Four months. That’s how long San Francisco has to change its rules to allow taller buildings and denser neighborhoods across much of the city. It’s a once-in-a-generation — maybe two generations — redesign to make room for tens of thousands of new homes.
The plan’s opponents feel emboldened by the recall of Sup. Joel Engardio. His main sin was converting the Great Highway into a car-free park, but he was also a staunch advocate of more density in the Sunset District, his home turf, and other low-rise neighborhoods.
It remains to be seen if Mayor Daniel Lurie names a replacement who has political wiggle room to vote against the housing expansion, which the administration has dubbed the Family Zoning Plan. Its backers say an influx of new homes will ease San Francisco’s crushing rents and home prices.
The Board of Supervisors, including Engardio’s replacement, must approve the new plan by the end of January, or San Francisco will face punishment from California housing regulators — perhaps a total loss of local control over housing decisions.
The next four months will feature long hearings and enough pressure on board members to trigger one of the Bay Area’s slumbering fault lines. “I have been telling anyone who’ll listen that the Family Zoning Plan will be a very difficult vote,” says San Francisco State University political science professor Jason McDaniel.
Alongside the new map and zoning code changes, supervisors have crafted extra protections for renters and small businesses that city planners have been pushing for since last year.
In an interview with The Frisc in August, new SF Planning director Sarah Dennis Phillips said that her staff had to wait for legislators to introduce the bills.
“When you partner with others, the timeline is not yours to control,” Dennis Phillips said. “But collaboration is important.”
The protection bills are about to enter a series of hearings. In current form, they’re much less drastic than the accompanying height and density changes.
On the residential side, San Francisco already has some of the nation’s strongest tenant protections. Existing local and state law also have strict rules around demolition and displacement.
On the small business side, the main proposal on the table is essentially an extension of a rule that’s been in place since last year. But with anxieties running high and every front in SF’s housing wars about to light up, these are the new rules that SF tenants will have on their side.
Odd bedfellows
One of the new proposals is from District 11 Sup. Chyanne Chen, who represents the Excelsior, Crocker-Amazon, and other southern neighborhoods.
If the current map becomes the final blueprint, height limits along many corridors will rise to six or eight stories, and higher in a few places. In some areas where heights don’t go up, there can still be denser construction — knocking down a two-unit house, say, and putting up four or six units instead.
“It’s our responsibility to ensure that people who lose their homes through no fault of their own have as strong a safety net as possible,” Chen said in a September press release.
Chen wasn’t available for comment, but her aide Charlie Sciammas explained the proposal’s safeguards, including “extensive tenant notification” about changes that would affect a unit; funds to help cover moving costs; a “relocation specialist” to help displaced renters find new homes; and the right to move back into new buildings at the same rent once construction is finished.
Chen said that the Race & Equity in All Planning Coalition (REP-SF) helped write the bill, which has five cosponsors plus Chen — enough to pass the board.
REP-SF makes an odd bedfellow with YIMBY Action, another supporter. The REP-SF coalition of neighborhood and tenant groups often describes the Family Zoning Plan in dire terms of displacement of low-income people, despite the plan deliberately avoiding many of SF’s lower-income neighborhoods. YIMBY groups hail the Family Zoning Plan as a much-needed remedy to decades of underproduction.
The YIMBY endorsement is a signal that Chen’s bill isn’t likely to disrupt or delay new construction. In fact, many of its provisions are already covered by state and local law.
For example, current rules require landlords to provide notifications and relocation resources, but Sciammas says they lack enforcement. Chen’s law would make landlords and developers document their outreach or else face delays applying for permits.
“It requires really comprehensive noticing at different steps of the process, so a tenant knows from the get-go they have rights,” says Sciammas.
A second provision of the bill is more a clarification of older rules rather than anything radically new. A 2019 state law gives tenants whose homes are demolished the right to return to the replacement building. REP-SF spokesperson Joseph Smooke calls the state law “complicated” and says the Chen bill will smooth out the details and establish local standards.
A $250,000 fine
Another pro-tenant bill has already passed the legislative gauntlet and won the mayor’s signature. It lets the city go after developers or owners who conduct “renovictions” — a never-ending carousel of construction meant to make habitation of the property unbearable. It also threatens penalties for landlords who try to demolish off-the-books illegal apartments under the guise of renovation.
