San Francisco’s old housing policy regime was a world-historical failure. What comes next?

The city is stepping into the urban planning unknown, with the rest of California following close behind.

The proposed tower at 530 Howard, which would be the fourth-tallest in San Francisco, will be approved without any political process thanks to new state housing laws. (Pickard Chilton)

When I was a reporter at the San Francisco Examiner, I made it my mission to keep up with the city’s rapidly shifting housing policy. It remains an impossible task. Things are changing so quickly and so dramatically that even the people who wrote the laws can’t say exactly how they will play out on the ground.

But one thing is now crystal clear: San Francisco’s old housing policy regime has definitively come to an end. From here on out, it’s going to be much, much easier to build housing of all kinds in virtually every neighborhood in the city.

That’s a good thing. The previous housing policy regime was a world-historical failure. It is the self-inflicted wound at the heart of nearly all of the city’s deepest problems. And it has rightfully turned San Francisco into a synecdoche for what not to do when it comes to housing. California regulators have used the city’s global housing infamy to demonstrate how serious they are about enforcing state housing laws.

Still, what comes next could be fraught and painful. Big transitions usually are. San Francisco is stepping into the unknown, with the rest of California, and perhaps, the rest of urban America, following close behind.

Not everyone will be happy with the results of the new housing policies. They will disrupt the now-orderly urban fabric, including cherished views and sunny backyards. They will introduce types of households and communities of people into neighborhoods that are today relatively homogenous, changing their cultural feel. Some badly designed projects, with too much parking and too little housing, might go up in spite of the stated desires of policymakers. My reading of new state and city housing laws suggests that direct displacement due to these laws will be quite rare. But these policies are so numerous and so complex that new forms of displacement are certainly possible, even as the housing affordability situation broadly improves.

The political implications of the new housing policy regime will be massive and many-faceted. A renewed anti-housing backlash could very well be in the offing. But there’s also a more hopeful potential outcome: With housing development largely insulated from politics, political activism and energy could be directed elsewhere. Saying “no” to new housing has historically been the lever that activists can pull to, in their minds, combat worsening traffic, parking, or other perceived neighborhood ills. Now, that lever will no longer be available. The most logical tool to address the externalities of new housing construction will be to say “yes” to bus lanes, bike lanes, car-free streets, and eventually, new subway lines.

Let’s take a closer look at how all of this might play out.

A mercifully brief primer on the old housing policy regime

Always at the cutting edge, San Francisco was a pioneer of downzoning in the 1970s, essentially banning apartments in areas already peppered with high-density housing. Instead, the city directed new development to a handful of post-industrial, low-income, minority neighborhoods, like SoMa and Mission Bay. It then made it exceedingly difficult to get housing developments approved, even when they followed existing zoning laws. A single disgruntled neighbor could use the California Environmental Quality Act or the city’s unique discretionary review process to halt projects for months, if not years.

We all know the rest of the story. The housing shortage worsened through the final decades of the 20^th century, and gentrification became endemic. The city’s Black population declined by roughly half from 1970 to 2010. And this was before the city’s economy went into hyperdrive in the Web 2.0 era. Between 2010 and 2015, San Francisco permitted just one new home for every eight new jobs in the city. Homelessness, which initially emerged in the 1980s due to a variety of factors, including the city’s severe restrictions on new housing construction, began to affect more working people, students, and families.

Other expensive coastal cities were experiencing similar problems. But in San Francisco, where these trends were most advanced, leaders finally said enough is enough. With grassroots backing from the YIMBY movement, San Francisco legislators like Scott Wiener and David Chiu began passing laws in the late 2010s that forced cities to both loosen zoning restrictions and speed up housing approvals. Many of those laws are only just beginning to take effect.

You can read more about the specifics in an article I wrote for the Examiner last year. But the gist is this: The construction of small to medium-sized apartment buildings will soon be allowed across large swathes of the city where they have long been banned. Any housing development that is permitted by zoning will be approved just about automatically, without input from neighbors or politicians. And in many cases, developers will be able to build much taller, bulkier structures than is even technically allowed by zoning.

What will the new housing policy regime look like on the ground?

Three development projects exemplify this transformation of the built environment, and the different anti-housing constituencies they could upset.  

The 100% affordable development at 2550 Irving rendered in its low density context. (TNDC/ Pyatok Architects)

2550 Irving, a 90-unit affordable housing project in the Sunset District, is a good indicator of the kind of development headed for the sleepy west side of the city after the planned rezoning takes effect. Think:  six or seven story buildings along commercial and transit corridors like Geary, Fulton, Judah, and 19^th Avenue. The Irving St. project also demonstrates the stubborn persistence old-school NIMBYism. This 100% affordable project sparked passionate opposition from a group of residents, citing traffic, parking, and vaguely defined environmental concerns. Class and race scaremongering were also major themes. Fortunately, new state housing laws prevented these opponents from blocking the project, which is slated to start construction next year.

