by Randy Shaw on October 24, 2022 (BeyondChron.org)
The Strategy Behind “Process”
What do these recent San Francisco news stories have in common?
* it takes 7 years for SFMTA to close 1200 parking spots at bus stops by painting the spaces red;
*it takes 255 days for the city to replace a departed employee;
*it takes 500 hours to add a traffic bulbout
Add San Francisco’s notoriously lengthy housing approval process and you have a city that routinely and regularly uses “process” to empower people to stop change. One reason the $1.7 million Noe Valley toilet costs so much is that the process went through seven city departments.
Remember when San Francisco was “The City That Knows How”? Now its “The city That’s Lost Its Way.”
Yet it’s hard to believe that the city will expedite change.
After all, all the horror stories about neighbors stopping each other from remodeling their kitchens has not forced a change in the permit appeal process. Discretionary review, which gives San Francisco homeowners the most power of any city over building projects across the city, remains strong. When activists qualified a ballot measure to eliminate some of the hurdles for housing approvals (Prop D) a majority of Supervisors qualified a rival measure protecting these appeal grounds for affordable projects.
San Francisco has yet to have an election that reduced the power of anyone in the city to stall housing developments. Perhaps Prop D will be the first.
San Francisco wants to combat climate change yet it took a pitched battle for over two decades to remove cars from a key stretch of Golden Gate Park. And now that opening can be reversed by voters (Be sure to Vote No on I, Yes on J).
Compared to European cities San Francisco is a complete failure when it comes to building protected bike lanes. I recall riding to work on Valencia in the 1980’s and hearing talk about a protected bike lane. Nearly forty years later the city is still only proposing soft-hit posts, which don’t protect riders.
Why aren’t there protected bike lanes throughout the city? Because people fear change and use lengthy processes to prevent it. There is powerful political support for even nonsensical appeal rights, overwhelmingly exercised by homeowners to stop others from living in their neighborhood.
A City That Resists Change
San Francisco is filled with people committed to social change. But not change that involves building apartments in or near their single-family neighborhoods. Or that removes parking, or in any way limits their ability to appeal anything proposed to be built in the city.
San Francisco prioritizes preventing neighborhoods from changing. Stopping the “wrong” progress defines “progressive” San Francisco. Many San Franciscans see the “ideal” San Francisco as it looked in the mid-1960s.
That’s why tech’s late 1990’s emergence (and post 2011- expansion) caused such a huge social upheaval. Tech was new. It wasn’t around when most grew up or moved to San Francisco, and hence was particularly distrusted.
Tech was fairly criticized for promoting inequality and disproportionately benefiting younger males. But every new economic engine arriving in San Francisco becomes subject to progressive attack. The fiercest critics often come from organizations whose city funding expands due to the new economic engines creating a robust economy.
Now the longtime targets of the city’s left—downtown office building owners and tech—are prioritizing remote rather than on-site work. Some no doubt feel that San Francisco progressives won’t have them to kick around any more—nor will the city have the mammoth revenue these entities produced.
San Franciscans are unhappy with the city’s direction. But are voters willing to give up the use of “process” in order to stop progress? Let’s see if Prop D’s passage signals the start of a public shift.
Randy Shaw
Randy Shaw is the Editor of Beyond Chron and the Director of San Francisco’s Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which publishes Beyond Chron. Shaw’s latest book is Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America. He is the author of four prior books on activism, including 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. He is also the author of The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco
