Editor:

Mayor Lurie’s “upzoning” plan won’t work for the western neighborhoods. He calls this his “Family Zoning Plan.” It is anything but. The so-called “Builder’s Remedy” would be far worse.

The plan would raise height limits from the current four stories in many places to as much as eight stories. It would encourage the demolition of single-family housing and even small apartment buildings in favor of larger apartment buildings. 

The plan claims that people would commute to work on Muni. They would walk to stores which would pop up in their neighborhoods.

It will not only not work, but will actually drive many families from the City. The main reason it won’t work is that transit on the west side of the City is not up to the task. On a good day, it takes 45 minutes to commute to downtown from the outer neighborhoods. It can take 40 minutes on transit to get from homes in the Richmond to shopping in the Sunset and vice-versa. Commuting to Marin or the Peninsula on transit is nearly impossible and requires a car.

Almost 90% of the homes in the Sunset and 80% of homes in the Richmond have at least one car. Living on the western side of the City without a car is very difficult. It is especially difficult for families. Imagine taking a child, a stroller, a shopping bag, and the family dog on a Muni bus. Walk by any school in the area at 3 p.m., and you will see a line of cars outside waiting to pick up kids underscoring the necessity of cars for families in this part of the City..

These new buildings will not have parking, forcing the new tenants to compete for scarce parking spaces on the street. If families can’t have cars, many will have no choice but to leave the City.

High-density neighborhoods require the kind of subways that San Francisco does not have. San Francisco has just 19 subway stations compared to hundreds in high density cities like New York, Chicago, London and Paris. Subway lines must be built before new high-density housing. In New York, subway lines were often built in neighborhoods before there was housing. 

When I arrived in the 1980s, the South of Market area, then a district of old warehouses, presented a prime opportunity to create a forward-thinking, walkable city. Instead, a regrettable urban sprawl ensued. In the 30 years before the pandemic, the city added 200,000 office workers (see here and here), but only 80,000 housing units (here and here). This imbalance led to skyrocketing rents and nightmarish commutes. The developers built what was most profitable in the short term and ignored the very foreseeable consequences. 

The same developers are now advocating for the bulldozing of west side neighborhoods. Their aim is to construct the housing they neglected to build decades ago, profiting from a problem that they created at the expense of the residents.

Andy Fields