There probably won’t be much opposition to 530 Howard, a 672-unit, 840 foot-tall building proposal in SoMa. What’s notable about this project is that it will use AB 2011, a new state law by East Bay Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, that automatically rezoned nearly all commercial land for housing. The law also allows for “ministerial,” ie automatic, approval for eligible projects like this one. That means there will be no political process at the Planning Commission or Board of Supervisors.

530 Howard looking rather monolithic (Pickard Chilton)

This slab — which would be the city’s fourth-tallest building — won’t face the same level of architectural scrutiny large projects typically face. The careful work San Francisco planners have put into “sculpting” the skyline won’t hold for long. In SoMa, a neighborhood that has radically transformed in recent years, that’s not a big deal. But when new towers pop up in Russian Hill or Pacific Heights — high-rise neighborhoods that haven’t seen any construction in 60 years — neighbors might not be so amenable. Recall that it was the view-blocking, brutalist Fontana Towers at the foot of Russian Hill that sparked the city’s 1970s downzoning. This form of aesthetic NIMBYism is alive and well in San Francisco, though it increasingly lacks an outlet.

2588 Mission is the most fraught example here. The Mission District site has been vacant since a suspicious fire in 2015 that displaced more than 60 residents and two dozen businesses. In the intervening years, community groups have pressured the landlord to sell the property to a non-profit affordable housing developer. But the landlord has refused to sell, and has instead put forward his own redevelopment plans. Before, powerful Mission District non-profits and the district Supervisor could have put serious pressure on this developer to build the kind of project they want to see. Now, all of that leverage is gone. Using the state density bonus, this ten-story, 182-unit project will be ministerially approved.

2588 Mission announcing its whiteness to the neighborhood (Ian Birchall and Associates)

On the one hand, it’s tragic that community members are powerless in the face of a developer who does not appear to have the community’s best interest at heart. On the other hand, community groups in the Mission District — which provide many valuable community services — have at times acted like neighborhood gatekeepers when it comes to new businesses and development. These groups have an easy villain in a negligent landlord, but too often their ire is directed towards earnest and well-intentioned people hoping to make a positive contribution to the neighborhood. Perhaps this regime of “left-NIMBYism” helped slow down a certain skin-deep version of gentrification, but it wasn’t particularly fair or democratic. What’s more, there are far more effective policies for preventing displacement than seeking the blessing of neighbors and unelected community spokespeople.

Development without displacement?

What happens to a San Francisco neighborhood when development is allowed? Ironically, we have the answer because of the most notorious NIMBY incident in recent San Francisco history. In 2021, the Board of Supervisors delayed a 495-unit development on Stevenson St. in SoMa, on the legally dubious grounds that the parking-lot replacing project failed to analyze its gentrification impacts.

A year later, the new environmental impact report was released. It found — wait for it — that the development would not cause displacement because it was to be constructed on a parking lot. In fact, the analysis determined that leaving the site as a parking lot would be more likely to cause displacement than developing it with nearly 500 homes, including 73 deed-restricted affordable homes. 

The 700 page report went on, in Talmudic fashion, to analyze the recent history of development in SoMa. Between 2005 and 2021, roughly 9,000 new homes were built in the immediate vicinity of the Stevenson St. project. Of those, 3,000 were deed-restricted affordable homes, about one third of which were built as inclusionary units in larger market-rate projects.

All of this development corresponded to a marked increase in racial diversity over that time period. The neighborhood’s Black population increased by 38%, and the Latino population increased by more than 100%. That growth considerably outpaced citywide trends, which saw the Black population decline by 23% and the Latino population increase by just 25%.

469 Stevenson St., still a parking lot. (Google Street View/ SF YIMBY)

Unleashing lots of housing construction does not automatically increase racial or economic diversity. In plenty of cases, it has done the opposite. But what San Francisco has going for it, and what it continues to have going for it even under its new housing policy regime, are strong tenant rights and strict regulations governing the demolition of existing housing. State laws like AB 2011 direct development toward under-utilized commercial areas. Other local and state policies require homes slated for redevelopment to have been previously occupied by the owner, not a tenant. In theory, this should mean that the person whose home is being redeveloped is voluntarily cashing out, not involuntarily being pushed out.

Is this a perfect system for development without displacement, for improving affordability, or for creating a green, transit-oriented metropolis? Probably not. But is it an orders of magnitude improvement on the previous housing policy regime? Absolutely.

In a future post, I’ll explore how hard-headed realism replaced sloganeering and idealism at the core of San Francisco’s housing policy. It has a lot to do with taking an everything bagel and scraping off all of the delicious toppings…