By Thomas K. Pendergast

As many as 20,700 units of rent-controlled housing could be demolished if San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie’s upzoning plan is passed in its current form, although District 1 Supervisor Connie Chan introduced an amendment to completely exclude them.

The Family Zoning Plan will allow developers to raise height limits for new buildings – focusing on major traffic and commercial corridors in the northern and western parts of the City, the latter having long been criticized for not taking a fair share of new housing – from the standard four-story buildings up to six, eight or even taller, depending on the exact location.

Critics say this will incentivize developers to buy up and develop properties with rent-controlled units, resulting in demolitions that will reduce the City’s rent-controlled housing stock.

District 7 Supervisor Myrna Melgar already got an amendment into the plan that will exclude buildings with three or more rent-controlled units and so far, the mayor has accepted it.

According to an analysis by Mission Local (https://missionlocal.org/2025/10/rent-control-exempted-sf-upzoning/), the change will exempt at least 84,000 rental units in 11,700 buildings from the plan, along with ground-floor retail in them. Since two-or-fewer-unit buildings are not exempted under the current version, however, Mission Local estimates that about 20,700 rent-controlled units are still vulnerable to demolition.

District 11 Supervisor Chyanne Chen has also introduced an amendment that would strengthen existing law by requiring additional relocation assistance, particularly for “lower-income” tenants and prohibiting demolitions for 36 months if there has been an owner move-in eviction or tenant harassment.

“When the proposed amendments are overlayed with each other, they meet one policy goal; displacement of tenants and small businesses should not be the cost of doing business for developers,” Chan said. “We will provide incentives to drive housing development at the much-needed vacant sites.”

“Meeting our housing obligation isn’t about a numbers game. It’s about people,” Chyanne Chen said. “It’s about our families. It’s about workers and our communities. Families who worry if their buildings are being torn down, they will never find another home that they can afford to stay in this City again.

“There is simply too much at stake for us not to get this right.”

Lurie has not stated if he supports these amendments. Phone calls and emails to the mayor’s press office asking if he will or will not support them, should the Board of Supervisors pass these amendments, received no response by press time.

But the stakes are high because a plan to expand housing by 36,000 units is now required by the State of California and expected soon. A total of 82,000 units are demanded by the state by 2031.

Failure to do so could mean lost transportation funding from the state and, in a worst-case scenario, what is called a “builder’s remedy” wherein local control is taken away and developers have free reign to build whatever they want.

“If it does not pass, let’s just be clear, the state comes in and does this work for us. And then there could be towers everywhere,” Lurie said. “Eight different counties have already been taken over by the state and the ‘builder’s remedy’ all over the state.”

Lisa Chen, the Planning Department’s manager overseeing the zoning plan, said they are already protecting rent-controlled units.

“Right now, you have to have a hearing to demolish any rent-controlled building,” Lisa Chen said. “Most often the Planning Commission does not approve these and when they do it’s usually because of extraordinary circumstances.”

She also noted that low-income tenants have a right to return at the same or an “affordable” rent, but that is not the case for middle-income tenants or above.

Yet critics contend that upzoning will incentivize developers to pressure the department for more demolitions of rent-controlled units.

Kim Tavaglione of the San Francisco Labor Council said the City needs to provide more affordable housing, not more market-rate housing, if it wants to keep workers here.

“We already have a shortage of service workers in San Francisco,” Tavaglione said. “Why would they want to commute to the City? To work in a restaurant? We have tech workers, but they are not going to bus your tables. They are not going to do those types of jobs.

“What about small business workers? They are all being pushed out. We don’t have enough healthcare workers living in our City to take care of our seniors. What’s going to happen to them?”

Housing activist Fernando Marti is concerned that the current plan might actually backfire because landlords might instead start holding more units vacant.

“Landlords will be holding out for a developer to come along based on the potential that has been created by this legislation,” Marti said. “You might then neither see the development because it’s not the right time … but you also don’t get these rent-controlled units because these landlords are fixated on an idea that they’ve got an up-story building on a site that used to be four stories but now it’s zoned for six.

“So, the easiest solution is to just take (rent-controlled units) out of the upzoning.”

Marti mused, if, as the City claims, these units will still have to go before the Planning Commission and thus be difficult to demolish, then why bother to keep them in the plan at all?

“Why not just leave them out?” he said. “What’s the gain if they already acknowledge that there are additional hoops you have to take? Why create a greater incentive for a landlord or developer to go through those hoops?”

Glenn Rogers, a journalist and columnist for the Westside Observer, called Chyanne Chen’s amendment a “praiseworthy notion” but he is skeptical it will help much.

“People who are broke are going to have to wait a couple of years to move into a new apartment,” Rogers said. “It’s completely unrealistic to think these people, who have probably moved out of state, will even be able to ask them to come back. I don’t see that happening.”

And if the plan succeeds in creating more housing in the western and southern parts of the City, there is still the issue of building out the infrastructure to meet more demands – particularly the Emergency Firefighting Water System (EFWS), a parallel auxiliary water system of more robust piping built after the 1906 earthquake to help fight post-quake fires. This system does not extend west of 12th Avenue in the Richmond or west of 19th Avenue in the Sunset, nor does it cover many southern neighborhoods.

“Currently our (EFWS) is not adequate to control fires that we expect to occur in the event of the next big one,” said Sunset resident and community activist Lisa Arjes. “It covers the northeast part of the City but leaves the western suburbs and the Bay View and Hunters Point unprotected.

“There have been three bond measures: one in 2010, one in 2014 and one in 2020, and two Civil Grand Juries. The recommendations of both Civil Grand Juries were the same – to extend the auxiliary water supply system to the rest of San Francisco and do it urgently,” Arjes said.

“As a Sunset resident and taxpayer, this makes me angry,” she said. “We really need to get appropriate infrastructure in place before densification.”

At a rally in front of City Hall, another Sunset resident and the owner of Great Wall Hardware on Taraval Street, Albert Chow, asked for a show of hands by people that were there to support supervisors Chan and Chen’s legislative amendments.

“How many of you have had friends and families that have been forced to move out of San Francisco due to affordability?” Chow asked. “We cannot talk about development without talking about small businesses. Too often when developments rise, these small businesses are the first to fall. They’re displaced by construction, priced out of new leases, left to fend for themselves.

“Meanwhile the developers and the landlords walk off with all the profits. That’s not equity; that’s exploitation.”

Breaking news at press time: Ted Egan of the San Francisco City Controller’s Office issued a report analyzing the Family Housing Plan and concluded the most optimistic assessment is it will produce 14,646 new units over a 20-year-period, less than half of the target number of 36,000 units which the state demands by the end of this coming January.