After years of planning, heated arguments, and a flurry of down-the-stretch changes — some successful, some not — San Francisco’s new plan to open its western neighborhoods to thousands of new homes finally won the day Tuesday. The Board of Supervisors voted to approve the redrawn map and complex package of rules by a 7-4 vote.
The proposal will allow taller buildings and denser housing in the Richmond, Sunset, Haight, Marina, and other neighborhoods where, in the 1970s, heights were capped by the city’s lawmakers. That “downzoning” guaranteed decades of a low-rise profile, little new construction, and — as proponents of the new plan noted before yesterday’s vote — a climb in prices and rents that have fed the city’s housing crisis.
Mayor Daniel Lurie’s name has become synonymous with the housing plan — his administration dubbed it the Family Zoning Plan. A new map first emerged under his predecessor London Breed, part of a requirement to please California regulators. All California cities must submit new housing growth plans every eight years. In 2022, San Francisco’s slow approvals and other obstacles resulted in even more scrutiny.
The city faced the possibility of state sanctions if the board failed to approve the new plan and clear the way for nearly 36,000 potential homes.
“San Franciscans should decide what gets built in San Francisco,” Lurie said in a statement after the vote, which he framed as a move to retain local control. “I don’t want to hand control to Sacramento.”
Some of the fiercest opposition came from Sup. Connie Chan, who represents the Richmond. She and others warned it would usher in a wave of redevelopment that threatens longtime renters and small businesses. In a mirror image of the mayor, Chan framed the plan as caving into state demands. “I am disappointed that we are not choosing to negotiate or frankly even fight these mandates” from the state, Chan said during Tuesday’s hearing.
Chan failed to make several changes to the plan last month, including one that would have excluded from upzoning every residential parcel in the city. She tried again last night, with what her colleague Sup. Bilal Mahmood criticized as a “literally 11th-hour amendment,” to remove 20,000 homes from the upzoning map.
That amendment failed as well, gaining support from the same group that ultimately voted against the entire plan. Sups. Chyanne Chen, Jackie Fielder, and Shamann Walton joined Chan.
Chen, who represents southern neighborhoods like the Excelsior that are almost entirely exempt from the new plan, was more successful making changes. She has convinced nearly all the supervisors to sign on to a package of extra tenant protections — technically a separate bill that’s likely to win approval this month.
But in the end she complained that too many of her other proposals were rejected, such as a demand that the city’s transit agency build only 100 percent affordable housing on its surplus land.
Before the vote last night, Walton, calling himself “a supervisor who builds,” ridiculed the plan for lacking funding sources or specific sites for construction. Both were misleading criticisms: zoning plans are not meant to have either.
The point of the plan, as one backer pointed out, was to legalize more housing in more neighborhoods. Much of the city’s current housing stock, including “my own apartment, would be illegal to build today,” said Sup. Danny Sauter, whose district includes North Beach, Chinatown, and Russian Hill.
Mahmood, whose district covers the Haight, pointed out that many of the city’s housing prohibitions reflect racist 20th century redlining policies. He called the campaign against the plan “fearmongering.”
The plan now needs a second procedural vote, likely next week, before going to the mayor’s desk. The city faced a series of state and local deadlines to get the plan done, the earliest set for December 19.
The mayor and his allies have won this protracted battle, but the city’s housing wars will likely continue for years. Five of the 11 board seats are on the ballot next year. Two of the five incumbents will be termed out. One outspoken foe of the plan, Lori Brooke, has said she’ll challenge District 2 Sup. Stephen Sherrill, who supports it. The main political weapon that Brooke and others will wield is the wrecking ball — or at least the image of one.
Demolition, man
In the thousands of public comments emailed to the board ahead of this week’s key votes, the words “demolition” and “demolish” appeared nearly 1,000 times.
“Mass demolition” was popular too, invoking the ugly history of SF’s destruction of the Fillmore and parts of South of Market.
“This is no different than urban renewal,” Renee Lazear, cofounder of Save Our Neighborhoods, wrote in one message. SON’s site offers printable “Don’t Demolish SF” signs with the silhouette of a wrecking ball.
“Please don’t demolish SF pretending that it will help anyone but developers,” wrote filmmaker Jennifer Kroot, scourging “real estate interests,” “neo lib lawmakers,” and Airbnb — and signing off with an acidic prediction: “I doubt you’ve even read what I’ve written here.”
Criticism has been consistent: Upzoning will spur new housing by knocking down existing homes — maybe even your home — in favor of taller, more expensive modern construction.
