Supervisor Bilal Mahmood is asking the city to create a centralized database with information about all its properties, a list he hopes will be useful for identifying sites for grocery stores, food pantries, and affordable housing.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The move was inspired by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose administration took an inventory<\/a> of all city-owned land and then identified sites that could be used for housing development.\u00a0<\/p>\n Yes, San Francisco has a property<\/a> database<\/a>, but Mahmood wants more information for each piece of property \u2014 what it could be used for, if it is vacant or in use, and its historic status, for instance.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have information in a lot of different places,\u201d said Angela Yip, the spokesperson for the City Administrators Office, which includes the Real Estate Division. \u201cWe don\u2019t have one single database.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The city lands and facilities databases, for instance, do not include information about a property\u2019s existing leases or historic status.\u00a0<\/p>\n To Mahmood, this fact is unsurprising. He said that last year when his office was working on legislation related to homeless shelters in the city<\/a>, he discovered the city had no\u00a0 consolidated list of all its shelters.<\/p>\n That was because different city departments \u2014 homelessness, health, and housing \u2014 \u201cweren\u2019t talking to each other to consolidate one central list because there wasn\u2019t technically a need to,\u201d Mahmood said. Now, every six months a list of all city shelters<\/a> is released.\u00a0<\/p>\n He hopes something similar will happen with the database of city properties. \u201cI think right now, everyone in City Hall believes that we have to make decisions based on data, but you can\u2019t make decisions based on data if you don\u2019t have a consolidated, clear source of that data,\u201d Mahmood said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Once he has the list in hand, he hopes to identify places for more grocery stores or food pantries. Both, he said, are lacking in the Tenderloin.\u00a0<\/p>\n Last month, his proposal to tax vacant grocery stores<\/a> to incentivize a new tenant to come in was shot down, but he now plans to address food insecurity in other ways, including by helping corner stores sell fresh produce<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cSupervisor Mahmood is asking exactly the right question: how do we use every resource this city has, differently and more creatively, to meet this moment?\u201d said Tanis Crosby, executive director of the San Francisco-Marin Foodbank. \u201cPutting underutilized resources to work to reduce food insecurity is exactly the kind of focus we need.\u201d<\/p>\n Mahmood hopes that the property database will also be able to help identify sites for affordable housing development, much like it did in New York City.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cCity owned property can be faster to develop,\u201d Mahmood said, explaining that developing on city owned property is often cheaper because you don\u2019t have to buy the land and easier because state laws have streamlined the permitting.\u00a0<\/p>\n