News

From Awattorneys via email:

Aleshire & Wynder, LLP Secures A Legal Win for Restoring Local Control on Housing: Court Rules In Favor of Five California Charter Cities Declaring Senate Bill 9 Unconstitutional

On April 22, 2024 at 11:00 AM, the Honorable Curtis A. Kin in Department 86 of the Los Angeles Superior Court issued a ruling granting a Petition for Writ of Mandate challenging the constitutionality of Senate Bill 9, as applied to charter cities. Senate Bill 9 requires all California cities to ministerially approve an application for a lot split, and up to four total housing units, on a single family residential lot that meets certain specified criteria.

Five charter cities – Carson, Redondo Beach, Torrance, Del Mar, and Whitter – initiated a lawsuit in early 2022 against the State of California claiming that Senate Bill 9 is unconstitutional and invalid against charter cities. The League of California Cities and the City of Cerritos filed respective amicus briefs in the Trial Court in support of the Charter cities’ position. After extensive briefing and two hearings in Department 86, the Court ruled in favor of the five charter cities. In this litigation, the charter cities are represented by Managing Partner Sunny Soltani, Equity Partner Pam Lee, Partner Michelle Villarreal, and Associate Shukan Patel of Aleshire & Wynder, LLP along with Michael Webb from the Redondo Beach City Attorney’s office

For further information on what this ruling means or how your city can benefit from this decision, please contact Pam Lee at plee or visit awattorneys.com… (more)

Now we may approach the city and county of SF and the SF Planning Commission with the news.

Forgive repeats

By Steve Stallone : 48hills – excerpt

Peskin, Chan amendments offer accountability—but where is the affordable housing, and why are details still secret?

The supes will consider Tuesday/23 a risky plan to bail out the developers of the Treasure Island housing development. This so-called “Alternative Financing” plan, embodied in the Disposition and Development Agreement amendment, could leave the city on the hook for more than $200 million at a time when the city is already facing a huge deficit.

This should be taken seriously.

Alarmingly, many in the city, led by Mayor London Breed and Supervisory Matt Dorsey, have remained conspicuously silent about the plan’s obvious deficiencies, even in the face of the board’s own budget analyst’s dire warnings…

In accordance with the Sunshine Ordinance and the city’s commitment to transparency, the board should demand the release of the fiscal impact study the staff has cited to assure board members that the numbers will all work out. If it proves it, prove it.

The supervisors need to take the legislative analyst’s advice to “pause” the Alternative Financial Plan until that is done.

In the meantime, the board must demand a plan for when and how the promised affordable housing will be built, and tell anxious TI residents when it will be ready for occupancy…(more)

By Han Li : sfstandard – excerpt

San Francisco’s Democratic Party entered a new era Friday night as candidates from the city’s moderate political camp, who won in a landslide in the March election, were sworn into office.

The governing body, officially known as the Democratic County Central Committee, or DCCC, also elected Nancy Tung, a career prosecutor and chief-level attorney working for the District Attorney’s Office, as the party chair.

The committee will play a major role this election year as moderate mayoral candidates compete for endorsements and support. Tung said the mayoral endorsement process will start in June after the filing deadline.

The political calculation and manipulation for the mayoral endorsement may start soon, if it hasn’t started already, as multiple moderate candidates are running, including incumbent Mayor London Breed, former interim mayor Mark Farrell and philanthropist Daniel Lurie.

“The moderates in general are on the same page about ranked-choice voting,” Jade Tu, a newly sworn-in member and campaign manager for Farrell, told The Standard about the potential dual or triple endorsement of the moderate candidates. “People already are talking about endorsement, chatting about it.”…(more)

By Kevin V. Nguyen : sfstandard – excerpt

San Francisco is full of empty offices that residents and politicians keep saying need to be converted into housing, but most developers are not interested in pursuing such projects because of the high costs.

But in the exclusive Presidio Heights neighborhood, the back-to-back closures of two massive hospitals have opened the door for a different type of transformation—one where a local developer plans to turn medical campuses into over 1,300 new homes.

Both are located on California Street on either end of thriving Laurel Village—a business strip filled with ground-floor boutiques, small chains, fitness studios and beauty salons, among other small businesses. Historically, this is one of the city’s most built-out and tightly constrained neighborhoods.

One hospital is located at 3700 California St., which is the site of the former California Pacific Medical Center, recently home to Sutter Health before it decamped to Van Ness Avenue…(more)

Ever wonder why every piece of available property must be torn down and rebuilt to be converted into something it is not? As we understand it, there are plans to set up medical facilities for people who need to transition from using drugs on the street to living indoors. It seems like using the hospitals as medical facilities more or less as they are and turning some of the buildings into transitional housing within the shell would be the cheapest, and therefore our government avoids it. Somebody has to make money on every project or the government will not support it. How do we bring economic sanity to San Francisco?

By Savannah Dewberry : 48hills – excerpt

So far, the Breed Administration has not taken advantage of a program that will close in September.

In 2023, San Francisco announced its goal of having 82,000 new homes built by 2031 in order to address affordability and overcrowding concerns. This would require the city to build 28 new units every day for the entire eight year span of the project.

