San Francisco Housing Element

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General Information

The Planning Commission is considering the final draft of its Housing Element for the San Francisco's General Plan update. A simplified description of a General Plan is the equivalent of a 10-year business plan that the State requires each county to prepare, which is based on information collected from the last census.

The Housing Element is one of the many topics covered in the General Plan update.

The substance of the proposed Housing Element was first presented to Cow Hollow at our 2003 annual meeting by its chief proponent, Gerald Green, Director of the San Francisco Planning Department. At that time, he forewarned the members in attendance that the document would be controversial, and indeed it is.

The philosophical premise of the Housing Element is based on two ideas:

1) that the way to make housing in San Francisco more affordable is to build more of it (up to 20,000 units) The single family residence is an inefficient use of land and should be replaced with multi-family buildings allowing for greater density at affordable prices. and

2) a "public-transit first" policy takes precedence over the current requirement of 1:1 off-street automobile parking considerations.

The Housing Element proposes to increase residential densities up to 1,200 feet on either side of "transportation corridors", allowing multi-family residential development up to 8 stories (80 feet) high. These apartment or condo projects would have no requirement for off-street parking. Theoretically, this would allow development of 8 story multifamily residential buildings with no off-street parking requirements along Greenwich, Filbert and Union Streets since the Housing Element considers Lombard Street to be a "transportation corridor".

When all of the "transportation corridors" and their corresponding swaths of high-rise development areas are overlaid on a map of San Francisco, the overall impact of the development potential enabled by the Housing Element becomes abundantly clear…up to 25% of San Francisco's land mass would be effected.

A second way provided by the Housing Element to increase the housing stock would be to legalize the many 'in-law' units that now exist or could be developed in existing housing. This would permit a change in zoning for any given property with no input from or recourse by the effected neighbors.

The Cow Hollow Association has been proactive in preservation of the Cow Hollow neighborhood characteristics. Indeed, "preservation of the neighborhood characteristics" is the one and only policy statement of the Association. Based on the stated objectives of Proposition M (preservation of San Francisco's individual neighborhood characteristics) passed by the voters several years ago, Cow Hollow prepared the Cow Hollow Neighborhood Design Guidelines, which were submitted to and approved by the Planning Commission.

The new members of the Planning Commission now want to vacate the substance of Prop M in favor of a housing-at-any-price approach. The Housing Element has been developed by staff planners and will be (has been) adopted by a Planning Commission that is appointed, not elected. The Planning Commission will accept (has accepted) the Housing Element with public input but without the expertise and neutrality that an Environmental Impact Statement would provide.

The Housing Element contains statistical information that even the planners admit is outdated. The information defining the scarcity and expense of housing reflects the housing situation, as it existed at the height of the dot-com era three years ago. Yet, public policy that will have devastating effects on the people of San Francisco is being developed based on data that is admittedly flawed and hopelessly out of date.

San Francisco is the second most densely populated city in the United States behind New York City. The effects of the Housing Element could raise San Francisco to number one. When this point has been brought to the attention of the planning staff, they see no problem with it.

Although the Housing Element will go to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for review, there is a legal question about the Board's ability to reject the Housing Element passed by the Planning Commission.

The Cow Hollow Association and other neighborhood associations from throughout the City are taking steps to raise public awareness about this matter but there is considerable indifference at this point. The newspapers have been un-characteristically silent on this issue although the Chronicle did run an editorial on Sunday, September 28, 10 Ways to Improve San Francisco, which embraced the concepts of the Housing Element.

Now is the time to write that once-in-a-lifetime letter or email or phone members of the Board of Supervisors with a demand that the housing solutions contained in the Housing Element be stopped or overturned.

Once single-family residences are lost, they will never come back.