Stopping the loss of housing in Mid-Market, a new special trustee (why?) for City College — and Scott Wiener v. Willie Brown on the value of market-rate housing
By Tim Redmond
The problem with “interim” planning controls is that they’re, well, interim. They last for a short period, typically a couple of years, while the Planning Department figures out whether longer-term rules make sense. Sometimes, they’re aimed at a problem that may not last forever: We don’t know today if the tech boom will go bust in a couple of years, or the Big One will hit, or something else will change the housing dynamics of the Mission.
But the controls that Sup. Jane Kim passed that prevented the conversion of residential units to commercial use in the mid-Market area expired at the end of 2014. But the problem hasn’t stopped: Since then, tenants from an 84-unit building at 1049 Market have been fighting eviction attempts as the landlord converts empty units to office space.
“I’m a recently retired teacher who has lived in SF for over 30 years. Where would I go if I’m pushed out of my rent-controlled apartment that I’ve lived in since 1998 so they can turn it into office space?” Naomi Cooper, a resident of 1049 Market, asked in a press release by the Housing Rights Committee.
The group will convene at Noon Monday/23 on the steps of City Hall to demand that the supervisors and the mayor renew the controls on conversions.
A judge has ruled pretty clearly that the decision to yank the accreditation of City College was illegal. The final injunction is now in place, and City College has the right to a new, fair accreditation evaluation.
So we should be back to normal right? No: On Monday/23 at 11am, the state chancellor, Brice Harris, is going to appoint a new special trustee.
Why do we need to do that, when the reason the first trustee was appointed was because of the accreditation issues – which a court has now ruled were wrong? Why hasn’t the elected College Board been restored to its authority to oversee the school?
And what happens next?
We’ll know more Monday.
In the meantime, the City College teachers’ union, AFT Local 2121, will be announcing its proposals for a new contract Thursday/26 at 3:30pm at the Science Hall stairs. The union wants to rebuild enrollment, return the school to its democratically elected leadership – and start to restore years of faculty wage cuts.
It appears that we will be continuing to argue about the role that new market-rate housing plays in the effort to contain the soaring price hikes that have made San Francisco unaffordable to anyone who lacks a high-paying job or an existing rent-controlled apartment or was lucky enough to buy a place quite a few years ago.
Sup. Scott Wiener, responding to the discussion over a moratorium on new luxury condos in the mission, wrote a piece for Medium arguing that, yes, supply and demand works in the local housing market, and if we just build enough, eventually prices will come down :
In recent history, we’ve never come close to producing enough housing to allow anyone to argue that increasing housing supply doesn’t stabilize housing prices. But, we do have evidence to the contrary. Since 2003, San Francisco has grown by nearly 100,000 people, while producing around 24,000 units of housing. During that same time period, housing prices have gone through the roof.
Interesting, and this will be the theme of much howling and protest if Sup. David Campos introduces a measure to follow the recommendations of Calle24, a community group that is trying to protect the culture and prevent displacement in the 24th Street Corridor.
I have argued about this forever, but let me make a couple of quick points:
Development in San Francisco has been driven since the 1980s not by demand for office space or housing but by supply of international investment capital. In the 1980s, the money was all in offices; the deregulation of Savings and Loans and the new accelerated depreciation tax rules that Ronald Reagan got passed made it possible to make large financial rewards building office towers –even if they stayed empty for years.
That boom almost took down Houston and damaged a lot of other cities that built more office space than they could possibly absorb. San Francisco, with Prop. M, avoided that fate.
Today, international speculative capital wants to build top-end housing in major cities like New York and San Francisco. Much of that housing may never be used by people who reside full time in San Francisco. There’s no doubt that most of it will be used to attract new residents, not to house the existing workforce. How that will bring prices down remains a mystery.
(The office boom of the 1980s didn’t bring prices down; in fact, even when empty buildings reached the sky, rents soared. It wasn’t until the recession of the early 1990s that commercial office rents declined. Supply and demand? Yes – supply of speculative investment capital.)
I quote that great political expert Willie Brown, from his Chronicle column Sunday:
I took a walk from the Google offices in the old Folger Coffee building along the Embarcadero to Mission Street the other day. Man, what a traffic mess.
Every street leading to the Bay Bridge looked like a parking lot, with no more than three cars at a time able to get through the lights.
And it’s only going to get worse. At least three more of those towering residential high-rises will be opening up in the next six months, which means there will be another 3,000 to 4,000 people in the neighborhood and who knows how many cars on the streets.
I was told by a salesman from one of the high-rises that a Chinese financier bought 25 percent of the units in the building, and it’s not even finished yet.
The plan is to resell them to buyers in China at an even higher price.
Speculative capital at work. Not much to do with whether a teacher or a hotel worker can afford the rent.
I mentioned it last week, but the Ethics Commission is going to hear from some advocates who are pushing to close a lot of gaping loopholes in campaign-finance law. The meeting’s Monday/23 at 5:30, City Hall, room 400).
To quote Larry Bush of Friends of Ethics:
Here’s what’s up:
1. Donor limits to ballot and other committees controlled by elected officials or candidates. This is how Ed Lee raised over $500,000 to bundle money to his favored issues and candidates from people who wanted Ed Lee to approve their profit interests.
2. Disclosure of bundling and fundraising which now only applies to contractors, not to developers, folks like Ron Conway, and others. This is a huge loophole.
3. Letting the public sue to force compliance with the law when City Hall turns a blind eye to its cronies. Remember when Gascon claimed he had no evidence (despite video) of Chinatown vote collecting? And there is so much more.
4. Banning contributions from entities and their officers who get a financial benefit from city officials. Yes, voters made this illegal in 2000 with 83% yes votes, and then Ethics slipped in a repeal without explaining what they were doing. Time to get back what the voters already approved.
5. Debarring violators from receiving a city contract or benefit just as they do in LA and elsewhere. What, we fine them $5,000 and then turn around and give them a $150 million city contract? Ye gods and little fishes. Let’s make the consequences of violating the law something that is a real deterrent, not just the cost of doing business-as-usual.
6. Requiring disclosures of slate mailers to be filed at Ethics. The state ethics agency gave their OK to this to Ethics as long ago as July 2010 and the Executive Director slipped the whole thing into the “round file” aka trash can. So now to find out the money trail, you have to go to several offices you may not even know about.All of this will not fix ethics, but it will give the public rules that matter and enforcements that matter. It can be done in time for this November’s election. Ethics takes it up Monday and then may vote on it in March. But action is needed now.
