Affordable Housing

Supervisors pose tough but important questions to Mayor Lee

Sasha Cuttler
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Supervisors pose tough but important questions to Mayor Lee

There’s a full agenda at the San Francisco Board of Supervisors meeting today, from the condo conversion lottery bypass legislation to approval of the term sheet from the massive development project at Pier 70, but some of the most interesting and potentially newsworthy items are at the very beginning of the agenda, when Mayor Ed Lee will answer questions posed by the supervisors.

Unfortunately, if past is prologue, Lee won’t give direct, substantive answers to the vitally important questions that he’s being asked, just as he dodged a question on the condo conversion debate in February and has kept everyone in the dark of which of the rival measures he supports and which he may veto. Mayoral leadership was desperately needed on that protracted debate, just as it’s needed today on some of the questions he’s being asked.

The first question, posed by Sup. Eric Mar, concerns Plan Bay Area and how it plans to pack 280,000 more people into San Francisco by 2040, which was the subject of a May 28 Bay Guardian cover story and panel dicussion that we’re sponsoring at the LGBT Center tomorrow night.

Mar lays out the massive displacement of existing residents and the traffic gridlock that the plan will create in San Francisco and how the approval process from much of this streamlined development may be given waivers from California Environmental Quality Act review.

Mar notes more than 40 regional groups have come together to try to improve the plan and mitigate its damage, and he plans to ask Lee:

“A consensus has formed around the following recommendations for making Plan Bay Area better:

– Provide $3 billion in additional operating revenue for local transit service and commit to a long-range ‘Regional Transit Operating Program’ to boost transit operating subsidies by another $9 billion over the coming years.

– Move 5 percent of the housing growth from low-income communities (mainly San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose) to transit-connected suburban job centers.

– Incorporate strong anti-displacement policies for community stabilization measures, such as land banking and preservation of affordable housing in at-risk neighborhoods.

– Director the Planning Department to analyze the impacts of potential CEQA streamling as soon as possible and create strong mitigation measures.

Do you support these measure, and are you committed to a plan with lower displacement level than the current proposal? If you do not support these ideas, why not?”

Excellent  question, and definitely an appropriate one for our chief executive officer, who would have more clout to push for these changes than any of the supervisors.

The second question comes from Board President David Chiu, who makes news by noting that Mayor Lee has continued his predecessor’s underhanded practice of refusing to fill city positions to provide services that the supervisors have decided to fund in the budget, undermining the city’s balance of power and Lee’s rhetoric on collaboration.

“In recent months, Controller data indicates that positions allocated by the Board for librarians, recreation and park staff, building inspection, health and labor enforcement, urban agriculture and other Board priorities were either not filled or only recently hired. Will you commit to ensuring that when the FY 13-14 budget is approved, our Board of Supervisors’ priorities are treated equally to your Administration’s, with positions filled as soon as possible?”

Again, great question about an important current issue, the kind of thing that voters created this question time for, to ensure that there was communication and collaboration between these two branches of government.

The last two questions concern San Francisco’s housing crisis. Sup. David Campos cites the scatching report that he commissioned from the Budget and Legislative Analyst on the dysfunctional and mordibund Housing Authority, which Lee controls, asking “what is your long term vision to save public housing — a significant public asset to San Francisco?”

Sup. John Avalos cites data on the skyrocketing rents in San Francisco and asks, “Are you concerned that your administration’s policies to stimulate economic activity, especially supporting the tech industry, have created one-sided development and only job for high-income ‘appsters,’ and have exacerbated the already extremely limited housing market? Do you have any plans to address the increasing rents, and increasing rate of evictions and displacement of long-time San Francisco renters?”

These are tough questions, but they are central to what kind of city San Francisco is becoming. They were all submitted last week, so the mayor has had time to think about them and he should provide answers and show leadership on these difficult issues. That is his job.

Will he? Check back later and I’ll let you know. The meeting starts at 2pm.

Planning for displacement: Short takes

Andrew Lam
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Regional planning hits Chinatown

When regional planners at the Metropolitan Transportation Commission funded a study to create a bus-rapid transit system on Van News Avenue, they decided, in the interest of speeding the buses along, to allow only one left turn — onto Broadway.

That would turn Broadway into a much-busier thoroughfare — and have a huge impact on Chinatown, where there’s heavy pedestrian traffic. That, Cindy Wu says, is one of the problems with regional planning — it doesn’t always consider the impacts on existing, fully developed neighborhoods.

Wu is a planner with the Chinatown Community Development Center and a member of San Francisco’s Planning Commission. She’s concerned that Plan Bay Area, with its macro focus, ignores the micro — the people who already live in communities that will feel the pressure.

“Chinatown is performing amazingly,” she told me recently. There’s low car use, high density … all the things ABAG seems to want. And yet, it’s in the Priority Development Area, where new construction could lead to displacement. “It doesn’t get to the neighborhood scale, where people will be forced to control the impacts of growth.”

Gen Fujioka, policy director at CCDC, noted that the plans says people displaced from a San Francisco community like Chinatown can be accommodated elsewhere in the region. “Like that’s an acceptable alternative,” he said.

A (somewhat) better approach

The Draft Environmental Impact Report on Plan Bay Area looked at several alternatives, including doing nothing at all, which everyone pretty much agrees is a bad idea. But interestingly, a proposal put together by community groups, including Public Advocates, Urban Habitat, and TransForm, turned out to do a better job of reaching ABAG’s environmental goals.

In the DEIR models, “Alternative Five,” as it’s described, leads to slightly lower levels of displacement and less car travel. It does that in large part through the imposition of a Vehicle Miles Travelled Tax — a one-cent levy on every mile driven by a private car or light truck in the region.

That, it turns out, does indeed discourage car use. It would also raise more than $600 million a year, most of which would go to public transit and affordable housing. Over 25 years, that’s a lot of cash.

But ABAG planners rejected that proposal, preferring their own alternative.

ABAG and the UN plan for world domination

One of the biggest problems with opposing, or even questioning, ABAG’s Plan Bay Area is that some of the loudest voices against it are, in a word, loony.

Around the Bay Area suburbs, people packing hearings on the plan are talking about the secret United Nations plan to confiscate all private property, burn down suburban homes, and force everyone into tiny cells in teeming cities where our personal freedoms will be systematically destroyed.

You haven’t heard of that? It’s called Agenda 21, and the John Birch Society is convinced that it’s a global plot to destroy America.

Actually, Agenda 21 is a weak, unenforceable document that came out of the UN’s environmental conference in 1992. It suggests — as does SB375, as does just about every sane thinker in civilization — that the world’s growth ought to be planned, sustainable, and energy efficient.

But it’s getting dragged up as grounds to scuttle Plan Bay Area. The black helicopter folks, the Obama Wants To Take My House folks, and a few NIMBYs who just don’t want density in the suburbs, have been wailing about this massive conspiracy in the past few months.

It’s unlikely that the Tea Party types will make common cause with San Francisco progressives on this issue. But there’s a real danger here: If the nut cases get the attention, serious questions about the feasibility of this plan could get lumped in with the ravings of conspiracy kooks.

And as far as the UN taking over California? Hey, at least we’ll get universal health care.

Planning for displacement

Andrew Lam
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Planning for displacement

tredmond@sfbg.com

The intersection of Cesar Chavez and Evans Avenue is a good enough place to start. Face south.

Behind you is Potrero Hill, once a working-class neighborhood (and still home to a public housing project) where homes now sell for way more than a million dollars and rents are out of control. In front, down the hill, is one of the last remaining industrial areas in San Francisco.

Go straight along Evans and you find printing plants, an auto-wrecking yard, and light manufacturing, including a shop that makes flagpoles. Take a right instead on Toland, past the Bonanza restaurant, and you wander through auto-glass repair, lumber yards, plumbing suppliers, warehouses, the city’s produce market — places that the city Planning Department refers to at Production, Distribution, and Repair facilities. Places that still offer blue-collar employment. There aren’t many left anywhere in San Francisco, and it’s amazing that this district has survived.

Cruise around for a while and you’ll see a neighborhood with high home-ownership rates — and high levels of foreclosures. Bayview Hunters Point is home to much of the city’s dwindling African American population, a growing number of Asians, and much higher unemployment rates than the rest of the city.

Now pull up the website of the Association of Bay Area Governments, a well-funded regional planning agency that is working on a state-mandated blueprint for future growth. There’s a map on the site that identifies “priority development area” — in planning lingo, PDAs — places that ABAG, and many believers in so-called smart growth, see as the center of a much-more dense San Francisco, filled with nearly 100,000 more homes and 190,000 new jobs.

Guess what? You’re right in the middle of it.

The southeastern part of the city — along with many of the eastern neighborhoods — is ground zero for massive, radical changes. And it’s not just Bayview Hunters Point; in fact, there’s a great swath of the city, from Chinatown/North Beach to Candlestick Park, where regional planners say there’s space for new apartments and condos, new offices, new communities.

It’s a bold vision, laid out in an airy document called the Plan Bay Area — and it’s about to clash with the facts on the ground. Namely, that there are already people living and working in the path of the new development.

And there’s a high risk that many of them will be displaced; collateral damage in the latest transformation of San Francisco.

CLIMATE CHANGE AND “SMART GROWTH”

The threat of global climate change hasn’t convinced the governor or the state Legislature to raise gas taxes, impose an oil-severance tax, or redirect money from highways to transit. But it’s driven Sacramento to mandate that regional planners find ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in California cities.

The bill that lays this out, SB375, mandates that ABAG, and its equivalents in the Los Angeles Basin, the Central Coast, the Central Valley and other areas, set up “Sustainable Communities Strategies” — land-use plans for now through 2040 intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 15 percent.

The main path to that goal: Make sure that most of the 1.1 million people projected to live in the Bay Area by 2040 be housed in already developed areas, near transit and jobs, to avoid the suburban sprawl that leads to long commutes and vast amounts of car exhaust.

The notion of smart growth — also referred to as urban infill — has been around for years, embraced by a certain type of environmentalist, particularly those concerned with protecting open space. But now, it has the force of law.

And while ABAG is not a secret government with black helicopters that can force cities to do its will — land-use planning is still under local jurisdiction in this state — the agency is partnering with the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which controls hundreds of millions of dollars in state and federal transportation money. And together, they can offer strong incentives for cities to get in line.

Over in Contra Costa and Marin counties, at hearings on the plan, Tea Party types (yes, they appear to exist in Marin) railed against the notion of elite bureaucrats forcing the wealthy enclaves of single-family homes to accept more density (and, gasp, possibly some affordable housing). In San Francisco, it’s the progressives, the transit activists, and the affordable housing people who are starting to get worried. Because there’s been almost zero media attention to the plan, and what it prescribes for San Francisco is alarming — and strangely nonsensical.

Under the ABAG plan, San Francisco would approve 92,400 more housing units for 280,000 more people. The city would host 190,000 more jobs, many of them in what’s called the “knowledge economy,” which mostly means high tech. Second and third on the list: Health and education, and tourism.

The city currently allows around eight cars for every 10 housing units; as few as five in a few neighborhoods, at least 10 in many others. And there’s nothing in any city or regional plan right now that seeks to change that level of car dependency. In fact, the regional planners think that single-occupancy car travel will be the mode of choice for 48 percent of all trips by 2040 — almost the same as it is today.

And since most of the new housing will be aimed at wealthier people, who are more likely to own cars and avoid catching buses, San Francisco could be looking for ways to fit 73,000 more cars onto streets that are already, in many cases, maxed out. There will be, quite literally, no place to park. And congestion in the region, the planners agree, will get a whole lot worse.

That seems to undermine the main intent of the plan: Transit-oriented development only works if you discourage cars. In a sense, the car-use projections are an admission of failure, undermining the intent of the entire project.

The vast majority of the housing that will be built will be too expensive for much of the existing (and even future) workforce and will do little to relieve the pressure on lower income people. But there is nothing whatsoever in the plan to ensure that there’s money available to build housing that meets the needs of most San Franciscans.

