by Randy Shaw on September 2, 2025 (BeyondChron.org)
Signs by opponents of Lurie’s Plan
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie has excelled at avoiding major political fights. But that may not be possible for his Family Zoning Plan. Opposition is building across political lines. The battle harkens back to the “Downtown vs Neighborhoods” framework that shaped San Francisco politics for decades.
Do development opponents still have the political base that propelled Art Agnos to victory in the 1987 mayor’s race? Or does Lurie’s election, following four prior pro-development mayors, signal that the times in San Francisco have changed?
Let’s break down what’s happening.
What Divides San Francisco
Since San Francisco began gentrifying in the late 1970’s, development issues have divided city politics. In the 1970’s and 80’s the fight was over downtown development. In the 90’s it was over the conversion of vacant industrial spaces to live-work lofts. The dot-com boom of the late 90’s framed the development fight around tech; that continued through Mayor Ed Lee’s tenure.
London Breed ran for mayor in 2018 as a pro-development moderate. Yet Breed’s most destructive policies and the ones most complained about by moderates and conservatives—the SIP Hotels, the Linkage Center, her backing Harm Reduction policies that attracted drug tourists—were wrongly blamed on progressives.
Despite Breed’s history as a progressive-bashing moderate, Daniel Lurie’s election still gets wrongly framed as a victory over a progressive City Hall. This despite Breed also holding a moderate Board majority.
Development concerns were not an issue in the 2024 mayor’s race. The historic cleavage that divided San Francisco was off the table.
Until now.
The New Development Fight
The mayor’s Family Zoning Plan has returned development politics to center stage. The Plan increases heights and density—a process known as upzoning– to support more housing, particularly near public transit. What’s drives opponents is that the Plan covers neighborhoods that have avoided upzoning for decades.
The mayor and housing advocates see the Plan as essential for attracting a new generation of working and middle-class residents. People long priced-out of San Francisco. They also argue that San Francisco cannot meet its state-mandated housing construction requirements without building more units in various neighborhoods.
Opponents see the situation very differently. You can read their critique of Lurie’s plan on the website of Neighborhoods United SF —which shows photos of what they see as the impact of the upzoning on several neighborhoods—or the website of Alliance for Affordable Neighborhoods.
A recent SF Examiner op-ed states :
“This isn’t about building new homes for cops, teachers, nurses, or city workers. It’s about opening up real estate in west-side neighborhoods, many of them built by and for middle-class San Franciscans, to speculative redevelopment. The proposed zoning incentivizes property owners and developers to raze existing buildings and perfectly functional homes in search of the greater profits larger developments might hold….This isn’t a theoretical risk — it’s already happened in the Mission and SoMa. Now, it’s coming for Parkside, West Portal, Ingleside and the Outer Sunset.
Mayor Lurie’s plan …undermines the very communities that have kept this city functioning through decades of instability. These are neighborhoods where families have put down roots, bought homes, invested in public schools and built community infrastructure. They deserve thoughtful planning, not a one-size-fits-all upzoning decree.”
The Alliance is asking small businesses to post signs in their windows. They say, “Protect Small Businesses from Extreme Upzoning. Skyrocketing Rents, Displaced Shops, Vacant Storefronts.” “There’s a Better Way. Support Affordable Neighborhoods.”
Opponents claim that it’s not upzoning they oppose but rather Lurie’s “Extreme Upzoning” and “developer-led zoning.” They demand “a real community plan.” They also point to the 70,000 units that are already entitled, arguing that if they got built no upzoning is needed to meet state requirements.
This misleading claim citing entitled units has become the most repeated argument against city efforts to encourage taller and denser buildings. Here’s the problem.
The fact that someone got the right to build years ago is irrelevant to whether that project is likely to be built today. Or next year. Or in five years. We have individual projects comprising thousands of units on the entitled list (e.g. Parkmerced) that were entitled many years prior to COVID. If these projects weren’t built before 2020, don’t count on them being constructed in time to meet the city’s state housing requirements.
Mayor Lurie certainly can’t count on their construction. If he could, my sense is he would be happy not to get in a major fight with neighborhoods that backed him last November.
