Over a year after it was introduced, Mayor London Breed’s “Cars to Casas” upzoning legislation will finally come before the San Francisco Board of Supervisors today. On Monday, it received a positive recommendation from the Land Use Committee, even as committee member and District 5 Supervisor Dean Preston called the attempt to motivate developers to build on former automotive sites a “complete nothing burger” that would not meaningfully increase housing in the city.
Preston’s comments came in response to a feasibility study he had requested on the legislation, which showed that not one of 16 possible scenarios, including those with the Cars to Casas density bonuses, would lead to the feasible creation of more housing.
“I think this ordinance before us kind of epitomizes the problem right now with our approach on housing,” Preston said. “It’s made for press releases and coverage and not for actual housing policy.”
But several housing advocates at the meeting spoke in favor of the legislation, with the Housing Action Coalition’s Jake Price calling it a “first step forward.”
Those thoughts were echoed by Aaron Starr, manager of legislative affairs for Planning and the mayor’s point person on the legislation at the hearing. In an email interview before the land use vote, Starr said that while the report showed that projects would still be infeasible with density decontrol, it also found that feasibility improved under the proposed ordinance.
“It shows the ordinance is moving the city in the right direction,” he said.
Starr said that he was not surprised by the feasibility report’s findings, given similar results in a feasibility study for Supervisor Rafael Mandelman’s fourplex legislation, also designed to moderately increase density, and the general slowdown in housing construction citywide. The most notable thing about the report, he said, was that it showed “that there are things out of our control that impact housing feasibility—such as labor, materials, land costs—but that we can help reduce the feasibility gap by allowing greater density and removing process.”
Starr did not “want to venture a guess” on how the legislation would fare before the full board, which often has a contentious relationship with the mayor.
Though both Preston and District 3 Supervisor Aaron Peskin voted to move the legislation forward with a positive recommendation, they also showed concern that the additional density might drive up land purchase costs for affordable housing providers, which could be a preview of their “nay” vote at the full board. Land Use Committee Chair and District 7 Supervisor Myrna Melgar, however, said she did not see evidence that purchase costs would go up at former automotive sites due to the upzoning and was generally more supportive.
“I think that this does make for less impediments and I like that,” she said at the meeting, adding that her district’s “enormous” and often empty church parking lots would be good candidates for “repurposing.”
“What we want to do is incentivize what we want to see, and I do think we want to incentivize moving off of automotive uses and into other uses,” she said, while also agreeing with the general sentiment of her colleagues regarding the feasibility study results. “Is this going to create things that we want to see right now? Obviously not.”
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