Editor’s note: As San Francisco moves to allow more housing density across much of the city, The Frisc is examining what’s in store for a handful of neighborhoods. We previously visited the Haight-Ashbury.
If there’s one sentiment that crystallizes the resistance against new housing that has kept San Francisco’s western neighborhoods looking more like suburbs than the residential flanks of a modern metropolis, it’s this: “Most of us are going to get pushed out of our houses.”
The speaker who said this was attending a Planning Department open house last month, at the SF County Fair building in Golden Gate Park. City planners had just presented the latest version of a proposal to change SF’s housing laws and encourage taller buildings with more homes in neighborhoods like the low-slung Outer Sunset.
The room was busy despite the rainy night, and knots of curious, concerned, and opinionated neighbors clustered around poster-sized presentations explaining the housing crisis; the state’s demand that SF make room for more than 80,000 new homes by 2031; and the sanctions facing the city if it fails.
As of this writing, SF lawmakers are going down to the wire to approve a crucial package of rule changes, risking state penalties including tens of millions of dollars of funding withheld and loss of local housing control.
The latest proposal — the version planners hope SF lawmakers approve early next year — would allow taller skylines along busy Sunset arteries like Judah, Noriega, and Taraval Streets, and 19th Avenue. Members of the public wrote comments on sticky notes, some encouraging, others insightful. (“How is the city going to pay for all this?”) And a few were irate.
In their presentations, planners tried to thread a difficult course between a spirit of community collaboration and a gentle but firm insistence that politics as usual must change in SF’s residential areas. The audience member who was worried about being pushed out identified himself only as “Mike” — and as a longtime homeowner. He and other homeowners, he said, were directly threatened.
SF principal planner Lisa Chen told Mike that she too was a homeowner and sympathized with his perspective. But he talked over her, expanding his litany of other priorities the city should tackle: affordable housing, homelessness, the pandemic, and his neighbors’ illegal renovations three years ago. Letting developers build more, he added, would cater to people moving in from out of town, not help residents like himself.
The exchange underscored how it’s one thing to change city policy, but changing hearts, minds, and political bottom lines is another, especially in a neighborhood where for generations nothing much has changed at all.
The rest of both worlds
In 2022, the Outer Sunset added zero net new homes, and not for the first time, per the Planning Department’s annual counts. Over the decades, homeowners like Mike have reaped huge rewards from juiced property values, and the average Sunset homeowner bought way back in 1980. Across more than 30,000 homes in the Outer Sunset, where western SF slopes down to meet Ocean Beach, the median home value in 2021 was more than $1.28 million, according to the U.S. Census, and the median rent was nearly $2,400 a month.
The proposed changes to the Outer Sunset would allow much taller construction along major transit corridors, but with very few alterations to tracts presently containing single-family homes. Local and state law would make demolition of rent-controlled homes, a common fear stoked by opponents, highly unlikely.
Some density advocates say the changes don’t go far enough. “I think upzoning only on arterials is one of the big blind spots of city planning,” Phoebe Ford of Outer Sunset Neighbors tells The Frisc, noting that the plan would stack much of the density along 19th Avenue, which funnels Highway 1 into six lanes of constant stop-and-go traffic. She fears the plan would mean a form of segregation: newcomers on “horrific” 19th Avenue, and lower-rise blocks belonging mostly to longtime residents. “That seems like the people who don’t live here yet are not as valuable,” Ford says.
Changes will vex some people, for sure. “It’s Hatfields and McCoys out here,” says John Lindsey, owner of the Great Highway Gallery on Lawton Street, who says many Outer Sunset dwellers enjoy the best of both worlds, with the privileges of San Francisco residency but a foggy suburban vibe.
“If you have this house you bought and a view of the ocean and someone’s going to take away that view, I cannot fault that person for being upset,” he adds. “I don’t want this neighborhood to change, but it’s state-mandated, and there’s people who need housing.” Lindsey himself lives in NoPa, for the record, but has operated his Outer Sunset business since 2011.
“All change comes with a level of anxiety,” Planning chief of staff Dan Sider tells The Frisc. Sider was one of the planners cornered by fired-up Mike at the open house, but he seemed to take it in stride. “Emotions are what they are,” he said before the event. “People are hardwired to have an affinity for their environment, and when that changes it’s going to take time to lessen that anxiety.”
Perhaps the politics of the Outer Sunset are changing. District 4 Sup. Joel Engardio believes the current rezoning debate will ‘help unlock gentle housing reforms on the west side. We have a great opportunity and a duty to create housing for middle-income families.’
One ugly feud spilled into public view in 2022 over a proposed affordable housing project on Irving Street and 26th Avenue. An anonymous flier protesting the project called the district supervisor, Gordon Mar, a “communist pedophile” for backing it, and the prospect of low-income and formerly homeless neighbors prompted other critics to fear an influx of drugs and crime. Mar blamed that blowback on a “vocal minority.” After some delays, the project has broken ground. Once completed, it will be the only 100 percent affordable housing project in the neighborhood.
