A new City Hall report throws cold water on Mayor Lurie’s “family zoning” plan, saying it won’t really build much housing. YIMBY groups are threatening to sue, while west side voters say it’s overdevelopment and are threatening a recall.
With the city of San Francisco staring down the barrel of a state-mandated requirement to build 82,000 new housing units by the year 2031, Mayor Daniel Lurie has made his signature proposal a so-called “family zoning” plan to meet that requirement. That plan calls for upzoning that would allow for heights of up to six stories in the mostly single-family housing Sunset District, 16 stories along the Marina’s Lombard Street, and up to 24 stories on parts of Van Ness Avenue. The proposal is working its way through City Hall, but many SF residents have been giving elected officials an earful claiming that this is a ridiculous amount of overdevelopment.
On Thursday, Lurie’s plan took a huge punch in the stomach. A report from City Economist Ted Egan forecast that Lurie’s plan would only result in 40% of the units required for that 82,000-unit goal, and even that 40% likely wouldn’t all materialize until 14 years after the 2031 target date. Mission Local adds that the report found Lurie’s plan wouldn’t really make apartments more affordable either, with estimated monthly renter savings only $75 to $125 a month, even if the upzoning came to full fruition.
In other words, the City Economist says that Lurie’s plan is too weak to hit the housing goals. It adds that the proposed height and density increases would still only yield an additional 732 units per year, when more than 10,000 units a year would be necessary for the state-mandated goal.
So today, the Chronicle reports that YIMBY groups are threatening lawsuits against San Francisco for the zoning plan not going far enough, just one day after the City Economist report came out. Meanwhile, that same Chronicle report says that District 7 voters are starting to organize a recall against Supervisor Myrna Melgar, saying that she’s colluding with Mayor Lurie to take this upzoning business way too far and overdevelop their neighborhoods.
First let’s hear from the YIMBY groups who swear they’ll sue the city, represented by the California Housing Defense Fund (CalHDF), whose whole deal is mostly suing cities or threatening to sue cities if they don’t permit enough housing. Their website even declares “We carry a big stick, and we aren’t afraid to use it.”
“The City must rezone as promised in its housing element — it must upzone enough to produce (not merely attain capacity for) 36,282 units based on an analytical model that assesses the probability of development for rezoned parcels under current economic conditions,” the group wrote in a letter to the SF Board of Supervisors. “If the City does not obey the law on these points, CalHDF stands ready to challenge the City’s intransigence in court.”
And then there’s this whole “Recall Myrna Melgar” thing brewing. Melgar chairs the Supervisors’ Land Use Committee, and the recall threat is ironic, considering that she’s been offering numerous amendments that would actually soften Lurie’s upzoning plans (for example, exempting rent-controlled buildings from potential demolition to build taller buildings).
That hasn’t stopped the threats of a recall against Melgar, threats that have been popping up ever since the dust settled on the Joel Engardio recall.
The Chronicle says that potential recall effort already has “five core organizers,” and they spoke to one of them.
“She’s not representing the homeowners of District 7 at all,” that organizer Dave Bisho told the Chron. “We’re ready to pull the trigger.”
That paper also noted that flyers have been turning up in mailboxes and around District 7, formatted as a “demolition notice,” and saying that “Under Mayor Lurie’s Family zoning plan this building is subject to demolition,” plus claiming that Melgar “had a chance to save your home but she decided against it.”
So both the YIMBYs and the NIMBYs appear very willing to get ugly in their fight against Lurie’s upzoning plan, though with polar opposite arguments that it either goes too far, or doesn’t go far enough.
Meanwhile, the state requires that SF’s upzoning plan be approved by the end of January. So it’s looking like a rocky three months ahead for Mayor Lurie and his high-stakes upzoning plan, and somehow Supervisor Myrna Melgar is likely to have a lot of headaches ahead on this thing too.
Image: Joe Kukura, SFist