Instead, the planners acknowledge that 36 percent of existing low-income people will be at risk for displacement. That would be a profound change in the demographics of San Francisco.

Of course, adding all those people and jobs will put immense pressure on city services, from Muni to police, fire, and schools — not to mention the sewer system, which already floods and dumps untreated waste into the Bay when there’s heavy rain. Everyone involved acknowledged those costs, which could run into the billions of dollars. There is nothing anywhere in any of the planning documents addressing the question of who will pay for it.

THE NUMBERS GAME

Projecting the future of a region isn’t easy. Job and population growth isn’t a straight line, at best — and when you’re looking at a 25-year window in a boom-and-bust area with everything from earthquakes to sea-level rise factoring in, it’s easy to say that anyone who claims to know what’s going to happen in 2040 is guessing.

But as economist Stephen Levy, who did the regional projections for ABAG, pointed out to us, “You have to be able to plan.” And you can’t plan if you don’t at least think about what you’re planning for.

Levy runs the Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy, and he’s been watching trends in this state for years. He agrees that some of his science is, by nature, dismal: “Nobody projects deep recessions,” much less natural disasters. But overall, he told me, it’s possible to get a grip on what planners need to prepare for as they write the next chapter of the Bay Area’s future.

And what they have to plan for is a lot more people.

Levy said he started with the federal government’s projections for population growth in the United States, which include births and deaths, immigration, and out-migration, using historic trends to allocate some of that growth to the Bay Area. There’s what appears at first to be circular logic involved: The feds (and most economists) project that job growth nationally will be driven by population — that is, the more people live in the US, the more jobs there will be.

Population growth in a specific region, on the other hand, is driven by jobs — that is, the more jobs you have in the Bay Area, the more people will move here.

“Jobs in the US depend on how many people are in the labor force,” he said. “Jobs in the Bay Area depend on our share of US jobs and population depends on relative job growth.”

Make sense? No matter — over the years it’s generally worked. And once you project the number of people and jobs expected in the Bay Area, you can start looking at how much housing it’s going to take to keep them all under a roof.

Levy projects that the Bay Area’s share of jobs will be higher than most of the rest of the country. “This is the home of the knowledge industry,” he told me. So he’s concluded that population in the Bay Area will grow from 7.1 million to 9.2 million — an additional 2.14 million people. They’ll be chasing some 1.1 million new jobs, and will need 660,000 new housing units.

Levy stopped there, and left it to the planners at ABAG to allocate that growth to individual cities — and that’s where smart growth comes in.

For decades in the Bay Area, particularly in San Francisco, activists have waged wars against developers, trying to slow down the growth of office buildings, and later, luxury housing units. At the same time, environmentalists argued that spreading the growth around creates serious problems, including sprawl and the destruction of farmland and open space.

Smart growth is supposed to be an alternative: the idea is to direct new growth to already-established urban areas, not by bulldozing over communities (as redevelopment agencies once did) but by the use of “infill” — directing development to areas where there’s usable space, or by building up and not out.

ABAG “focused housing and jobs growth around transit areas, particularly within locally identified Priority Development Areas,” the draft environmental impact report on the plan notes.

The draft EIR is more than 1,300 pages long, and it looks at the ABAG plan and several alternatives. One alternative, proposed by business groups, would lead to more development and higher population gains. Another, proposed by community activist groups including Public Advocates, Urban Habitat, and TransForm, is aimed at reducing displacement and creating affordable housing; that one, it turns out, is the “environmentally preferred alternative.” (See sidebar).

But no matter which alternative you look at, two things leap out: There is nothing effective that ABAG has put forward to prevent large-scale displacement of vulnerable communities. And despite directing growth to transit corridors, the DEIR still envisions a disaster of traffic congestion, parking problems, and car-driven environmental wreckage.

THE DISPLACEMENT PROBLEM

ABAG has gone to some lengths to identify what it calls “communities of concern.” Those are areas, like Bayview Hunters Point, Chinatown, and the Mission, where existing low-income residents and small businesses face potential displacement. In San Francisco, those communities are, to a great extent, the same geographic areas that have been identified as PDAs.

And, the DEIR, notes, some degree of displacement is a significant impact that cannot be mitigated. In other words, the gentrification of San Francisco is just part of the plan.

In fact, the study notes, 36 percent of the communities of concern in high-growth areas will face displacement pressure because of the cost of housing. And that’s region wide; the number in San Francisco will almost certainly be much, much higher.

Miriam Chion, ABAG’s planning and research director, told me that displacement “is the core issue in this whole process.” The agency, she said, is working with other stakeholders to try to address the concern that new development will drive out longtime residents. But she also agreed that there are limited tools available to local government.

The DEIR notes that ABAG and the MTC will seek to “bolster the plan’s investment in the Transit Oriented Affordable Housing Fund and will seek to do a study of displacement. It also states: “In addition, this displacement risk could be mitigated in cities such as San Francisco with rent control and other tenant protections in place.”

There isn’t a tenant activist in this town who can read that sentence with a straight face.

The problem, as affordable housing advocate Peter Cohen puts it, is that “the state has mandated all this growth, but has taken away the tools we could use to mitigate it.”

That’s exactly what’s happened in the past few decades. The state Legislature has outlawed the only effective anti-displacement laws local governments can enact — rent controls on vacant apartments, commercial rent control, and eviction protections that prevent landlords from taking rental units off the market to sell as condos. Oh, and the governor has also shut down redevelopment agencies, which were the only reliable source of affordable housing money in many cities.

Chion told me that the ABAG planners were discussing a list of anti-displacement options, and that changes in state legislation could be on that list. Given the power of the real-estate lobby in the state Capitol, ABAG will have to do more than suggest; there’s no way this plan can work without changing state law.

Otherwise, eastern San Francisco is going to be devastated — particularly since the vast majority of all housing that gets built in the city, and that’s likely to get built in the city, is too expensive for almost anyone in the communities of concern.

“This plan doesn’t require affordable housing,” Cindy Wu, vice-chair of the San Francisco Planning Commission, told me. “It’s left to the private market, which doesn’t build affordable housing or middle-class housing.”

In fact, while there’s plenty of discussion in the plan about where money can come from for transit projects, there’s virtually no discussion of the billions and billions that will be needed to produce the level of affordable housing that everyone agrees will be needed.

Does anyone seriously think that developers can cram 90,000 new units — at least 85 percent of them, under current rules, high-cost apartments and condos that are well beyond the range of most current San Franciscans — into eastern neighborhoods without a real-estate boom that will displace thousands of existing residents?

Let’s remember: Building more housing, even a lot more housing, won’t necessarily bring down prices. The report makes clear that the job growth, and population boom that accompanies it, will fuel plenty of demand for all those new units.

Steve Woo, senior planner with the Chinatown Community Development Center, sees the problem. In a letter to ABAG, he notes: “Plan Bay Area and its DEIR has analyzed the displacement of low-income people and explicitly acknowledges that it will occur. This is unacceptable for San Francisco and for Chinatown, where the pressures of displacement have been a constant over the past 20 years.”

Adds the Council of Community Housing Organizations: “It would be irresponsible for the regional agencies to advance a plan that purports to ‘improve’ the region’s communities as population grows while the plan simultaneously presents great risk and uncertainty for many vulnerable communities.”

Jobs are at stake, too — not tech jobs or office jobs, which ABAG projects will expand, but the kind of industrial jobs that currently exist in the priority development areas.

Calvin Welch, who has been watching urban planning and displacement issues in San Francisco for more than 40 years, puts it bluntly: “It is axiomatic that market-rate housing drives out blue-collar jobs,” he said.

Of course, there’s another potential problem: Nobody really knows where jobs will come from in the next 25 years, whether tech will continue to be the driver or whether the city’s headed for a second dot-com bust. San Francisco doesn’t have a good record of building for projected jobs: In the mid-1980s, for example, the entire South of Market area (then home to printing, light manufacturing, and other blue-collar jobs) was rezoned for open-floor office space because city officials projected a huge need for “back-office” functions like customer service.

“Where are all those jobs today?” Welch asked. “They’re in India.”

TOO MANY CARS

For a plan that’s designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by moving residential development closer to work areas, Plan Bay Area is awfully pessimistic about transportation.

According to the projections, there will be more cars on the roads in 2040, with more — and much worse — traffic. The DEIR predicts that a full 48 percent of all trips in 2040 will be made by single-occupant vehicles — just slightly down from current rates. The percentage of trips on transit will only be a little bit higher — and there’s no significant increase in projected bicycle trips.

That alone is pretty crazy, since the number of people commuting to work by bike in San Francisco has risen dramatically in the past 10 years, and the city’s official goal is that 20 percent of all vehicle trips will be by bike in the next decade.

Part of the problem is structural. Not everyone in San Francisco 2040 is going to be a high-paid tech worker. In fact, the most stable areas of employment are health services and government — and hospital workers and Muni drivers can’t possibly afford the housing that’s being built. So those people will — the DEIR acknowledges — be displaced from San Francisco and forced to live elsewhere in the region (if that’s even possible). Which means, of course, they’ll be commuting further to work. Meanwhile, if current trends continue, many of the people moving into the city will work in Silicon Valley.

Chion and Levy both told me that the transit mode projections were based on historical trends for car use, and that it’s really hard to get people to give up their cars. Even higher gas prices and abominable traffic delays won’t drive people off the roads, they said.

If that’s the case — if auto culture, which is a top source of global climate change, doesn’t shift at all — it would seem that all this planning is pointless: the seas will rise dramatically, and San Franciscans ought to be buying boats.

“The projections don’t take into account social change,” Jason Henderson, a geography professor at San Francisco State University and a local transportation expert, told me. “And social change does happen.”

Brad Paul, a longtime housing activist who now works for ABAG, said these projections are just a start, and that the plan will be updated every four years. “I think we’re finding that the number of people who want to drive cars will go down,” he said.

Henderson argues that the land-use policy is flawed. He suggests that it would make more sense to increase density in the Bay Area suburbs along the BART lines. “Elegant development in those areas would work better,” he said. You don’t need expensive high-rises: “Four and five stories is the sweet spot,” he explained.

Most of the transportation projects in the plan are already in the pipeline; there’s no suggestion of any major new public transit programs. There is, however, a suggestion that San Francisco adopt a congestion management fee for downtown driving — something that city officials say is the only way to avoid utter gridlock in the future.

SIDELINING CEQA

ABAG and the MTC have a fair amount of leverage to implement their plans. MTC controls hundreds of millions of dollars in transit money; ABAG will be handing out millions in grants to communities that adopt its plan. And under state law, cities that allow development in PDAs near transit corridors can gain an exemption from the California Environmental Quality Act.

CEQA is a powerful tool to slow or halt development, and developers (and some public officials) drool at the prospect of getting a fast-track pass to avoid some of the more cumbersome parts of the environmental review process.

Under SB 375 and Plan Bay Area, CEQA exemptions are available to projects that meet the Sustainable Community Strategy standards and are close to transit corridors. And when you look at the map of those areas, it’s pretty striking: All of San Francisco, pretty much every square inch, qualifies.

That means that almost any project almost anywhere in town can make a case that it doesn’t need to accept full CEQA review.

The most profound missing element in this entire discussion is the cost of all this growth.

You can’t cram 210,000 more residents into San Francisco without new schools, parks, and child-care centers. You can’t protect those residents without more police officers and firefighters. You can’t take care of their water and sewer needs without substantial infrastructure upgrades. And even if there’s state and federal money available for new buses and trains, you can’t operate those systems without paying drivers, mechanics, and support workers.

There’s no question that the new development will bring in more tax money. But the type of infrastructure improvements that will be needed to add 25 percent more residents to the city are really expensive — and every study that’s ever been done in San Francisco shows that the tax benefits of new development don’t cover the costs of public services it requires.

