By Deia de Brito
Last year, Florida-based Lennar Corp. broke local ballot funding records at the time when it spent close to $5 million on its campaign to approve Proposition G, giving it the right to develop more than 10,000 homes in southeast San Francisco, and to defeat Proposition F, the alternative measure demanding that half these units be affordable.
Lennar, the Redevelopment Agency, and Mayor Gavin Newsom argued that 50 percent affordability would doom the project. But to win the support of the San Francisco Labor Council, the San Francisco Organizing Project (SFOP), and Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), Lennar agreed to increase the number of affordable units from the 25 percent it proposed up to 32 percent of the total, along with guarantees of using local union members in the construction.
But in its first residential project under that plan, revealed on Tuesday at the Redevelopment Agency, it proposes building 88 market rate ownership units at the shipyard’s Parcel A, with only 13 are set aside for families earning less than 80 percent of the Bayview’s Area Median Income. That’s less than even the 15 percent required of most projects in San Francisco, and less than half what the company promised San Francisco voters.
Sup. Chris Daly authored Prop. F and warned at the time that Lennar couldn’t be trusted. “It’s not surprising, but it is unfortunate,” Daly said of Lennar’s opening residential project. “They should either live up to their promises or we should kick them out of town.”