Doing Your 'Fair Share' of Housing [GuestOpinion]
San Francisco’s painful and vicious battles over new development revolve around just a handful of neighborhoods. This is largely because of an unspoken rule that the wealthier, home-owner dominated areas of the city are unquestioningly off-limits to new rental housing. This unspoken rule is a continuation of decades of urban policy re-inscribing inequality across space.
The probability that your neighborhood hosts a proposed project with more than four housing units is strongly predicted by its 1935 HOLC (Homeowner’s Loan Corporation) status, if it had one back then, as illustrated in Figure 1.
Contemporary racial dynamics also appear to play a role in which neighborhoods are likely to face rapid development in the name of the environment. To meet the state’s ambitious sustainable planning goals in SB 375, the Metropolitan Planning Commission slated a set of neighborhoods as “Priority Development Areas” in the initial Plan Bay Area.
MTC argued that concentrating development in these transit rich areas would assist in reducing vehicle miles of travel (VMT). Which MUNI stops were slated as PDAs in San Francisco correlates with the number of Black residents near stops, as illustrated in Figure 2.
Planners might claim the western lines move too slowly to serve more residents. The solution is better transit, not exclusionary zoning. The relationship between development patterns and race and class power dynamics challenges us to think creatively about how San Francisco can serve the housing needs of all its current and future residents.
Randy Shaw, director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, recently proposed applying a “fair share” approach to locating homelessness services, arguing that requiring every neighbourhood doing its ‘fair share’ to address the homeless crisis would better address the crisis and, well, be fair… Why not apply the concept to all new housing development?
A ‘fair share’ framework could best address the City’s housing challenges because building new housing is a classic collective action problem. What this means is that most people agree that lack of housing is a problem they want to see solved, but few people want their neighborhood to take on the challenges of solving it. The collective action challenge around housing is why California requires all its jurisdiction to plan for their ‘fair share’ of anticipated housing needs. Why shouldn’t larger jurisdictions like San Francisco then, in turn, apply similar mandates to their own neighborhoods?
Critics may counter that projects in these areas won't “pencil out,” but a genuine upzoning of exclusionary neighborhoods can remedy that. Nothing I’m arguing is new, unfortunately: these issues and ideas have wandered through activist and academic spaces for decades. San Francisco has the opportunity to meaningfully put them into practice.
Until we address the collective action problem of housing within our cities, we should not be surprised to see development only being built in the areas where existing residents have the least power.
Matthew Palm has a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of California, Davis. His research focused on sustainable urban planning. We welcome op-ed submissions from our readers on any topics of local interest. To submit yours, email info@baycitybeacon.com.