By Nate Horrell, HANC Board
HANC’s May general membership meeting will cover the topic of the state-mandated upzoning, and its implications for small businesses, tenants, affordable housing and the Haight Ashbury. HANC has invited representatives from the Race and Equity in all Planning (REP-SF) coalition and Neighborhoods United San Francisco (NUSF) who have been closely tracking and pushing back on the city’s policy proposals, to present.
Because of a maelstrom of changes to state law led by Scott Wiener, the city is required to build 82,000 new housing units by 2031. This mandate was created and inflated during the apex of the 2010s Bay Area tech boom, and was seriously far-fetched even under those conditions. While San Francisco already has over 56,000 approved and entitled units sitting ready for a developer to decide that market conditions, i.e. rents, are high enough to justify development, the City still must upzone for an additional 36,000 additional units to meet our unrealistic and unachievable mandate.
Although our “Regional Housing Needs Assessment” identifies that the majority (57%) of these 82,000 units should be affordable to very low income, low-income and moderate income residents in order to meet our housing needs, the proposed rezoning entirely facilitates the development of market-rate housing, except for the small portion which is required to be affordable through inclusionary zoning (15% on site, or developers can pay a fee and build no affordable units on site, only for buildings of ten units or more). Unlike every previous upzoning in the City, this upzoning proposes to grant investors additional development rights, without making any attempt to capture that increased value for public good: affordable units, transportation funding, infrastructure, etc.
The nomenclature given to the upzoning by the City is deeply misleading (Planning’s “expanding housing choice” or Lurie’s “family zoning”). Developers will only build a narrow range of real estate products available at high and increasing rents. Nothing in this plan will give most San Franciscans any choice at all, and if we don’t facilitate affordable housing in the “high resource neighborhoods”, then this plan will do nothing to increase access to opportunity or counteract inequality, all of which it promises.
As the Chronicle’s JK Dineen told KALW last week, this upzoning is also different than any he’s previously covered in decades of reporting because this time he is aware of zero interest from developers in this plan (even though it is the most generous, requiring the least public benefits, of any in a half century). He posits that this is because zoning is not the chief obstacle to development in San Francisco. It’s way down the list, past stagnant rents, high land and construction costs, and high interest rates. As real estate industry lobbyist Corey Smith told the Planning Commission last year: “the problem we have in San Francisco is that the rent is actually too low”!
But some day, if and when a local tech boom 3.0 takes off, these zoning changes may enable a wave of market-rate development that could have profound impact on longtime tenants and neighborhood serving businesses.
The proposed upzoning is concentrated on neighborhood commercial districts, which are our community centers, and some of the most beloved, economically viable, inclusive and stable parts of the city. If we are not careful, these proposals, which are the most dramatic proposed changes to land use in San Francisco in decades, could wipe out small businesses we cherish from the Haight and across the west side. Think of the Fillmore, where Black wealth in businesses and Victorian homes were destroyed and demolished, and replaced with cold towers and persistent commercial vacancies in the name of redevelopment. The sad truth is that modern developers and building codes cannot produce the fine grain dense neighborhoods that we already have. And every truly rent-controlled apartment, built before modern restrictions on rent control, can never be replaced.
In the Haight, the latest upzoning map, endorsed by Mayor Lurie, proposes to upzone Haight, Stanyan, Cole, Carl and Parnassus to 6 stories, and everything within one block of those to five stories. Single-story contiguous commercial buildings have been identified by Planning as prime development targets, which happen to include our local grocery stores and both hardware stores. Lurie’s administration also seems to be moving against formula retail controls and commercial vacancy taxes which are both vital to the success of our neighborhood corridors.
Join us on May 8th to hear more about potential impacts on neighborhoods, neighborhood-serving businesses, and tenants. See the accompanying article for how to join our meeting, either in-person or online.