San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors is poised to thwart Mayor London Breed’s agenda to build more housing, by playing hardball politics on proposed ballot initiatives for the November election that would speed up affordable housing construction. As a result, the city may continue to see a sluggish pace of housing development, particularly subsidized housing for lower-income households. Prices and rental costs remain among the highest in the nation.
In April, Breed proposed two complementary measures to fulfill her campaign pledges on housing, particularly affordable units and housing for school teachers. (The San Francisco Unified School District struggles with staff getting priced out of the region.) One would rezone publicly-owned land for affordable housing with five-story height limits and minimum density requirements. The other would amend the City Charter to forgo the requirement for what’s known as a conditional use permit — streamlining the approval process for affordable housing by removing the public’s ability to appeal projects.
But: A bloc on the progressive-supermajority Board of Supervisors, led by District 3’s Aaron Peskin, is not having it. Hoping to force the mayor to withdraw her proposals, Peskin and three other supervisors have introduced their own placeholder measure, and they have remained largely reticent on the proposed charter amendment. Not a single high-profile progressive is running against Breed in November, so consider this a proxy fight.
The mayor’s office quickly responded to the Peskin-led measure, pointing to its watered-down provisions and to what it called greater effectiveness in her measures. Most critically, the mayor’s side said the supervisors’ counterproposal does not raise height limits, which nonprofits and housing advocates say will likely make these projects infeasible. On the charter amendment, supervisors balked at the potential for streamlining, underscoring their preference for allowing neighbors to appeal affordable housing — which enables NIMBYism and furthers scarcity, exacerbating our housing crisis.https://twitter.com/eparillon/status/1141408466185015296
“The key is the density more so than the height,” says Sam Moss, executive director of the nonprofit Mission Housing Development Corp., and a founding board member of the pro-development advocate YIMBY Action. He notes that height limits below five stories would stymie “economies of scale,” and make unit costs too high on most eligible parcels of land. “Some of those lots are small enough that you need to go to five stories for it to pencil out,” Moss adds. “The Francis Scott Key project in the Outer Sunset is on a huge parcel, so it didn’t need that height. Other sites wouldn’t have that advantage.”
The Francis Scott Key development is the first affordable housing project for SFUSD employees to be developed on school district property. Under the supervisors’ proposal, it would need to be completely redesigned. It also would include requirements on minimum unit size and number of bedrooms. In addition, the supervisors’ plan would narrow the range of incomes eligible for the housing, and restrict the units entirely to teachers — and all of this would just be temporary, to build 500 units. The United Educators of San Francisco union has come out in support of the supervisors’ alternative. (Peskin’s colleagues and plan co-sponsors, supervisors Sandra Lee Fewer, Matt Haney, and Shamann Walton, have all done stints on SFUSD’s Board of Education.)
Breed’s proposal does not limit the number or the size of units. It also expands eligibility to those employed outside of SFUSD. “The limited heights in the board’s proposal means that more affordable housing won’t be built,” said Jeff Cretan, director of communications for the mayor. “Its proposal also won’t apply to the teacher housing development currently waiting to be built at Francis Scott Key and the three other projects that the school district is pursuing, which means those teacher housing projects would still have to go through a lengthy rezoning process.”
The board’s team had its own criticisms. Ian Fregosi, legislative aide for District 1 supervisor Fewer, blasted Breed for exempting parcels in San Francisco’s single-family zones, which prohibit apartment construction. “I thought the idea was to ‘legalize affordable housing citywide’?” he wrote on Twitter. Fregosi also wrote that the board’s goal was “to negotiate in good faith and resolve legislatively.”
‘It’s like saying they want to also want to extend the upzoning out beyond the beach into the Pacific Ocean. OK, great, but that’s not going to build any housing.’
— Breed spokesperson Jeff Cretan
Laura Foote, executive director of YIMBY Action, who has butted heads with the board’s progressive majority on housing policy, had her own slant on this tale of two proposals. “It’s thrilling to see elected officials competing to see who can most effectively upzone the west side of San Francisco for affordable housing,” she says. “Everyone seems to be trying to undo our segregationist zoning policies, and that is a huge change.”
Change is definitely needed to get us out of our crisis of housing scarcity. Housing construction fell by 41 percent in 2018 — from roughly 5,000 units in 2017 to just over 2,600, and that’s unlikely to improve anytime soon.
