More than a year after announcing her “Cars to Casas” proposal in front of a former gas station turned housing development, San Francisco Mayor London Breed’s legislation to ease bureaucratic headaches and increase density for housing built on former automotive sites was passed unanimously and without comment by the Board of Supervisors.
“This legislation is part of our critical work to remove barriers to building new housing,” Breed said in a statement.
She tied the need for the legislation to the city’s state-required housing goal of creating 82,000 new homes in the next eight years, despite a feasibility study showing that even with the restrictions eased the types of housing likely to be built on former gas stations and parking lots is economically infeasible.
“We know there is much more work to do, but this is a step in the right direction,” Breed said.
Breed estimated that the removal of the conditional use authorization to turn an automotive site into a residential use, on the books since the 1990s, would save up to 18 months in the development process. The shorter timeline and the additional density provided by the legislation would increase feasibility between 10 and 60 percent, depending on the scenario, according to the study.
Buildings in more expensive neighborhoods such as the Marina and Russian Hill come closer to breaking even than in the Sunset or Excelsior. The northern neighborhoods have virtually the same development costs of $700 per square foot but can charge more for rents or home prices, the report found.
There was no comment before the unanimous vote at the board meeting on Tuesday, but in a Land Use Committee meeting on Monday Supervisors Dean Preston and Aaron Peskin expressed hesitancy about the new legislation potentially driving up costs for affordable housing providers looking to buy former automotive sites for development.
Preston requested the feasibility report back in July to see if additional affordable housing requirements could be added to the legislation, which is one reason the legislation took so long to reach the full board. After seeing the results, Preston said he wondered if the mayor would have moved forward if the report had been done earlier.
“I think this ordinance before us kind of epitomizes the problem right now with our approach on housing,” Preston said at the Land Use Committee meeting. “It’s made for press releases and coverage and not for actual housing policy.”
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