The way some activists put it on social media sites, you would think they expect people to pay no rent to live in the Bay Area. An Oakland activist on the OK Council Twitter account posted a comment about "affordable" rent (scare quotes theirs) being $1,400 in that city and too high. Actually, that's not bad, especially compared to San Francisco. But let's face it, many housing activists – and some city leaders – cry foul when a market-rate project is proposed even if it contains the minimum or above minimum requirements for affordable housing.
The dust-up over gay Supervisor David Campos' proposed Mission moratorium, which fell short of the nine votes it needed for passage Tuesday, is a case in point. The city's housing crisis is partly the result of not building enough units – at all price points – to keep pace with demand. Last year, only 65 new units were built in the Mission and neighborhood rents increased by 20 percent, according to a fact sheet from gay Supervisor Scott Wiener and his colleague, Supervisor Mark Farrell. They and others opposed to the moratorium support the creation of new units at all levels of affordability by increasing funding for the production of affordable and middle-income housing, and increasing density and up-zoning in exchange for increased production of affordable and middle-income units.
As Farrell noted at Tuesday's board meeting, "This crisis didn't start today. We should have started this conversation years ago."
For better or worse, the city's housing policy is tied to market-rate construction. It's the fees generated by market-rate housing, expected to be $227 million over the next five years, that will pay for affordable housing. If the moratorium had passed, that money wouldn't be available.
Wiener has also proposed new tenant protection legislation that will require notice to all tenants, regardless of whether their unit is officially recorded, when a property owner files for permits to demolish their units. There's a significant loophole in the current law that requires property owners to notice tenants only in legally permitted units. That has left thousands of tenants vulnerable to losing their homes with no notice ahead of time and no opportunity to contest the demolition.
This will by no means solve the lack of affordable housing in San Francisco. It is, however, one more tool that can provide tenants with a way to fight back in a city where they enjoy strong protections.
In recent years, Wiener has passed legislation to allow more in-law units in the Castro, which could be beneficial to LGBT seniors, and to relax density use limits when at least 20 percent of a project's units are affordable.
Supervisor Jane Kim's opposition to the San Francisco Giants' development project is also worth mentioning. Last year she said she supported a proposal that projects include 30 percent below market rate housing. The Giants came back with 33 percent – more than she wanted – and now Kim wants a ballot measure that could scuttle the whole project, which would include 1,500 units of housing, eight acres of parkland, and 1.5 million square feet of commercial space. At issue, Kim says, are height limits (which voters will already weigh in on) and a lower threshold for area median income.
There seems to be an attitude among some public officials that development is bad, yet the city needs more housing.
Maybe San Francisco leaders should look to Oakland. On the job only six months, City Councilman Abel Guillen this week announced that he's negotiated the inclusion of 30 permanently affordable units of housing on the site of a project at 12th Street, and more than $1 million for the city's affordable housing fund that will be used to build more units elsewhere. Additionally, he announced $700,000 worth of community benefits as part of the proposal for a controversial housing project near Lake Merritt. The benefits are subject to City Council approval. But in any case, Guillen, who identifies as two-spirit, has proven in a very short amount of time that 1) he has made affordable housing a priority and 2) that he's able to compromise and work with developers to secure additional funds and benefits. It's that second part that seems to be lacking in San Francisco, where "compromise" is a dirty word.