When World War II and the post-war boom in the Bay Area brought huge growth to the region, property taxes and federal and state money were adequate to build things like BART, the freeways, and hundreds of new schools, and to staff the public services that the emerging communities needed. But that all changed in 1978, with the passage of Prop. 13, and two years later, with the election of Ronald Reagan as president.

Now, federal money for cities is down to a trickle. Local government has an almost impossible time raising taxes. And instead of hiking fees for new residential and commercial projects, many communities (including San Francisco) are offering tax breaks to encourage job growth.

Put all that in the mix and you have a recipe for overcrowded buses, inadequate schools, overstressed open space (imagine 10,000 new Mission residents heading for Dolores Park on a nice day), and a very unattractive urban experience.

That flies directly in the face of what Plan Bay Area is supposed to be about. If the goal is to cut down on commutes by bringing new residents into developed urban areas, those cities have to be decent places to live. What would it cost to accommodate this level of new development? Five billion dollars? Ten billion? Nobody knows — because nobody has run those numbers. But they’re going to be big.

Because just as tax dollars have been vanishing, the costs of infrastructure keep going up. It costs a billion dollars a mile to build BART track. It’s costing more than a billion to build a short subway to Chinatown. Just upgrading the sewer system to handle current demands is a $4 billion project.

And if the developers and property owners who stand to make vast sums of money off all of this growth aren’t going to pay, who’s left?

The ABAG planners point out, correctly, that there’s a price for doing nothing. If there’s no regional plan, no proposal for smart growth, the population will still increase, and displacement will still happen — but the greenhouse gas emissions will be even worse, the development more haphazard.

But if the region is going to spend all this money and all this time on a plan to make the Bay Area more sustainable, more livable, and more affordable in 25 years, we might as well push all the limits and get it right.

Instead of looking at displacement as inevitable, and traffic as a price of growth, the planners could tell the state Legislature and the governor that it’s not possible to comply with SB375 — not until somebody identifies the big sums of money, multiples of billions of dollars, needed to build affordable housing; not until there are transit options, taxes, and restrictions on driving.

Because continued car use and massive displacement — the package that’s now facing us — just isn’t an acceptable option.

Housing for the rootless superrich

Zelda Bronstein
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61
Housing for the rootless superrich

When San Francisco looks at building ultra-luxury housing — places like 8 Washington — and some city officials and “experts” say it’s going to help meet the housing needs of the city, we ought to look at what’s happening in Manhattan. There, high-end housing is being flooded with people who don’t live in Manhattan, won’t live in Manhattan, and will at best hang out there a few weeks a year.

Only 10 floors have been completed in what is intended to be the tallest residential building in the Western Hemisphere — a slender, 84-story tower on Park Avenue at 56th Street in Manhattan. But the top penthouse is already under contract for $95 million. Other buyers have snapped up apartments on lower floors for prices that are almost as breathtaking. While their identities are not known, it is likely that many are the rootless superrich: Russian metals barons, Latin American tycoons, Arab sheiks and Asian billionaires.

Why does that matter? Other than the fact that, according to developers, “Only about a quarter of the units will be occupied at any one time,” which doesn’t make for street life, community or even much in the way of economic benefits? Here’s the problem:

The growth in high-end projects in Manhattan comes as housing for the working and middle class is in increasingly short supply in the city. These buildings are proving so profitable that they are warping the local real-estate market, making it more difficult to put up more-affordable housing.

Developers have long complained that the prices of land, construction materials and labor are high in New York, even if they are somewhat less expensive than in London or Hong Kong.

But builders of ultraluxury apartments have much more latitude on costs because they are securing spectacular prices for their projects.

As a result, the luxury building trend is driving up the overall cost of land in the city. Several developers maintained that they could build moderately priced housing only if they could get significant tax breaks.

Sound familiar? There is, one New York architects say, “only two markets, ultraluxury and subsidized housing.” San Francisco is also an international city, and prices here are even better than New York. So don’t be surprised if, in a city that doesn’t seem a bit concerned about how much new housing costs or who the buildings are designed for, we reach Manhattan-like levels of insanity.

 

 

Why is the SF housing market “positive?”

Zelda Bronstein
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81
Why is the SF housing market “positive?”

It’s been a long, long time since anyone said that traffic is terrific. When there are too many cars on the road, it’s considered bad, not healthy — even if the boom in single-occupant auto travel is a sign of a recovering economy and lots of job creation.

So why do newspaper reports still talk about a “positive market trend” when home prices reach levels that no middle-class people can ever afford? Why does the Chronicle run a quote like this …

Steve Berkowitz, CEO of online listing company Move Inc., said the region “is seeing a real stabilization and a really positive market trend. There is a very solid market in all the Bay Area counties.”

… without any indication that soaring housing prices are bad for most people who want to live in the area, bad for businesses, particularly small businesses, that have trouble paying employees enough to afford to live near where they work, bad for the environment (when people have to move further and further from their jobs to find affordable housing) and generally bad for the region?

Yes, it’s good to see that people who were underwater on their homes are getting back into the black. But for the most part, what we’re seeing is the affordability of homes soar way beyond the reach of the vast majority of people who work in San Francisco. That’s not “terrific.” That’s terrifying.

Can the tech boom solve our housing crisis? No, but it can make it worse

Sasha Cuttler
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64
Can the tech boom solve our housing crisis? No, but it can make it worse

 San Francisco Housing Action Coalition and San Francisco Magazine posed an intriguing question at a forum they sponsored last night in the W Hotel: “San Francisco’s Housing Crisis: Can the Tech Boom Help Us?” Unfortunately, it wasn’t a question they ever really addressed at an event of, by, and for developers and their most ardent supporters.

Instead, the event was mostly just pro-development boosterism supporting HAC’s goal of building 100,000 new homes in SF over the next 20 years, and the discussion seems to show that the tech boom will exacerbate the housing crisis without ever addressing it, particularly given the local tax breaks and subsidies Mayor Ed Lee keeps giving the industry.

“San Francisco must radically increase its anemic housing production,” HAC Executive Director Tim Colen said during the introduction.

The pro-development cheerleading was slightly offset by the dose of reality offered by panelist Peter Cohen of the San Francisco Council of Community Housing Organizations, who noted that market rate developers aren’t building for today’s San Franciscans, 61 percent of whom make less than 120 percent of the Area Median Income. 

“We don’t believe the market will ever touch the 120 and lower,” Cohen said, later offering, “How do we build for the kind of San Francisco we have now?”

San Francisco Magazine Editor-in-Chief Jon Steinberg, who moderated the panel, said this event grew out of an important and widely acclaimed story that David Talbot wrote for the magazine last fall, “How Much Tech Can One City Take?” that raised critical questions about the wisdom of the big bet that San Francisco has placed on an industry driven by speculative bubbles.

“We got more responses from readers than anything we published in our history,” Steinberg said of the article, before shamefully expressing second thoughts on publishing it. “I felt the writer had been a little hard on our friends in the tech industry.”

He introduced UC Berkeley Economics Professor Enrico Moretti, whose 2012 book “The New Geography of Jobs” argues for reducing regulations that hinder housing production in cities, by saying that if he’d read it before publishing Talbot’s excellent article, “I think it would have had a little different tenor.”

Yet Moretti’s presentation was an overly simplistic Economics 101 argument that housing prices go up when demand is strong and supply is weak. “It doesn’t take a degree in economics to know those workers will bid up the price of housing,” Moretti said after noting San Francisco added 21,500 job but just 2,548 new housing units last year.

That’s the basic line we hear a lot these days, that only a massive housing construction boom will keep housing prices down and prevent mass displacement. “The only answer is to radically increase the supply,” said SPUR Executive Director Gabriel Metcalf, noting that means tossing out many of the city’s historic preservation and height and density restrictions. “All we have to do is get out of the way and allow housing to increase to make it normal again.”

Metcalf confidently predicted that housing prices and rents would drop if the city pursued that kind of unfettered housing boom, offering to buy Cohen a beer if he was wrong. Yet even Moretti’s research shows that Metcalf would probably lose that bet.

Moretti compared San Francisco to Seattle, which is also experiencing a comparable high-tech job boom that exacerbated a housing supply shortage, which Seattle responded to by following the prescription of HAC and building thousands of new condos in the downtown core.

The result was that rents in Seattle have increased 31 percent less than San Francisco’s, which he called significant, despite the fact that rents are still on the rise there even with a massive influx of new people and condos and all the infrastructure challenges that presents (it’s widely accepted that new development in San Francisco doesn’t pay for the full cost of infrastructure needed to serve it, which is a huge issue in the transportation sector alone).

Nobody had a good answer to Cohen’s point that building tons of market rate housing won’t actually do much to prevent the displacement of a majority of current city residents. As he put it, “What’s missing is who is that housing for, who is it actually serving?”

Metcalf welcomes the wholesale transformation of San Francisco – “It will be a change, a total change, and guess what? That could be great.” – but even he argues for the importance of policies that protect those on the bottom half of the economic scale, from rent control to more government-subsidized affordable housing production.

As Metcalf, one of the biggest market rate development cheerleaders in city, said, “If it were not for rent control, I would have been forced out of the city by now.”

DPH: Unaffordable housing is bad for your health

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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13

To cover rent on a two-bedroom apartment at “fair market value” in SoMa, a San Francisco minimum-wage earner would have to work 7.4 full-time jobs.

That jaw-dropper of a statistic is just one tidbit in a fascinating dataset featured in a recently published interactive map plotting housing affordability in San Francisco neighborhoods. Combining data from Craigslist and PadMapper, the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, and the local minimum wage ($10.24 per hour, widely regarded as generous), the map isn’t the handiwork of affordable housing activists. [Note: this reflects the 2012 minimum wage, the rate now stands at $10.55.]

Instead, it was created by the San Francisco Department of Public Health’s Program on Health, Equity and Sustainability. To view the full map and dig around for data on your neighborhood of interest, go here.

The embedded dataset reveals that the median income in SoMa is $91,000 lower than the $158,000 one would need to afford renting a market-rate two-bedroom. This figure, expressed as $-91,000, is known as the “affordability gap,” and the map plots these gaps neighborhood by neighborhood.

It was rolled out as part of a weeklong effort to raise public awareness about the link between affordable housing and public health, explains Cyndy Comerford, manager of planning and fiscal policy at the Environmental Health division of DPH. The reason? “Unmet housing needs in San Francisco can result in significant public health concerns,” Comerford says.

A lack of affordable rental housing can push more tenants into substandard or overcrowded living situations, she adds. Housing units within reach for lower income residents might be squeezed up against a highway, for instance, putting tenants in close proximity to noise, traffic, or air pollution, thus increasing their risks for experiencing heart or respiratory problems. Substandard housing also makes lead or mold exposure more likely, possibly triggering serious health issues over time.

For residents who fork over a significant percentage of their income for rent, other problems can arise. “It leaves little money for other provisions,” such as healthy food or preventative health care, Comerford adds, so low-income tenants have a higher likelihood of malnourishment or preventable disease related to nutrition.

The map is part of a broader DPH initiative known as the Sustainable Communities Index, which provides datasets for more than 100 health indicators. There’s a whole section on housing, which even covers the negative health effects of eviction: “Involuntary displacement contributes to stress, loss of supportive social networks and increased risk for substandard housing conditions and overcrowding,” DPH points out.

More information is yet to come: “Every day this week, we’ll put out a new bit of information around health and housing,” Comerford says.

Taking a broader view, it appears that sweeping cuts to public programs will present a whole new set of challenges for lower-income populations who have a higher risk of housing-related health problems. As a New York Times opinion piece highlighting the public health ramifications of austerity measures notes, “there are warning signs … that health trends are worsening. Prescriptions for antidepressants have soared. Three-quarters of a million people (particularly out-of-work young men) have turned to binge drinking. Over five million Americans lost access to health care in the recession because they lost their jobs.”

Amid all this, as a consequence of the $85 billion “sequester” that began on March 1, “Public housing budgets will be cut by nearly $2 billion this year,” the New York Times piece continues, “even while 1.4 million homes are in foreclosure.”

