by Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt
The new line from the neoliberals, Big Tech, and the mayor’s allies, and we saw it all through the campaign, was “a city that works.” Now Heather Knight at the Chron has picked it up:
No, San Franciscans haven’t turned into a bunch of right-wing Donald Trump lovers as some far-left city leaders and their acolytes repeat ad nauseam on Twitter. They just want a city that works — and they’re willing to put their money behind commonsense, good-government efforts in a bid to make that a reality…
San Francisco is required to adopt a new Housing Element to the General Plan, and the state wants it to include provisions to build 84,000 new housing units over the next eight years, and 46,000 of them need to be below-market rate.
That’s impossible, unless the state and federal government dramatically increase their spending: The price tag for the affordable housing is $19 billion.
And right now, hardly any developers want to build any sort of housing in San Francisco; the costs are too high and the returns are too low to generate the kind of profits that investors demand…
And yet, the fantasy world of the Housing Element continues.
On Tuesday/15, the Board of Supes, sitting as a Committee of the Whole, will hear a presentation on the document. Two days later, the Planning Commission is slated to approve the Final Environmental Impact Report and give its nod to the new Housing Element…
Comments From lawyer Sue Hestor, who has been consistently right (and never wrong) on planning issues for 50 years:
The EIR omits an issue, which we have been underproducing housing for low-income people, for working-class people, and instead the entire incentive is to apply, approve, and build luxury housing, and that housing can’t accommodate real workers. People working in San Francisco hotels and the retail district need housing. If they are not housed in San Francisco, at rents they can afford or housing prices they can afford to buy, they will sprawl throughout the region, and that affects transportation, noise, air pollution, and all the things that we are trying to step down. Instead, we are going to worsen them…
If you want to read all of the comments and responses to the EIR, the document is here. The city planners simply say that since the Housing Element includes a lot of language about equity and racial justice, those things are going to happen…(more)
AND
The other huge, defining planning and economic issue for the city will be the focus of a set of hearing at the Budget and Finance Committee Wednesday/16: What is the city going to do about downtown?…
For more than half a century, mayors and supervisors have viewed downtown offices as the economic hope of the city. San Francisco’s entire transit system is designed to get workers from the neighborhoods to downtown. City leaders have courted not just developers but finance, insurance, and real-estate industries, then tech, to fill those towers…
Modest ideas and plans to help building owners aren’t going to work. So let me make a wild suggestion that might: Maybe downtown should be the new arts district of the world.
Anybody have a better idea?…(more)
Yeah. How about turning those towers into housing and leave the west side of the city alone. Bring back live-work zoning. Let people build their homes in the empty offices. That is what the artists did in the empty warehouses and industrial zones on the 1970’s.