Editor:
Last December, the SF Standard released aerial photos of just how much San Francisco has changed over more than 85 years. I was particularly drawn to how much the Sunset has transformed in that period.
As a relatively new resident of the Sunset, my family and I have been enamored by what the neighborhood has to offer: friendly neighbors, active commercial corridors, and good schools. It has all the ingredients necessary for raising a family.
And that’s only the beginning. See what our neighborhood has seen in the past few years.
- A night market showcasing our small businesses and demonstrating what is possible with our public spaces.
- The Great Highway is gaining national and international recognition as a travel destination.
- The Sunset is now home to the biggest pickleball courts complex in the city.
- According to the New York Times, while other neighborhoods are struggling, the Outer Sunset is “thriving.”
That’s why when I learned that San Francisco had to build 82,000 housing units – many of which would be on the west side – I welcomed the challenge. Back in September of last year, I participated in a focus group organized by the SF Planning Department to collect feedback on what future plans for the west side of San Francisco should look like. This group specifically focused on feedback from families with young children like mine.
The Planning Department presented proposals about how tall and how dense homes should be in merchant corridors, like Irving Street and in the surrounding areas. We discussed what this would look like and what kind of units could fit in. Ultimately the discussion turned to what housing would be acceptable to current residents. Would it obstruct people’s views, how would it be received, and is there any way we can mitigate the inevitable opposition?
We discussed what the buildings would look like, but we barely talked about who would live in these homes. The buildings aren’t just a pretty view. They are places where people live, grow, design, create, develop and innovate.
San Francisco has no future without families, and families need places to live. Without more housing, “SF natives” are an endangered species. I don’t want San Francisco to just be a nice place to visit. It should be a place where people not only want to raise their children but can afford to raise their children. Where children can access the resources and creativity of a world-class city.
Our City’s best resource is not our landmarks, our libraries or our parks; it is the people. Look no further than downtown to see what it looks like when a neighborhood doesn’t have enough people.
More people means more children attending our half-filled schools. It means more people patronizing our restaurants and small businesses. It means more workers and customers spending money to raise revenue for more city services. It means more eyes on the streets to ensure greater public safety. It means more people starting new businesses and developing ideas that we can’t even imagine.
Instead of sand dunes, the City had a greater vision for what it could be and embraced it.
We don’t have to fear San Francisco’s future. The Sunset can be a leader in the City by welcoming more neighbors and creating a community that is truly welcoming, inclusive and forward looking.
We’ve already been doing it, not just recently but for decades. Why stop now?
Alex Wong
Outer Sunset Resident
Categories: letter to the editor
Richmond Review/Sunset Beacon 
I think the vision Alex would like to see are 50 story buildings adjacent to a freeway for entitled motorists along the Pacific ocean front. It’s not gonna happen. EVER. Just look at what the Supervisors did yesterday. Override Breed’s veto of greater housing density. Scott Weiner and his cadres in the Real Estate and construction trades may like it. But, as the SF Standard notes earlier today there are many single family homeowners; i.e. the Richmond and Sunset who will oppose and fight this greed all in the name of housing density.
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Yes, really a shame that Engardio and Weiner do not represent the views of the majority of their constituents.
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They are gentrifiers shamelessly pushing for more of their kind exclusively.
NEITHER ARE REAL SAN FRANCISCANS, nor do they care about us.
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You obviously chose The Sunset to live, rather than a more congested part of the city, because you appreciate some tranquility in an urban environment. As you say, look no further than downtown (South of Market) to what a landscape of highrises looks like. Awful.
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Good article, but there are several “value” issues here, and one troubling elephant in the room: How much affordability can actually be achieved by how much additional supply? How “inelastic” is San Francisco housing demand? And separately, how does additional supply type, that pencils economically for developers, “shape” the City? Is our goal a particular stratification (shape) of poor to rich, for example, or to increase density for its own sake and without regard to socio-economic stratification or potentially negative impacts on existing residents?
Our current policies and cost challenges drive us toward a barbell–luxury and subsidized “affordable” housing–but little in between. That increasingly squeezes the middle class, and in particular young, growing families, with long-term implications for the City. Massive up-zoning across the board, or up-zoning battled-out through individual neighborhoods, do not fix our barbell-driving economics of actually building housing, although it is true that any additional supply of even luxury housing will have some knock-on impact on improving affordability of legacy housing.
What do we want from San Francisco and for it, long-term? And does one set of citizens have more of a say than others, such as long-term residents and the tourism industry that might want to protect the museum, or new entrants that bring new life and vibrancy to the City. Do we embrace or fear change as a localized or Citywide consensus? And can we mitigate the downsides of increased density with far more attention to aesthetics, green spaces, and neighborhood amenities to foster the building of Social Capital.
All of this comes down to personal values, which are not shared by all, so aligning consensus to policies is key, and yet when it comes to housing supply and neighborhood development, Citywide consensus is very different than District and neighborhood-level consensus. To thread the needle of bringing on more supply (to reduce pressure on prices), preserve the tourist value (and meal ticket) of San Francisco’s key points of interest and charm, to make San Francisco a welcoming environment to small and large businesses that fuel employment and street vibrancy, and to enable lower-wage workers we all rely upon to be able to live here, all in a physically-constrained (49 square miles) area with great weather and geography, what do we do?