The new law, authored by Sup. Myrna Melgar, will penalize building owners who misrepresent plans on their construction permit applications up to $250,000. “In the past, as long as you called it a renovation or an alteration, there were fewer eyes on it and you didn’t have to disclose that anyone lived there,” Melgar aide Jennifer Fieber tells The Frisc.
Fieber says Melgar is also working to bolster Chen’s proposal. One improvement would extend the protections to higher-income renters instead of capping them at single-person households earning up to $90,450, or a household of four earning up to $129,150.
Melgar also hopes to lengthen the “look-back period” for new construction. The Chen bill only requires landlords to offer protections for tenants who have moved out within five years. Melgar would like to add some years to that. The specific amount is under negotiation, according to Fieber.
In yet another bill, Melgar is also offering a carrot to encourage rent control. The proposal would let developers skip SF’s affordable housing “inclusionary” requirements if every unit in a new building is rent controlled. Under state law, rent control does not apply to anything built after 1979. But Melgar’s bill uses a loophole that allows developers to rent-control their buildings if they choose. (It does happen, and one of Melgar’s colleagues, Sup. Matt Dorsey, lives in one rare example.)
What about the merchants?
Small business displacement has been a major talking point for Family Zoning Plan critics, especially since many changes concentrate along major transit and commercial corridors such as Van Ness Avenue, Geary Boulevard, Lombard Street, and Judah Street.
San Francisco typically has more than 90,000 small businesses at any given moment. City planners estimate the plan could displace up to 50 a year.
Sup. Connie Chan, who represents the Richmond District, wants to make a temporary law permanent. Under the current law, which expires in 2026, development that displaces a legacy business requires special permission from the Planning Commission and perhaps the Board of Supervisors as well.
Chan’s proposal would extend it indefinitely. It wouldn’t apply to a project that entirely replaces a legacy business with housing, but many if not most of the buildings in question have ground-floor retail. The Chan plan would either delay projects that want to replicate that blueprint, or perhaps have the perverse effect of pushing developers to eliminate the retail space altogether.
To qualify as legacy, a business must have been in operation in SF for at least 30 years and needs a supervisor’s nomination. As of August, there were 444 in the city registry.
Separately, Melgar is teaming with Sup. Danny Sauter and Sup. Stephen Sherrill to propose a fund to help small businesses relocate if they face displacement.
Who’s in, who’s out
Even months before the Engardio recall, it was clear that a successful ouster could have a spillover effect.
In a speech to end what might have been his final board meeting, Engardio made an impassioned plea to keep fighting for a denser San Francisco and debunked a common refrain among housing plan opponents that “Ocean Beach will become Miami Beach.”
While lawmakers have room to tinker with the plan, the city must pass something, and it must abide by the state’s mandate to make room for 82,000 new homes, half of them affordable.
SF State political science professor McDaniel anticipates a lawmaker or two will “vote no [and] hope yes” if the final count can afford protest votes without scuttling the package.
Vocal supporters of the plan include Dorsey, Sauter, who represents neighborhoods like North Beach and Chinatown, and Sup. Bilal Mahmood, whose district includes the Haight and Tenderloin.
Other supporters want protections for key concerns, such as Melgar. Sup. Rafael Mandelman is another. He said in September he wants a plan to protect historic buildings, which the Planning Department is putting together.
Engardio was a clear supporter, but now Lurie must find a replacement who supports upzoning without enraging Sunset voters.
Potential spoilers include Chan, a consistent critic. In a letter to the Planning Commission ahead of its recent vote, she accused the plan of “threatening our tenants, our aging homeowners, our small businesses, and the preservation of our history.” (When The Frisc contacted Chan’s staff for this story, they insisted on re-sending the letter to make sure we had seen it.)
One potential wild card is Bayview rep Sup. Shamann Walton, often a skeptic of new development. In a July conversation with The Frisc he said “it remains to be seen” if rezoning can encourage new housing on the west side. But the zoning plan doesn’t touch his district, and he has not publicly come out for or against it.
Brianna Morales, spokesperson for the Housing Action Coalition, vocal supporters of the Family Zoning Plan, predicts that there won’t be as much pressure on supervisors as the Engardio recall might suggest. Besides, she adds, “the plan isn’t optional. San Francisco has to comply with state housing law.”