On 43rd Avenue, meanwhile, 135 units of teacher housing are rising fast, but it took two decades to fight neighborhood resistance and break ground. Developers are using a state “density bonus” law to build higher than local code allowed.
Mar supported the project but also tried watering down other efforts for more density. Perhaps the politics are changing. Sup. Joel Engardio squeaked past Mar in 2022 by fewer than 500 votes. Mar was the first elected incumbent supervisor to lose re-election since 2000. Engardio made no secret of his housing stance; for years he has touted his “Paris in the Sunset” proposal, suggesting that higher and denser development can beautify the neighborhood rather than detract from it.
Via email, Engardio tells The Frisc he believes the current rezoning debate will “help unlock gentle housing reforms on the west side, especially the Sunset,” adding “we have a great opportunity and a duty to create housing for middle-income families” and noting that his “Dom-i-city” proposal, which emphasizes a model of five stories of housing over ground floor retail or community space, will be considered by the city’s Land Use and Transportation Committee soon.
Whales over people
What’s now the Outer Sunset was incorporated into San Francisco in 1866, but back then it was almost entirely uninhabited, dubbed the “outside lands” or even the “great sand waste.” Historian Lorri Ungaretti writes that land speculators sank their ambitions into its dunes for decades, without much to show for it.
Not until the 20th century and westward rail service did housing fill the empty tracts with bargain homes. The average Sunset home dates to the late 1930s, and by the ’60s almost all of the current housing stock was in place. Not much has changed since then, except prices (they’re no longer bargain homes) and demographics. (Once overwhelmingly white, the Sunset is now majority Asian.)
The Sunset has become a vast swath of accumulated wealth tied up in home prices and protected from competition by decades of zoning restrictions. In 2019, 60 percent of Sunset residents owned a home, compared with just 37 percent for the city at large, and 73 percent of the neighborhood was composed of single-family housing.
The overwhelming majority of Outer Sunset parcels are zoned RH-1, the lightest designation possible, a product of the city’s great 1978 downzoning that capped construction at 40 feet across much of the city, among other prohibitions. The late Dianne Feinstein hailed the caps as a bid to “protect single-family housing,” even as critics like Sup. Robert Gonzalez warned, “This legislation cuts out, literally, low- and moderate-income folks,” excoriating his peers as a generation that “saved the whales […] but forgot its people.”
“I don’t personally see any benefit to that downzoning,” says Parag Gupta, a YIMBY Action board member and founder of the Westside Families Democratic Club. (Gupta works at affordable housing developer Mercy Housing, but stressed he wasn’t speaking on behalf of that organization.) “We need to be thoughtful” about how and where to add new housing, Gupta emphasizes, but “it’s a matter of when, not if” at this point.
What does “thoughtful” look like? City planners think their most recent draft of the new zoning map balances a dire need for more housing with the atmosphere that makes the neighborhood attractive to residents. It concentrates higher density along the transit corridors that form a grid across the neighborhood. The height cap would be eight stories along busy streets like Judah, Taraval, and 19th Avenue, up from the current four, with a few parcels going as high as 14 at major intersections.
To make the idea less alien, Planning is happy to show off photos of existing apartment buildings sprinkled across the city that already rise to those heights.
Beyond the transit corridors, not much would change. An earlier draft allowed more parcels to add more homes as long as they didn’t exceed four stories, but planners appear to have moved on from that idea.
‘A fresh start’
The Sunset for decades has been an enclave for East Asian immigrants and their descendants, including many Chinese-American San Franciscans who saw new opportunities outside the bounds of racist housing policies that once hemmed their families into Chinatown.
“Back then it cost maybe $20,000 or $40,000 for a house in the Sunset, and that was the beginning of the Chinese moving out of Chinatown — you’d get a front yard, you get a back yard, you get a whole new lifestyle,” says Lily Wong, director of the Sunset Chinese Cultural District. More than 53 percent of Outer Sunset residents identified as Asian-American in 2021, according to the US Census.
Downzoning was once used to keep non-whites out of many areas. SF planner Chen points out that SF has also occasionally used development limits to protect vulnerable neighborhoods such as Chinatown. But even when prohibitions were deployed with good intentions, they were probably not effective. Other methods like tenant protections do a better job, according to Chen: “Our toolbox has evolved a lot since the ’70s.”
Wong grew up in the Mission, exposed to gentrification battles from a young age, and now says the Sunset is “an opportunity for a fresh start.” Adding more homes affords a chance to work with the culture of the neighborhood and not “end up in a position of fighting over what’s left,” she says. Thus far, Wong thinks the city has done a good job including Asian communities in the planning conversation.
Indeed, the attitudes of people like Wong and Engardio might be a lesson, framing these changes not just as a chance to fix a problem and undo past oversights, but also to create something positive for future generations. “When I go out to 48th Avenue, I really like the vibe, but why can’t we have more housing on that corner? I think it’d be beautiful,” says Gupta. And perhaps it could be, if SF can move beyond longstanding disagreements and acknowledge that standing still is no longer an option.
Adam Brinklow covers housing, development, and more for The Frisc.