Free-market economists will argue that we let the City grow and change without social-design intervention–that we cannot know what is best for all because we cannot predict potential macro-changes over time–so we should focus on reducing artificial building impediments like SFGov costs (permitting, fees, discretionary review, etc.) and let the market organically shape the City. People will adjust accordingly and there will be winners and losers without a command-and-control design. This might, ironically, be the outcome of hard-core, NIMBY obstructionism to new supply, by ensuring State takeover of our local zoning controls and risking a “Builders’ Remedy” free-for-all.
Personally, I value socio-economic diversity for the future of a productive, relatively happy City. I’d also like housing-type and neighborhood-type variety. And I think we can handle more density with focused attention on aesthetics, etc. But I also believe we live in a permanent state of excess demand for potential housing supply and we suffer current policies that excessively favor the poor and the rich, while unbridled growth begs intractable questions. Without intervention, middle-class housing affordability declines and the Socialists in our midst are fueled with ever more arguments to provide public and/or publicly subsidized housing for the lowest incomes.
If there is a consensus to have some kind of long-term balance of residency between rich, middle and poor, old and young, families and singles, etc., AND if we don’t want housing policies to cause knock-on effects worse than the diseases they purport to cure (like rent control), AND you can’t compel private developers to develop middle-class housing if projects cannot produce attractive returns, AND if there is some point of objective, quality-of-life, diminishing returns from densification, perhaps we should get creative about limited, middle-class housing/personal subsidizations. This question will engender all kinds of flawed ideas with terrible knock-on effects of their own–major trade-offs–but there are no simple answers to a physically constrained, permanently desirable place if we reject San Francisco as a gated community. Otherwise, we should be talking about a massive expansion and subsidization of regional transport systems to gain more housing outside of our 49 square miles and still attract a balanced daytime populace.
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NO ONE living in the Outer Sunset/Parkside, Inner Sunset and even Golden Gate Height for a very long time DON”T WANT ANY urban size apartments at all in the neighborhoods. What is needed more of are single family homes, that don’t have any stairs or only one or two steps. So, when a person gets old or have health problems don’t need a stairlift build. But IF whoever wants apartments in any of the three neighborhoods, ONLY those that are suburban size apartments. Like the ones in the San Bruno mountains/hills, around and near Dublin Blvd and Danville (both in the TriValley). That might or could be how long-time locals that live in those three neighborhoods sees it and own a single family home. As a local born in San Francisco and lives in the Outer Sunset/Parkside since the day I was born. Have always seen the Outer Sunset/Parkside’s characteristics as either 45% urban and 55% suburban or 45% urban and 45% suburban. Never was 100% one way. IF any Urban size apartment(s) is planned to be built in the neighborhoods, long time locals would fight tooth and nail to stop it, IF it can be stop. The Richmond neighborhood across Golden Gate Park, I think the locals there see the same thing for their neighborhood.
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The writer’s statement that the Great Highway is gaining recognition as a travel destination is a silly, unsupported, self-created narrative created by the Bike Coalition/SFMTA. Rec and Park uses our tax payer money to host events out there, and then spoon feeds a “journalist” to write an article about the events, then claims it is evidence of some huge community support. Apparently, pro-development leaders like Engardino and Weiner have calculated that they need to placate the Bike Coalition/SFMTA/Rec Park on this issue in order to push through their West side development agenda. The idea that the “Great Walkway” is some great destination demonstrates that media manipulation can come from the progressive left as well as the Trump right. Let’s have reasonable development on the West side, as the writer suggests, but avoid parroting the inaccurate talking points of the special interests (including our government leaders).
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BINGO!
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I live in the Sunset and I want to see apartment buildings built here. I’ve lived here my whole adult life and my kids were born and raised in the Sunset. And yet they cannot find a place to live here.
The false narratives that people have to start thinking more carefully about are the non-fact based assumptions that higher density can only bring problems. It’s just the opposite.
Higher density housing means more places for families to live. More families means more people to shop in our local restaurants, stores and other businesses. Higher density apartments will drive up the land value of those of us who live here already, but drive down the cost of individual homes. How is that possible? Do the math – a piece of land with 3 small houses converted into 12 apartments is going to be worth more, even if the apartments are less expensive.
I especially find the demonization of developers bizarre. Every single one of us here lives in a house built by a developer. They are just businesses trying to make a profit while building housing for the rest of us. Why exactly is this terrible?
Change is uncomfortable, no doubt. But if we don’t make San Francisco a place that has a growing mix of housing that lots of people can afford, then our people and our housing will just get older and older and our city will fade into exhaustion and irrelevance. Let’s build for a brighter future.
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“Higher density housing means more places for families to live.”
Unless this housing is 100% aimed at the lowest economic rungs of the ladder, you’re advocating for a giveaway to monied yuppie transplants, not families of SF natives or long-time blue collar SF workers.
The Wiener narrative is that by building yuppie condo towers we’ll alleviate the housing crisis which is felt exclusively at the lower and middle classes, which is decidedly and obviously NOT what developers (Wiener’s biggest backers, note) are interested in – they only want top $ for their constructions. The 10-20% “low income” housing only drops the threshold down to around $80,000 income levels, which is still too darn high for “low income” housing. They base this on 80% of “median” incomes which as we all know are stratospheric with all the technoyuppie transplants of late. The trend continues.
“Let’s build for a brighter future.”
Let’s lose the slogans, YIMBY-paid advertisers and associated parasite non-profits.
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