More Housing Needed on West Side

With the November general election fast approaching, we’ve seen our local elected officials put their focus toward the controversial topic of housing and the City’s zoning laws.

At the Planning Association for the Richmond (PAR) town hall on March 6, the Neighborhoods United SF town hall in the Sunset on April 11 and in District 7 on June 5, mayoral hopeful and current Board President Aaron Peskin took residents’ input on the City’s potential upzoning plans. Many believe it could negatively affect the west side due to increased height limits for new housing developments. Is this shift toward a battle with the state-imposed mandate to plan for 82,000 new units by 2032 a constructive effort with other priorities looming?

Comments from those attending the town halls would give the impression that the west side is under assault from potential skyscrapers that would simultaneously lower property values while raising the values that would lead to gentrification and displacement. Worst of all, people’s precious views of the bay and the ocean would be blocked! There are even claims that this is all unnecessary. Comments ranged from citing large numbers of vacant units that include temporary vacancies, to asking for downzoning from the currently allowed four stories to saying we shouldn’t even permit more than three stories in places. And there was the evergreen railing against capitalism because someone is making money from housing.

Sadly, comments like these have not changed since the last Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA) cycle when Eric Mar was our supervisor. This constant and consistent opposition to new housing has led to the minuscule amounts of housing built in the Richmond and the surrounding westside neighborhoods compared to other parts of the City. More recently it led to the delay of even 100% affordable housing projects like 2550 Irving St. which finally broke ground this past month or the Shirley Chisholm Village teacher housing that was stalled for nearly two decades. While new housing and developments can bring certain challenges to any neighborhood, these are the trade-offs we need to acknowledge rather than bury our heads in the sand to keep any change from occurring. Not everyone will come out as winners, but we can protect the vulnerable and mitigate harmful changes.

In the last decade we’ve built a grand total of 190 units in the Richmond District, according to SF Planning. Unlike many of the older buildings that make up our neighborhood, new buildings would be up to the newest building codes and should be safer and more accessible to seniors. The new construction would also bring jobs to the area and likely even families that would help with SFUSD’s enrollment declines. The new residents would hopefully shop locally – at worst it would provide more property taxes to fund city programs.

Yet here in SF and around the Bay Area, we see how these tactics to delay and deny housing are soon to be subject to severe penalties by the state for those not actively working to solve our collective housing crisis. Most recently in Half Moon Bay, a community effort to shrink a 100% affordable farm-worker housing project has put them in the cross hairs of the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) with a ruling that a subjective standard of “neighborhood character” was specifically disallowed as a basis for disapproving, reducing density or rendering unfeasible a housing development project under the Housing Accountability Act (HAA). This is happening because one of the big changes to the current cycle of RHNA was the addition of the goal of “affirmatively furthering fair housing” (AFFH) to combat housing discrimination, eliminate racial bias, undo historic patterns of segregation, and lift barriers that restrict access in order to foster inclusive communities and achieve racial equity, fair housing choice and opportunity for all Californians.

Instead of the exclusionary intent that comes from trying to preserve our neighborhood in amber, we should be advocates for things we want to see. Identifying where and how much more housing we can be providing goes further to keep us out of the HCD’s doghouse where we can follow the examples of some of the housing that was previously built by repurposing gas stations and parking lots.

Either we support a blanket rezoning across the west side that enables more potential everywhere or we support even taller heights and densities along transit corridors, but we need to be doing our part.

Should we continue to give anyone the ability to throw up a roadblock and force concessions that impart higher costs on everyone else? This is not a call for deregulation, but to highlight that we are not a homeowners’ association that is in place to regulate every little detail of our neighborhood and what others are allowed to do and not do. Neighborhood character is not preserved through exclusion but by active cultivation. Our neighborhood character exists because we built houses that were in demand and people moved in.

Brian Quan is a Richmond District native, co-leader of Grow the Richmond, member of the Park Presidio-Sunset Lions Club and participant in monthly RefuseRefuse street clean-ups.