back against Preston’s charge that the office was dragging its feet to acquire potential affordable housing sites and hoarding money that Preston and colleagues had budgeted. MOHCD spokeswoman Anne Stanley reiterated Shaw’s comments, telling the Frisc MOHCD considers many factors, including “site capacity, funding availability, and citywide geographic equity of sites,” when acquiring a site. “This open and competitive procurement process is utilized throughout the City for the allocation of public funds.”
She also noted that acquired sites carry security and maintenance costs while they await design and financing. The empty lot at 730 Stanyan Street in the Haight-Ashbury, for example, has cost $1.24 million since 2018, said Stanley.
The estimated price tag for 46,000-plus affordable units, albeit at currently inflated costs, is something in the neighborhood of $20 billion. In 2020, San Francisco voters approved a real estate tax (also spurred by Preston) that could generate more than $100 million annually for affordable housing. But the board and the mayor’s office have fought over how to spend the cash, in part because the ordinance did not specifically earmark the money for housing.
One source of funds for affordable housing development are fees paid by market-rate developers to complete their own projects. The new Housing Element makes it plain that these fees must be part of future affordable housing plans. But a significant number of activists and SF politicos, including Preston, are deeply resistant to market-rate development.
This week’s votes set the city up to narrowly meet state deadlines for the new Housing Element; supervisors will vote again on the plan next week and send it to the mayor’s desk. Her approval will shuttle it along to state regulators on the last day possible to avoid penalties.
And now the next battles begin.
Adam Brinklow is a staff writer for The Frisc, covering housing and development. He’s lived and worked in San Francisco for over 15 years.