Editors note: This is something I have supported and written about in detail. Marc makes the case nicely — T.R.
By Marc Salomon
San Francisco’s future as a creative and diverse progressive beacon is at risk due to the Planning Department’s Eastern Neighborhoods plan. The planning staff has decided the city’s need for luxury housing is so significant that it has set the development bar too low, allowing big builders to cash in on market rate housing.
Planning staff has labored to produce an inelegant community benefits and affordability model that has so many unproven moving parts it might barely work for current conditions but cannot be counted upon to provide for changing circumstances in the future.
But there is an existing successful city policy, passed by the voters in 1986 to control office sprawl, that can serve as a model for harnessing the insatiable demand to build profitable luxury housing, both for the benefit of existing San Franciscans as well as those of the non-rich who would seek refuge here in the future as so many of us did in the past.
Proposition M imposed a 950,000 square foot annual limit on office space. When applications to build exceed that cap, developers may offer up additional sweeteners to increase the chances of their projects being permitted.
The Western SoMa Citizens Planning Task force broke off from Eastern Neighborhoods planning process in 2004, and is nearing completion on its democratic, participatory, community-based plan. One policy that has caused consternation among the development types, who expect to run planning processes unhindered, has been a proposal to replicate Prop M, but this time, applied to housing.