San Francisco supervisors opposing bill to increase housing density

https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/supes-sound-off-against-bill-increasing-housing-density-near-transit-hubs/

by Reedx • 7 years ago

76 52 7 years ago

mc324• 7 years ago

Freaking supes. They treat SF like their little political science experiment and nothing of note ever gets done. Just let them build.

Do something about the car break-ins and package thefts. You know, govern the damn city.

tehlike4• 7 years ago

It's interesting to have all these startups improving efficiency and all, but then have a government doing exact opposite.

jgalt2122• 7 years ago

because the supervisors are just acting in the short term best interest of property owners. limit supply and prices will go up. they're all on the take.

noobermin• 7 years ago

No love for Nimbyish supervisors but "startups improving efficiency" isn't a counterweight nor a good example to contrast with.

xiphias2• 7 years ago

,,Just let them build.''

Would you also advise a company to destroy its profit center?

mc324• 7 years ago

Thing is they’re like that guy or gal who is waiting for the “perfect one”. That one is never gonna come. It’s been like this decades. Get something!

api• 7 years ago

You are asking a cartel to vote to increase supply and decrease prices. That's not what cartels do.

OceanSunfish• 7 years ago

The term "cartel" is interesting here, if the power structure is indeed the voting population of San Francisco being predominantly homeowners, then as those homeowners are the suppliers of the housing market, it is a cartel in form.

partiallypro• 7 years ago

I know this will never happen, and I'm sure is not a popular opinion, but San Francisco needs a Bloomberg/Giuliani (pre-nutcase) style Republican to come in and clean house. Sometimes that is needed, and sometimes the opposite is needed; otherwise you get run away situations like deep red and deep blue areas that progress backwards.

mc324• 7 years ago

Hope springs eternal but we’d have to change the city charter so we’d have city-wide elections.

It doesn’t matter what stripe, but yeah we need someone with determination to come in and clean house like after the Koch era.

People are so fed up neighbors in the west part of the city are wondering out loud if it’s possible to secede from the city while remaining in the county cuz they just want a government which takes care of the hoi polloi. The police don’t even want to bother with robberies unless it involved a weapon because the DA won’t take the cases and the perps are instead given citations...

paulsutter• 7 years ago

Really the problem is San Francisco voters. How many tech people actually vote?

pmoriarty• 7 years ago

...and how many are home owners or landlords?

dannyr• 7 years ago

Tech population is mixed of US citizens and immigrant workers. But yeah, I would say that even American tech workers do not reliably vote.

You just accept the situation and pay since you make good salary. If you can't afford it, move somewhere else.

boulos4• 7 years ago

Sigh, this kind of thinking is some sort of variant of broken-window syndrome:

But Board President Norman Yee said San Francisco should be exempted altogether from Wiener’s proposal.
He said that SB 50 “does not take into account the nuances and intended impacts that comes up upzoning entire neighborhoods” and he noted that there are large developments planned in the district he represents.
"We’re actually building our share of housing,” Yee said. “Maybe we could better. But we certainly are probably doing better than most places in California. We have motivated communities that want to plan. We should be exempt from SB 50.”

It's definitely true that San Francisco is building more housing than the other counties in the Bay Area, and that they should also do better. But that isn't a license to ignore the need for more housing directly in San Francisco. If anything, it's almost a non sequitor to the basic challenge facing any major city: how do you have enough housing within a reasonable commute of the jobs in your city?

Just earlier today [1] the mayor decried the lack of housing in the city that our public transit employees can afford. Over 250k people were already commuting in back in 2013 [2]. For a city of under 1M people where job growth has outstripped housing growth, that seems like a fairly high "deficit".

[1] https://medium.com/@LondonBreed/fixing-muni-ecb536aea50e

[2] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2013/cb13-r22...

mc324• 7 years ago

The supes are a ridiculous hypocritical bunch.

They hem and haw about building in the city, but they’re okay with bullying a neighboring community[1] in a different county into building (they threatened Brisbane, down the road, an independent jurisdiction in another county!!)

[1]https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/10/04/san-francisco-supervi...

boulos4• 7 years ago

A friend points out that Yee is Supervisor for District 7 [1], which is essentially entirely zoned as 40-X [2] (40 foot height limit) and mostly RH-1 and RH-2 [3] (single-family homes and two-unit residential respectively).

