How San Francisco creates its own housing crisis
Scott Wiener
Published 5:45 pm, Monday, January 13, 2014
A fight played out last month at San Francisco's Board of Permit Appeals that was a perfect microcosm of why the city has a housing shortage: It demonstrated an aversion to new housing, coupled with an expensive planning process, topped off with arbitrary decisions.
Exhibit A: 1050 Valencia St., a former Kentucky Fried Chicken store. After a process lasting nearly a decade, the city adopted the Eastern Neighborhoods Plan, which rezoned the eastern third of San Francisco. The plan's policy goals were to increase housing density near transit and to deliver more affordable housing. The 1050 Valencia site is part of that plan area.
The developer proposed a project fully within that zoning and said he would build the required two affordable units on-site. The project would have no parking, as it is close to transit. Over the six-year process leading to approval, the developer agreed to reduce the number of units from 16 to 12 and to add car sharing. The Planning Commission approved the project over objections by some neighbors and the adjacent Marsh theater, and the Board of Supervisors rejected an environmental appeal.
Project opponents then appealed to the Board of Permit Appeals, which - citing no policy basis for its decision - arbitrarily chopped off the top story of the building. That decision reduced the number of units from 12 to nine and thus eliminated the two affordable units, because 10 units is the threshold triggering affordable-unit requirements. Welcome to housing policy in San Francisco: a policy based not so much on our city's dire housing needs but on who can turn out the most people at a public hearing.
This case-by-case decision-making process undermines all forms of housing, both affordable and market rate. Indeed, affordable housing projects are much less able to weather the time, cost and energy required to move a project through San Francisco's approval gantlet.
San Francisco is experiencing a housing crisis. One-bedroom apartments are going for $3,000 a month or more. The pressures of this market lead to displacement, including Ellis Act evictions, make it hard for working-class people to live here, and make raising a family here nearly impossible.
Yet this crisis didn't just happen. San Francisco has been unwilling to prioritize smart housing production of market-rate and affordable units, even while our laws state that housing is to be encouraged.
Over the past 10 years, San Francisco's population has grown by 75,000 people. Over the same time period, our city produced 17,000 units of housing. You do the math: Over the next 25 years, San Francisco is projected to add another 150,000 residents. If we continue to produce housing at the same anemic rate, $3,000 rents will begin to look cheap.
This disconnect - saying that we need more housing while arbitrarily finding reasons to kill or water down projects that provide that housing - is having profound effects on our city and its beautiful diversity, economic and otherwise.
I'm certainly not suggesting that the 1050 Valencia project and the loss of its two affordable and one market-rate units is going to move San Francisco's housing market. Yet, the dynamics that led to this decision, exacerbated as many 1050 Valencia projects have navigated the process over the years, have had significant effects over time. We can't keep saying we want to save the forest, while continuing to chop down trees. It's incumbent on all of us to make sure policymakers understand that they must keep the big housing picture in mind rather than make ad hoc decisions disconnected from the housing crisis we face.
sfgate.com
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...The City by the Bay is going through one of its worst housing shortages in memory. With typical high demand intensified by a regional boom in tech jobs, apartment open houses are mob scenes of desperate applicants clutching their credit reports. The citywide median rental price for a one-bedroom is $2,764 a month, but jumps to $3,500 in trendy areas.
One reason for the shortage? Me.
I’ve recently joined the ranks of San Francisco landlords who have decided that it’s better to keep an apartment empty than to lease it to tenants. Together, we have left vacant about 10,600 rental units. That’s about five percent of the city’s total — or enough space to house up to 30,000 people in a city that barely tops 800,000.
I feel a twinge of guilt for those who want to settle in this glorious city but can’t find a flat. But after renting out a one-bedroom apartment in my home for several years, I will never do it again. San Francisco’s anti-landlord housing laws and political climate make it untenable...
...To stabilize rents and prevent eviction abuses that are typical when housing is scarce, the city developed some of the nation’s toughest housing policies. Rent-control ordinances, for example, sharply limit rent increases after the initial lease for most housing constructed before 1979. As a result, many leases morph into lower-rent tenancies for life, subsidized by landlords, even when the tenants are wealthy.
In addition, a complex legal structure has been created to make evictions for just cause extraordinarily difficult.
At first many of these rules governed only apartment complexes and larger properties with many units. But in 1994 the city applied the regulations to homes if they included just one rental on the property. In other cities, including New York City, such small-time landlords have far more rights over their own homes...
nytimes.com
...Advocates for rent control say that these policies are necessary to keep landlords from raising prices beyond the ability of people to afford them. But rent-control critics note that the rules actually increase rent prices, especially over the long term, by dampening the supply of apartments.
In cities where the market reigns, people tend to be mobile, but in places such as San Francisco tenants stay put in their apartments given that they don’t want to leave their rent-controlled units. So few apartments become available. Restrictions on rent prices diminish the incentive of landlords to improve the buildings, thus leading to more substandard buildings, rent-control critics argue.
It’s not just conservatives who say so. “History has shown that the best intentioned plans of protecting tenants through rent control don’t necessarily help the low-income residents who need it most – and can actually aggravate a housing shortage, which drives up prices for those desperate to find a place to live,” opined the liberal-oriented San Francisco Chronicle.
San Francisco is a sought-after city on a tiny peninsula, which leads to a tight supply. “But the biggest problem with the Bay Area is 75 percent of the land area is off limits to development so you can’t build your way out of this,” said Lawrence McQuillan, senior fellow at the libertarian Independent Institute in Oakland. Even for cities without rent control, such as San Diego, these basic “supply and demand” lessons are useful for anyone whose “values” include affordable housing.
http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2013/Nov/25/san-francisco-values-home-prices-soaring/ |