The city’s goals include 46,000 units of affordable housing. But only 871 were built in 2023.

A new funding program developed by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) could alleviate this issue—if the city takes advantage of it. Called Faircloth-to-RAD, the program debuted in 2021 with the first new affordable units being built in Galveston, Texas…

RAD is short for Rental Assistance Demonstration, a HUD program that launched during the Obama administration. It would allow public housing authorities to convert subsidized public housing units to Section 8 subsidies, and potentially attract private investors to help cover repairs. …

Supervisor Dean Preston’s chief of staff, Preston Kilgore, said in an interview that their office asked asked the Breed Administration to look into the RAD program back in 2022. However, it wasn’t until this month, when the Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a resolution calling on SFHA to release a call for interested developers, did SFHA and the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Developmen confirm that they plan to do a feasibility analysis of the program this year… (more)

From Scott Wiener via email

SACRAMENTO – The Senate Environmental Quality Committee passed Senator Scott Wiener’s (D-San Francisco) Senate Bill 1227, new legislation that spurs the revitalization of downtown San Francisco by providing regulatory and tax relief to a targeted area for a period of 7 years. The bill passed 4-2 and heads next to the Senate Revenue & Taxation Committee…

The bill provides an expedited pathway to convert parts of downtown San Francisco’s office-heavy downtown to a vibrant mixed-use hub of activity…

SB 1227 does not relax any local permitting or zoning requirements. The City of San Francisco will continue to implement its local permitting requirements. The City will also be able to invoke this CEQA exemption.

Second, SB 1227 expands the ‘welfare exemption’ from property tax for specified projects that provide rental housing up to 120% of the area median income, so long as projects are rented 10% below the market value, as determined by the Housing and Urban Development Fair Market Rents. This provision expands a property tax exemption used by affordable housing projects to encourage the production of moderate-income workforce housing projects in downtown San Francisco. This expansion will help the City meet its housing goals while giving more moderate-income workers a chance to locate close to jobs and supporting local businesses with an increase in area residents.

The downtown zone covered by the bill includes the Financial District, Union Square, Civic Center, Yerba Buena, East Cut, Eastern and Central SOMA, South Beach, and Rincon Hill.

SB 1227 is sponsored by San Francisco Mayor London Breed. The bill is supported by the San Francisco Housing Accelerator Fund, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, YIMBY Action, SPUR, Bay Area Council, and many others… (more)

By Randy Shaw : beyondchron – excerpt

“Anybody telling you to vote for a single mayoral candidate just wants Aaron Peskin to win.”— @sbuss, April 1

Aaron Peskin’s entry into the San Francisco mayor’s race has led to a lot of talk about moderates uniting to stop him. This won’t be easy.

Here’s why.

Breed and Farrell Fundamentally Disagree

Mark Farrell’s mayoral campaign is premised on his view that incumbent Mayor Breed has failed. From his website:

“Over the past five years, I have watched our City crumble. People don’t feel safe, the conditions of our streets have never been worse, downtown has collapsed, and we’re the butt of jokes across America. We have a crisis of confidence in City government that needs to be fixed, and it starts and stops with the Mayor.”

Can Farrell retain credibility if he starts telling voters, “Make the candidate who has caused our city to crumble your second choice.”?

I don’t see it…(more)

Why would Mark want to support Breed? In my opinion he is not that desperate to win. He wants to return San Francisco to a city he wants to live in. He thinks he can do it or he would not run. Peskin gave him the job the last time. They are probably not that far apart. We think the goals are similar. Methodology may be what is different. Financing schemes may differ as well.

Opinion By Joe Jamil : sfstandard – excerpt

We need a return to pragmatic, bottom-up neighborhood and community planning that respects existing height limits and fosters community consensus for new development, says Mo Jamil

YIMBYs are demonizing San Francisco residents and small businesses with labels like NIMBY. But such smears can’t obscure the truth about the extreme housing policies of Mayor London Breed, state Sen. Scott Wiener and their allies.

Simply put, an “upzoning” plan to double height limits and disregard public input is radical and will not benefit the city’s residents or small businesses. Rather, such moves would destroy our neighborhoods and displace the people and local businesses that make San Francisco special.

Last week, the mayor appeared to shelve the most radical elements of the upzoning plan in favor of a more targeted and nuanced approach that I and other neighbors and merchants have advocated. Despite the mayor’s clear about-face, the radical fringe YIMBY elements rushed to social media to call for an even bigger plan that demolishes existing buildings and expands the scope of the rezoning plan. Did they get the memo from Room 200 or do a temperature check of residents and merchants? Clearly not…

I identify with the many residents and merchants who are best described as SHIMBYs: Sensible Housing in My Backyard advocates. We reject polarization and name-calling. We demand pragmatism and dialogue so we can be both pro-neighborhood and pro-housing.…(more)

Moe Jamil is a deputy city attorney, Russian Hill Neighbors board member and a candidate for District 3 supervisor in November’s election. His comments are his own and do not represent the views of his employer.