SF delays housing two years waiting for uncompleted study

The alleged shenanigans involved in San Francisco’s housing approvals may now include the delay of major downtown apartment projects for no accountable reason.

The latest housing failure: 1,300 units held up for 25 months in the historic Market Street Hub for a study that would never happen, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

The news follows an unprecedented probe launched last month by the State Department of Housing and Community Development into why San Francisco takes longer than any other city in the Golden State to greenlight housing.

For years, city planners have wanted to rezone an area around Market Street and Van Ness Avenue known as the Hub to allow taller, denser apartment buildings. The homes would be near transit. They would create union jobs. They wouldn’t displace residents, they said.

Planners singled out 15 parcels in underdeveloped lots and government buildings as promising sites for future housing.

They said rezoning the neighborhood would allow 1,300 more housing units within the parcels, including 350 affordable apartments, plus thousands of homes that were already approved, according to the Chronicle.

But in July 2020, Supervisor Dean Preston led a vote to delay the plan six months to make way for a race and equity study. He wanted input from the nearby Western Addition, where Black residents had long been displaced by development.

Tenants and Owners Development Corp. (TODCO), an affordable housing group run by John Elberling that lobbies against housing construction, volunteered to conduct the study.

It never did – and now won’t, according to the Chronicle, which spoke with Elberling.

It was Elberling who persuaded supervisors to kill a plan to build 500 units on a Nordstrom valet parking lot, which triggered the state investigation. After the October rejection, Mayor London Breed tweeted: “That’s no way to run a city.” 

The 25-month pause for a report that never happened means no developers have been enticed to plan housing on those sites, in a city with a housing shortage and a mandate from the state to build 82,000 new units by 2031.

Preston didn’t address questions from the Chronicle about the study-that-wasn’t and whether he thinks the pause on rezoning was the right move.

State Assemblyman Matt Haney, a former supervisor who represented the district that now includes the parcels, called the study that never launched “another ridiculous indictment of San Francisco’s insane process of building, or more often not building, housing.

“It’s a perfect illustration,” he said, “of why the state has taken the unprecedented step of opening a systematic review of San Francisco’s uniquely bizarre and burdensome process of housing approval and construction.”

— Dana Bartholomew

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