Say what you will about San Francisco’s state senator, Scott Wiener, but he’s a politician who has stuck to his promises. When voters sent him to Sacramento in 2017, he said it was long about time California cities cleared the way for more housing.
Now even Wiener’s hometown is cooking up plans to somehow generate 10,000 new units per year.
While plenty of other politicos at both the state and local level have contributed to breaking the grip of NIMBY politics, it’s fair to say something like the latest Housing Element would never have happened if not for Wiener’s legislative pressure.
For example, hours after being sworn in, Wiener introduced the bones of what would become State Bill 35 — a law that allows developers a “streamlined” approval process, as long as they meet certain labor standards and commit a certain volume of the proposed units (as low as 10 percent in some locales, though for the Bay Area it’s 20 percent) as affordable homes.
The law applies to cities that haven’t met their state-mandated housing goals, which in California means pretty much everywhere. Only 28 cities have made that grade in the past five years.
But the law is set to expire at the end of this year, and housing hawks in Sacramento are trying to rustle up votes to extend it. This time around, the extension is known as SB 423, which sailed through the state Senate back in May. The Assembly must vote or pass on it by mid-September.
SB 35 had more than its share of critics in San Francisco. As it turns out, even those who opposed the law on principle have developed something of a penchant for the advantages it offers when it comes time for them to build.
If you can’t beat it, use it
Case in point: In July, the nonprofit developer Mission Economic Development Agency announced that at long last it had reached a deal on 2205 Mission, a long-defunct property on 18th Street that will soon offer more than 60 affordable homes for local teachers.
The development comes with one interesting wrinkle: MEDA employed SB 35 to get the deal done — despite the fact that the group has historically opposed SB 35 and is currently campaigning against its renewal.
In 2017, as the original neared the governor’s desk, then-MEDA director Luis Granados wrote in the SF Examiner that it would serve as a “short-term catalyst for displacement of low-income communities of color.” Despite this, MEDA was actually the first San Francisco developer to employ SB 35 after it eventually passed, with a 130-unit project on Florida Street.
“MEDA has always supported the affordable housing part of these bills,” its senior land use policy analyst Peter Papadopoulos tells The Frisc via email, “and utilized SB 35 once for an affordable housing project.” The nonprofit developer has similar plans for 2205 Mission, saying that it’s “MEDA’s responsibility to maximize equity outcomes using all available tools.”
Nevertheless, the group still fears what others may do with the same law, with Papdaopoulos predicting that “market-rate developers will likely begin purchasing key Mission District parcels over the next few years” and accelerate the displacement of longtime residents.
Back in 2017, the heads of the Council of Community Housing Organizations blasted SB 35 as “a potentially serious threat to California’s most vulnerable urban communities.”
Today, the executive director of CCHO, former District 11 Sup. John Avalos, whistles a different tune, telling The Frisc via email that the organization “has not taken an official position for or against” the current version of the law, and that the previous criticisms were “before my time.” Avalos believes SB 35 “ended up enabling affordable housing to move more quickly,” and calls the resulting units “a win for the working class.”
To be honest, it’s not surprising that affordable housing developers and boosters end up turning to SB 35, even in cases where they formerly fretted about it: As it turns out, affordable housing is the thing this law does best.
Affordability, discounted
UC Berkeley’s Terner Center estimates that developers proposed more than 18,000 units statewide using SB 35 between 2018 and 2021. Of these, more than 13,000 were low-income housing. Wiener’s office tells The Frisc that since 2018, SB 35 projects proposed in San Francisco make up some 3,000 units, again, almost all of them affordable homes. (Note that not all of these proposals have yet been approved or built.)
Affordable housing projects automatically qualify for the law’s 10 percent to 20 percent affordable-unit requirement. But the Terner researchers state that the big reason most new homes fast-tracked this way come from affordable housing developers is because of the law’s labor provisions: To qualify, developers must promise to pay contract workers the “prevailing wage” (a technical term defined by the state) — and since most affordable housing projects use public money, they’re required to do this anyway. So most such developments qualify for the law’s bonuses without any fuss. Of 18 San Francisco housing proposals Terner identifies invoking SB 35, only four offer more than one unit that’s priced above the city’s moderate income bracket.
“Some people call the law a sellout to developer interests, but it’s overwhelmingly used for affordable projects, and that was always the intention,” Wiener spokesperson Erik Mebust tells The Frisc. He says Wiener anticipates that if the SB 432 extension passes, we’ll see “an exponential increase” in the units produced with it each year.
“You have to give developers time to adjust to the new rules, and the further you get away from 2017, the more developers will feel comfortable” venturing proposals they wouldn’t under the previous status quo, Mebust adds.
It’s still not surprising that even many of the parties that employ SB 35 are mistrustful of it: Housing policy and development long served as a means of enforcing a racist status quo in California, and while modern lawmakers may vow that those days are over, it takes a long time for such wounds to heal, as we’ve reported before.
The bottom line still remains that San Franciscans need places to live, and there’s still no way to get them than more and faster development.