Why rent control works

Zelda Bronstein
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108
Why rent control works

I shouldn’t even bother to talk about this, because all it will do is stir up the trolls, but I’m getting sick of all the talk about rent control being a source of San Francisco’s housing problem. The latest is an editorial in the Business Times, which I buy to read J.K. Dineen’s stories about commercial real-estate, among other things. I should treat it like the Wall Street Journal; nobody takes the Journal’s editorial page seriously.

But the BT is just putting in print the argument that I’m hearing from the neo-libertarians who seem to be more and more populous in this town. And it goes like this:

Rent control distorts the market, which should be controlled by supply and demand. When you have rent control, evil tenants can stay in one place a really long time, thus “reducing urban vitality by discouraging mobility.” They can save their money for something other than rent. And it’s deeply unfair to landlords, because, as the BT notes:

By artificially limiting the return a building’s owner can generate on his investment, it discourages him from spending to maintain or upgrade the city’s housing stock. Rent increases are ordained not by supply and demand but by the city’s rent board. Legally, controlled rents can only go up each year by a fraction of the inflation rate. The ability to recoup costs of improvement or maintenance are also tightly curtailed. Costs are subject to no such limitations, so generally as a rent-controlled landlord, the longer you do it, the further behind you get.

Actually, rents go up by the percentage of the inflation rate that’s due to housing. The ability to recoup maintenance costs are not “tightly curtailed.” But more important, this notion that landlords “get further behind” because they can’t raise the rent assumes that most landlords — and their bankers — are idiots.

When you buy a piece of rental property, you typically have to prove to the bank that the rental income from the place is adequate to cover the mortgage, the taxes, the insurance, and upkeep, the same way a person buying a home has to prove that he or she has adequate income to pay the costs. When banks make loans the borrowers can’t repay, you get the mortgage crisis we’ve seen — but most of those units were single-family homes.

If I buy a rental property, the rent that’s coming in TODAY is matched with the price I’m paying TODAY. If the rents are too low to cover the cost, I have no business buying the place. And the bank has no business loaning me the money.

In San Francisco, unless you’re a complete moron, you buy rental property knowing, as the banker does, exactly what the current tenants are paying, and understanding, as the banker does, that the law won’t let me raise those rents by more than a modest amount each year. You’re making a profit at those rent levels; if not, you shouldn’t buy the place.

Now: Under Prop. 13, your property taxes can’t go up by much more than the rent goes up each year. And if you aren’t a speculative gambler (if you are, you have no rights anyway), you almost certainly have a fixed-rate mortgage. So your biggest “costs” are just as constrained as the rents you get. Meanwhile, your property continues to appreciate in value as the tenants pay your mortgage and taxes.

I know a lot of landlords in San Francisco, and the honest ones all say that owning rental property is a great deal — for the owner. There are probably some poor landlords who either (a) made bad business decisions or (b) were subject to some awful disaster and now find themselves unable to make ends meet. But they are not common.

Here’s the bottom line: Rent control prevents landlords from making speculative profits when the housing market booms. It also allows non-wealthy people to live here, for long periods of time, and become part of the San Francisco community. Housing stability INCREASES “urban vitality.” That’s the point.

Real, effective rent control would include limits on rent increases when a property becomes vacant. Berkeley had that in the 1980s. It didn’t cause urban blight or landlords abandoning buildings; instead, it helped create the Gourmet Ghetto and a thriving local business scene because tenants had more money to spend. It was a great success, until the state outlawed it.

Oh, and don’t tell me it discourages new construction: All new construction, since 1979, is exempt from rent control in San Francisco.

Rent control is, I will admit, bad for people who see housing as a speculative commodity, to be traded with little regard for its function as a basic human right. But I see housing more as a regulated utility — private owners have the right to a regular, acceptable return on investment, but not to excessive profits. Tenants have the right to live in the same place their entire lives, as long as they pay the (stable) rent and don’t become a nuisance.

These are good things for a city. The only problem with San Francisco rent control is that it isn’t strong enough.

Attack me, trolls. Or better, make a civil counter-argument that doesn’t start with “The problem with Tim is ….” Cuz we all know about my problems.

 

 

Boom life: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore talks about ‘The End of San Francisco’

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Boom life: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore talks about ‘The End of San Francisco’

A picture of Brian Goggin’s iconic site-specific sculpture “Defenestration” (that 16-year-old “furniture leaping out of an abandoned building” piece in SoMa that may be demolished soon) is pictured on the cover of Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s latest book, The End of San Francisco — which I reviewed in this week’s Guardian.

It’s an almost too-perfect image to represent the book’s contents — “Defenestration” cheekily channeled the out-the-window frustration of the dawning of the first Internet boom, with its hordes of tech gold-rushers pushing out old San Francisco culture. (And now, in the middle of another tech boom, the artwork itself will be pushed aside to make way for affordable housing — the term for anything under $2500 per month rent pretty much at this point.) The End of San Francisco takes us on an atmospheric, highly personal through the turbulent period of the ’90s and early 2000s, while asking some hard questions about the queer activism, participatory gentrification, and “alternative culture” of the period. Along the way, Mattilda intimately delves into issues like her recovered memories of sexual abuse as a child at the hands of her father; the rampant drug use, mental illness, and hostile attitudes of Mission queer culture; the gynophobia and transphobia of many “underground” scenes, and much, much more. 

I asked Mattilda a few questions over email in advance of her appearances here at City Lights (April 30) and the GLBT Historical Society (May 9) to help set her book in the context of what was happening then, and what’s still happening now. As always, she pulled no punches. 

MATTILDA BERNSTEIN SYCAMORE reads Tue/30, 7pm, free at City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus, SF. www.citylights.com, and Thursday, May 9, 7pm, free at the GLBT History Museum, 4127 18th St., SF. www.glbthistory.org

SFBG What was the impetus for writing such a wide-ranging memoir? You cover almost your entire life, from some of your earliest memories to when you officially moved away from San Francisco. Was there a specific purpose when you sat down to write it?

MATTILDA BERNSTEIN SYCAMORE With my anthologies, I always have a specific purpose in mind, a political intervention, but for this kind of personal writing – I write to stay alive. So it’s a different kind of intervention. I started with 1200 pages of material, and then separated different sections into themes. So, for example, the chapter called “The Texture of the Air,” originally that was something like 200 pages of writing about cruising and its limitations, about trying to regain a sense of hope in my own sexuality. Now it’s 15 pages. At some point I realized that the book centered around the myths and realities of San Francisco as a refuge for radical queer visions in community building. I first moved to San Francisco in 1992, when I was 19, and it’s where I figured out how to challenge the violence of the world around me, how to embrace outsider visions of queer splendor, how to create love and lust and intimacy and accountability on my own terms. I left San Francisco in 2010, and in some ways this book is an attempt to figure out why or how this city has such a hold on me, in spite of the failure of so many of my dreams, over and over and over again.

SFBG I think the most fascinating parts of the End of San Francisco are your spot-on description of life here in the 1990s, and your detailing of the excruciating decline of that era in the dot-com boom. Now
that we’re undergoing another dot-com boom, what are some of your thoughts as to how that’s once again affecting “alternative culture.” Is there any such thing as “alternative culture” anymore?

MBS Oh, it’s so sad! The way gentrification has progressed over these last 20 years. The displacement, the homogenization, the transformation of cultures of resistance into commodities. The way all of this limits people’s imaginations. At the same time, I don’t want to romanticize the past. In the early-‘90s, it felt like everywhere people were dying of AIDS and drug addiction and suicide; it was a desperate time, even if in some ways there were more possibilities for choosing a life outside status quo normalcy. But, no matter when we are living in this country so responsible for genocide, endless war, the destruction of the environment, we are living in a desperate time and we still need to come up with radical alternatives to giving up.

SFBG I figure a lot of the people who were here in that era (me included) will recognize a lot of truth in what you describe, including some pretty scathing but deadly accurate words about the people who thought they were on the forefront of alternative culture back then — how a lot of it was “vintage store glamour” and the “strung-out junkie look.” Have you had any reactions from anyone about that? Or from any of the people who were close to you back then that you’ve written about?

MBS I offered the manuscript ahead of time to everyone in the book who plays a major role. A few people didn’t respond. Some offered detailed feedback. And some, of course, are featured in conversations about the book, in the book – while The End of San Francisco is about my memories, of course these memories exist in the context of the relationships I’m describing. I want to challenge the notion of one true story, while at the same time I obsess about figuring out all these formative moments for me – politically, socially, sexually, ethically, emotionally. One of the funniest responses was from the first person who I trusted, we moved to San Francisco together in 1992. She wanted me to take out the parts where we do drugs, so she could show her kids!

SFBG Another fascinating part is your account of the rise and peter-out of Gay Shame [the guerilla anti-assimilationist co-founded by Mattilda]. You’ve talked about this before in previous books, like the anthology That’s Revolting — how did you approach writing about it within the context of this memoir?

MBS This writing is more self-critical. It’s more about the relationships I formed through activism, the gaps between our rhetoric of inclusiveness and the more complicated realities. Ultimately I’m looking at this activist group that meant so much to me, that challenged and inspired me in so many ways, but ultimately failed me. I’m not saying that it failed, but it did fail me and I’m trying to figure out why.

SFBG Do you think there’s any space now, in SF or anywhere else, for a true queer resistance movement?

MBS There never is space. We have to create it. There is so much self-congratulatory rhetoric in San Francisco, especially in radical-identified queer spaces, and we’re never going to get to something beyond a cooler marketing niche unless we can examine the ways that so often in radical queer spaces people treat one another just as horribly as in dominant straight culture or mainstream gay culture, and it hurts so much more when this kind of viciousness comes from people you actually believe in.

SFBG I loved your take on the Eagle even while I disagreed with some of it. Have you been following the whole return of the Eagle thing, spearheaded by probably our loudest current voice in queer anti-assimilationism, Glendon Anna Conda Hyde?

MBS In the book, mostly I’m talking about how the Eagle, a bar entrenched in mainstream gay norms of mandatory masculinity, objectification without appreciation, racial exclusion, and fear of all things feminine without beards, became a hipster hotspot without changing its core values. I can’t comment specifically on Glendon Anna Conda Hyde, but I will say that it depresses me when people embrace tragic gay institutions as “community,” as if they have ever offered us anything meaningful beyond a place to get smashed with people we’ll hate in the morning. Yes, it’s also depressing that public sex cultures that used to exist South of Market have basically disappeared, but I think we need to envision new possibilities instead of fetishizing the past.

SFBG You write so boldly and candidly about sexual abuse, drug will addiction, illness, relationships, politics … were there any memoir models you worked off of, and were there any rituals you went through to be able to open up so much?

MBS I think most memoirs take the most fascinating, multifaceted, complicated lives and turn them into Choose Your Own Adventure books without the choice. I wanted to create something more layered and honest — I was drawn to exploring the places where my analysis stops, to using those gaps as openings into something more spontaneous and incisive. As a teenager I needed to create a facade of invulnerability in order to survive, in order to find other kids like myself, in order to go on living. But now that façade leaves me feeling shut off rather than connected. Now I’m drawn towards expressing vulnerability, I think that’s what will save me.

SFBG I felt like you left us with a cliffhanger in terms of your father reconciling with you over memories of your childhood sexual abuse. Was there ever any resolution?

MBS I love that it felt like a cliffhanger for you even though the part about visiting my father before he died was right at the beginning. That was an incredibly intense moment for me, to visit him on his deathbed, to go to the house where I grew up with all that violence and still be able to express everything, to sob and tell him that I loved him, something I would never have imagined I would even want to say, but it’s what I felt in the moment and so I figured why not, he’ll be dead soon and I don’t want to hold anything in. For me that felt really powerful: it meant that all this work I’d done to become someone other than the person my parents wanted me to be, it really had worked. That was a certain kind of closure, that openness. But no, he refused to acknowledge anything. He wouldn’t even tell me that he loved me.

