Opposition grows to Lurie’s zoning plan that would transform San Francisco

Opposition to Mayor Daniel Lurie’s plan to upzone much of the city is emerging on several fronts, from tenants, small businesses, and a neighborhood group that argues the sweeping plan never got a valid environmental review. There’s also a serious problem with providing transit service to the new residents.

Meanwhile, two supervisors are pushing legislation to address some of the displacement concerns, and Lurie has already said he will support one of those bills.

At Question Time today, Sup. Myrna Melgar told Lurie that a lot of people are worried about the displacement of small businesses and rent-controlled housing units.

Lurie said “we will not leave rent-controlled units and small businesses behind.” He insisted that “most new housing is built on vacant land,” which may be the case now—but there’s no way to build the tens of thousands of units his plan envisions without demolishing existing residential and commercial structures.

Melgar has introduced legislation that provides incentives to developers and landlords to protect housing and small business:

This would allow property owners of rent-controlled buildings in rezoned areas to preserve and enhance their current properties while selling their development rights to other sites that would like to build taller.

The legislation establishes a “Small Business Construction Relief Fund and Program” dedicated to small businesses displaced by a rezoning project by providing grants or loans for relocation support and other technical assistance. 

Lurie said he supports that legislation.

Meanwhile, Sup. Chyanne Chen has introduced a broader bill that

Requires disclosure of plans to demolish and early noticing of rights to tenants;

Prevents wrongful evictions and holds landlords accountable for bad behavior;

Guarantees the maximum possible relocation assistance allowed under the law; and

Enforces tenants’ rights to return to a comparable unit should their building be redeveloped.

The Tenants Union has demanded more detailed protections:

No by-right approval to demolish rent controlled buildings. The project must offer more than just “one additional unit than exists” in order to be worth the loss of sound housing and hardship for tenants.

If demolition is approved (through a commission vote) rental units MUST be replaced with rental units (not homeownership units).

Tenants of all incomes deserve adequate relocation rental assistance while they move to temporary housing.

A trackable and enforceable right of return overseen by a city agency with legal powers to fine owners who don’t follow through.

Sup. Connie Chan released a letter to the Planning Commission that says:

The Mayor’s current proposal to upzone two-thirds of San Francisco rejects much of the Planning Commission’s own work on the Housing Element. It focuses primarily on redeveloping intact neighborhoods and rent-controlled housing, without consideration for the preservation and protection guidelines of our regional strategy. It creates a blanket upzoning plan, threatening our tenants, our aging homeowners, our small businesses, and the preservation of our history.

Among other things, she calls for:

Boost Affordable Family Housing: Requiring a higher percentage of 2-bedroom and 3-bedroom units in all upzoned areas, increasing the inclusionary requirements in all new development to 20% and 25% affordability, maintaining housing units above ground floor in many neighborhood districts, and setting development deadlines to ensure housing is built quickly.

Meaningful Tenant Protections: Prohibiting the demolition of rent controlled units in the local program and restricting demolition of residential flats to protect existing affordable housing stock and to stabilize tenants;

Protection of Vulnerable Populations: Removing Priority Equity Geographies areas from the proposed plan in order to stay consistent with the San Francisco General Plan’s Housing Element, approved in 2023, and protect vulnerable populations living in identified neighborhoods;

Small Business Support: Furthering the protection of small businesses by prohibiting the demolition of Legacy Businesses and Neighborhood Anchoring Businesses, creating additional guardrails to prevent displacement for small business and mixed-use developments with ground-floor storefronts, and maintaining cohesive use on commercial and non-residential transit corridors;

Historic Preservation: Prohibiting the demolition and major alteration of landmarked buildings or buildings located in designated historic districts, including those identified as eligible for landmarking status, to strengthen the City’s existing iconic neighborhoods;

It’s always seemed to me that a basic tenet of law is that when a party is injured by the actions of another, it’s the responsibility of the person who did the damage to “make whole” the one who is hurt. You run me over with your car and break my leg, you pay to get it fixed.

If a residential or commercial tenant who has done nothing wrong is evicted, the landlord or developer should have to pay for relocation, subsidize the rent at a new location if it’s higher than the old rent, and if the plan is to build a new, bigger building, guarantee a right of return at the old rent. If the old building had rent control, the existing tenants should retain that right.

That’s not part of Lurie’s plan, and it’s not in Melgar’s legislation.

