No on E: Jobs cap
On San Francisco Propositions on the March 3 Ballot
The city has enjoyed an employment boom that would be the envy of most while suffering from a governmentwrought housing bust that turns a blessing into a curse. Proposition E offers a classically San Francisco “solution”: Rather than add housing, it would subtract jobs.
Under what became Proposition M, San Francisco imposed the nation’s first annual limit on office development in the 1980s. Prop. E contrives to double down on the inscrutable achievements of this policy by further choking the city’s growth.
Sponsored by John Elberling of the affordablehousing management company Todco and appearing on the March primary ballot, Prop. E purports to link the existing office space allocation to affordable housing production. After grandfathering in several large commercial developments already in the works, it would lower the office limit proportionate to the city’s failure to reach an affordablehousing target that is nearly triple the city’s typical pace.
The superficially appealing notion is that this would somehow increase the number of affordable homes in San Francisco relative to the number of jobs. The trouble is that there is no evidence that the initiative would create housing, which it does not fund or facilitate.
More likely, much as Prop. M has begun to do three decades later, the initiative would restrict office and employment growth many years hence, when the economic conditions are unforeseeable. That would in turn limit tax revenue, development fees and the public services and programs they fund — including subsidized housing. A city controller’s analysis — assuming the past decade’s trends — estimates that over the next 20 years, Prop. E. would rob San Francisco of more than 10 million square feet of office space, 47,000 jobs, $114 million in public programs and services, and 8.6 percentage points in economic growth, the equivalent of $23 billion.
Vote no on Prop. E: The right response to San Francisco’s housing shortage is more housing, not fewer jobs.