SFBG In terms of queer relationships and friendships, The End of San Francisco speaks insightfully about pain, desire, co-dependence, processing, betrayal, apathy, need, and abuse. Was there ever any love? Could there be?

MBS Yes, there was so much love – I hope that comes through in the book! And nothing has let me down more than love.

You want to live in Manhattan? Move there.

Zelda Bronstein
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192
You want to live in Manhattan? Move there.

I feel like I’ve been having this discussion for 30 years, and it still keeps coming back. The latest installment (thanks to sfist for the link) is a Slate article by Matthew Yglesias arguing that San Francisco could solve its housing crisis by becoming as dense as Manhattan. Lots of highrise condos and apartments in places like the Mission. A total of 3.2 million residents.

Obviously, a totally different city:

Obviously that would have a transformative effect on Oakland as well in various regards. It’s obviously not “politically realistic” to imagine San Francisco rezoning to allow that kind of density. But uniquely among American cities, I completely believe that 3.2 million people would want to live in a hypothetical much-more-crowded version of the city if they were allowed to. You’d need to build another heavy rail line or three and do some better dedicated bus lanes, but it’d be affordable with a much larger tax base.

Here’s the problem. Two problems, really.

1. That level of density hasn’t exactly made Manhattan affordable. (Although if you want to move there, it’s probably cheaper than SF at this point). There’s been a huge surge in housing construction in NYC, and housing prices are still way too high. The housing market in San Francisco is so unusual that demand is essentially infinite; you can’t build your way out of this.

2. There are already 800,000 people living here, and most of us don’t want to live in Manhattan.

One of the reasons San Francisco is so attractive is that it’s still a human-scale city. I’ve spent a lot of time in Manhattan, and the rush is pretty cool, and some urbanists say that’s how we’re all going to have to live in the future — packed into tall buildings in dense cities — but that’s not how I want to live. I know I sound old and I’m becoming a curmudgeon and one of those “you should have seen us in the old days” people, but I like the fact that there are no highrises in the Mission. 

Yeah, San Francisco is going to have to grow in population. There are ways to do that — to make dense neighborhoods that are still very livable. See: North Beach. But San Franciscans have generally taken the position that we don’t want to be Manhattan. We want to be San Francisco.

Now: My vision is not in synch with how housing is allocated in a hyper-capitalist system. Me, I think housing should be treated as a human right and regulated like a public utility. Landlords should be allowed a “reasonable return on investment” but not the greatest profit the market will bear. Homeowners should see their property appreciate at a reasonable level, but not at a speculative level. Housing shouldn’t be bought and sold as a commodity. And it should be allocated by seniority — that is, the people who have been a part of a community for the longest get the better housing.

That’s how you avoid the demand-exceeds-supply issue (and again, in this city, there will always be more demand than supply.) I know that’s commie shit, but that’s the way it is.

Still, whatever the economic or policy arguments, you can’t force that level of density onto this city. Because before you make those kinds of plans, you have to check with the people who live here.

I wrote this mostly to give the trolls some red meat, since they don’t seem to be agitated enough lately. Go to it, Adam Smith.

Making CEQA work

Andrew Lam
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10

OPINION In San Francisco, a single person can file an 11th-hour appeal under the California Environmental Quality Act to stop a park, library, transit, or affordable housing project that has broad public support. It’s actually worse: that single person can file the appeal long after the project has been approved and even after it goes into construction. When the appeal is filed, the project must stop construction — creating huge costs — until the Board of Supervisors gets around to ruling on the appeal.

This is government dysfunction at its worst, and it needs to be reformed. Supervisor Scott Wiener is sponsoring legislation to do just that: to allow full public participation and challenges to projects while implementing the common-sense rule that for any project, there must be an end to the process and a clear deadline for filing CEQA appeals. Public participation in decision-making is important, but at some point, the decision is made, the process comes to a conclusion, and the project begins. Open-ended CEQA appeals with no deadlines — San Francisco’s current system — are anti-democratic.

Passed 40 years ago, CEQA is an important state law that requires environmental analysis before approving projects. CEQA has helped stop or modify environmentally problematic projects in our state. Pretty much every project in San Francisco — whether a mega-development or a smaller project, such as a homeowner replacing a rotted-out porch handrail, a playground or library renovation, an affordable housing project, or a bike or pedestrian-safety upgrade — must undergo CEQA evaluation. These myriad CEQA evaluations are then appealable to the Board of Supervisors. Yes, if you are replacing that rotted out handrail or working with your neighbors to renovate your local playground, those projects can be appealed to the Board of Supervisors under CEQA if a single person doesn’t like what you’re doing.

We support CEQA and support the right to appeal projects. What we cannot support is having no firm deadline to file those appeals. We’ve seen excellent projects, with broad public support, get delayed and have dramatically increased costs because of our bad process. A small group abused CEQA to fight the North Beach Library for years. After the Dolores Park renovation underwent dozens of community meetings and attained broad community support, a single person appealed the project, arguing that the dog areas of the park would lead to childhood obesity. San Francisco’s bike plan was delayed for years, costing millions of tax dollars.

By setting a clear deadline to file CEQA appeals — 30 days after the project is approved — and by improving notice to the public, Supervisor Wiener’s legislation will provide opponents every opportunity to challenge a project, but they will have to do so before the project goes into construction. That is a common sense rule, and as a result, the legislation has garnered broad support from affordable housing builders, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, Walk SF (our pedestrian safety advocacy group), SPUR, labor unions, and neighborhood associations and leaders.

Supervisor Jane Kim has introduced an alternative to Supervisor Wiener’s legislation. Supervisor Kim’s legislation would make our dysfunctional process even worse. It would allow for multiple CEQA appeals of projects instead of just one and would continue to allow CEQA appeals long after projects are approved and even after they go into construction.

It’s time to bring rationality to our CEQA appeal process. Supervisor Wiener’s CEQA appeal legislation is the right approach and deserves to be passed.

Scott Wiener is a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Pat Scott is Executive Director of Booker T. Washington Community Service Center in the Western Addition, which provides services and affordable housing to families and youth.

 

CEQA change moves faster in SF than Sacto

Zelda Bronstein
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13
CEQA change moves faster in SF than Sacto

So the Guv says he doesn’t think he’s going to be able to gut CEQA this year. I think he’s right: The party he supposedly leads (but doesn’t tend to follow him) won’t go for it, any more than the party Obama leads will got for cuts to Social Security.

It’s partly that both are hard-fought pieces of progressive history. The late 1960s and early 1970s were a good time for the environmental movement — Congress passed both the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act, and Nixon signed both. The California Legislature passed CEQA in 1970, and Gov. Reagan signed it. Back then, even Republicans thought it was a good thing to be on the side of protecting the planet.

But there’s more — and it’s interesting that the state Leg, typically not known as a bastion of progressive thought, is better on this issue than San Francisco, where some sort of changes to CEQA are almost inevitable.

Some background:

What NEPA and CEQA did, first and foremost, was eliminate the problem of “standing” that had plagued environmental lawyers for years. If I couldn’t prove that a horrible development project on the San Francisco waterfront would personally injure me (which would typically mean I had to own adjacent property), I had no right to go to court to oppose it. CEQA mandates a valid, complete environmental review of any major project, which gives anyone the right to sue; I may not be able to describe specific financial damages from a project, but as a citizen, I have a legal right to an adequate Environmental Impact Report.

Likewise, anyone can appeal a development in San Francisco to the Board of Supervisors on the grounds that the EIR was inadequate.

CEQA review slows down projects and costs money. If you “streamline” the process, you make life easier for developers. But there’s a hefty price to pay — because while Sup. Scott Wiener talks about homeowners fixing rotting handrails, very few CEQA suits or appeals are ever filed over that kind of thing. Yeah, there are exceptions; year, one lone bike-hater slowed down the city’s bicycle plan. Yeah, NIMBYs will sometimes slow down affordable housing projects.

But most major CEQA lawsuits and appeals are over big projects, ones that, in San Francisco, tend to slide through the official approval process no matter how horrible they are. Mayors of this city for most of the past half-century have liked developers; mayors appoint the majority of the Planning Commission, and they appoint commissioners who like developers. There’s big money in San Francisco real-estate development, and the savvy builders spread enough of it around that they typically get their way.

CEQA gives the rest of us a way to fight back. Most of the time, it doesn’t work: A CEQA appeal, for example, didn’t stop the atrocious 8 Washington project. CEQA hasn’t stopped developers from building about 50 million square feet of office space in the city since the 1970s. CEQA didn’t stop that hideous Rincon Hill tower. Oh, and it hasn’t stopped a single affordable housing project.

In a city where developers rule and bad decisions are made all the time, for all the wrong reasons, you have to look at tradeoffs. Is it worth accepting a delay in the bike plan and the Dolores Park plan because lone nuts are using CEQA — if that means we can force big commerical projects to mitigate some of the damage their doing? CEQA isn’t perfect, but “reforming” it to make appeals harder is, on balance, a bad idea.

Have at me, trolls. I am a backward-thinking luddite who hates success and never wants anything in the city to change. I am an old curmudgeon. I am whatever you come up with next.

Or maybe I’ve just lived here long enough to see that much of what passes for “progress” in this town does more damage than good.

 

Proposal would halt condo conversions for ten years

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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77

San Francisco Supervisors Norman Yee, Jane Kim and Board President David Chiu gathered with a cluster of tenant advocates at City Hall April 15 to unveil a proposal billed as a more equitable alternative to a highly controversial condominium conversion legislation that’s fueled a months-long battle over affordable housing.

Crafted with the input of tenant advocates, the new plan seeks to amend controversial legislation proposed earlier this year by Sups. Scott Wiener and Mark Farrell to allow a backlog of approximately 2,000 housing units to convert immediately from jointly held tenancies-in-common (TICs) to condos.

The proposal would effectively shut down the city’s condo conversion lottery for a minimum of 10 years, a measure aimed toward ending the cycle of real estate speculation that tenant advocates say has given rise to a spike in evictions in San Francisco’s supercharged housing market.

The proposal would still allow a current backlog of TICs to convert to condos without having to wait in a lottery system created to limit the number of units lost from the city’s rental housing stock. The board’s Land Use and Economic Development Committee, which is currently in session, will take up the legislation and proposed amendments later this afternoon.

The 10-year suspension on condo conversions would allow time for permanently affordable units to be built in place of the rental units that would be lost in the one-time conversion, proponents of the alternative legislation said. “If more affordable housing isn’t produced, then units don’t get to convert,” Housing Rights Committee executive director Sara Shortt told the Guardian. 

Chiu stressed that the proposal was crafted to “ensure that as we expedite condo conversions … we protect tenants by suspending the lottery for at least 10 years.”

The 10-year minimum suspension is based on current regulations capping condo conversions at 200 per year. It would last a decade because an estimated 2,000 units would be converted, but could last longer than that.

“For example, if 2,200 units are converted,” Chiu explained, “the suspension would last for 11 years.”

Meanwhile, the proposal would require the conversions that would be intially allowed to be staggered over the course of three years.

The plan “puts the Board of Supervisors on record that we strongly believe in preserving our affordable housing stock,” said Sup. Yee, adding that the package of amendments seeks to “address the risk of speculation that will ensue with a large number of TICs being converted to condominiums.”

The Wiener-Farrell proposal spurred a months-long opposition campaign led by tenant advocates, who said it would permanently remove affordable rental units from the city’s housing stock and incentivize evictions of long-term tenants at a time when Ellis Act evictions are already on the rise. 

“Condo conversions are the number one reason why people are being evicted from the city,” San Francisco Tenants Union executive director Ted Gullicksen said at the April 15 rally and press conference.

Wiener and Farrell’s proposal was presented as a way to remedy TIC owners’ complaints that onerous shared mortgages had left them financially strapped.

But Sup. David Campos, who also appeared at the rally, commented that the real challenge “is for the renters who are finding it very hard to live in San Francisco.”