The Lurie plan also fails to acknowledge that, for a lot of small businesses, location is critical: You have to move to another part of town and you lose your customer base.

Melgar asked for a dedicated source of funding for affordable housing, maybe from future property taxes. I’ve got a better one: A city income tax on the richest 5,000 San Franciscans.

Then there’s Muni.

The concept behind the “Family Zoning Plan” is that the city can build more dense housing along transit corridors. That’s also what state Sen. Scott Wiener is claiming about SB 79.

But you can’t move thousands of people into transit corridors if you don’t have adequate transit—and right now, Muni is barely able to survive and will almost certainly have to cut service. So more people will live on transit lines that lack to capacity to get them around town.

How does that work?

I asked Lurie about Muni funding as he was walking back from the Board of Supes meeting to his office, and he told me that the impacts of the upzoning are “years away.” Probably true: But at some point, if his plan works, someone will have to pay for Muni service. He told me that a “robust” economy would cover those costs—but that’s never been the case in San Francisco. Developers never pay the cost of the impacts on the city.

Neighborhoods United raises another key issue: The city has never done an Environmental Impact Report on what will be a transformational change in the city’s land-use laws. Richard Drury, a lawyer representing the group, sent a Sept. 9 letter to the Planning Commission noting that they city is relying on a 2022 EIR covering the Housing Element—but this is a much more extensive plan:

The Rezone will forever change the face of the City. It will allow new development to accommodate 54,000 new housing units in so-called “well-resourced” areas of the city. While the City prepared an environmental impact report (“EIR”) for its Housing Element in 2022 (2022 EIR), the proposed Rezone is vastly different from the zoning studied in the 2022 Housing Element and its associated 2022 EIR. Nevertheless, the Planning Department proposes to rely on the 2022 EIR. A rezoning of this magnitude requires thorough environmental review under the California Environmental Quality Act (“CEQA”) so that the City’s residents and decision-makers can be aware of its impacts, can consider all feasible mitigation measures and alternatives, and can have a robust and open discussion prior to making irreversible changes to San Francisco’s landscape for all time.

The planners released on Sept. 3 a 130-page “addendum” to the old EIR, and say that’s all the review needed. “This is a momentus decision,” Drury told me. “It will change San Francisco forever, and they want to give people a week to review it? That’s absurd.”

The Lurie plan includes 6,000 new housing units in the historic districts of the North East city, allows some housing as tall as 650 feet, and would cause huge impacts on transportation, wind, shadows, and in some cases, an increase in toxic materials shown to cause cancer.

From the letter:

The Rezone, unlike the Housing Element, will allow new, high-rise development in the historic districts of Telegraph Hill, North Beach and the Northern Waterfront, including Fisherman’s Wharf– something not allowed or analyzed the 2022 EIR or Housing Element.

The Rezone, unlike the Housing Element, includes amendments to base zoning and base height limits, and creating new zoning for some areas. The Rezone, unlike the Housing Element, establishes a housing sustainability district.

The Rezone will allow the construction of buildings up to 350-feet taller than anything analyzed in the 2022 EIR, resulting in new wind, aesthetic, biological and shadow impacts not analyzed in the 2022 EIR. The Rezone will create significant new wind impacts from vastly taller buildings, while at the same time the Rezone ordinance proposes to weaken the City’s wind ordinance to eliminate the requirement for mandatory wind mitigation, and to redefine significant wind impacts from 1-hour to 9-hours – all of which will conspire to create significant new wind impacts far greater than anything analyzed or contemplated in the 2022 EIR.

The Rezone will result in the displacement of rent-controlled tenants and legacy businesses, by replacing rent-controlled and existing affordable units with luxury, high-rise condos and allowing development in the areas within the Priority Equity Geographies Special Use District – something avoided in the 2022 Housing Element.

The Rezone will create significant airborne cancer risks in newly identified APEZ zones (air pollutant exposure zones).

Oh, and:

The City has failed to analyze new changed circumstances, particularly the closure of the Great Highway, which will exacerbate significant traffic and public transit impacts on the Rezone, which adds thousands of new residential units to the Sunset and Richmond neighborhoods.

Neighborhoods United has asked the commission to delay consideration of the plan until there’s a full EIR that includes possible mitigation measures.

The Tenants Union will hold a rally Thursday/11 at noon at City Hall. The Planning Commission will hear the item that day, and it will probably come up around 1pm.