Letters will be arriving in mailboxes across the city, particularly on the West Side, this week, advising residents and businesses that the city is planning major zoning changes to their neighborhoods.
The notices are going out because Sup. Connie Chan demanded that people be notified about the profound transformation that the new zoning laws could involve.
But the notices don’t exactly tell people what’s happening. They say that the city “is required to expand housing availablilty and affordabilty,” which sounds just wonderful. The QR code on the notice takes you to a city planning website that says
The SF Family Zoning Plan (a.k.a. Expanding Housing Choice) aims to expand housing affordability and availability by allowing for increased density throughout the City, especially along transit and commercial corridors, in order to meet San Francisco’s Regional Housing Needs Allocation requirements set by the State of California.
Again, that sounds just grand.
The problem is, the plan would allow, and in some cases encourage, the demolition of existing buildings that have small commercial tenants. A new bill by state Sen. Scott Wiener would go further, allowing the demolition of rent-controlled buildings.
All in the name of making housing more affordable.
The problem is that the city only requires 15 percent of the new housing to be affordable, and given construction costs, interest rates, and demands for high returns by investors, the vast majority of the new housing will be far too expensive for most working San Franciscans.
More new housing doesn’t mean more affordability; it often means the opposite.
None of that information is on the city website. There’s no discussion of the possibility of displacement of small businesses and the wholesale transformation of neighborhood commercial districts.
But there’s plenty of information out there. You can find a detailed discussion of the issues involved in upzoning at the website of Neighborhoods United SF. There’s more at the Race and Equity in All Planning site. Small business info is available at Small Business Forward.
The Planning Commission will hold a hearing on the upzoning Thursday, Sept. 11 at noon.