Campos seemed dubious that a one-time condo conversion should be allowed to move forward at all. “If anything, I think we should be doing more to protect tenants,” he said. “My hope is … if it’s something we cannot live with as a community, we will make sure it dies,” he added, referring to the original condo conversion proposal. 

In an earlier attempt to strike a compromise between TIC owners and tenant advocates, “negotiations broke down quickly,” Shortt said in an interview. At the rally, she said this alternative was “drafted in a way that’s not trying to meet any political agendas.”

For many elderly and low-income tenants who have few options if they are faced with eviction, “there is no price tag that you can put on their units,” said Matt McFarland, a staff attorney at the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, who spoke at the rally. “Their most valuable possession is the long-term rent control on their property. For these tenants, it’s basically a death sentence when you get these eviction notices.”

No progress in condo conversion standoff, despite the Chron’s spin

Sasha Cuttler
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93

Perhaps it was just an unfunny April Fool’s Day joke or some wishful political spin, but the San Francisco Chronicle’s April 1 article about how tenancy-in-common owners and their political supporters are pushing legislation that would allow them to bypass the condo conversion lottery seriously misrepresented the city’s biggest current political standoff.

Nevermind the article’s over-the-top bias in favor of those poor, hard-luck TIC owners, like the featured Pacific Heights couple forced to raise their baby in a closet when all they really want to do is flip the apartment they bought for a profit. Or how the Chron all-but-ignored the fact that these TICs were rent-controlled apartments in a city where two-thirds of citizens rent. That kind of top-down view of the world is pretty typical for the Chron, even in its news stories, despite the paper’s strained claim to “objectivity.”

No, the article’s real sin was to get the basic facts wrong on where this political stalemate now stands, presenting the wishful spin of one side as if it were the latest news. Between the headline, “Owners seeking condo conversions may have shot” and the first deckhead, “Making progress” (which plays off this paragraph. “’I think we’re making progress in our discussions and negotiations,’ said [sponsoring Sup. Mark] Farrell, while noting the talks with tenant advocates, TIC owners, and real estate interests are ‘far from the finish line.’”) the article leaves the impression current negotiations may produce a compromise.

But the problem is that there aren’t any current negotiations between the two sides, and there haven’t been for weeks, according to tenant and other involved sources. In fact, they say there’s been no movement in this standoff since almost a month ago when I last reported that tenant groups and progressive supervisors were preparing a set of hostile amendments to the legislation.

They would allow a one-time condo lottery bypass for the nearly 2,500 TIC owners in the pipeline in exchange to shutting down the lottery for many years and preventing any conversions of rent-controlled apartments into condos until city builds a comparable amount of new affordable housing, and then probably restricting condo conversions to smaller buildings after that to protect large rent-controlled apartment buildings from real estate speculators.

That proposed compromise, which the article barely mentions before letting Farrell say “his legislation poses no threat to rent control,” would help the poor Pacific Heights couple at the center of the article. But the real estate industry and its conservative allies don’t really care about that couple as much as they do maintaining the flow of rental units into the real estate market, which is why the negotiations have broken down.

Instead, the Chron has Sup. London Breed – who is indeed a swing vote of the issue, but not one that tenant groups are counting on given how close she is to Plan C and the landlord lobby – citing a compromise proposal that would prevent the new condo owners from selling their properties for five years to discourage real estate speculation.

Perhaps that’s something the TIC owners and real estate interests that the article relies on think is a realistic compromise, but it’s not something that has been seriously discussed with tenant groups, mediating Sup. David Chiu, or the other interests that would be needed to pass this legislation.

Sara Shortt, the token tenant activist that the Chron talked to for the article, confirmed to us that there is no real compromise deal in the works and preventing the creation of new condos from existing apartments is a bottom-line issue that unites everyone who is now opposed to this legislation.

“The Plan C/Realtor etc. won’t concede on our key issue: restriction on future conversions in exchange for the bypass. We have given as much as we can give and they have given virtually nothing in return,” Shortt, executive director of the Housing Right Committee, told us by email.

Even Sup. Scott Wiener, who co-sponsors the legislation with Farrell, told us there has been “no change from before,” when negotiations broke down. But the legislation is on the April 15 agenda for the Land Use and Economic Development Committee – for the fifth time, with most hearings canceled because of the lack of negotiating progress.

If the Realtors and Plan C (which is dominated by real estate and banking interests) stick to their intransigent position – hurting this poor Pac Heights couple in the process, which the Chron fails to note – then tenants and progressive supervisors are likely to amend the legislation and call the bluff of those who claim this issue is simply about poor TIC owners stuck with shared mortgages.

No golden years for LGBT seniors

Zelda Bronstein
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139
No golden years for LGBT seniors

According to studies, queer seniors are poorer than their straight counterparts. They’re half as likely to have health insurance, and two-thirds as likely to live alone. Not to mention facing discrimination in medical and social services, retirement homes, and nursing care facilities. So much for the “golden years.”
Here in San Francisco, LGBT seniors face another grave threat: evictions. Many of our elderly live in rent-controlled apartments that are targeted by real-estate speculators and investors out to make big bucks turning them into tenancies-in-common.

With median rents close to $3,000 a month and vacancy rates low, the odds are pretty good that an evicted senior won’t find an affordable place in the city. For a senior with AIDS, an eviction is especially threatening since our city offers the best treatment and services. Studies show that people with AIDS who lose their apartments tend to die sooner, especially if they become homeless. 

The only LGBT organization that actually addresses the housing needs of queer seniors is Open House. Its 110 units at 55 Laguna will be the first affordable queer senior housing development in the city. I hope it’s not the last. As for seniors with AIDS, there’s only one AIDS organization in the vast list of groups and services — the AIDS Housing Alliance — that actually finds housing for its clients. It was started by Brian Basinger, a gay man with AIDS, after he was evicted and his apartment was sold as a TIC.

No one knows how many LGBT seniors have been, and are being, evicted. Ditto for how many seniors with AIDS end up on the streets. We also don’t have stats on how many transgender seniors are victims of real estate greed or live in absolute terror of losing their homes. 

The Rent Board doesn’t break down its eviction stats by sexual orientation or even age. The city’s homeless count doesn’t mention if someone’s queer or transgender. There is no way to determine how many LGBT seniors live in SROs or with life-threatening conditions such as mold or lack of heat. Or how many live in homes that have been — or are being — foreclosed.

That’s why the housing subcommittee of the city’s LGBT Aging Policy Task Force is holding a hearing into the housing needs and concerns of queer seniors. Information is power.

All LGBT seniors — housed and homeless — are invited to come testify about their housing issues. Whether they live in an SRO or a home that they own, whether they sleep in a shelter or a rent-controlled apartment, whether they’re in a subsidized unit or an illegal in-law, the subcommittee wants to hear from them about their concerns and needs.

The subcommittee will ultimately be making recommendations that will be included in a task force report on what the city can do to address LGBT issues.
LGBT seniors deserve their golden years.

The hearing is Monday, April 1, 9am to 12 noon, room 416, City Hall. Written testimony accepted. For more info, call Tommi at 415-703-8634.
Tommi Avicolli Mecca is a longtime queer and tenants rights/affordable housing activist who works for Housing Rights Committee. He is a member of the LGBT Aging Policy Task Force.

Fighting for patients, beyond the bedside

Andrew Lam
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1
Fighting for patients, beyond the bedside

It’s no coincidence that the California Nurses Association has been the most active and effective union in fighting for a broad social and economic justice agenda, one that seeks to give greater value to caring and caregiving. Unlike many unions that fight mostly for their members’ interests, CNA is an extension of the nursing ethos itself.

“It’s not enough to advocate for patients at the bedside. We take it out into the streets and the community. That’s what nursing is,” Zenei Cortez, an RN of 33 years and co-president of CNA, told us. The CNA agenda has included support for increasing taxes on the wealthy to restore cuts to social services, advocacy for a single-payer healthcare system, affordable housing, and some of the best and sharpest opposition to the gubernatorial ambitions of Meg Whitman, who proposed deep cuts to state spending on education and other essential programs.

“We have a health care system that only cares about profits and nothing else,” said Chuck Idelson, who heads the communications staff that works for the nurses, “which is why you need people who value care over profit.”

And that’s the nurses, who have been growing in both numbers and political strength just as the healthcare profession has increasingly fallen under the sway of Wall Street and its values, making CNA an important political force.

“When I first started in nursing, we had a lot of time with our patients at the bedside,” Cortez told us. “But now, that human factor has disappeared.”

Nurses first began to flex their power early in Cortez’s career when “nurses were thought to be the handmaidens of doctors. But we were able to change that mentality,” one that was rooted in sexism and old domination-based models.

After the doctors, the nurses stood up to the healthcare corporations, winning statewide minimum patient care staffing ratios and contracts for themselves that gave them a stronger voice in patient care. As the Occupy Wall Street movement took root two years ago, CNA and its larger National Nurses United launched its Main Street Campaign to push people’s interests over those of the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans. “We have to have partnerships with our patients,” Cortez said. “The companies only care about the bottom line…We are not afraid to fight, particularly because we know it’s not for our own jobs, but for the good of our communities.”

The “mystery” of the homeless families

Zelda Bronstein
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86
The “mystery” of the homeless families

The Chron’s having a hard time figuring out why there are so many more homeless families looking for help.

“It’s been difficult to pin down any kind of trend,” said Elizabeth Ancker, assistant program director at the nonprofit Compass Connecting Point, the group that manages the waiting list and helped find Bailey a shelter room. “We’re really just seeing more of everybody – every demographic, in every situation.”

No shit.

Of course there are more homeless families. The cost of housing is beyong the reach of even many full-time employed people, and anyone who lacks a sizable weekly paycheck is completely out of luck. When dozens of high-paid workers are competing for every single available apartment, there’s no room at all for anyone else.

And more and more families are losing their homes to eviction as landlords seek to cash in on the demand for tenancy-in-common units.

Gavin Newsom calls it “the burden of success.” But it’s not a burden for the successful; it’s a burden for those who are struggling — and this city has never asked the winners in the economic boom to pay a fair share to help those who are being displaced and hurt.

The city’s scrambling to find public-housing and nonprofit alternatives, but there aren’t anywhere near enough places to meet the need. And there won’t be, not for a long time, not without a whole lot more money. Building affordable housing is expensive and time-consuming.

The bottom line: In a crisis like this one, the cheapest affordable housing is existing affordable housing, and the best way to prevent homelessness and keep families off the streets is to prevent evictions and TIC/condo conversions. Why the Chron can’t figure that out is anyone’s guess.

CPMC deal gets warm welcome despite some shortcomings

Sasha Cuttler
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9

Even though the Board of Supervisors unanimously approved the term sheet for the California Pacific Medical Center’s hospital deal this week, comments from the supervisors and the general public indicated there are still a few outstanding issues before the project returns to the board for final approval, probably in July.

As the Guardian recently reported, CPMC’s longstanding contract impasse with the California Nurses Association remains the biggest sticking point even for many labor-community coalition members who helped hammer out the deal that was announced last week. James Tracy of the Community Housing Partnership told the supervisors that he was almost ready to uncork the champagne and celebrate, “but I’m holding off until there is labor peace with the nurses.”

New District 5 Sup. London Breed went on extended tirade ripping into the hard-won compromise plan, voicing support for the nurses, wanting more specifics on how affordable housing money will be used, calling for more money for job training to support the plan’s local hiring standards (“I need to know how this is going to transfer into support for Western Addition residents,” and concluding that she’s generally supportive of the deal but “I will reserve final judgment.”

Calvin Welch of the Council of Community Housing Organizations echoed Breed’s concern that the $36.5 million in affordable housing funds will be paid into the Mayor’s Office of Housing’s general pot rather than be set aside for specific projects. “We are very concerned with how this multi-faceted program will unfold,” Welch said, asking that COCHO be included in decisions about how the money from CPMC gets used.

Sup. Scott Wiener decried how the new deal’s $14 million in transportation impact fees is 30 percent less than the ill-fated previous deal – the result of a significantly smaller footprint of the Cathedral Hill Hospital – saying, “Once again transit comes out on the short end.”