Sites with existing residential units are significantly less likely to be redeveloped. They generate a lot of income, and that gets factored into the price.
SF chief economist ted egan
Demolitions in San Francisco are relatively rare: According to the Planning Department, the city averaged 87 units (not buildings) demolished a year between 2014 and 2024.
Many of those weren’t occupied. The SF Rent Board indicates pending demolition as one of the least common eviction scenarios. It recorded only 98 eviction attempts in the “demolish or remove from housing use” category during that same ten-year period.
As tenant advocates point out, landlords have a workaround that can go unrecorded — so called “renovictions” that serve as demolition in disguise.
The demolition of rent-controlled housing — which the housing plan’s foes and backers alike agree is important to protect — is so rare that City Hall doesn’t keep statistics.
In 2024, a rent-controlled Nob Hill building faced the bulldozer. Some of the units in the small, decrepit building had been vacant for more than 50 years. Even then, three Planning Commission members voted against the redevelopment.
If demolition and eviction occur, SF has some of the strongest renter protections in the country, soon to be made stronger by Sup. Chen’s bill. People pushed out receive relocation assistance and first dibs on homes in the new building for low-income renters.
Despite the protections, some tenant advocates say even one demolition is too many.
“Why should your building be bulldozed?” asks Fred Sherburn-Zimmer, director of the Housing Rights Committee of SF. “That’s a horrible thing to live through.”
They also counter that demolition may be rare now, but isn’t the point of the new housing plan to make redevelopment more profitable and attractive?
Blowing up buildings
It’s true: Sometimes new housing requires blowing up old buildings and homes.
Some demolitions are welcome, like the plan to knock down the shuttered hospital on California Street in favor of hundreds of new homes. Similarly, Parkmerced is home to some 9,000 people, but residents complain that the aging buildings are riddled with bad plumbing, mold and other problems that would benefit from a re-do.
“City and State law heavily restricts, but does not prohibit, the eviction of tenants for the purpose of demolition,” city economist Ted Egan wrote in his October report assessing the likely effects of the zoning plan.
However, Egan tells The Frisc that any increase in demolition will probably be modest, because those parcels are not the most attractive for developers. “Sites with existing residential units are significantly less likely to be redeveloped. This may be somewhat due to the complexity and expense of buying out or evicting a tenant,” says Egan. “Existing residential uses generate a lot of income, and that gets factored into the price.”
In drawing up the Housing Element — the 2023 blueprint that helped shape the Family Zoning Plan — city planners estimated that a variety of existing housing types would make many lots less attractive because builders would rather focus on underdeveloped properties that bring them higher yields and lower costs.
This calculus became clear as the supervisors wrangled for weeks over amendments to the housing plan.
Case in point, Sup. Myrna Melgar added language that makes it more difficult to redevelop rent-controlled buildings with three or more units — an estimated 11,700 buildings.
It seemed like a sweeping change, but the mayor’s office and state regulators had no beef with it because few of those sites were likely prospects to begin with. “Planning already identified them as unlikely for development, because it’s next to impossible to redevelop rent-controlled housing in San Francisco,” says Jane Natoli, SF organizing director for YIMBY Action, which supports the Family Zoning Plan. (On background, planners corroborated that excluding these buildings didn’t tip the scales much.)
Similarly, Board President Rafael Mandelman pushed through an amendment to preserve historic buildings, which didn’t really affect the housing math either. Mandelman estimates it amounted to just a few hundred lots taken off the map.
Campaign plans
Assurances and statistics from city planners and others haven’t assuaged critics. The larger question is how SF voters feel. Organizers of the successful Joel Engardio recall in District 4 believe their momentum includes a housing backlash. In the adjacent District 7, there are recall stirrings against Sup. Melgar, one of the Family Zoning Plan’s champions.
Lori Brooke, founder of Our Neighborhood Voices, has accused the plan of “painting a bullseye on the people most at risk of displacement” and says she’ll run to unseat Sup. Stephen Sherrill in District 2 next year.
Perhaps SF’s highest-profile campaign will be for Nancy Pelosi’s congressional seat. Connie Chan has thrown her hat in the ring. Her main opponent is none other than state Sen. Scott Wiener, a former SF supervisor and architect of the state laws that have dragged the city and much of California into a reckoning of its housing shortage.
It’s a good bet that the wrecking balls on posters, in TV ads, and in political speeches will outnumber the ones San Franciscans actually see in their neighborhoods next year.