Bill could revive working-class communities
Nearly a half-century after San Francisco’s urban renewal movement destroyed thousands of homes and uprooted families from working-class communities, new proposed legislation seeks to address some of the historic damages with something the city desperately needs: affordable housing.
Senate Bill 593, proposed by state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, would create the Redevelopment Property Tax Trust Fund, which will allow the city to borrow against future tax revenue to finance the construction of thousands of housing units in the neighborhoods most hurt by urban renewal — the Western Addition, Japantown and South of Market — as well as other parts of the city.
The bill was unanimously approved in the state Assembly and will go before the Senate later this month.
The bill would represent a breakthrough for San Francisco, which, like many California cities, has struggled to fund affordable housing since former Gov. Jerry Brown eliminated redevelopment agencies in 2011. In the decade before its dissolution, the city’s redevelopment agency had financed the construction of just 867 replacement units for the thousands of homes lost during urban renewal.
The effort to address the destruction of entire communities is a long time coming, said Mattie Scott, who has lived in the Western Addition’s Freedom West co-op for nearly half a century. Like other Black families who lost their homes during redevelopment, Scott has been waiting for more than four decades for what has been long promised by city lawmakers: the replacement of 5,842 homes that were destroyed in the Western Addition and other neighborhoods between 1955 and 1975.
“It was urban removal,” said Scott, a nationally recognized anti-violence activist. “Redevelopment removed families and businesses that were thriving and made it hard for them to come back. Took away their stability. Took away their jobs, their livelihood. And didn’t replace it.”
Now Scott and some of her neighbors in the Western Addition neighborhood — where thousands of mostly Black families were displaced — are working with Wiener on a bill they say would rectify some of the crimes of the urban renewal era.
Under the legislation, bonds and affordable housing construction would be overseen by the city’s Office of Community Investment and Infrastructure, or OCII, which has been responsible for finishing the redevelopment agency’s existing projects, including Mission Bay and the BayviewHunters Point Shipyard.
Tax increment financing will cover approximately half of construction costs and will leverage other public and private sources to complete affordable housing funding needs, according to Wiener.
“This is a very specific wrong that was done to several communities in San Francisco, and we have an obligation to right that wrong,” Wiener said.
At Freedom West, where Scott has been on the board of directors for more than a decade, the coop shareholders are working with the developer MacFarlane Partners on a plan that would replace the 382 co-op units as well as add another 133 affordable homes.
It would also include a huge chunk of market-rate homes — 1,790 — as well as a hotel, day care center, innovation technology center and 250-room hotel.
Scott said she sees the Freedom West 2.0 redevelopment as a model that could be emulated elsewhere in the city and beyond. The current units in the development are more than 50 years old and in need of major renovation.
“You can’t patch this place up any more. We need to tear it up and redo it — and benefit from it,” she said. “This is a form of reparations for me. We need to put people back in their homes and stabilize them.”
Wiener said funding for the remaining 5,842 redevelopment replacement units will be a key component as the city works to meet its state-mandated goal of producing 82,000 units by 2031, including 46,000 units targeting lowand moderate-income households.
OCII Director Thor Kaslofsky said the city has been looking at a tax increment financing program for more than a decade, but “it hadn’t really gone anywhere.” He said OCII currently has 980 units in its pipeline that would benefit from the financing mechanism that would be created by SB593.
“There was a gap in the work we had done in that community,” he said. “We thought it was important for the legacy of those people who had been displaced to really finish it.”
In addition to the Freedom West project, the program will help fund about 600 affordable units on 2 ½ acres of land in Mission Bay, Kaslofsky said. The projects would be built on the last two remaining Mission Bay sites, a neighborhood that has seen about 6,000 housing units built since 2004.
“The beauty of replacement housing is these are projects that can be anywhere in the city,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be in the (former redevelopment) areas.”