The change called for by more supervisors than any other is an increase in job training funds to support the guarantee that 30 percent of construction jobs and 40 percent of permanent entry level jobs go to San Franciscans. Even though job training funds were doubled to $4 million under the new agreement, some supervisors and activists say that’s not enough.

“That’s a big improvement, but it’s still not enough, given the type of training needed for low-income San Franciscans to be able to work in the hospitals,” Gordon Mar of San Franciscans For Healthcare, Housing, Jobs and Justice told the Guardian.

Yet even with all these gripes and picking of nits, which will play out as the development agreement is prepared and goes through the Planning Commission approval process starting in May, the consensus across the ideological spectrum seems to be that this is a good deal for the city that is likely to be approved if CPMC can reach a contract with CNA

And all hailed it as a vast improvement over the deal CPMC cut last year with the Mayor’s Office, offering a lesson for city officials who are now negotiating other big deals, such as the Warriors Arena proposal. As Sup. John Avalos said at the hearing, “I remember a statement form the Mayor’s Office last year that this is the best we can get. I think we always need to challenge that.”

Condo conversion compromise in the works despite Realtors’ resistance

Sasha Cuttler
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180

[UPDATED BELOW] Negotiations between tenant advocates and real estate interests (including the political advocacy group Plan C) over the controversial condo lottery bypass legislation haven’t gone well or found common ground. But sources tell the Guardian that Sup. Jane Kim and Board President David Chiu, who has been mediating the dispute, are preparing to introduce compromise amendments that have the support of the San Francisco Tenants Union and other tenant advocates if a deal can’t be worked out with real estate interests.

Details are still being hammered out with advocates and the City Attorney’s Office, so the hearing scheduled for this Monday at the Land Use and Economic Development Committee will likely be postponed until March 25. But the basic deal is to allow the roughly 2,000 tenancies-in-common now seeking to convert into condos to do so in exchange for a long moratorium on new condo conversions, possibly indexed to construction of new affordable housing for the renters who comprise nearly two-thirds of San Franciscans.

The original legislation by Sups. Mark Farrell and Scott Wiener is being strongly backed by both current TIC owners who want the ability to refinance and Plan C and other real estate interests that want to continue converting ever more rent-controlled apartments into condos, rather than abiding the city’s current limit of 200 per year, awarded through a lottery system. The SFTU has strenuously resisted opening up those flood gates, but it’s open to clearing out the backlog in exchange to shutting the gates for awhile (see my story in this week’s Guardian for more on the political dynamics surrounding this issue).

“We’re hopeful that a majority of the board will support amendments which will significantly protect tenants and which will allow a version of the Wiener-Farrell legislation to be approved,” SFTU head Ted Gullicksen told us.

Progressives on the board oppose the legislation as currently written, and the swing votes are thought to be Sups. London Breed (which Plan C supported in the last election in exchange for what it says was her promise to support more condo conversions, an assurance she denies making), Norman Yee (who was brought into the Chiu-mediated negotiations), and Malia Cohen, with just one of them needed to force changes to the legislation.

But the real estate interests – including Plan C, the Association of Realtors (whose government affairs director we left a message for and are waiting to hear back from, and we’ll update below if/when we do), San Francisco Apartment Association, and other downtown-based groups – who are pushing for more condo conversions are likely to strongly resist the amendments. They simply want more rent-controlled apartments turned into condos they can sell, period.

Their perspective is reflected in SF Apartment Magazine, put out by the San Francisco Apartment Association, which every month offers advice to real estate investors and apartment building owners on various ways to buy apartment buildings, evict tenants or increase their rents, and convert the buildings to TICs or condos.

It runs a regular column called “TIC Corner” with the latest tricks for financing acquisitions and getting rid of those pesky tenants. In the November 2012 issue, for example, attorney D. Andrew Sirkin wrote excitedly about a new Securities and Exchange Commission rule that will now allow owners to advertise the sale of apartment buildings as TIC/condo investments, which he said “will dramatically ease the regulatory burden for real estate entrepreneurs wishing to raise money for apartment acquisitions and make it much easier to find investors.”

Another feature story in the magazine, “The ABCs of OMIs,” teaches these investors all the tricks for evicting tenants from their buildings, while “Roommate Roulette” offers advice to owners of rent-controlled buildings for keeping new roommates of existing tenants off the lease so they can charge market rate rents as soon as possible.

And, of course, the magazine is filled with ads for San Francisco apartment buildings that are for sale and just waiting to be cleared of tenants and turned into amazing real estate investment opportunities. Gullicksen says it is this mentality, applied to what even Mayor Ed Lee has called the city’s “precious few rent-controlled apartments,” that has animated the opposition to the Wiener-Farrell legislation. SFTU had planned a rally for Monday called “Stop Rent Control Attack,” which has now been postponed until March 25.

UPDATE 3/11: Sup. Wiener got back to us and said, “I hope we can move to a compromise and I don’t want to prejudge that compromise.” Asked about the concept of approving TICs in the pipeline in exchange for halting on all condo conversions for some number of years, he said, “It’s definitely something to explore, a pause in the lottery, and I’m open to that. But the devil is in the details.”

SF approaches 1 million residents

Zelda Bronstein
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167
SF approaches 1 million residents

So the Association of Bay Area Governments, which plays an outsized role in local planning by making all sorts of projections, based on whatever economists and demographers use to make projections, that are supposed to guide how cities in the region make land-use decisions, says San Francisco should be prepared to see its population grow to 964,000 people by 2035.If you figure that’s only an estimate, and probably off by at least five percent, we could be talking about a million people in this city just 20 years down the road.

Now: Some of those people will be coming here for jobs that are being created. Many will be coming here as immigrants from other countries. Many more will be coming because, well, California is growing, and, as the official motto of the old Redevelopment Agency put it, “Omnes Volunt Habitare in Urbe San Francisco.” Everybody wants to live in the city of San Francisco.

ABAG says we’re going to need to build homes and create jobs for all of those people, and the Chron talks about the new private-sector development that’s going on, and the zoning plans the city has adopted to increase density, particularly on the Eastern and Southeastern side of town. (Yes, it’s crazy, but John Rahaim, the planning director, freely admits that 80 percent of all new development is going into 20 percent of the city.)

Before we decide that this is our fate and our future, though, it’s worth considering a few points.

1. San Francisco is already one of the densest urban areas in the US. Last time I check the data, this city was number three on the list, behind Manhattan and Union City, New Jersey. Clearly, urban areas are going to have to get more dense as population increases in this state; the only other option is suburban sprawl, which works for nobody. But I wonder: Should San Francisco take this much more density when Berkeley (for example) doesn’t want it and won’t take it? Should it all go on the East Side when the more suburban-style areas on the West Side don’t want it?

Is there a way to do density that looks more like North Beach — one of the densest neighborhoods in town, and a really great place to live, work, and visit — and less like the highrise forests of Soma, which are unappealing at ground level, discourage neighborhood interaction, and are lacking in human scale?

I don’t want to live in Manhattan. I don’t want Soma to turn into Manhattan. Downtown is bad enough.

2. Nowhere in the Chron article, or in the comments attributed to Rahaim, is there any mention of affordable housing. That’s crazy. The urban planning train wreck that we’re heading for is all about the balance between jobs and the cost of housing. The vast majority of the jobs in San Francisco today do not pay enough to cover the cost of renting or buying a market-rate home. That’s not going to change radically; tourism and government are, and will be, the city’s major industries, even as tech, which pays better, increases.
If the housing that gets built is not in synch with the needs of the workforce, then the workers will be forced to live futher and further away, which leads to exactly the kind of sprawl and transportation problems that this “infill” and increased density is supposed to prevent.In other words: Affordable housing for the workforce prevents sprawl. Market-rate housing for people who live here and commute to work on the Peninsula is not environmentally sound.

3. Density — both in housing and in commercial development — has huge impacts on existing populations, particularly low-income communities. That’s not part of the planning discussion at all, and it really ought to be the starting point.

I know my trolls — I know you well — and I know you’re all going to say that growth and change is inevitable. Sure. But I think of a city first and foremost as a community, as a place where a diverse group of people live. Protecting that is just as important as giving developers and businesses a chance to make money.

Oh, and Rahaim’s comment —  “This (growth) is going to happen whether we plan for it or not” — is wrong. If we don’t build office space and room for new jobs, if we don’t build housing, the growth isn’t going to happen. San Francisco gets to decide what happens on land in San Francisco. Not saying we want to stop (all) growth, but Rahaim is a planner, and he should know: Growth happens when you encourage it and allow it. Growth doesn’t happen in places where you don’t allow it.

There is no growth in Bolinas, because the people who live there don’t want it. There’s less growth in Berkeley, because the people who live there want less. Again: Not the model I want to use. I don’t want to live in Bolinas any more than I want to live in Manhattan. But San Francisco does control our own fate, and we should never forget that.

 

Noise Pop 2013: YACHT, Shock, and Future Twin at Slim’s

Tony Robles
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0

When I went to see YACHT, a couple years ago during the Treasure Island Music Festival, it was playing outdoors in the afternoon, and it seemed like the wrong time and place. Last year at the Fox, the conceptual electropop band seemed stifled by the combination of the large venue and sparse crowd, and also mired by the same lackluster audio conditions that made headliner Hot Chip sound like it was playing underwater. But Saturday at Slim’s, on my last night of Noise Pop, it seemed just…

Fuck, I’ve wandered into the Goldilocks cliché.

Anyway, YACHT likes to keep it personal. Personable? The duo of Jona Bechtolt and Claire L. Evans (bolstered by other band members on tour) affect a borderline cultish air — utopian ideals were all over its last album Shangri-La and lead track, um, “Utopia” — that plays better when the audience is kept close, in a intimate venue.

“Ahhh, your hair is so long!” a woman in the sold out crowd screamed, when singer Evans first appeared on stage during the sound check, dark roots showing under what was previously close cropped and bleached blonde. It struck me as the kind of thing you say to a close friend you haven’t seen in a while. (“She’s much better looking than the last time I saw her,” someone else near me judged later in the show.)

This friendly rapport makes a lot of sense, given how much effort the group makes towards fostering it. Hopping off stage and tangling the crowd up in a mic cord has basically become a rock party trick at this point (probably because it’s an almost foolproof way to charm the crowd). Evans employed it as a starter, but went on to continually flatter fans and solicit questions, indulging in requests for hugs and spare beers. Throughout this course of events, singer, multi-instrumentalist, and YACHT founder Bechtolt competed for the larger cult of personality with a hopped-up glee.

Somewhat listless at the Fox performance, YACHT was nothing but efficient on Saturday. Maybe it was limited on time to begin with, but the set clicked by, highlighted by high-energy renditions of “I Walked Along” and “Utopia” — better than any I’ve heard.

An obvious encore followed (right after Bechtolt assured someone — probably the guy up front waving a sticker sheet and Sharpie since the sound check —that he’d sign anything five minutes after the show was over) with “Ring the Bell,” a super snappy version of shout-along “Psychic City,” and “Second Summer.” It was all done with an intentionality that could be either super endearing to a fan or off-putting viewed as an outsider, but I’m increasingly finding myself group with the former.

Openers

Shock: “We only have two minutes left and our songs are like seven minutes,” singer and bassist Terri Loewenthal of Shock said, after playing three tracks of slinky synth funk with slow vocals and lots of glissando. Five or so minutes later, the ground finished its set and she added, “So that was the short version.” Which was pretty satisfying.

Future Twin: Future Twin was precociously San Francisco, noting that one song was about trying to find affordable housing and cracking dead on delivery jokes about the nudity ban only applying out on the streets. But with dynamic singer and guitarist Jean Yaste  — whose voice recalls equally parts Corin Tucker and Exene Cervenka — and drummer Antonio Roman-Alcala, this band can get away with saying whatever it wants during mic breaks. Its upcoming benefit for the Roxie at the Verdi Club with Thee Oh Sees and Sonny and the Sunsets has it in good company.

