On Ninth Avenue, between Geary Boulevard and Clement Street, stands the Richmond neighborhood branch of the San Francisco Public Library. Visitors love this fixture of the community, filtering in to attend storytime, workshops and cultural celebrations year round.
In 2005, San Francisco designated the Richmond branch as an official city landmark. The designation report states the building “expresses the national and local ascendancy of Progressive political and social values,” noting the library as an empowering gathering site that strengthens the community. From Juliana’s weekly visits after school growing up and Divya’s neighborhood walks to check out new books, we each recognize the value in this historical landmark.
But the same landmark designation program is now being misused to block critically needed housing, preventing community members from putting down roots in the neighborhood. Such exclusionary use of the program closes off the neighborhood to the very people who could help preserve and celebrate our rich history for future generations.
We care about protecting historic landmarks and institutions that make our neighborhood unique, yet historic landmark designation is often a tool that housing opponents use to prevent new developments. The buildings currently being proposed for landmark designation in the Richmond district are a telling example. The list, proposed by Supervisor Connie Chan and the Planning Department, includes buildings with genuine historical significance worth protecting. But it also features several unremarkable sites, such as a Chase Bank, an Office Depot, and 389 Ninth Ave., that would better serve the community as housing.
A short walk from the library, neighbors can find 389 Ninth Ave, a three-story beige and red-brick building currently used by AT&T. It sits on a large corner lot on Geary with an adjacent parking lot, making it one of the select parcels in the neighborhood where housing development is actually possible. With a 38-Geary bus stop in front, a grade school and church a block away, and the Richmond library and its playground around the corner, the site is an ideal location for future residents.
Designating the building as a landmark creates barriers to new development at the site through more hearings, more environmental review, and exemptions from laws recently passed to streamline housing approval. If, in the future, AT&T decides to move on from their Ninth Avenue property, we should install housing at this site as fast as possible and not have to wade through myriad red tape to do so.
While there are elements of our built environment that can and should be preserved, the bar to do so should be high so that only truly unique and historical buildings are preserved, and so that such proposals would garner high approval rates among the population nearby. We should follow the example of peer cities, such as Los Angeles, where the landmark designation process costs $140,000, over 80 times as much as the application fee of $1,650 in San Francisco. Time and again, barriers are added to prevent building housing in San Francisco, barriers that are cheap to impose and expensive to reverse.
Further, when we preserve older buildings for the sake of their age, we deny new architects and designers the chance to add to San Francisco’s unique fabric. All old buildings were once new; all historic designs were once modern. When we value the aesthetics of San Francisco’s past over its future, we also deny a new generation of talent from making their mark in the City. What new landmarks are we prohibiting by preserving an Office Depot?
Cities grow, evolve, and change. While we should do our best to document, honor and preserve timeless physical elements, we should use that tool sparingly and carefully. The push by Planning and Supervisor Chan to landmark several otherwise unassuming buildings now (and who knows how many more in the future) flies in the face of careful and calibrated designations, instead attempting to leverage this loophole to prevent as much change as possible. It is a cynical attempt to continue to encase the City in amber and prevent future generations from being able to grow up, build their lives, and flourish here.
Blanket historic preservation fosters a fear of change within a community. Neighbors are led to believe that pro-housing policies that introduce change, like Mayor Daniel Lurie’s Family Zoning Plan, work to tear our beloved neighborhood down. But this fear is misguided: the Plan and similar pro-housing measures create opportunities for residents to afford to stay and live here – the very same people who will be the stewards of our neighborhood’s deep history.
Juliana Lamm-Perez and Divya Singh, volunteer leads at Grow the Richmond.
