Breed starts search for housing czar
Mayor London Breed wants to speed housing production, so she’s going hire someone to steer projects through San Francisco’s famously cumbersome permitting process.
On Wednesday, Breed is expected to announce that a search is under way to find a director of housing delivery. That person will be responsible for tracking housing developments and guiding them around bureaucratic logjams as they bounce among city departments.
The new position, which officials hope to fill before the end of the year, will report directly to the mayor.
Some development hangups can add months or years onto a project’s timeline, and they tend to arise after developers get the Planning Commission’s blessing to move ahead. That’s when projects thread through as many as eight departments that have to review specific details like fire safety, disability access and compliance with building codes.
Those departments can offer conflicting interpretations of the same codes, resulting in delays of housing stock, Breed said.
“When we have families struggling to find an affordable place to live and people living on our streets, it is unacceptable that badly needed housing takes months or years to get final permits from city departments after being approved by the Planning Commission,” Breed said in a statement sent by a spokesman.
“I need someone who can focus on the simple and ur-
gent task of getting more homes built faster, either by resolving conflicts between city departments to move projects forward or coming up with creative solutions to streamline the process. I want this permitting time cut in half so we can get more housing, particularly affordable housing, built now.”
The move is the latest step Breed has announced since taking office in July to build more housing faster. In August, she mandated that departments accelerate their review of applications for accessory dwelling units. She also tried to bring a modular housing factory to San Francisco by pledging to place a $100 million order as soon as it’s up and running.
It will be the responsibility of the future director of housing delivery to track projects after they receive approval from the Planning Commission and shepherd them through the permitting process. When departments offer developers conflicting mandates, the director will have the authority to make decisions about how the project should proceed.
“At the end of the day, it’s really hard when you have two department heads who can’t figure out how to reconcile their goals and someone has to try to be that arbiter for the city and move things forward,” said Douglas Shoemaker, president of affordable housing developer Mercy Housing California and former director of the mayor’s office of housing when Gavin Newsom held the office.
The director will also have to oversee the eventual digitization of the entire housing permitting process. Currently, city departments review a project’s plans on paper, one department at a time. City officials say that making the process digital will accelerate reviews and allow multiple departments to examine proposals simultaneously.
The Planning Department is already testing out a pilot program for reviewing plans digitally.