Here’s where things get wonky
But Foote also points out that the single-family exemption in Breed’s proposal would not hamstring affordable housing development, because it applies to lots larger than 10,000 square feet and prohibits any demolition. “For this particular legislation, since both ordinances prohibit demolitions, we’re talking about a weird subset of parcels,” she says. “The only way to really understand which would apply in more places is with mapping. Back of the envelope, the extra height is worth way more units than the RH-1 [single-family zoning].”
The mayor’s chief spokesperson went further on this issue. “We did an initial review of eligible parcels for affordable housing, and identified no opportunity sites in RH-1 districts, so it’s irrelevant to include it,” Cretan says. “It’s like saying they want to also want to extend the upzoning out beyond the beach into the Pacific Ocean. OK, great, but that’s not going to build any housing.” He also mentions that the board opposed legislation by state Sen. Scott Wiener that would have rezoned single-family areas in western neighborhoods earlier this year.
Fregosi from Fewer’s office was nonplussed. “According to data from the Planning Department, there are 216 parcels over 10,000 square feet that are zoned for single-family homes and do not have existing housing on them,” he says. What’s more, he elaborates, qualifying projects could choose to apply for three additional stories through the State Density Bonus law. (State density bonus? Here’s a PDF on it from the Planning Commission; here’s how it applied to a single project in SF.)
While the two competing proposals differ on height limits and on how much affordable housing to allow, there’s a third variable the supervisors are largely avoiding: building it faster.
The mayor’s charter amendment would be crucial at delivering more affordable housing and reducing its costs, according to Moss of Mission Housing. “One of the hardest things about developing affordable housing is the constant threat of appeal, almost always for aesthetic purposes like height and parking,” he says. Moss recalls that a project his organization will be developing near the Balboa Park BART station, with up to 136 units of low-income housing but no parking, drew years of threats of costly discretionary review appeals.
After a long night of #housing Twitter debates on Friday, signs of an upcoming compromise are beginning to appear. District 6 supervisor Haney, a coauthor of the board proposal, says he would be meeting with the mayor’s office this week to discuss the charter amendment. “If it was just for 100% affordable, I’m good with that,” he tweeted.
Haney asserts that discretionary reviews had only been filed twice against affordable housing projects. There have actually been more. Since 2012, at least four affordable housing projects have been delayed by discretionary reviews: 88 Broadway, 2060 Folsom Street, 800 Presidio Avenue, and 1296 Shotwell Street. Each appeal cost a mere $578 to file. Moss says the threat of them can lead to delays and higher costs.
Supervisors ‘probably believe that their re-elections are imperiled by allowing for affordable housing to get built.’ —San Francisco State University professor Jason McDaniel
The supervisors also take issue with the range of incomes eligible under Breed’s proposal, which are intended to add more units for middle-income professionals. “It would also redefine ‘100% affordable housing’ to increased income levels, and create a new definition of ‘affordable teacher housing’ that is unaffordable to most teachers” and would include market-rate units, Fregosi says. But for a household earning 160% of the area median income, a deed-restricted unit charging one-third of income for rent would cost roughly $4,000 a month—essentially market-rate anyway.
Semantics and mathematics aside, this is a battle that is tremendously dispiriting to some observers. “The fact that we get these fights over 100% affordable or teacher housing shows that the politics are so strongly in favor of the status quo,” says Jason McDaniel, professor of political science at San Francisco State University. “People can talk about both sides wanting to address the crisis, but if the mayor can’t even get a ballot measure on 100% affordable housing passed, it shows how difficult this will be. No action means that the status quo remains, and that gives the supervisors a lot of leverage.”
The nature of supervisorial elections by district make the political incentives particularly fraught for streamlining affordable housing, McDaniel adds. Supervisors are not held individually accountable for citywide problems: “The supervisors very strongly believe that local control and neighborhood input is the most important part of this. They don’t believe that their elections swing on whether or not the housing crisis gets solved; that’s the mayor’s job.”
McDaniel predicts that any compromise would likely hinge on supervisors ensuring some degree of local control. “They probably believe that their re-elections are imperiled by allowing for affordable housing to get built,” he says.
So the consensus, so far, is that our public school teachers should not be homeless. The gambit by Fewer, Haney, Peskin, and Walton is that they can address this urban travesty and still maintain credibility as defenders of their districts. Breed, for her part, shows no signs of backing down. “If you think we need more affordable housing now, there’s no reason you shouldn’t support” her proposals, she tweeted.
Diego Aguilar-Canabal is the former managing editor of the Bay City Beacon and also writes for the East Bay Express. Follow him on Twitter: @daguilarcanabal
