Mayor Daniel Lurie will hold a rally on the steps of City Hall at 11:15 Thursday/11 to promote a zoning bill that would radically transform San Francisco. Opponents of the bill, who are organizing at many levels, will also be on hand.
The Race and Equity in All Planning Coalition is organizing a rally that will include housing activists, small business people, and community leaders. The group has sent a letter to the commission, which you can read here.
From the group’s press release:
“REP-SF strongly opposes Mayor Lurie’s upzoning plan, which does not serve families, will make rent more expensive, will increase the displacement of tenants and small businesses, and will make it impossible for San Francisco to develop the affordable housing we desperately need. We are running out of time and must act now to change course. We urge the Planning Commission to say no to the Mayor’s displacement plan, and instead invest in a real community plan to refocus on affordability and real opportunities for families, seniors, and working people,” says Jeantelle Laberinto of the REP-SF coalition.
“The upzoning plan threatens tenants and small businesses in ways that disregard decades of community-based policy making that has built a resilient city through a network of strong neighborhoods. Instead, the upzoning provides developers of expensive, market-rate condos with extraordinary tools and incentives – giveaways for them to use for profit and speculation – while tenants and small businesses suffer and are displaced,” says Joseph Smooke of REP-SF.
“It is a grand deception to state that our city’s lack of affordable housing is due to a limited supply of market-rate condos, and that we should therefore remove all restraints to profiteering developers. Why are we equating the basic need for dignified, truly affordable housing with the need for greedy developers’ profits? The past has shown us that relying solely on private investment to fund housing will ONLY lead to expensive and unaffordable housing being built,” says Don Misumi of Richmond District Rising, a member of REP-SF.
“While the State’s Housing Crisis Act already creates vulnerabilities for tenants, the Mayor’s upzoning plan creates new threats to tenants that cause us great concern. The upzoning rolls back decades of work by tenant and housing advocates to create a network of tenant protections that have given us tools to fight back to save our neighbors and communities. This plan encourages and enables demolitions, conversions, and mergers of existing housing citywide, including in areas designated through prior legislation as being part of the Priority Equity Geographies Special Use District (PEGs),” says Fred Sherburn-Zimmer of the Housing Rights Committee, a member of REP-SF and the San Francisco Anti-Displacement Coalition (SFADC).
From the San Francisco Tenants Union:
Mayor Lurie, greedy developers, and the Planning Department have proposed a plan to Upzone San Francisco with few protections for existing tenants and rent controlled buildings. By increasing heights, the plan incentivizes speculators to displace tenants, destroy sound rental housing and small businesses, and build luxury towers in their place.
They offer up a weak “right of first refusal” to evicted tenants but cannot guarantee that rental units will be replaced as rental units. If you manage to survive years paying market rent elsewhere and can qualify for a private loan, then you might be able to purchase a replacement unit. Whether the city will enforce on owners who do not follow through on this requirement is not assured. It certainly hasn’t worked in cases of fire where tenants displaced rarely return to rebuilt apartments years later despite their “right of return.”
Small businesses get even less from the plan as state law prohibits any sort of rent control or protections for commercial tenants.
The Tenants Union has thoroughly analyzed the proposal with an eye towards identifying loopholes, enforcement, and state law preemption that overrides the proponents’ claims. We have 45 years of experience watching speculators stay one step ahead of even well-intentioned legislation. We have serious concerns with the Mayor’s plan because we know profit by any means necessary is the goal.
The mayor controls four seats on the Planning Commission, so he will probably have the votes—but expect hours of testimony from supporters and opponents.
There are so many questions the commissioners appointed by the supes might want to ask. How is all this market-rate housing going to bring down prices—if developers are saying that they won’t build anything until rents increase another 20 percent? From the Chron:
Even with rents surging 11.5% in the past 12 months, developers say that in the best case scenario new multifamily housing development is still 18 months away from starting. And that is only if construction costs and interest rates stay flat, and rents jump an additional 20%. Otherwise equity investors are unlikely to reenter a market they abandoned in droves at the start of the pandemic, according to experts. … For a region and an industry grappling with a shortage of affordable housing the situation is a bit of a conundrum: The Bay Area needs to become more affordable to keep workers, but the cost of housing has to go up for new market rate housing projects to pencil.
That’s why
For the foreseeable future housing development in the Bay Area will be dominated by government-subsidized projects financed by tax credits and affordable housing bonds. Of the 110 housing projects under construction in the Bay Area’s nine counties, 90 are affordable, according to Cushman & Wakefield. Roughly 518 affordable units will wrap up in the second half of 2025, including 160 at 730 Stanyan St. in the Haight. Nearly 900 affordable units will open in 2026 and 2027, including projects in the Sunset, Transbay, Sunnydale and Mission Bay.
But Lurie’s plan includes zero new financing for affordable housing.
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And if the city plans to encourage new housing on transit corridors, at a time when Muni is near fiscal collapse, how will the new service needed for new residents get funded? Lurie has no plan.
Can the city even do this under the California Environmental Quality Act, since there has been no full EIR on one of the most consequential land-use decisions in many years?
The rallies will start at 11:15. The commission hearing starts at noon. This item will probably come up around 12:45.
