San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Bureaucracy is corrupting S.F.
Not a day goes by these days, it seems, without a new story about the failures of San Francisco’s bureaucracy to meet the needs of its residents delivering a gut punch to everyone who cares about this city.
Some of these stories demonstrate the cold, technocratic indifference that stands in the way of making our city a joyful place — such as Chronicle columnist Heather Knight’s recent story on the couple who are being told to remove a beloved free library they installed on the sidewalk outside their home or pay $1,402 for a “minor encroachment permit.”
Others show how government inefficiency is enabling the crises on our streets — such as this Editorial Board’s examination into why the city isn’t filling open supportive housing units for homeless people.
And then there’s Chronicle op-ed contributor Bilal Mahmood’s revelation that it takes 87 permits and years of meetings just to get permission to build a single housing development — including government-subsidized affordable housing — in a city that is crying out for more places for people to live.
What are we to make of a city government structure that appears to be intentionally stepping on its own toes and that of its residents?
San Francisco’s bureaucracy isn’t just incompetent and comically inefficient, it is a corrupting force in our city life. Spiritually, yes. But also, literally.
Consider the scandal around former Public Works Director Mohammed Nuru, where Department of Building Inspection commissioner and structural engineer Rodrigo Santos pleaded guilty to, among other things, soliciting donations from nonprofits favored by Senior Building Inspector Bernard Curran in exchange for his sign-off on projects that may not have passed inspection otherwise. Then there was private “permit expediter” Walter Wong, who lavished officials with gifts in exchange for special treatment on projects.
In the aftermath of these and other scandals, San Francisco
installed layers of new oversight. For instance, San Franciscans voted to crack down on behested payments — charitable gifts made at a public official’s request — by passing Proposition E last May.
But the one good government measure we seemingly haven’t tried is hacking apart our red tape in a meaningful way — deconstructing the systems that are so needlessly tortuous they incentivize even well-intentioned people to pursue problematic shortcuts.
The mere existence of a forhire permit expediter like Wong should be all the indication needed to know that city systems — particularly surrounding housing development — are dangerously cloudy.
Corruption born of needlessly complicated government bureaucracy isn’t just a San Francisco phenomenon. In Los Angeles, disgraced former City Council Member Jose Huizar recently pleaded guilty to accepting $1.5 million in bribes
while in office to push real estate developments through that city’s similarly tight-fisted land use processes. Yet another Los Angeles City Council member, Mitchell Englander, who served on key land use committees, was sentenced to 14 months in prison for accepting cash gifts from a developer.
Cue the cries that developer greed is the problem and that deregulation only rewards bad actors.
You won’t get any argument from us that real estate can be a shady business. But an unnavigable bureaucracy is clearly no check on the powerful. In many ways, it’s the opposite.
These scandals offer undeniable evidence that befuddling bureaucracy creates incentives and opportunities for those with money or insider knowledge to game the system. Beyond that, San Francisco’s regulations have driven the price of development so high that all but the wealthiest and most influential players have access to the market. The result
isn’t just a housing and affordability crisis born of insufficient supply. It also results in smaller projects and missing middle-density housing — built by smaller contractors, customized for smaller neighborhoods — going by the wayside in lieu of rootless corporate megaprojects.
San Francisco has passed an ambitious state-mandated “housing element” that calls for the city to build over 80,000 homes in the next eight years. That plan smartly and sensitively prioritizes middle-density housing around public transit, and in historically exclusionary neighborhoods that have long failed to build their fair share.
State laws now require cities to create a feasible pathway to increasing housing, whether they want to or not. Eliminating red tape is an essential part of living up to that mandate. Relying on an inefficient bureaucracy to cuff the city’s hands on land use is no longer an option. If San Francisco
doesn’t meet the obligations of its housing element, it will fall out of compliance with state law. This will allow the “builder’s remedy” to take effect, which will essentially let developers build whatever and wherever they please.
In other words, San Francisco can willingly and purposefully remove red tape in a way that upholds the city’s values, or it can abandon all sense of responsibility and let events unfold as they will. San Francisco can be a city that continues to prioritize saying “no” to everyone’s detriment. Or, it can learn to say “yes” and accept both the compromises and the benefits that come with that mindset — namely a transparent system, with fewer resources devoted to stopping the things some residents claim to hate, that is more dedicated to achieving goals the majority of residents insist they want.