Most people in San Francisco want more housing and greater density, and they want it sooner rather than later. A functional city government could translate this once-in-a-generation alignment into bold action.
Instead, our politicians have handed voters the thankless job of breaking their legislative logjam in the form of Propositions D and E, two competing housing measures on next month’s ballot, birthed from City Hall squabbling.
If this pairing seems confusing, it’s not your fault. Navigating the policy vagaries that distinguish these different approaches to development should be the job of lawmakers, not the rest of us. But as often happens, when San Francisco cannot function as designed, voters must step in.
How did we get here?
Last week, Bay Area News Group published a poll finding that a majority of people in the Bay Area and particularly in San Francisco want more homes built.
In SF, 60 percent of those polled favored “significant quantities” of new housing, compared with 26 percent who were opposed. (The remainder said they didn’t know.)
The results also revealed a NIMBY undercurrent; support for new housing dropped when proposed within half a mile of the respondents’ homes. Nevertheless, the fact that most people appreciated at least the idea of greater density should be a clear signal to city officials.
There’s even greater pressure coming from Sacramento, where state housing officials and the attorney general have vowed to crack down on cities that don’t build their fair share. Penalties could include losing local control of housing policy. Caught in this pincer, SF politicians should be down in the trenches, doing the hard work of creating new and better housing opportunities.
And indeed they are. It’s how they’ve gone about it that’s the problem.
As Sup. Myrna Melgar told The Frisc earlier this year, “One of my colleagues has a piece of fairly complicated legislation to counter the mayor’s legislation, and the mayor put hers on the ballot because she felt we couldn’t get our act together. It’s an extreme way of doing legislation.” (Melgar chairs the committee that must approve housing legislation before it reaches a full board vote.)
Streaming wars
Prop D is a product of the mayor’s office, dubbed the Affordable Homes Now measure. It would make it easier to create 100 percent affordable housing projects in the city (meaning homes priced for earners making up to 120 percent of the area median income) by burning away miles of red tape, most notably around state environmental review, the rocky strait in which so many housing projects have wrecked in years past.
Prop D would also expedite teacher housing and large projects (10 or more units) that exceed the existing affordable requirements by at least 15 percent, which in a 100-unit building would mean at least 25 affordable homes, depending on the particulars.
In these larger projects with mixed-income units, the definition of “affordable” would expand to 140 percent of the area median income.
Projects that invoke Prop D would have to abide by the current planning code and include a certain amount of union labor, a play for union support without which the measure might not be able to pass. Otherwise, there would be relatively few roadblocks in the way of construction.
At a SPUR forum last week touting Prop D, Maureen Sedonaen, CEO of Habitat for Humanity Greater San Francisco, said a project that normally takes two years to push through could be done in as little as six months under Prop D’s approach.
Prop D also lets qualifying projects circumvent the Board of Supervisors. Under current rules, the board can have the last say on many projects, as happened last year with their rejection of a tower that would have replaced a parking lot with nearly 500 homes.
But members of the board who don’t like giving up control introduced Prop E, the Affordable Housing Production Act, as a direct competitor to Prop D, and even gave it an almost identical name.
Prop E would also make it faster to build 100 percent affordable homes, but it would maintain a greater level of bureaucratic and supervisorial scrutiny, including appeals to the supervisors. (As state watchdogs have noted, these processes are part of how we got into a housing crisis in the first place.)
The biggest difference between Props D and E comes with big market-rate projects, for which Prop E demands an even greater number of affordable homes — 30 percent of the total units on offer. (So in a 100-unit building, 30 must be affordable.) Prop E also demands that at least half of those be two or three bedroom homes, and it prices affordable homes at 80 percent AMI, which reserves those units for residents with lower incomes than Prop D would.
Increasing the percentage [of affordable units] is not necessarily the best way to get more affordable housing.
Sujata Srivastava, SPUR
The measure’s backers, such as supervisors Connie Chan and Dean Preston, tout the higher affordable demand as the more responsible option.
But Mayor London Breed and other Prop D boosters argue that Prop E’s demands would keep developers from building the volume of affordable housing that the measure promises. “Increasing the percentage is not necessarily the best way to get more affordable housing in SF,” SPUR’s SF director Sujata Srivastava tells The Frisc, since “30 percent of zero is zero.”
What would happen if voters approve both propositions? Matthew Selby, a manager at the city Department of Elections, tells The Frisc: “If there is a conflict between provisions of the two measures, then some or all of the measures approved by fewer votes would not go into effect.”
Not every voter is an urbanist, economist, social housing advocate, or developer. How is the average San Franciscan to know which of these measures will really deliver the housing that they promise?
For many, it becomes a question of, in the words of a latter-day Jack Nicholson, who do you trust: the interests behind one proposition or the other? This isn’t an ideal standard, but our elected officials’ inability to solve the problem has led to this.
Breed tried three times to have her legislation, which eventually became Prop D, vetted and passed by the Board of Supervisors, and three times that effort failed.
Future developments
Even with growing recognition of the housing crisis, and the state putting city housing policy on blast, local developers aren’t hanging on the outcome of the Prop D-Prop E vote.
“I think everyone is in a holding pattern, given the lack of financing sources in the market right now,” says Gary Pike, who represents a number of SF developers. “Nobody is adding risk to their investment portfolio” until the national and global economy looks less volatile, he adds.
“Very few projects can pencil out today under the current rules,” Sarah Dennis-Phillips, senior director at Tishman Speyer, tells The Frisc, and adds that Prop D wouldn’t help as long as economic conditions remain bleak. However, she notes, “if and as costs come down, Prop D will become a realistic way to develop in SF.”
To enable Prop E, on the other hand, “costs would have to come down dramatically in a way that we have not ever seen happen,” Dennis-Phillips contends.
On the other side, Prop D’s relative attractiveness to developers only stokes skepticism. In the official opponent statement, Joseph Smooke of the Race & Equity in All Planning Coalition calls D a “giveaway to developers” and blames them for driving housing inequality.
The clock is ticking, as the state demands a new and aggressive housing element from SF — or else. SF’s planners seem to be getting the message. In a new draft of the Housing Needs Assessment, they raise their target to more than 10,000 new homes a year for the next decade — much of it in low-rise neighborhoods like the Sunset. This volume would be “twice the highest year of housing production in the last 40 years,” the document reads.
The new plan must also include a high amount of affordable housing. If Prop D or Prop E don’t deliver the promised housing fast, the state will simply walk right over us and rewrite our rules themselves. There is no future in which greater density doesn’t happen; it’s only a question of who, officials in SF or elsewhere, are going to put it where.
