In an extraordinary meeting, the San Francisco Planning Commission heard a presentation and hours of public testimony on the impacts the city’s proposal to increase height and density in neighborhoods would have on tenants and small business.
The Race and Equity in All Planning Coalition, the Council of Community Housing Organizations, and the Anti-Displacement Coalition told the commissioners that recent state laws and upcoming city policies would cause widespread displacement.
The city is considering raising height limits in some neighborhoods, particularly on the West Side of town, to eight stories, a process known as upzoning.
“Upzoning,” one speaker said, “promotes speculative development, and speculative development promotes displacement.”
Planners are considering a tenant protection ordinance that would be introduced and discussed as part of the rezoning, Lisa Chen, principal planner, said.
Chen said that so far, demolition of existing housing hasn’t been prevalent in the city. But if developers can build eight-story buildings on commercial corridors in, say, the Richmond of Sunset, the only way any substantial increase in housing units will happen is if exiting, lower-density housing is demolished.
“We’re talking about demolitions and more demolitions,” Mitchell Omerberg, who has worked on tenant issues in the city for more than 40 years, told the commission.
In a letter to the commission, the coalition of community groups noted that:
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Unfortunately, however, since the certification of this current Housing Element two years ago, all policies and resources that the State and our City have pushed through have been focused on upzoning, incentivizing, and streamlining for market-rate housing – to the detriment of affordable housing. Any additional upzoning for market-rate housing, either to increase underlying building heights or to apply “density decontrol” to these newly enlarged building volumes will have a compounding effect of working directly against equitable outcomes.
In fact:
The City’s actions to upzone, incentivize, and streamline for market-rate housing are resulting in an escalation of speculation by market-rate housing developers. Increased speculation combined with SB-330 which allows developers to demolish existing rent-controlled housing and to demolish existing occupied housing, are causing tremendous apprehension and concern among tenant advocates.
SB 330, a state law that claims to streamline housing production, allows for the demolition of existing housing with only limited oversight. The bill, by Sen. Nancy Skinner of Berkeley (who once upon a time, in the 1980s, was a very progressive tenant advocate before she become all Yimby), provides some limited protection to tenants.
But the coalition notes that those protections are inadequate. Developers can use SB 330, and other bills by SF’s state Sen. Scott Wiener, to avoid much oversight as they move to build market-rate (that is, luxury) housing.
A speculator who buys a building with rent-controlled tenants has a wide range of options, some legal and some not, to get rid of those renters, demolish or “renovate” the place, and bring in new tenants at much higher rents.
Often, the speculator will tell the tenants they are going to be evicted, and offer then a “buyout.” Under city law, that offer should be recorded with the Rent Board, but often is doesn’t happen.
The tenants either take the money and leave (sometimes after being forced to sign a nondisclosure agreement) or face the prospect of losing their homes and getting nothing in return.
From the coalition:
Developers will follow the Rent Board’s procedures for temporary eviction, so the tenants are displaced from their homes with the premise that the eviction is temporary. After some time has elapsed, the developer expands the scope of their project, sometimes adding units. The project takes longer than the former tenants had expected. The developer’s payment obligations end, and the tenants move on. These temporary evictions turn into permanent displacement, which is why tenant advocates call these “renovictions”.
Whether a developer is pursuing demolition from the outset, or capital improvements that turn in to renovictions, and whether a developer invokes SB-330 streamlining or not, layering density bonuses, incentives, and streamlined approvals have and will continue to increase speculative activity. Promoting speculation will increase tenant displacement.
The idea behind SB 330 is to increase the supply of housing in cities that are reluctant to approve more density. In San Francisco, where there’s very little land that isn’t already developed, that density means removing the housing and small businesses that currently exist.
The coalition proposes that speculators pay to make sure existing tenants get relocation money and the right to return—at the same rent-controlled rent as they had when they were forced out for a demolition or renovation.
The city’s current Housing Element recognizes the problem. It calls for the city to Increase relocation assistance for tenants experiencing temporary or permanent evictions, including increasing the time period during which relocation compensation is required for temporary evictions from three to six months.
But that’s not codified in law. And six months is far, far too little time, since many demolitions and reconstruction projects take years to complete.
The coalition is proposing that:
Planning must contract with certified Relocation Specialists who are culturally and linguistically accessible to impacted tenants on a project-by-project basis. There are community-based Relocation Specialists within the SFADC and REP-SF networks, and there are also independent Relocation Specialists that Planning can contract with. The fees for engaging Relocation Specialists can be funded from increased developer application fees.
If the developer fails to make Relocation Payments or fulfill any of its Relocation obligations prior to demolition, the Relocation Specialist will make note of this to Planning staff, and Planning staff will disallow issuance of the Demolition Permit.
Once the development is completed, and the tenants return into their newly constructed, rent-controlled units, their initial rent will be the same as the rent had been prior to their temporary relocation, with the appropriate annual Rent Board increases applied.
Planning Commissioner Theresa Imperial called for the hearing, and most of the commission members seemed open to the idea of an ordinance that would codify protections for tenants as a part of any upzoning.
But the state laws that the Yimbys have succeeded in passing may make that difficult—which is why the coaliton also wants the Planning Deparrtment and Commission to push back on the state, and demand changes to SB 330 that would allow more protections against displacement.
That’s something San Francisco officials have never done. Former Mayor London Breed supported SB 330. The Planning Commission never offered comments or opposition.
Now this is in Mayor Daniel Lurie’s court, and he said on the campaign trail that he supported appropriate upzoning. But the commission, and the Board of Supes, which will have final say here, would have to directly link new zoning rules to tenant and small-business protections to have any impact on displacement.
That will be one of the most important tests of whether this mayor and the more conservative Board of Supes cares more about speculators than existing San Francisco tenants and small businesses.
But for now, in a rare moment, the commission heard from, and acknowledged, the concerns of a citywide coalition that wants to prevent displacement. The city planners said they will attempt to draft a tenant protection plan by May.
