Ballot measure on housing would test voters
San Franciscans are famous for complaining about the city’s homeless problem, high housing costs and fleeing middle class, and in the same breath, blasting affordable housing projects planned near them.
The homeless encampments sprawling all over city sidewalks are outrageous! Build affordable housing for homeless people in my neighborhood? No way!
So it’ll be an interesting test to see how a ballot measure planned for June fares with city voters. The love-it-or-hateit group known as Yimby Action (for Yes in My Backyard) wants voters to make it easier for developers to construct 100 percent affordable housing and teacher housing.
The measure, being reviewed by the city attorney’s office and set to hit the streets soon for signature collection, would eliminate discretionary reviews for those two housing categories.
That means that if a 100 percent affordable or teacher housing project met all zoning and other requirements, it would get the go-ahead automatically. It could speed the process for getting permits from several years to a few months, said Laura Foote Clark, executive director of Yimby Action.
It would also mean residents who object to those sorts of projects in their own neighborhoods would have no recourse. You don’t like the thought of homeless people being housed in your hood? Oh, well!
Clark said she thinks most San Franciscans don’t really value vacant land or parking lots more than affordable housing. But she said the current process prioritizes the angry neighbor over everybody else.
“When you make it so decisions are made at obscure hearings on Thursday afternoons, that’s an inherently undemocratic process,” she
said. “Most people don’t even know that is a thing — that you can go and say, ‘I don’t want those people in my neighborhood.’ And they really say it in San Francisco!”
They sure do. Listen to just about any public comment session when one of these projects comes up for debate, and you’ll want to grab a stiff drink.
A few months ago, Clark moved from Noe Valley to SoMa near the Hall of Justice. It’s not a move most people would choose, but she and her husband wanted to shorten their commutes. Her walk to work in Mid-Market is now just 15 minutes, but it’s “miserable,” she said.
“You’ve got homeless people living on the sidewalks,” she said. “And then you’ve got fenced off, mostly empty parking lots. It’s insane.”
Peter Cohen, who heads the Council of Community Housing Organizations, said he’s not sure what Clark’s ballot measure would accomplish, since a state law approved last year already streamlines the process for affordable housing development in cities that aren’t meeting their state-set goals for constructing new housing.
One difference is that Clark’s measure would be permanent and apply regardless of whether San Francisco meets its goals. Also, the state law doesn’t cover some teacher housing.
Cohen, a frequent critic of Yimby Action, said what’s really needed to get more affordable housing built in San Francisco is money to do it, sites on which to build it and a shift toward prioritizing it over market-rate housing at City Hall.
Clark admitted the June measure is starting small. But it’ll be a good test of what city voters think of her controversial group and its prodevelopment ideas. As with so much of San Francisco and its debate over housing, it’ll definitely be an interesting ride.
I got a lot of response to Sunday’s column on the nastiness of the 16th and Mission BART Station. There is no shortage of stories of what Bay Area residents have encountered on their public transit trips, and many of them will make you lose your lunch.
One tweet came from a woman who was taking her three kids into the city on BART to see “The Velveteen Rabbit” over the weekend. In the garage at the Fruitvale Station in Oakland, they found a pile of human feces. She tweeted a picture of it to me along with the words, “This daily occurrence is just unacceptable.”
(Some people get unsolicited photographs of private parts. I get unsolicited poop pics.)
Bevan Dufty, the BART board director who’s been cleaning the 16th Street Station weekly since September, was tagged in the tweet, too. He responded that he texted and emailed the assistant general manager of operations for BART about the mess. It was cleaned up.
“She’s our customer,” Dufty told me. “She shouldn’t have to come in contact with human waste.”
Dufty said he got a lot of gripes about the Civic Center Station after the column ran, particularly about the “constant smell of urine on the platforms,” and that he’ll focus on that station next.
Does that mean he’ll actually be cleaning it like he does the 16th Street Station every Wednesday morning?
“Oh yeah, you’ve got to learn what’s going on,” he said. “I might have to pick a second day of the week and just clean twice.”
Hey, if all city officials took regular shifts cleaning various BART stations and city sidewalks, we might actually get somewhere.
I’ve been ragging on the city a lot lately, but it’s still a wonderful place in many respects. One of those is its propensity to adopt liberal policies before anybody else.
In January, San Francisco became the first city in the country to require employers to provide fully paid baby bonding time for new parents. While California’s family leave law gives workers 55 percent of their wages for six weeks of bonding time, San Francisco required local employers to make up the rest.
A new study out of UC Berkeley looked at the first six months of implementation and found a modest 6 percent increase in the number of San Francisco women who took bonding leave compared with the first half of 2016. But it found a far more notable increase of 28 percent in men taking bonding leave.
State Sen. Scott Wiener, who sponsored the legislation while a city supervisor, said he was thrilled so many more men are staying home after their babies are born and hopes the culture continues to shift and encourages more new dads to do the same.
“The fact that men appear to be jumping at the chance is really great news,” Wiener said.
As someone who has two kids and knows the dread that comes with the first day your husband goes back to work after the baby is born, I also think it’s really great news.