Like the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings, an academic paper that examines local housing changes in Chicago is providing ammunition, half a continent away, for people looking to blunt the momentum for more housing in California.
The timing is noteworthy: State legislators are starting to dig into the details of a significant housing-density bill, now in its second go-around after dying an early death last year, and San Franciscans are paying close attention.
At a Planning Commission meeting Thursday, a discussion of the bill, called SB 50, was the main attraction. The commission staff presented its analysis for what the bill could mean for the city, if passed. Speaker after speaker stood up to weigh in. We’ll get to the particulars in a moment, but first let’s go back to sweet home Chicago.
Yonah Freemark, a PhD candidate in city planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studied the effects of zoning changes in Chicago, starting in 2013, that allowed denser housing near public transit and reduced the need for cars. Broadly speaking, these are the same goals of SB 50: more environmentally friendly housing supply to ease demand.
To Freemark’s surprise (he is admittedly a pro-housing, pro-density advocate), the Chicago upzoning did not reduce housing costs. In fact, it had a double whammy of negative effects. Property values immediately rose, but with no uptick in construction — a grim scenario for gentrification and displacement of vulnerable tenants lacking protections. And in Chicago, there were no protections. (His study does not report how much displacement, if any, the rezoning caused.)
“This is not a great result if you think upzoning is a great way to encourage new construction immediately,” Freemark recently said on the Gimme Shelter podcast, which is dedicated to California housing issues.
With this backdrop, the cautionary tale of the Freemark study has become a cause célèbre among the anti-YIMBY crowd, amplified by an essay from rock-star urbanist Richard Florida. (CityLab ran a counterargument to his essay a few days later.)
So is playing “I told you so” with the Freemark study the urban-planning equivalent of saying, like President Trump loves to do, that a week of polar-vortex ice and snow means climate change is a hoax? On the podcast last month, Freemark himself pushed back: “Don’t take the conclusion of this to mean we should stop rezoning policies … It’s quite possible the trends I found over the short term will not happen over the long term.”
There are caveats aplenty: It’s only one city, and like all cities, Chicago has its own unique circumstances. Freemark only measured property values, not rents. What’s more, he had just five years of data — likely too little to capture the longer cycles of new construction.
In other words, there’s no good reason to wave his study around as justification for curbs on new housing.
Nevertheless, Freemark’s research is now a talking point for SB 50 opponents and development-supply skeptics. Yes, the bulk of research on metro regions, such as this study, shows an increase in housing supply eases affordability. This is where the climate-change analogy fits. On a broad scale, supply and demand works.
But housing may have microclimates, making smaller sample sizes harder to predict. “We don’t have a great deal of clean empirical results at the neighborhood level to understand the connection between supply and prices,” according to Michael Lens, an urban-planning professor at UCLA who is all in for more density for California. He was discussing the Chicago study on the Gimme Shelter podcast last month.
If rezoning takes place, it requires other guardrails — like guarantees that construction will actually happen, with a certain amount of stock reserved for lower-income folks, and that when it happens, vulnerable renters aren’t tossed out. We need multiple simultaneous policies, Lens said, “to make upzoning as effective as possible.”
Even before Freemark published his Chicago study, California state senator Scott Wiener, the author of SB 50 and a former SF supervisor, was heeding similar advice. His first attempt at this, SB 827, died last year in a committee hearing, in part because it didn’t do enough for renters vulnerable to displacement. SB 50 addresses at least some of those concerns — that’s one difference from Chicago — with protections against demolitions. It gives “sensitive” neighborhoods the chance to delay new construction, and it requires a percentage of units be affordable. (That percentage varies depending on building size and the level of affordability.) The requirements for affordable units alone, not fully hashed out yet, are sure to stir up debate in San Francisco.
Our city has for some time been front and center on the crisis of housing, and some people want to solve it. California’s new governor (and former SF supervisor) Gavin Newsom wants 3.5 million new units statewide by 2025, which would be a boom like no other in recent history.
Our mayor London Breed couldn’t have been clearer about her pro-housing agenda during last year’s campaign. Even though voters later shunned her pro-housing allies in the supervisor races, she continues to hammer on housing, and no high-profile candidate has emerged to challenge her reelection this November.
The Chicago study tells us that we need to be mindful and move deliberately. At the same time, not changing at all will only fortify SF’s shameful status as a precious enclave.
Some people assert the only housing that should be built from here on out are affordable, subsidized units. Even if affordable projects that should be slam dunks — like 150 homes for low-income seniors scuttled by despicably selfish neighbors — actually see the light of day, the affordable-or-nothing approach isn’t likely to add significant supply, which is why folks like Wiener and Breed want new market-rate housing to be part of the mix too.
A major current in the debate, then, is where and how to set affordability requirements. The so-called “Monster in the Mission” project above the 16th and Mission BART station might never come to fruition, even if SB 50 passes, because many residents, community advocates, and others are adamant that the project must be 100 percent affordable housing.
It remains to be seen how much SB 50’s protections quell worries about displacement, congestion, and usurpation of local zoning control; the bill has yet to face a hearing in Sacramento. But San Francisco — always looking to be ahead of the curve! — offered a preview at the Planning Commission hearing. Without reamplifying all the arguments against SB 50 (see one partisan thread here), let’s applaud their coinage of a new term: Wienerville. Scott himself seems to be enjoying it.
If SB 50 passes, it could mean a lot of rezoning for San Francisco. Anything with half a mile of a BART or Muni Metro stop (or a ferry terminal) would fall under new rules that waive existing height limits, which in many parts of the city are capped, and set minimum heights. Anything within a quarter mile of an often-used bus line or in a “jobs-rich” area would be subject to slightly different rules. This is pretty much all of the city, as figured by Planning Commission staff.
You can download the full analysis here, which was provided for Thursday’s hearing.
With these new codes and additional protection, plenty of sites eligible for upzoning under SB 50 won’t see new housing. That might be a good thing. It would be wholly fair if the guardrails help deflect some of the pressure away from the Mission and South of Market and into the city’s woefully development-resistant western neighborhoods — increasing the density along Geary Boulevard, for example.
Other changes besides transit-based density still need to happen. As part of her “we need all types of housing” agenda, Mayor Breed has started to unjam the backlog of applications to build backyard carriage houses (ADUs, in planning-speak). The city needs to maximize every opportunity to build as much affordable housing as possible. Resistance — which reprehensibly won the day near Forest Hill Station, and might happen again at the western end of Haight Street — must be heard out and then end.
The Chicago study tells us that when we change the rules to allow more housing, we need to be mindful and move deliberately. At the same time, the current situation tells us that not changing at all, leaving the status quo (NIMBYvilles, if you like) will only fortify San Francisco’s shameful status as a precious enclave — ruled by those lucky enough to buy houses in the so-called good old days or rich enough to buy houses in this digital Gilded Age.
Alex Lash is editor in chief of The Frisc.
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