San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Newsom’s not to blame
Regarding “A foolish solution” (Letters, Sept. 1): While the author correctly identifies climate change and limited resources as challenges, they nonsensically tie it to an anti-housing, anti-density message. That has been tried, and it has failed. California municipalities spent decades resisting growth, making apartments illegal and empowering overzealous neighborhood defenders.
And look where we are now: firsttime buyers unable to buy homes, people on the street, and others choosing to build in the risky wildfire-urban interface.
People are going to come to California — that is immutable. America has no domestic immigration restrictions, and California is a pretty swell state with lots of jobs. So how do we manage limited resources, climate change and more people?
You build in cities (cities have a lower per capita energy and water use than other places), you build near transit (transit is 40% of California’s emissions), and you build small dense units (naturally more-affordable housing).
An undeveloped hillside in San Francisco’s Diamond Heights was slated for low-income housing, but may become market-rate homes instead.
NIMBYism.
I live 100 yards from the hillside. It currently sits unused, home to mostly weeds and the occasional cluster of litter, nestled between two bus lines. It’s certainly not the kind of open space kids can play on, given how steep it is.
If built, these homes would add to San Francisco’s meager housing stock, and alleviate the pressure on home prices ever so slightly — while contributing almost $3 million to the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development fund.
As is often the case in San Francisco, the choice isn’t between market-rate housing and below-market-rate housing
— it’s between housing and a vacant lot that serves no purpose, in a city with an existential housing crisis. Let’s pick the choice that actually houses people.
Regarding “Newsom fails on fires” (Letters, Aug. 31): A writer blames Gov. Gavin Newsom for the fires raging across California because “he is on the campaign trail shaking hands and kissing babies” rather than calling out the National Guard to reduce fuel loads during the winter and spring.
Newsom would not, of course, be on the “campaign trail” if Republicans had not engineered his recall, nor is it the National Guard’s responsibility to spend nearly half the year managing forests.
That work should be undertaken by a revived Civilian Conservation Corps which would also give badly needed jobs and training to tens of thousands of young people. We will all have to pay for it if we want to avoid ever greater disasters.