Tussle: It’s been three years since I last saw Tussle at Milk Bar, and given the recordings the group released since then I had high expectations to see it much improved. But trouble with setting up a ton of equipment and subsequent delays really hobbled its start, and the group never seemed to quite overcome it. Unintentional tempo shifts seemed common, the double drummers never quite seemed to sync, and the generally structureless songs seemed to only end when every member came to the sudden realization that someone else was cuing them to wrap it up.

“Unlikely trio” of supervisors saves CPMC hospital deal

Sasha Cuttler
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37

An ideologically diverse trio of supervisors, a community-minded mediator, and a deliberate negotiations process (one that that involved local stakeholders and verified corporate claims) has managed to do what the Mayor’s Office couldn’t: reach an agreement that seems to be a good deal for the city and has broad political support for California Pacific Medical Center to build two new full-service hospitals in town.

It differs from the disastrous deal announced by Mayor Ed Lee last year in key ways. St. Luke’s Hospital – a staple of care for low-income San Franciscans that must to rebuilt to meet new state earthquake safety standards – will be about 50 percent larger than previously proposed, while the new luxury hospital that CPMC has been trying to build on Cathedral Hill will be about 50 percent smaller.

That simple flip alleviated much of the Cathedral Hill project’s impact on traffic and affordable housing – which CPMC will still pay $14 million and $36.5 million respectively to mitigate, more than in the previous agreement and part of a roughly $80 million payment to the city – and overcame community concerns about the company’s commitment to St. Luke’s.

The new deal also has stronger local hiring requirements and more stringent guarantees that CPMC will serve MediCal patients and provide more charity care to the poor, regardless of the company’s financial situation, while maintaining contributions to community-based organizations at the same level as under the previous agreement.

In many ways, the agreement repudiates the deal cut last year by Mayor Ed Lee, which CPMC refused to significantly modify or even support with verifiable financial claims even as it fell apart in spectacular fashion under scrutiny last year by the Board of Supervisors, particularly during hearings at the Land Use Committee chaired by Sup. Eric Mar.

That flawed deal was rushed to completion just as the Saleforce headquarters expansion that had been trumpeted by Lee and the America’s Cup real estate deal both fell apart, which sources tell the Guardian put pressure on Lee to quickly deliver something to the business community and building trades (read tomorrow’s Guardian for more on Lee’s approach to tough negotiations and its implications).

But today’s press conference to announce the new deal at St. Luke’s was a forward-looking celebration of what was universally lauded as a big victory for the community. And most of the credit seems to go to mediator Lou Giraudo, who owns Boudin Bakery, and Sups. David Campos, David Chiu, and Mark Farrell, who all stepped up late last summer to salvage the project.

“There are two stories: the deal itself and the process,” Giraudo told the crowd. He said that he had some trepidation going in and that all he knew of the supervisors was what he read in the newspapers, and that the three represented the left (Campos), right (Farrell), and center (Chiu). Giraudo said they were the keys to making this deal happen.

“I have never been so impressed by politicians to come together as one,” Giraudo said, praising the trio for working hard, bringing in outside expertise to verify CPMC’s financial claims, and working with their constituencies. “We depoliticized together and then we built trust.”

Farrell also praised both the deal – “It ensures we have access to quality health care for years to come in San Francisco.” – and the process, in which the three supervisors worked well together. “I think about the future of the Board of Supervisors and us working together as colleagues,” he said. “None of us have spent more time on anything than we have CPMC.”

Campos echoed the point. “I really cannot be more proud of the work that we as the Board of Supervisors did here,” Campos said, noting how they had all committed to work together for the good of the city, demonstrating “how we, as the Board of Supervisors, can work on even the most difficult issues and resolve them.”

He also praised his constituents in the community coalition of labor, housing, and social justice advocates – including San Franciscans for Healthcare, Housing, Jobs, and Justice – who had pushed for a better deal for San Francisco. “This is a victory for them at the end of the day,” Campos said, singling out their consultant Paul Kumar for helping shape a deal that ensures that, “St. Luke’s plays a large role in the CPMC system.”

Kumar, a consultant with the National Union of Healthcare Workers who wasn’t at the event, later told the Guardian, “This is a victory for democratic planning.” He noted that CPMC and its parent company, Sutter Health, are notoriously hard-nosed negotiators and that he’s hoping this agreement represents a turning point in their relationship with the community and their employees.

“The question is if we can parlay this into a better and more responsible relationship between Sutter and the city,” Kumar said.

Chiu – who has been at the center of several difficult city negotiations in recent years, and who helped lead the board’s charge against CPMC last year – told the conference, “When we started this process, I was not hugely optimistic we would get here,” calling the supervisors “an unlikely trio.” But he praised all parties involved for working to get a deal with strong local hiring and charity care provisions.

“This is a comprehensive project,” Chiu said.

When Lee spoke, he praised the deal and the crucial role played by the three supervisors. “This project would not have gotten done without their direct involvement,” said Lee, who didn’t attend any of the dozens of negotiating sessions, although Ken Rich from the Mayor’s Office was involved. Yet the unusually grim-faced mayor also seemed to bring up the only doubts expressed about the deal, saying “The job is never done, this is an announcement about where we are today” and vaguely warning that, “It’s sensitive, people do have trepidation about what this will mean to them going forward.”

Afterward, Lee took reporters’ questions while walking steadily to his car, without pausing to get into what he was alluded to or why this deal seems so much better than the one he cut, except to say that the “health care landscape has changed.” Later, a mayoral staffer who would only speak on background, said one key to this deal was that CPMC had decided that demand for hospital beds would drop in the future and that they needed fewer in San Francisco.

CPMC CEO Dr. Warren Browner, who had some tough clashes with supervisors last year, didn’t go into the reasons behind the sweetened deal during his presentation (except to contest Giraudo’s comment that he had fought through “deal fatigue and was weary at times” by saying that he actually had a lingering case of “walking pneumonia” that he thanked CPMC’s medical staff for helping to cure.).

After comparing the negotiations to the legend of Sisyphus repeatedly pushing a boulder uphill, Browner said, “We are looking forward to going through the process and putting shovels in the ground, hopefully in 2013.”

 

Terms of the deal, which were formally introduced at today’s Board of Supervisors meeting, include:

  • Permits for a 120-bed St. Luke’s Hospital, 274-bed Cathedral Hill Hospital (or an additional 30 beds if St. Luke’s operates at 75 percent capacity), medical office buildings at both hospitals, a parking garage with up to 990 spaces (limited to CPMC staff and patients only) on Cathedral Hill, and a new Neurosciences Institute at Davies Medical Center.

  • St. Luke’s Hospital will have a number of specified services – including acute care, senior and community health care, labor and delivery, intensive care, cancer treatment, mental health services, and outpatient care – to ensure it remains a full-service hospital.

  • CPMC caring for 30,000 charity care and 5,400 Medi-Cal managed care patients per year, limits on healthcare cost increases to city employees, and CPMC endowing a new $9 million Healthcare Innovation Fund to increase capacity at local clinics.

  • CPMC contributing $36.5 million to the city’s affordable housing fund and paying $4.1 million to replace the homes it displaces on Cathedral Hill.

  • At least 30 percent of construction job and 40 percent of the permanent entry-level positions in the new facilities will be San Franciscans, and CPMC will contribute $4 million to job training.

  • To offset transportation impacts at Cathedral Hill, CPMC will give $14 million to the SFMTA and “institute a robust transportation demand management program,” as well as spending $13 million on pedestrian safety and streetscape improvements at all its San Francisco facilities.

 

 

Western SoMa Plan changed to lessen development impacts to nightlife and Muni

Sasha Cuttler
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Western SoMa Plan changed to lessen development impacts to nightlife and Muni

The Western SoMa Community Plan had its first hearing before the Board of Supervisors Land Use and Economic Development Committee today, with dozens of speakers praising the eight-year citizen-based planning effort that developed it but with much of the testimony criticizing the plan’s emphasis on facilitating housing development to the exclusion of other goals.

As we’ve reported, the nightlife community has in recent months been pushing for changes to the plan that would better protect nightclubs from complaints and pressure from nearby residents, particularly along 11th Street. Area Sup. Jane Kim has supported that effort and those concerns were echoed by Sup. Scott Wiener, the committee chair and a strong nightlife advocate.

“I have had significant concerns about this plan…and I’m hoping we can address them over the course of this hearing,” Wiener said.

Wiener also opened another front of attack on the plan by noting that it doesn’t adequately pay for the impact that thousands of new housing units would have on Muni and other aspects of the transportation system. In particular, he criticized a policy in the plan that would let 13 large properties get increased density in exchange for higher affordable housing fees that would be offset by lower transit and other impact fees paid to the city.

“What are we doing to make sure our transportation system keeps pace?” Wiener asked of Planning Department staff, later asking again, “Where would we get the money to improve transit for these increased residents?” Wiener didn’t get back any answers that seemed to satisfy him, so he asked for a more detailed report when the plan returns next week for a second hearing. That concern was echoed by the third committee member, Board President David Chiu, who said, “Building housing without money for transit will lead to long-term problems.”

The concern seemed to revive a losing fight that Wiener led in December over expanding who pays the city’s Transit Impact Development Fee, which pitted transportation advocates against affordable housing activists. Fernando Marti of the Council of Community Housing Organizing rued the revival of that conflict. “We’ve been here before, pitting [transportation against affordable housing needs] as if it were a zero sum game,” Marti told the committee, noting the importance of policies to balance out market rate housing and calling it a “plan for stability in a neighborhood facing large-scale gentrification.”

Marti’s COCHO colleague Peter Cohen, who was closely involved with the plan’s creation, also urged the committee not to tweak the housing policies or the revenues it creates for affordable housing. “This is a major upzoning,” Cohen said. “In 20 years, perhaps all the market rate stock [of housing in the plan area] will be gentrified.”

But the issue raised most often during more than two hours of public testimony involved nightlife and the need to strike a better balance between housing development and entertainment, much of the input stirred up by the California Music and Culture Association, a industry-backed trade group that formed largely in response to crackdowns on clubs in SoMa.

“It’s often said San Francisco can plan more for fun, and this is a great opportunity to do that,” said Guy Carson, a CMAC founder who owns Cafe du Nord. Longtime nightlife advocate Terrence Alan took part in the Western SoMa Task Force for four years before resigning in frustration, and he told the committee, “We are bringing up issues we felt marginalized in bringing up earlier.”

But several people involved with the task force, as well as speakers representing development interests, urged supervisors to pass the place without significant modifications. “There are dozens or hundreds of compromises in this plan,” Cohen said, urging supervisors not to upset that careful balance.

Task Force Chair Jim Meko – whose leadership was widely praised in the testimony – detailed the extensive outreach and detailed work that went into the plan, and offered a simple plea to the committee: “Please pass this plan so we can get on with our lives.”

The committee unanimously voted to support the change made to the plan by the Planning Commission to ban new residential development on the raucous 300-block of 11th Street, but to reverse the commission’s decision to grandfather in one final 24-home residential project on that block, in the so-called “purple building” at 340 11th Street. A number of other small changes to the plan were also unanimously approved.

But Kim objected to Wiener’s motion to eliminate the plan provision that would reduce the transit and open space fees and raise the affordable housing fees that developers of those 13 large parcels would pay. “I don’t think it’s good policy to reduce transit impact fees when we’re increasing population,” Wiener said.

“This has gone through an extensive community process,” Kim countered, adding that, “I hate that we’re always having this discussion about transit versus affordable housing.”

But Chiu sided with Wiener and the amendment was approved on a 2-1 vote with Kim in dissent. Yet Chiu held open the possibility of changing his mind next week when the plan returns to committee for a final vote – the delay prompted by the other revisions in the plan – when Planning staff will provide more information on the fee structure and its impacts.

If the committee gives final approval to the plan next Monday, it could be before the full board for approval the next day.

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