Supervisors OK blueprint to add 82,000 new homes
San Francisco supervisors on Tuesday signed off on a state-mandated roadmap that details how the city intends to get 82,000 new homes built over the next eight years.
The Board of Supervisors approved the plan, known formally as a housing element, in a unanimous vote that united the legislative body’s political factions behind the closely watched blueprint that spells out the city’s vision for a huge increase in residential construction.
It’s an ambitious plan that would require the city to build 10,000 housing units each year — twice as many as it has built in its most prolific years and about four times as much as it has averaged over the past two decades. More than half of the 82,000 homes must be affordable to low- and moderate-income households, which will be a steep challenge for San Francisco, with one unit of affordable housing costing nearly $1.2 million.
All 11 supervisors voted in favor of the plan without making any comments. While housing policy is frequently a politically divisive issue in San Francisco, the board was only allowed to take an up-or-down vote on the housing element — it couldn’t make any changes on Tuesday.
Supervisors still need to vote on the plan one more time next Tuesday — which is also the deadline by which the city has to get state approval of the housing element. Missing the deadline would risk San Francisco losing control over housing approvals within its borders and would also jeopardize funding for transportation projects and affordable housing.
Supervisors did give input at a public hearing in November, when they decried the housing production goals set by the state as unrealistic and said that to meet them, California and the federal government would need to provide more funding.
Supervisors on the board’s land-use committee remained skeptical Monday about the city’s ability to fully implement the plan.
“The devil is going to be not in the housing element itself, but (in the) actual implementation along the way, which is going to be a lot of work and is easier said than done,” Board President Aaron Peskin said during the committee meeting Monday.
The plan envisions a sea change in where San Francisco has allowed new homes to be built.
In recent history, the vast majority of new homes have been built in the eastern and central areas of the city, much of it through mid- and highrise towers that have sprung up in neighborhoods such as SoMa, Mission Bay and others. But the plan assumes that the city will meet much of its goal by rezoning west San Francisco transit corridors such as Geary Boulevard, 19th Avenue, Ocean Avenue and Judah, Taraval and Noriega streets.
About 34,000 units of San Francisco’s 82,000unit goal would come from rezoning such streets. The remaining 48,000 units would come from housing developments that have already been proposed for various sites in the city, many of which are stalled due to the economics of building new housing.
More intense political debates likely lie ahead as the city works to implement the plan.
Supervisor Dean Preston, a progressive, on Tuesday announced that he was introducing new legislation that would allow nonprofits that advocate for low-income housing to sue the city if it fails to deliver on the affordable unit goals set forth in the housing element.
“We don’t take lightly creating the power for the city to be taken to court,” Preston said in a statement. “But as a legislative body we cannot in good conscience approve plans that have no possibility of succeeding without also creating a consequence for failure and a remedy that forces the affordable housing we need.”
Mayor London Breed plans to sign the ordinance approving the housing element just after the final vote next week, and state officials may grant their ultimate blessing that day or the following day.
Breed said in a statement Tuesday that, once the state has approved the city’s housing element, local officials will “turn to doing the hard work to change laws and processes that get in the way of building housing in San Francisco.”
“This will require us all to recognize that this work will take not just months, but years, and that we can no longer rely on past thinking to get anywhere near building 82,000 homes over eight years,” Breed said. “I’m hopeful for the work that lies ahead, and optimistic about what we can do. This is our opportunity to be a city that creates housing for all.”
The California Department of Housing and Community Development already granted preliminary approval to San Francisco’s plan last week, telling the city in a letter that the latest draft of the housing element met the requirements of state law.