Posted Feb 7, 2023, 12:28 AM
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Join Date: Jan 2012
Location: The Bay
Posts: 11,685
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Quote:
Housing plan in hand, San Francisco basks in YIMBY praise
Adam Shanks | Feb 5, 2023
All of a sudden, San Francisco has found itself the belle of the YIMBY ball.
OK, maybe not. But it’s at least on the yes-in-my-backyard housing advocates’ invite list.
San Francisco stood above many other cities when it adopted a state-compliant Housing Element on time last week, bucking its reputation as a housing-hating bastion of NIMBYism.
In doing so, The City did what Berkeley, Oakland, and countless other cities could not: It laid out a roadmap for the development of enough new homes to meet the needs of its residents over the next eight years.
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The next phase is implementing the plan, which if successful will open the door to the construction of 82,000 new homes across San Francisco.
That requires major changes to The City’s zoning laws, particularly by allowing denser development along west-side corridors with access to transit and other amenities, as well as improving and streamlining its much-maligned permitting processes.
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By adopting a compliant Housing Element, San Francisco avoided two major consequences.
First, it stood to lose out on millions in critical state funding for transportation, housing and other infrastructure projects if it failed to meet the state’s deadline.
That’s a very real penalty to city leaders like Supervisor Matt Dorsey, whose district includes Mission Bay and SoMa.
“If we lose funding for affordable housing, funding for transit, I think my district is disproportionately harmed, so I feel a real investment in this,” Dorsey said.
The absence of Housing Element would have also left The City vulnerable to “builder’s remedy,” which would allow housing developers to bypass local zoning regulations as long as at least 20% of the proposed units were affordable.
While legal questions about builder’s remedy remain, developers have already shown they’re willing to test this uncharted territory. Cities that didn’t adopt a compliant Housing Element have been quickly hit with builder’s remedy projects, which effectively negate strict residential zoning requirements.
“It does have an element of Christmas morning,” Trauss said. “San Francisco did manage to avoid that for now, but I am excited to see how that dynamic plays out in the rest of the Bay Area. What to expect is that there’s going to be cities that don’t have residential zoning for some time, and it’s going to be great.”
The builder’s remedy could have been powerful in San Francisco, given its demographics and housing market. Housing projects that require 20% of units to be affordable can’t turn a profit everywhere, but they can in a city like San Francisco and other expensive markets. This is largely because the median income — the metric by which “affordable” is set — is already high, as are market-rate rents.
“San Francisco is absolutely a city that would’ve been targeted with builder’s remedy projects,” Elmendorf said.
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The Housing Element is not just a plan, but a promise. The document lays out very clear deadlines to implement recommended permitting policy changes (18 months) and zoning reforms (3 years).
If it fails to meet those targets, Housing and Community Development could declare The City out of compliance with its Housing Element. Traditionally, that has never happened, even when cities have fallen well short of the goals outlined in their Housing Elements.
But HCD has been strengthened, thanks in part to legislation spearheaded by elected officials like San Francisco Sen. Scott Wiener. And a Housing Element “is no longer a paper exercise,” the agency promised in 2021.
Still, three years is a long time in politics. Housing advocates expressed some concern that the political will of state government could change before cities like San Francisco actually implement the zoning changes outlined in their Housing Elements.
But organizations like YIMBY law could be waiting to take action.
“Theoretically, if in three years if HCD doesn’t want to bring the hammer down, housing advocates like ours still could,” Trauss said.
Numerous other factors could stymie San Francisco’s housing production in the coming years — a recession, supply chain disruptions or interest rates, just to name a few. But Dorsey said The City simply needs to control what it can, which is the implementation of the Housing Element.
To Dorsey, the stakes are huge.
“If this is something that we live up to, this is going to be one of the most important things the City has done in its history,” he said.
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/housing/...e44853e-a28f-11ed-81f7-ef1b52291ffa.html
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