
San Francisco supervisors opposing bill to increase housing density - Reedx
https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/supes-sound-off-against-bill-increasing-housing-density-near-transit-hubs/
======
pcwalton
To understand this, you need to realize that San Francisco politics is a
perpetual no-holds-barred fight between two factions within the local
Democratic Party: the "Moderates" and the "Progressives" (although the Progs
also contain some members of other parties, like the Greens and the DSA). The
Progs hate the Mods with a burning passion and are constantly trying to
undercut them. Generally, Moderates tend to win city-wide races, while
Progressives tend to win district supervisor races. Right now, the mayor's
office and all state-level seats--including Scott Wiener, who authored the
bill in question--are occupied by Mods, while the Progs have a veto-proof
supermajority on the Board of Supervisors.

The Progressives tend to lean more NIMBY than their Moderate counterparts, and
some of this opposition is certainly the result of that. (Gordon Mar, the
president of the Board, is probably the biggest NIMBY of all the supervisors
at the moment, possibly excepting Aaron Peskin.) But most of this opposition
is purely tribal: the Progs on the board just want to snipe at Scott Wiener.
Progs are not categorically opposed to housing: as others have pointed out,
when Brisbane was waffling on approving market-rate housing just to the south
of San Francisco, Jane Kim, a Progressive, threatened to annex the city!

Most of this anti-SB-50 resolution is properly understood as San Francisco
tribalism more than any sort of policy grievance. SB 50 doesn't even have much
if any of an effect on a lot of the districts these supervisors represent,
either because they're exempted as "sensitive communities" (e.g. much of the
district I live in, D10) or because the districts are already upzoned (e.g.
the Mission).

~~~
ianmobbs
Being progressive and being a NIMBY aren’t compatible ideologies.

~~~
doublement
When it comes to big-money issues like housing, self-interest takes precedence
over professed ideology. Ostensibly liberal California not only has rampant
NIMBYism, but is also in contention for the most regressive property tax
policies _on Earth_ via Proposition 13.

~~~
lsiebert
Yeah Prop 13 passed when the state was much more republican leaning. Remember
both Nixon and Reagan were from California and Schwarzenegger won the
governor's race. Arguably the state only went democratic because anti
immigrant efforts, particularly prop 187 in 94, pushed moderate latino and
asian voters to vote democratic.

~~~
t-writescode
And yet they haven’t undone it, so the majority of the people actually in
power must like it

~~~
lsiebert
There are costs to changing it, just like there are costs to rewriting an app
in a new language. Only rewriting something from php to python 3 doesn't
potentially leave senior citizens on fixed income homeless.

That doesn't mean people like it, or think it's not problematic, but there has
to be an upgrade path that's viable.

------
boulos
Sigh, this kind of thinking is some sort of variant of broken-window syndrome:

> But Board President Norman Yee said San Francisco should be exempted
> altogether from Wiener’s proposal.

> He said that SB 50 “does not take into account the nuances and intended
> impacts that comes up upzoning entire neighborhoods” and he noted that there
> are large developments planned in the district he represents.

> "We’re actually building our share of housing,” Yee said. “Maybe we could
> better. But we certainly are probably doing better than most places in
> California. We have motivated communities that want to plan. We should be
> exempt from SB 50.”

It's definitely true that San Francisco is building more housing than the
other counties in the Bay Area, and that they should also do better. But that
isn't a license to ignore the need for more housing directly in San Francisco.
If anything, it's almost a non sequitor to the basic challenge facing any
major city: how do you have enough housing within a reasonable commute of the
jobs in your city?

Just earlier today [1] the mayor decried the lack of housing in the city that
our public transit employees can afford. Over 250k people were already
commuting in back in _2013_ [2]. For a city of under 1M people where job
growth has outstripped housing growth, that seems like a fairly high
"deficit".

[1] [https://medium.com/@LondonBreed/fixing-muni-
ecb536aea50e](https://medium.com/@LondonBreed/fixing-muni-ecb536aea50e)

[2] [https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-
releases/2013/cb13-r22...](https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-
releases/2013/cb13-r22.html)

~~~
Retric
The problem is not housing it’s the ratio of commercial to residential
development. Ban new commercial development and you kill job growth and thus
the ever growing demand for new housing. That’s not going to fly, but clearly
it’s all about the ratio not the absolute numbers.

PS: Well not kill, companies would end up packing more people into the same
space up to a point.

~~~
boulos
Right, it’s all about the ratio. A group of us pointed this out to the
planning commission in relation to the Central Soma Plan. It called for
something like 32k new jobs and only 8k housing units (and IIRC, nothing about
transit other than claiming through magic that existing muni, Bart and
Caltrain service would suffice).

I’ve since moved out of Soma, as the commissioners and supervisors made it
clear that while they understood the problem, they also didn’t have anywhere
else to plop down tens of thousands of jobs.

------
mc32
Freaking supes. They treat SF like their little political science experiment
and nothing of note ever gets done. Just let them build.

Do something about the car break-ins and package thefts. You know, govern the
damn city.

~~~
tehlike
It's interesting to have all these startups improving efficiency and all, but
then have a government doing exact opposite.

~~~
jgalt212
because the supervisors are just acting in the short term best interest of
property owners. limit supply and prices will go up. they're all on the take.

~~~
codyb
Aren’t those the people that make up their communities?

~~~
mntmoss
The money going into SF is big enough these days(just look at the city budget,
it's a multiple of similarly large cities elsewhere in the US) that the
government has fallen into a default of over-regulating everything and then
carving out shortcuts and excemptions, and this isn't a new trend, even - SF
has always been expensive but the pay-to-play system really started picking up
steam with Willie Brown's mayorship back in the 90's, amid the original dot-
com boom.

When a city is "hot" and the working population is very transient, which is
the case with SF's new tech workforce, nobody is really being a watchdog. The
existing property owners will drift along, yelling about anything that might
concievably affect their property values, and they get thrown bones to stay
complacent since they're the most consistent voters. But they don't pay rent,
and the majority of the workers still expect to be here as a career stepping
stone and then move on to somewhere that doesn't suck, and so they put up with
the rent and don't put down roots. People staying long-term under rent control
hang onto their position for as long as they can. There's a lot of kicking
cans down roads going on, hence the system trundles on.

------
paulsutter
Really the problem is San Francisco voters. How many tech people actually
vote?

~~~
pmoriarty
...and how many are home owners or landlords?

------
StuffedParrot
SB-50 is the market-rate bill, but is just one of many movements to increase
density.

------
c3534l
So just business as usual in San Francisco, then.

------
jdkee
This is criminal.

