San Francisco politics can be a bit like that Mirror Universe in Star Trek, where there’s an evil version of each character that believes the opposite of what they do.
Basic, necessary ideas about housing and the law can suddenly seem quite sinister in the context of a City Hall hearing room. With few exceptions, almost everyone in San Francisco thinks people should have the right to safe and adequate shelter and to have housing options for themselves and their families. But as soon as the topic turns to building that housing, the blood runs cold in even the softest of bleeding hearts.
San Franciscans value environmental regulations, rent control, housing subsidies, protections for the poor and disenfranchised, and sheltering history and culture from ruthless, market-driven development. What we have, though, is a dysfunctional system that turns lofty language into a cover for a brand of politics — one that is overzealous at best and cynical at worst, setting off crises that put the city in the crosshairs of state housing regulators.
Take Monday’s meeting of the Board of Supervisors’ Land Use and Transportation Committee, which refines key planning considerations before they reach the full board. (Sometimes the committee stops ideas dead.) Yesterday, the committee took a second crack at a raft of ambitious code changes pitched by the mayor’s office meant to generate more housing. (The Frisc covered the meeting live here.)
The stakes could hardly be higher: If SF doesn’t create a path for 82,000 new homes this decade — more than half must be affordable — California’s housing agency could potentially strip the city of local authority over development and withhold state funds the city relies on.
“If we fall out of compliance with our housing element, we lose hundreds of millions of dollars in state grants for our shared priorities,” the Housing Action Coalition’s Jake Price commented at the meeting.
The watchdog agency has already begun a probe into SF’s legendarily slow development timelines and issued warnings; the legislation at hand here would speed up projects considerably in several ways. Still, it’s not even the most ambitious step SF lawmakers must take to fulfill their unanimous pledge in January to overhaul the process, via a blueprint called the Housing Element. But filling in the details with real changes is rather different from rhetoric and pledges.
Given all this, you might expect the tone of such a hearing to be urgent, perhaps even anxious. But there was barely a mention of SF’s predicament. Instead, the committee focused on amendments to the proposed changes while trying not to upset the most outspoken development skeptics, many of whom spoke out in the chamber and remotely.
Déjà vu, again
At one point, committee chair Sup. Myrna Melgar noted that the material in question should not be relitigated: “Everything we have talked about [so far] today is consistent with the Housing Element, which we have passed,” she said, reminding everyone that her colleagues in the room (and elsewhere) approved it months ago.
Yet at the end of this second round of debate on the proposal, Melgar agreed to put off a vote for at least two weeks.
The package of changes would exempt some housing projects from the ritualistic practice of neighborhood notification; give the Planning Department director authority to approve state density bonus projects; and suspend extra “conditional use” hearings, which can add months or years to a project’s approval, for a wide swath of projects including housing on large lots and senior housing that would double normal density.
The planning code’s decades of layered-on initiatives are like a dark pantry stocked with too many expired rations, according to Sup. Aaron Peskin. ‘It makes sense to go through and see whether that can of peas is outdated and needs to be thrown out. You need to look at every can.’
There are other dense details in this proposal, and there are more proposals in the legislative pipeline. Sup. Rafael Mandelman—who is not a committee member, but joined the hearing anyway—said yesterday that the board’s job for the next year or so is akin to “unraveling decades of work that various [past] boards and planning commissions have done,” via bills designed to do “a trillion different things.”
This open window to transform SF’s housing landscape might not come around again. So at least two more weeks and another hearing could seem reasonable to ensure the unraveling in this particular corner of the planning code is done right. But time is not quite on the city’s side.
Pass the peas
“I want to support this,” Mandelman remarked. “We have committed to trying to clean up our approvals process.” Almost immediately, though, he suggested sending the whole package back to the Planning Department for another month.
UPDATE: Via email from an aide, Preston told The Frisc that the mayor’s office was responsible for “half-baked legislation” that will require multiple hearings. The supervisor, a Land Use committee member, said the proposal has “serious flaws,” including potential threats to rent-controlled housing. As for pressure from regulators, Preston added he feels obligated to examine the proposal thoroughly, because SF’s Housing Element cites protection of rent-controlled housing as a policy objective: “To say that [the proposal] needs to be rushed through the legislative process to satisfy our requirements under the Housing Element is inaccurate, as the legislation presented advances one part of the Housing Element by undermining another.”
Sup. Aaron Peskin waved a couple different red flags. First, he said the proposal was “small ball” and didn’t “have the carrots and sticks to actually produce” enough housing. “I have never been afraid of density,” he added.
Peskin also commented on the complexity of the planning code’s “decades of layered-on initiatives.” As with a dark pantry stocked with too many expired rations, “it does make sense to go through and see whether that can of peas is outdated and needs to be thrown out,” he said, adding that “you need to look at every can.”
The can-of-peas metaphor suggests the kind of slog that got SF into its housing problem in the first place, all without acknowledgement that — to extend the metaphor a bit more — housing inspectors might lose patience and red-tag the entire joint while a few people look for dented tins.
After the hearing, The Frisc asked committee chair Melgar if the committee is going to run out of time, or perhaps stoke the ire of state regulators. “This is painstaking, nerdy work,” Melgar said. “I think we can do it. We passed the Housing Element, and I’m going to make sure we comply with our commitments,” adding that the state housing agency should be satisfied as long as the proposed legislation follows the Housing Element blueprint.
But she also voiced frustration about her colleagues showing up without substantive changes to discuss. ”Neither one had amendments prepared, but I did,” Melgar said of the other committee members, Peskin and Preston. (Peskin did not respond to requests for comment.)
‘No more competing wish lists’
Many community advocates in the chamber yesterday did not see the writing on the wall and continued to suggest that the code reforms should be nixed altogether. Some leaned on the hoary myth of tens of thousands of vacant homes, which if filled could solve the housing crisis — a falsehood abetted by a winning ballot measure to tax vacancies last fall. (“Convert them,” one caller demanded.)
Others made a valid observation: During the previous Housing Element cycle (2015 to 2022), SF exceeded goals for market rate housing but fell short on affordable homes. There is a danger that it might happen again, as The Frisc has reported.
What’s supposed to be different this time: The new, more ambitious, more accountable element calls for exactly the code reform that was on the table yesterday — and much more — which is meant to cut time and costs and spur developers to get cracking on housing at all price ranges. Until now, the “utterly byzantine process in which it takes two to five years to build code-complaint housing” — as local architect Serina Calhoun described it during yesterday’s public comments — made only some market-rate housing worth the time, hassle, and money to build.
Also different this time, which was barely acknowledged in yesterday’s hearing: San Francisco, like every other California locale, must satisfy the state’s housing demands.
It fell to Sup. Matt Dorsey to be the doomsayer. “City Hall no longer has the luxury of competing housing wish lists — those days are over,” he said. (Dorsey’s not a Land use committee member either, but like Mandelman, he joined the hearing anyway.)
District 6 would be hit hard if the state penalizes SF for shirking its Housing Element commitments, according to Dorsey. Debating amendments was fine, he noted, but the business-as-usual attitude held much greater risks with state regulators taking note: “HCD could scarcely be more clear on how closely they’re watching San Francisco.”
The committee and the advocates and commenters will pick up where they left off on Monday, Oct. 16.
Adam Brinklow covers housing, development, and more for The Frisc.
