A neighborhood coalition plans to file a lawsuit that could delay the implementation of Mayor Daniel Lurie’s Rich Family Zoning Plan—potentially until after the next elections for Board of Supes, when the majority on that body might change.
Lori Brooke, a founder of Neighborhoods United SF and a candidate for D2 supe, told me today that the group plans to file a case as soon as Lurie signs the legislation.
The argument: The city used an environmental impact report done for the 2022 Housing Element of the General Plan to fulfill the requirements that the upzoning undergo review under the California Environmental Quality Act.
The Yimby movement hates CEQA, but the law exists for a very good reason: Before any major project that could impact the environment gets approval, the public has the right to know what those impacts might be.
CEQA doesn’t prevent policy makers from approving projects that have negative impacts; it just requires that those impacts be made public, so the voters can decide whether to hold officials accountable.
In this case, according to a letter from Richard Drury, an environmental lawyer, the Housing Element and the Rich Family Zoning Plan have very different impacts, and the city needs to study those before final approval:
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.1 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.
More:
The City largely ignores or mischaracterizes the Rezone’s environmental impacts. For example, the Addendum does not even mention the fact that the Rezone (unlike the 2022 Housing Element) will allow redevelopment in the northeast districts of Telegraph Hill, North Beach and the Northern Waterfront, including Fisherman’s Wharf. The City also ignores the fact that it has already approved 71,772 new units of housing that have yet to be built. The City’ RHNA goal is 82,069. Therefore, the City only needs another 10,297 units to meet its RHNA goal – not 36,200, or 54,000.2 Nor does the City discuss the fact that the Rezone is likely to displace low-income residents from rent-controlled units, while constructing new market-rate units without rent-control. The Rezone does not require any affordable housing and allows rent-controlled units to be replaced with luxury housing. The net result is likely to be less affordable housing – not more. The City’s own calculations show that the Rezone will abjectly fail to meet RHNA’s affordable housing goals.
The Rezone opens up thousands of rent-controlled units for high density, market rate development, virtually ensuring that thousands of low-income residents will be displaced to make way for luxury housing. The Rezone includes 3,481 two-unit rent-controlled parcels with 32,237 units, increases height on 4,345 rent-controlled parcels with 26,784 units, an increases density on 1,341 rent-controlled parcels with 20,691 units. While the Board of Supervisors is considering amendments to protect rent-controlled units with 3 or more units, this leaves about 20,564 two-unit rent-controlled units (10,282 parcels) with absolutely no protection from displacement and redevelopment. None of these impacts were proposed, discussed or analyzed in the 2022 EIR, and must be analyzed and mitigated in a supplemental EIR.
A few critical facts: The Lurie plan contains no new funding for affordable housing. The state mandates under the Regional Housing Needs Assessment call for more than half of the new units to be affordable, but under current plans, at most 20 percent will be below-market rate.
I could certainly argue that the lack of affordable housing alone puts the city’s plans out of compliance with state mandates—but in the odd world of Yimby housing policy, that doesn’t matter: As long as San Francisco changes its zoning to make room for new market-rate housing, the lack of affordability doesn’t matter. The state will not penalize the city for missing its affordable housing goals under RHNA, just for missing its luxury housing goals.
Then there’s the transportation issue, which I think is critical to this debate.
One of the reasons so many people on the West Side opposed the closure of the Great Highway: The city provides very little north-south transit in that area. Most of the Muni lines were designed to bring workers from the neighborhoods to downtown; Muni doesn’t help you get from the Sunset to Daly City, or from the Richmond to the Sunset in any efficient way.
Now the transit system is in a financial crisis, and Muni officials are talking about closing lines, or running the buses less often. In a rather silly piece in the Chron, Anthony Lazarus argues that the city has plenty of infrastructure to handle the new growth:
Maybe it’s Muni, which is finally approaching pre-pandemic levels of ridership. Yes, Muni faces a fiscal crisis that threatens routes and service hours, like BART and Caltrain. But one of the ways to stabilize transit is to have more riders.
Reality: Farebox collections pay for less than ten percent of the cost of running Muni. Before the pandemic, that was about 15 percent. (That’s not true for BART, where fares have historically paid about two-thirds of the operating costs) Most of the money that pays for buses comes from parking fines and the General Fund. More Muni riders means more General Fund money—and there’s nothing in the Lurie plan to pay for that. I asked the mayor about this, and he told me we could worry about that later.
More relevant: The vast majority of the new West Side housing will be high-end, for rich people. The idea of building on “transit corridors” only makes sense if there’s good reason to believe the new residents will rely primarily on transit.
It seems pretty clear to me that in San Francisco, many rich people don’t use public transit. Either they have private cars, or they use Uber and now Waymo.
But we have no data on that: The Housing Element EIR didn’t address the question of how many more rideshare cars would be on the roads if developers build more housing and don’t provide parking.
It also ignores the traffic impact of delivery vehicles. Again, rich people shop on Amazon, and get dinner and often groceries delivered. All those deliveries and rideshares might block the streets and delay Muni, undermining the entire idea of “transit-oriented development.”
Or maybe not. We don’t know. That’s why CEQA requires studies.
(I asked the Planning Department about delivery vehicles a couple of years ago, and they said there was no way to measure how many of those cars and trucks were on the roads and to project how many would arrive at any address. But you only need to sit near any dense housing in the city and count: The delivery trucks fill the streets all day.)
Case law on CEQA is pretty clear here: If the Lurie plan is significantly different from the Housing Element, the city can’t use the same EIR for both. “They are not even in the same ballpark,” Brooke told me. That will be up to a judge to decide. If the plantiffs are successful, the city will have to do a supplemental study, which could take a year or more.
Five seats on the Board of Supes are up in November, and the upzoning will be an issue in at least some of them. That could mean a different board when the issue finally comes back.
Meanwhile, Lurie and D2 Sup. Stephen Sherrill are upset that a developer wants to build a massive new housing complex on the site of the Marina Safeway (which Sherrill carefully exempted from the new zoning laws):
“This so-called ‘project’ at Marina Safeway is outrageous,” Sherrill said in a statement to the Chronicle, in which he called the plan a “publicity stunt that is exactly the kind of reckless behavior that erodes trust in our system.”
“I won’t let it go unchallenged,” Sherrill said. “Our neighborhoods deserve stability and real rules — not to be blindsided by cartoonish mega-projects trying to exploit loopholes in state law.”
Missing from that discussion: The reason this project could be proposed, and maybe built, is state law promoted by Sen. Scott Wiener, who is now running for Congress. I wonder when the likes of Lurie and Sherrill will remind their constituents who to blame when the bulldozers come for the Marina Safeway.
