What's a bigger problem in San Francisco today: not enough tech offices, or not enough housing?
Obviously the need for housing is greater, and I say that as someone who works in tech. The City produced eight new jobs for every new home since 2010. And people are noticing the imbalance. Even an entrepreneur is likely to tell you that while signing an office lease is annoying, recruiting and retaining employees is much more difficult as people flee Bay Area housing costs.
But if you said, “forget housing, we need as many new offices as we can get,” then the Planning Department has your back.
City planners want to load up Central SoMa (the slice between 2nd and 6th Streets where a subway will open in 2019) with space for 50,000 jobs and only 7500 homes. The plan boldly and openly declares its intent to minimize apartments. This, they say, is fine, because we're doing such a great job building lots of housing everywhere else. Huh? Have they seen what happens at a Planning Commission hearing on new housing?
Planners will tout that 33% of this insignificant amount of housing is subsidized affordable. But if that's all that mattered, we could build three townhouses for the entire neighborhood, sell two to the uber-rich, and have a 500-year waiting list for the third. When you plan for a housing shortage, as the Central SoMa Plan does, you push more people out of market-rate and rent-controlled housing and into the already long lines for affordable housing - of which we don't (and won't) have enough.
The Planning Department will also try to dazzle us with the prospect of new parks, community centers and other goodies paid for through impact fees, which rings a bit hollow considering so many people won't be able to afford to stick around and enjoy it.
The Central SoMa Plan shuns opportunities for housing so blatantly that members of YIMBY Action voted overwhelmingly to oppose it.
To make this a defensible plan, housing needs to equal - or exceed - the number of new jobs in SoMa. Either revise the plan to add more space for housing, by raising the four- to eight-story height limits on most residential lots, or tilt some of the proposed office space toward residential and give other office markets like downtown Oakland a chance to shine.
City planners will resist these changes. They've been working on this plan for a long time, and they don't like having their work questioned. So we need strong leadership from our elected representatives. Maybe it will come from Supervisor Jane Kim, looking out for her SoMa and Tenderloin constituents who would see rent hikes and evictions if the job-housing imbalanced plan passed. Maybe Supervisor Hillary Ronen will step up to protect the Mission District, a favorite destination for tech workers who don't want to shell out for an expensive SoMa apartment, from further gentrification. Or perhaps, seeing as how the T-line will give a direct ride from the Bayview to Central SoMa, Supervisor Malia Cohen will call for a better plan to shield her district from becoming the new budget option for tech commutes.
So far, no one with decision-making power is speaking up, and the plan seems to have Supervisor Kim's blessing. Wherever we live in the City, we should all contact our supervisors and tell them the Central SoMa Plan needs to be fixed. We've been adding jobs without adequate housing for years. The results have been disastrous, and we can't afford to repeat that mistake in Central SoMa.
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