Sun never sets on Bay Area NIMBYs
The term “affordable housing” often functions as California code for no housing. Thanks to a scarcity of homes driven by residents and officials who pretend to support housing subject to its affordability, along with all manner of other more transparently trivial specifications, affordable housing serves as a theoretical construct excusing opposition to all actual construction.
On those relatively rare occasions when a real affordable housing development confronts a neighborhood that has and wants none of it, the usual result is what’s unfolding in San Francisco’s Sunset.
That’s where hundreds of mostly longtime, homeowning residents turned out last week to heap hatred on a proposed midrise apartment building and those who would dare live in it: families who don’t have the $1.8 million needed to buy an average home in the neighborhood and can’t afford the $4,500 rent for a typical twobedroom apartment there — which is to say most families. If the neighborhood NIMBYs succeed in cowing the Board of Supervisors, which is expected to decide whether to approve a loan for the site purchase this month, it will be another sad triumph for the city’s preferred form of affordable housing: makeshift tent encampments, preferably on someone else’s sidewalk.
The paroxysms in the Sunset are extreme but not atypical of the region and the state. On the opposite end of the Bay Area sprawl, in downtown Livermore, 130 affordable homes in the works for decades could be further delayed by a recently filed lawsuit.
In both places, the pretexts for the opposition are many and familiar: parking, traffic, toxic waste, scale, character. A Livermore official said the racist part out loud when he worried about the area becoming a “ghetto.” Likewise, the Sunset development, with seven stories and a sixfigure income limit, has been disparaged as a “highrise slum” that would “become the best place in San Francisco to buy heroin.” Neighbors are even griping about the shadow it would cast on one of the most notoriously sunless corners of California.
District Supervisor Gordon Mar deserves credit for supporting the development in the face of such unyielding and unhinged opposition. Mar, however, is also one of the board’s prominent proponents of the idea that every housing development must be painstakingly proved to be good and necessary rather than generally assumed to be in a city that is desperately short of homes. As events in the Sunset are demonstrating, it’s a corrosive notion that our leaders can appease or confront, but they can’t do both.u