Supervisor Jane Kim is oft-touted as the most progressive San Francisco elected official, having previously received the imprimatur of Bernie Sanders himself. Last Thursday, Kim chose to boost her mayoral chances with the strangest of bedfellows: residents from the wealthiest, most exclusionary neighborhoods of San Francisco.
At a press conference by the West Portal Muni station, Kim stood with westside residents opposed to S.B. 827, a bill by State Senator Scott Wiener that would legalize apartments near transit stops throughout California by removing some local zoning controls.
For the West of Twin Peaks crowd, this was akin to dropping a hydrogen bomb on their neighborhoods, a comparison they themselves made at a hearing earlier last week.
Four-to-eight story buildings near Muni and BART would “destroy San Francisco’s character,” they said on Thursday, and unravel the “fabric of our neighborhoods.” They held signs reading “Kiss Off Sunlight” and showed ominous-looking pictures of apartment buildings next to single-family homes.
George Wooding, president of the Coalition of San Francisco Neighborhoods, said the “silent majority” (hello Nixon!) who lived in “residential neighborhoods” needed Kim to stand up to 827 and “keep the integrity of the neighborhoods” intact.
Such thinking has a long history west of Twin Peaks. The areas surrounding West Portal Station—Forest Hill, St. Francis Wood, and West Portal itself—were single-family sub-developments built with racial covenants that forbade black owners. One 1912 ad for Forest Hill said that “no property will be sold to Africans or Orientals and every man who builds a house must build one that is a credit to the property.” Willie Mays was refused a house nearby after the contractor worried his business “would suffer if it became known that he had sold a property to a Black man.”
This is the legacy threatened by S.B. 827. This bill would begin to bring zoning equity to San Francisco by opening up westside land to dense development. Absent such a rezoning, the Mission and SoMa will continue to absorb the city’s demand for housing, and Forest Hill will get off scot-free in the name of “neighborhood character.”
Kim understands this. At the press conference, she said often that she was not against housing and touted her bone fides overseeing the thousands of units that have gone into District 6 under her tenure, more units than in any other district.
But for the westside? How does Kim plan to add housing to neighborhoods that decades ago enshrined a low-density “I got mine, Jack” attitude? How does she plan to radically transform these wealthy areas so that apartments can be built there and, in time, become far more affordable than the homes there now?
She doesn’t; not really.
Kim’s plan is to build three-to-five unit buildings “that fit the character of our neighborhoods” and don’t “penalize cities like San Francisco” for having good transit. She also wanted more in-law units and streamlining for approved projects.
It’s a perplexing policy statement from Kim: As she well knows, three-to-five unit buildings require zero affordable housing under city law, so incentivizing them in place of the four-to-eight story ones under S.B. 827 that do require affordable housing gives us...no low-income housing in the western half of our city whatsoever. (She later expanded her position a bit, saying it would be okay to approve buildings with up to 10 units—still too low to trigger affordability requirements.)
The Planning Department has written on this very question, saying that S.B. 827 would “likely have the effect of creating more affordable housing in [low-density] districts by allowing for denser development” as well as creating more affordable housing overall. A single-family home could be replaced by 10-16 units, it found, adding affordable housing citywide.
But Kim, buoyed by surging polling and seeking to cement westside support, is opting to kowtow to small-growth neighborhood activists whose main concerns are sunlight and property values. She could’ve engaged with Wiener on amendments to the bill to both incentivize dense housing on the westside and address displacement concerns in low-income communities. Instead, she’s made a political calculation to win over some westside votes by flat-out opposing the bill.
“I don’t see how this bill is gonna work across the state of California,” she said.
The local land use joke is that San Francisco is both a city and a county—the city is on the eastside, and the county is on the westside. It’s long past time the city expand into the county, helping to alleviate our shared housing crisis. Kim’s appeal to westside homeowners to keep their neighborhoods in amber is a naked political ploy that should make all leftists wary.
Joe Rivano Barros is the Communications Director for YIMBY Action, an organization advocates for affordable and market rate housing with the goal of bringing down the cost of housing in San Francisco and the Bay Area. You can follow him on Twitter at @jrivanob.
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