The plan to upzone San Francisco’s western and northern neighborhoods passed the Board of Supervisors 7-4 on Tuesday after a long, contentious process.
Voting in the affirmative were supervisors Stephen Sherrill, Danny Sauter, Alan Wong, Bilal Mahmood, Matt Dorsey, Myrna Melgar and Raphael Mandelman. Dissenting votes came from Connie Chan, Jackie Fielder, Shamann Walton and Chyanne Chen.
Developers can now build up to six or eight stories on most streets with businesses or public transportation, as long as the new building has at least one more unit than whatever was there before. Before the upzoning, developers were limited to four stories in most of the rezoned areas.
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A few larger streets, including Geary Boulevard, Van Ness Avenue, and Market Street will allow buildings up to 65 stories.
It is the first upzoning on the Westside since the area was downzoned in 1978. Since then, most of San Francisco’s new development has been concentrated in the city’s eastern neighborhoods, like the Mission, Potrero Hill, SoMa and Mission Bay, which were rezoned in 2009.
San Francisco’s downtown and nearby areas like Rincon Hill were also rezoned beginning in 1985, but contained fairly tall buildings to begin with.
In addition to building taller, developers can also now build as many units as they want per property, so long as they don’t exceed height and space restrictions.
Not all buildings in the city’s northern and western neighborhoods will be covered by the new zoning. Any rent-controlled buildings with three or more units were removed from the plan earlier by an amendment written by Supervisor Myrna Melgar.
Supervisor Rafael Mandelman also removed buildings that had achieved historical landmark status.
Proponents of the plan have argued that rezoning the city’s western and northern neighborhoods will help address rising housing prices in San Francisco, which have jumped dramatically since the 1980s.
“A vote against the family zoning plan is a vote for the status quo, and it is a privilege to be okay with the status quo,” Sauter said.
The status quo, Mahmood added, “forces many of the very people who make this city work … to commute from dozens or hundreds of miles away in substandard housing. We can’t keep doing the same thing and expect different results.”
“Our Family Zoning plan will allow us to build more homes so that kids growing up here will one day be able to raise their own families in San Francisco,” Mayor Daniel Lurie wrote in a statement. “This city’s affordability crisis has left too many young people, workers, and seniors unsure if they’ll be able to stay in the place they love.”
But dissenting supervisors argued that taller height limits would incentivize developers to displace tenants and small businesses, changing the character of San Francisco’s neighborhoods.
“Developing housing that people can afford without displacing residents and small businesses” is possible, Chen said. “But the plan that is before us does not achieve that.”
“Let’s build, and also let’s do no harm to existing San Franciscans,” she added.
The city didn’t decide to rezone on its own accord; the state mandated this move by strengthening enforcement of California’s housing element.
Every eight years, the state of California assigns local jurisdictions a certain number of housing units they need to build, also known as the Regional Housing Needs Allocation. This cycle, San Francisco’s assignment increased from 28,000 units to 82,000 units, due to a law written by state Sen. Scott Wiener.
But under existing zoning, San Francisco was only expected to build 58,000 units. With a 15 percent buffer, that was 36,000 fewer units than the state demanded.
To remedy the situation, the state required San Francisco to produce capacity for those additional 36,000 units, or risk ceding control over approval of new housing projects to the state, and potentially losing millions in state funding for housing and transportation.
The imperative was used to justify limiting the changes that supervisors could make to amend the plan.
Nevertheless, at Tuesday’s board meeting, Chan made a Hail Mary attempt to amend the plan to exclude all rent-control-eligible buildings, not just ones with three or more units.
“I am disappointed that we are not choosing a path to figure out a way to either negotiate or, frankly, even fight some of these mandates,” Chan said.
Ultimately it was voted down, with dissenting supervisors arguing that the place for amendments was during the four earlier committee hearings preceding today’s vote. At this late stage, changes could not be made to offset the capacity taken away by the amendment.
“I believe any attempts to make amendments at this point are more political rather than serious in nature,” Sauter said. Chan is currently running for Congress against Sen. Scott Wiener.
Even with the new upzoning plan, the number of units built will likely fall far short of the goal. A report by the city’s chief economist, Ted Egan, found that the amount of additional market-rate housing built under upzoning would be between 8,500 and 14,600 units over 20 years.
Market-rate housing development is also affected by economic factors including taxes, rents, and interest rates, and those factors are not currently favorable for housing development.
The rezoning, Supervisor Melgar said, will not, on its own, “solve our housing crisis or our affordability crisis.”
“But it is a necessary step,” she said.
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Io Yeh Gilman
REPORTER. Io is a staff reporter covering city hall as a part of Report for America, which supports journalists in local newsrooms. She was born and raised in San Francisco and previously reported on the city while working for her high school newspaper, The Lowell. Io studied the history of science at Harvard and wrote for The Harvard Crimson.More by Io Yeh Gilman
