New housing for poor in SoMa?
Homeless and the neighborhood suffer if the project goes forward
The Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development has requested that the San Francisco Board of Supervisors grant the authority to acquire the lot at 1064-1068 Mission St. to build housing for 250 of the city’s estimated 1,700 chronically homeless. The site is within District 6, which already contains 57 percent of the city’s homeless persons, according to a 2015 survey. The district’s residents have accepted more below-market housing than those in other parts of San Francisco. District Six Supervisor Jane Kim appears unlikely to oppose the further concentration of the homeless on that parcel.
The mayor’s office thinks it can obtain the site at virtually no cost from the federal government under the provisions of the 1987 McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act. Whether the Trump administration would allow such a give-away is unknown. This proposal:
Is not in the best interests of the homeless, the neighborhood or increasing the housing supply needed to deescalate rents and home prices in San Francisco.
Does not make fiscal sense. Over time, keeping housing habitable costs more than building new. In rental buildings with a mix of market-rate and below-market housing, those who pay market rents provide the bulk of the support for needed maintenance. Public housing projects have shown us the fiscal effects of the maintenance burden on local and federal treasuries: To keep the units habitable, the city must either skimp on maintenance or draw sizable funds from the general fund.
Does not make economic sense. The argument made to the Board of Supervisors that providing housing for the homeless will enhance housing affordability is just plain wrong. For the last 42 years, San Francisco’s stringent restrictions on new development have kept new housing from meeting the demand — at all economic levels. Homeless individuals are not part of effective market demand because they cannot afford to rent or buy. However, increasing the concentration of the formerly homeless, who will spend significant time on the street even when they have their own apartments, will make the neighborhood less desirable to those who can afford to pay the full cost of new housing. That will make it more difficult to build market-rate housing for teachers and other critically needed workers.
Does not make social sense. Studies have shown that concentrating the poor within one neighborhood further disadvantages them. The double whammy of cramming 250 chronically homeless into two buildings within a neighborhood that already contains a high proportion of low-income households seems designed to recreate the failed public housing projects of the 1960s.
If federal policy is to use government resources to alleviate the condition of the homeless, then it should not support a project that merely crams them into high-density housing.
San Franciscans should encourage the feds to take the site through the city’s entitlement process and then sell it to the highest bidder for a project that conforms to contemporary planning requirements.
The feds then would have the opportunity to truly help the chronically homeless — by dedicating the proceeds of the sale to the treatment and housing of the mentally ill, who make up a significant portion of the homeless population.