Categories: Commentary
Richmond Review/Sunset Beacon 
The authors here apparently are unaware of battles in the 60’s and 70’s when charming and very livable single family homes were destroyed and ugly, multi-story buildings with fire escapes at the facade that wrecked the beauty and charm of neighborhoods were spreading across the Richmond. The battle against these “Richmond Specials” and the monstrosities that were the Fontana East and West in the Marina resulted in laws enacted in the mid 1970’s providing for design review, height limits to 40-45 feet, etc to preserve neighborhoods like the Haight, Richmond, Sunset, Marina. People want to live in and visit San Francisco because of its distinctive neighborhoods and the small businesses, residences, etc that are livable communities and not blocks of towering high rises that cast shadow, create wind tunnels, displace small businesses and residents when speculators swoop in to build high density buildings that never sell or lease (Westerley anyone? on Sloat opposite the zoo). Currently we only need about 30,000 new units to meet the State mandated targets (another separate problem which has many issues with how those targets were established) given the 50,000+ units already permitted but not yet build. Not to mention vacant units which have been taken off the market by owners. The Family Planning proposal is a sledgehammer attempt to fix a problem with a solution that does not provide affordable housing but instead opens the doors for speculation and demolition when taken along with SB 79 (upzoning along transit), and the 4-6 law already passed a few years ago in SF. Focused development using appropriate lots and of appropriate size would be a better approach. Preserving historic structures is part of preserving a neighborhood’s history, culture and ambience. Just look at the Fillmore south of Geary where redevelopment destroyed the neighborhood and displaced it’s residences and north of Geary where more of the historic Victorian and Edwardian buildings were not destroyed.
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Sign our petition to the Planning Department and Supervisor Connie Chan’s office here: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/dont-let-new-historical-landmarks-slow-down-housing?source=direct_link&
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Hell no.
The YIMBY lie that market rate housing solves the housing crisis is a joke.
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The YIMBY argument in this op-ed ignores both reality and history. Historic preservation and neighborhood protections aren’t “anti-progress”; they safeguard communities from displacement, speculative overbuilding, and the soul-crushing sameness of high-rise towers. Look at Vancouver: after tripling its housing stock through aggressive upzoning, the city is now a soul-less forest of plastic-looking towers, almost as bad as Hong Kong — where single-family homes are nearly extinct, housing is sky-high, and homelessness remains rampant. Do the authors really want SF to go down that path?
State Senator Wiener’s SB 79 shows the math doesn’t add up. A Tier 1 transit zone in San Francisco would allow nearly 120,000 people per square mile — denser than Manila, the world’s most crowded city — yet the city’s projected population growth for the next 25 years would fit into less than a quarter of one of these zones. SB 79 primarily benefits developers, ignores infrastructure limits, and does nothing to make housing affordable.
Simply adding units doesn’t solve affordability. Without policies to capture speculative gains for the public, upzoning only enriches landowners. Thoughtful, targeted development and protections for neighborhoods and historic buildings actually help both residents and affordability. Blanket YIMBYism may sound progressive, but in practice it risks turning SF into a high-priced, homogenized city stripped of character — and still unaffordable for the people who call it home.
https://48hills.org/2025/09/the-bizarre-incompetence-of-wieners-sb-79/
https://macleans.ca/economy/why-canadas-housing-crisis-is-not-just-a-supply-and-demand-problem/
https://48hills.org/2024/09/vancouver-study-shows-how-the-yimby-narrative-has-failed-in-real-time/
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Do the authors even like living in the Richmond? Reading this, you’d think they want to wipe out everything that makes this neighborhood and San Francisco special. Historic buildings, mom-and-pop stores, the character of our streets they act like none of it matters. And they seriously bring up Office Depot and Chase Bank? Those are real businesses operating right now. What are they gonna do, just kick them out? That’s mean, not “pro-housing.”
And honestly every NEW build I’ve seen in the Richmond is UGLY. Cheap materials, cookie-cutter design, just boring boxes. These so-called “up and coming architects” don’t know what they’re doing. Why can’t they build something with actual charm, like the Victorians we all love? Fine, build new if you must but at least make it look pretty. Just look at that newish building on 8th and Fulton it looks like a dorm. Totally uninviting. Who actually wants to live in that?
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