Further, if the push for a “community plan” sounds familiar, it’s a common request by opponents of zoning reforms. I describe in Generation Priced Out how a community planning process for the Eastern Neighborhoods Plan blocked new housing in the area for seven years (2001-8)! Reliance on “community plans” is a major reason why many cities have a housing shortage.
The Politics of the Fight
Opponents of Lurie’s family zoning plan could potentially get Supervisors Chan, Fielder, Walton and Chen. It’s hard to find six votes.
But that wouldn’t stop opponents from going to the ballot in June or November 2026. Connecting an Affordable Neighborhoods ballot measure to supervisor races in November 2026 makes a lot of political sense. After all, the effort to recall Supervisor Engardio showed a candidate’s beliefs that are popular citywide may not be favored in their district.
There could be an Affordable Neighborhoods slate of candidates that could ride an anti-development district supervisor wave. Districts 4, 8 and 10 seem like obvious targets, along potentially with District 2. D6 has already seen large housing developments. I can’t see a candidate threatening Supervisor Matt Dorsey on that issue.
Lurie’s Base
Should a measure challenging the Family Zoning Plan go to the ballot, Lurie will have to lead the opposition. That means battling a lot of Westside homeowners who he would like to remain on good terms.
Some interpret fierce Chinese-American opposition to Prop K, the park measure that led to the recall election of Supervisor Engardio, as reflecting an anti-development, anti-change stance. I’m not sure about that.
In 2017 Sunset District Supervisor Katy Tang led the citywide fight for Home-SF, which created an affordable housing density bonus program. I describe in Generation Priced Out how Tang faced a “tsunami of anger” primarily among older white homeowners but persisted and prevailed. Tang easily would have won re-election had she not decided to leave politics.
Westside Chinese-American voters went big for Mayors Brown, Lee and Breed in 2018, and Lurie did well with this constituency in 2024. Engardio was definitely more pro-development than Gordan Mar in the 2022 D4 supervisor’s race.
If the mayor plays this right, what will be a divisive fight about development citywide may not divide Lurie’s constituency.
Does the Zoning Plan Really Matter?
Opponents see this as a fight for the soul of San Francisco. With AI raising the specter of another tech boom, they see their campaign as essential to save the city’s “working-class.” But the “working-class” neighborhoods they seek to protect have long priced out the new working-class.
The fact that existing homeowners bought their houses on working-class salaries says nothing about the present—or future. Only by building more housing in these former working-class neighborhoods can ownership opportunities be created for the non-wealthy.
For all the doom and gloom predicted by opponents, the Family Zoning Plan is unlikely to radically increase height and density in neighborhoods. And should SB 79 pass—opposition to which mimics opposition to Lurie’s Family Zoning Plan– the local measure becomes even less relevant.
State law already allows demolitions of rent-controlled housing as of right. We haven’t seen many such demolitions in San Francisco because they rarely make economic sense.
State law sought to deter such demolitions by mandating steep relocation costs and giving tenants the right to return to the new housing at their former rent. That latter provision makes funding such projects economically infeasible. San Francisco builders have enough trouble getting financing for entitled projects on vacant land. They don’t want to ask lenders to support projects whose viability depends on existing tenants not returning post-construction.
Builders I talk to aren’t interested in building five-story buildings in the Westside. Nor do they want to get into fights with tenant groups over evicting longterm residents and demolishing rent controlled housing. They’d rather build fifty plus units in the parts of the city that already allow such projects.
Ultimately, these development battles are really about people’s vision for San Francisco’s future. If stopping market rate housing were effective in keeping neighborhoods affordable, San Francisco would be an affordability oasis. But our city’s history shows that the driving force behind gentrification is not building housing.
San Francisco voters have increasingly understood that the path to greater affordability requires increasing, heights, density and encouraging housing construction. We’ll see how this plays out in the Family Zoning battle.
Randy Shaw
<I>Randy Shaw is the Editor of Beyond Chron and the Director of San Francisco’s Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which publishes Beyond Chron. Shaw’s new book is the revised and updated, The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco. His prior books include Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America. The Activist’s Handbook: Winning Social Change in the 21st Century, and Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century. </I>
