SAN FRANCISCO — It all started with Senator Scott Weiner’s Senate Bill 79… or did it?
Some folks argue that we need to travel back in time to understand the roots of San Francisco’s housing crisis—back to the creation of fallible rent-control policy or to the booms and busts that distorted the housing market. Regardless of the crisis’s impetus, San Francisco has to make room —and make it now.
Weiner has been fighting for years to advance California’s housing development, particularly near transit. SB79 passed on Oct. 10, and San Francisco was officially obligated to rezone to meet the state-mandated 82,000 new units. Current developments underway bring the actual number closer to 36,000 units.
Senator Scott Weiner, former member of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors (Photo: sd11.senate.ca.gov)
The Expanding Housing Choice (Family Zoning Plan) has already been approved by the Planning Commission and is expected to pass the board of supervisors. The next meeting regarding upzoning will be held Nov. 3.
The plan requires rezoning swaths of the West and North districts to allow taller, denser housing near major transit corridors. For City Hall and pro-housing advocates, the plan represents long-overdue progress, which Mayor Daniel Lurie calls it essential.
“Too many parents are questioning whether they can afford to raise their children in San Francisco, and too many young people are unsure if they’ll be able to stay in the city they love," Lurie said. "Our family zoning plan addresses those challenges while keeping control of our zoning decisions, rather than ceding it to Sacramento.”
Tenant advocates are far less confident.
Jennifer Fieber of the San Francisco Tenants Union (SFTU) warns that state laws like SB330, which works in tandem with SB79, “allow you to demolish rent control so long as you add another unit."
"These new laws aren’t going to protect as many tenants as our existing ones do," Fieber said, adding she sees each demolished rent-controlled unit as an irrecuperable loss, arguing that new construction often fails to offset what’s destroyed.
“You can build affordable housing, but if you’re losing it at the same time, you’re just pouring water into a sieve," Fieber said. "Overtime we’ve lost a lot of rent control housing, and it’s not gonna come back.”
At the Oct. 20 Land Use committee meeting, Supervisors Sauter, Sherill, Melgar, Chen, Chan, and Mandelman pushed amendments to address such fears, proposing protections for rent-controlled tenants and small businesses, more three-bedroom units, and potential exemptions for occupied buildings.
Map detailing proposed zoning height limit changes (Photo: San Francisco Planning Department)
Whether these amendments will be sufficient to protect rent-controlled tenants from displacement is yet to be seen.
Even if the zoning passes, the question remains: who will pay for it?
Rick Girling, a Bernal Heights resident and advocate for a public Green Bank, argues that financing, not zoning, is the city’s true challenge.
“The reason affordable housing is not built is because it’s not profitable," Girling said. "Corporate developers cannot be depended upon to build our housing.”
Girling envisions a public Green Bank to mobilize underused local resources.
“The Green Bank is the first step in developing a financial infrastructure that can mobilize under-utilized resources for the kind of development we need," Girling said.
Fieber agrees.
“We support the public bank," Fiber said. "The city uses a lot of private banks to hold its assets, and those profits go out of town.”
Establishing a public bank would keep interest from city assets in San Francisco, where residents could actually benefit. However, the two diverge on priorities. Girling wants financing secured before zoning changes, saying, "we need a more equitable tax structure where billionaires and multimillionaires living in SF pay more taxes.”
Fieber, meanwhile, says tenant protections must come first, noting "you have to replace the units demolished [as the plan states], but they’ll probably come back as condos, so there isn’t actually a right of return.”
Both argue that the private market alone can’t—and shouldn’t—solve the crisis.
Girling puts it bluntly.
“The market for housing is very different from the market for apples and oranges," Girling said. "Supply-and-demand theory is virtually useless when it takes years and billions to expand supply—and even if you build all the houses we need, most people won’t be able to afford them.”
Rendering of what Geary and 3rd Ave could look like under the new zoning plan, courtesy of SF Planning (Photo: AECOM)
Fieber says of SFTU, “We’re more interested in building affordable housing, not just deregulating [development] so the market has its way…We want the city involved in the actual building rather than turning it over to private developers.”
Most estimates agree that San Francisco will likely choose its fate with this plan, lest it be subject to a state takeover or the “builder’s remedy,” which removes the city's permitting powers and could yield comparatively more drastic development, sparking fear among NIMBYs and centrists across the city. The city’s centrists are caught between a rock and a hard place, while urbanist advocates decry the severity of the crisis and welcome the plan. Most citizens accept it but have valid questions about its execution.
Please share your thoughts on the report with me at sarah.h@lead4earth.org.
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