As the N-Judah line runs through it, the SB 50 bill would immediately cause entire swaths of his District to be upzoned fairly dramatically.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Yee

[2] https://sfplanning.org/sites/default/files/resources/2018-08...

[3] https://sfplanning.org/sites/default/files/resources/2019-02...

Retric• 7 years ago

The problem is not housing it’s the ratio of commercial to residential development. Ban new commercial development and you kill job growth and thus the ever growing demand for new housing. That’s not going to fly, but clearly it’s all about the ratio not the absolute numbers.

PS: Well not kill, companies would end up packing more people into the same space up to a point.

boulos4• 7 years ago

Right, it’s all about the ratio. A group of us pointed this out to the planning commission in relation to the Central Soma Plan. It called for something like 32k new jobs and only 8k housing units (and IIRC, nothing about transit other than claiming through magic that existing muni, Bart and Caltrain service would suffice).

I’ve since moved out of Soma, as the commissioners and supervisors made it clear that while they understood the problem, they also didn’t have anywhere else to plop down tens of thousands of jobs.

pcwalton2• 7 years ago

To understand this, you need to realize that San Francisco politics is a perpetual no-holds-barred fight between two factions within the local Democratic Party: the "Moderates" and the "Progressives" (although the Progs also contain some members of other parties, like the Greens and the DSA). The Progs hate the Mods with a burning passion and are constantly trying to undercut them. Generally, Moderates tend to win city-wide races, while Progressives tend to win district supervisor races. Right now, the mayor's office and all state-level seats--including Scott Wiener, who authored the bill in question--are occupied by Mods, while the Progs have a veto-proof supermajority on the Board of Supervisors.

The Progressives tend to lean more NIMBY than their Moderate counterparts, and some of this opposition is certainly the result of that. (Gordon Mar, the president of the Board, is probably the biggest NIMBY of all the supervisors at the moment, possibly excepting Aaron Peskin.) But most of this opposition is purely tribal: the Progs on the board just want to snipe at Scott Wiener. Progs are not categorically opposed to housing: as others have pointed out, when Brisbane was waffling on approving market-rate housing just to the south of San Francisco, Jane Kim, a Progressive, threatened to annex the city!

Most of this anti-SB-50 resolution is properly understood as San Francisco tribalism more than any sort of policy grievance. SB 50 doesn't even have much if any of an effect on a lot of the districts these supervisors represent, either because they're exempted as "sensitive communities" (e.g. much of the district I live in, D10) or because the districts are already upzoned (e.g. the Mission).

thebradbain• 7 years ago

That instance of Jane Kim threatening to annex Brisbane came off more as “everyone ELSE should build more housing so we don’t have to” than anything else to me, personally.

They’re not wrong that other cities also need to build more housing, too, but SF equally needs to. They’re the city, not the suburb.

caycep• 7 years ago

Forgive my municipal ignorance but how does one city "annex" another? It's not like they have an army to do it with? Are there legal maneuverings to accomplish this?

ianmobbs• 7 years ago

Being progressive and being a NIMBY aren’t compatible ideologies.

unlinked_dll2• 7 years ago

Thank god people act rationally when it comes to their professed ideology

doublement• 7 years ago

When it comes to big-money issues like housing, self-interest takes precedence over professed ideology. Ostensibly liberal California not only has rampant NIMBYism, but is also in contention for the most regressive property tax policies on Earth via Proposition 13.

erik_seaberg• 7 years ago

Moderates favor market-based solutions, progressives favor heavier government intervention (which NIMBY is).

ksec• 7 years ago

A brilliant summary for those not following closely. And then I look at the username to see who wrote this, turns out it was an immediately recognisable Rust and Compiler expert.

sartethought• 7 years ago

Progressives tend to lean more NIMBY

Take it from a progressive: this is false.

We lean towards stability for low-income populations. An ability to live somewhere, accumulate relationships, and find a stable job, without being thrust into homelessness any moment at the will of enterprise.

Above all else, we support real public housing, maintained by democratic institutions. Our numbers are growing at record rate lately, so if you want to build density, do it like this. Our armies of enthusiasm will be right by your side.

StuffedParrot• 7 years ago

SB-50 is the market-rate bill, but is just one of many movements to increase density.

jdkee• 7 years ago

This is criminal.

c3534l• 7 years ago

So just business as usual in San Francisco, then.

San Francisco supervisors opposing bill to increase housing density

Related Stories