This week, under extreme pressure from state officials, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted 9-2 to finally advance Mayor London Breed’s legislation to streamline the city’s notoriously lengthy housing approval process.
The board is set to take a final vote on the legislation next week to meet a last-chance Dec. 28 deadline imposed by the state Housing and Community Development Department, which has taken increasingly aggressive steps to force San Francisco to implement the policies necessary to accommodate 82,000 new homes over the next eight years — its share of the 2.5 million needed statewide.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration recently completed an unprecedented yearlong review of San Francisco’s housing approval process, which investigators determined takes 10 months longer than anywhere else in the state. The state subsequently ordered San Francisco to take 18 corrective actions, including passing Breed’s streamlining legislation by Nov. 24.
Supervisors punted that deadline, prompting the state to issue a strongly worded warning reminding them that failure to comply could result in decertification of San Francisco’s housing plan. That, in turn, would put the city at risk of losing millions of dollars of affordable housing and transportation funding and open it up to the “builder’s remedy,” which would allow developers to bypass the local planning process altogether for certain projects. Yet supervisors still can’t resist tempting fate.
They tucked several amendments into Breed’s streamlining bill that state housing officials had explicitly advised them to remove. “I don’t know that picking an unnecessary fight with San Francisco would be helpful to (the state’s) cause,” said Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, who authored two of the amendments — including a particularly dubious one to make it harder to demolish thousands of homes built before 1923 with no clear historic significance.
It’s an overconfident and, frankly, reckless bet. Although supervisors’ initial vote on Breed’s bill was an “encouraging first step,” the state is “still evaluating the latest amendments,” David Zisser, the state housing department’s assistant deputy director for local government relations and accountability, said in a statement. He also noted that San Francisco still needs to explain how it’s implementing other overdue required actions.
It’s embarrassing that “the state of California has to babysit the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to get them to do the bare minimum,” Louis Mirante, the Bay Area Council’s vice president of public policy, told the editorial board.
He’s right.
Contrast San Francisco with Sacramento, where its city council just unanimously — unanimously! — advanced housing reforms that go above and beyond what’s required by state law and may be among the most ambitious in the country.
Sacramento’s policy, scheduled for a final procedural vote in early 2024, aims to create what’s known as “missing middle” housing — such as triplexes, fourplexes and other types of multifamily housing — near transit and in neighborhoods currently restricted to single-family homes.Anyone used to San Francisco housing politics — including hours-long arguments over potential shadows cast by a proposed development — might expect that Sacramento’s single-family neighborhoods would rise in protest.
But “even the most suburban district of the city said, ‘Yes, more missing-middle housing because of the environment, because of our housing crisis,’ ” Kevin Dumler, a project manager at the affordable housing developer Jamboree Housing, told the editorial board.
Sacramento City Council Member Caity Maple, one of the policy’s most fervent backers, said that during her campaign, “the number one issue that I heard from residents was that they were having trouble finding housing they could afford — and keeping their housing.”
She added that in Sacramento, “people are really interested in development in general,” especially when it comes to enlivening the vacant and underutilized spaces that proliferated in California’s capital city amid the pandemic as state workers stayed home and the businesses that relied on them shuttered.
Many Sacramentans understand, Maple said, that new development means more people out and about and more eyes on the street — helping to reduce concerns about crime, homelessness and public safety, particularly in the hollowed-out downtown.In other words, Sacramento views new housing as an exciting opportunity — while San Francisco treats it as a dreaded obligation.
San Francisco’s resistance to new housing, and the sky-high home prices that result, help explain why so many Bay Area residents are moving to more affordable cities like Sacramento and the largely rural region surrounding it.
“The more San Francisco navel-gazes on its own ordinances, the more … places like Antioch and Fairfield and Vacaville and Sacramento (become) … dumping grounds for San Francisco’s luxurious indulgence in doing nothing,” Mirante said. “We’re doing as much to accelerate homebuilding in these regions as we can, but there’s only so much we can do.”
Sacramento is willingly doing more than its fair share to address California’s housing shortage in part because it is forced to by the refusal to build in cities like San Francisco.
But that doesn’t mean the state should let San Francisco get away with doing less.
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