{"id":430114,"date":"2026-08-11T21:52:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-11T21:52:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/430114\/"},"modified":"2026-08-11T21:52:09","modified_gmt":"2026-08-11T21:52:09","slug":"district-8-candidates-all-want-to-build-build-build","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/430114\/","title":{"rendered":"District 8 candidates all want to build, build, build"},"content":{"rendered":"

Even in Noe Valley, it seems that all conversations about housing come back to the Marina Safeway<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As supervisor, how would you have voted on that proposal? That\u2019s the question put to one of the four candidates running to replace the termed-out Supervisor Rafael Mandelman on Monday evening.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIf they don\u2019t want it, I\u2019ll take it over here at Market and Church,\u201d said candidate Darshini Patel, to the loudest applause of the evening from the crowd of 50-odd people, who had come to hear District 8 candidates talk about housing policy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Every other candidate at the forum \u2014 Gary McCoy, Michael Nguyen and Manny Yekutiel \u2014 agreed. All said they would support redevelopment at the Church and Market streets Safeway.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The housing policy forum, hosted by YIMBY Action and the Housing Action Coalition at Noe Valley Ministry, showed remarkable accord between the candidates. All the candidates agreed that District 8, which stretches from the Castro to Glen Park, should and must build more housing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But there was one point of disagreement: their positions on inclusionary housing<\/a> \u2014 the percentage of units that developers of market-rate housing are expected to set aside for lower-income buyers or tenants.\u00a0<\/p>\n

McCoy, a former California political director for Nancy Pelosi, told the crowd that he opposed the Board of Supervisor\u2019s decision in July to lower the inclusionary housing rate<\/a> from 15 to 5 percent for most new market rate housing in an effort to jump-start new housing production. Nguyen, a patent lawyer and LGBTQ rights organizer, also opposed lowering the rate.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

McCoy would not be where he is today, he told the crowd, without low-income housing. He spent his 20s on the streets battling addiction, he said, and went from shelters to residential hotels to permanent supportive housing, to finally being able to rent a market-rate two-bedroom apartment with his husband.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was a full ladder that existed out of homelessness that does not exist today, and we\u2019re not able to give people the opportunities that I had,\u201d McCoy said. \u201cWe need to be looking at the bottom, which is affordability, in that ladder.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

In contrast, Yekutiel and Patel both supported lowering the inclusionary rate \u2014\u00a0and in Yekutiel\u2019s case, removing it altogether for development on Market Street. Yekutiel cited a report from the city controller\u2019s office<\/a> that concluded that \u201cthe maximum economically-feasible inclusionary requirement was 0%.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cEven at 0 percent, it does not make financial sense to build in our city right now,\u201d Yekutiel said. \u201cThat is why all these projects are stalled.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI would like to be your builder supervisor,\u201d Yekutiel continued, adding that his candidacy was endorsed by GrowSF and AbundantSF, while McCoy was endorsed by former Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, who has historically supported<\/a> new affordable housing more than the market-rate kind.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not interested in waving my hands around and talking about policy. I\u2019m interested in getting housing built, units in the sky and people living in our neighborhoods,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"SafewayAll District 8 candidates said they would support redevelopment at the Church and Market streets Safeway. Photo by Junyao Yang on Aug. 26, 2024.<\/p>\n

If elected, Yekutiel continued, he would get 10,000 new homes built in eight years, first by building 6,000 of them on Market Street between Castro and Octavia. There, he wants to remove \u201call the barriers towards building housing,\u201d including inclusionary housing requirements, height limits, transfer taxes, impact fees, compliance issues, among others.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s let people build, let\u2019s let them build,\u201d Yekutiel said. \u201cThen take the property tax that comes from all those additional units and use that regular revenue to build the kind of affordable housing that the market cannot bear.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Yekutiel estimated that he could spur the development of at least 3,000 of those new homes on underutilized land in District 8, from the Beck\u2019s Motor Lodge on Market Street (a legacy business), the Safeway in Diamond Heights and the Glen Park BART parking lot. Finally, another 1,000 new homes would come from incentivizing building ADUs.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the past 10 years, only 722 housing units were completed in District 8 \u2014 just 86 of them were in 100-percent affordable projects and 65 were inclusionary units in market-rate developments, according to the Planning Department<\/a>. The majority of these units were built before the pandemic along Market Street.<\/p>\n

The abundance of already permitted but stalled development across the city was, Nguyen said, a missed housing opportunity. Now might be the time to focus on getting developers to follow through on projects that were already approved, instead of trying to incentivize them to come up with new ones, he said. \u201cYou need to build this housing or you lose your entitlement. That could be a fun piece of legislation,\u201d Nguyen said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cHousing needs to actually be produced. I want to see all the cranes,\u201d Nguyen added. \u201cLet\u2019s see what it\u2019s like as a pro-housing, anti-displacement candidate.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Nguyen was the only District 8 candidate who did not support the mayor\u2019s upzoning plan<\/a>, he said, because he wanted it to contain stronger tenant protections<\/a>. Now that the upzoning plan had already passed, he said keeping the development impact fees and the inclusionary requirements was critical.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need to actually make the developers \u2014 who are going to make a ton of money \u2014 we need to make them pay,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

McCoy, meanwhile, said that he supported the mayor\u2019s upzoning plan, and that he would focus on reforming San Francisco\u2019s building codes through policies like legalizing single-stairway apartment buildings and publishing pre-approved plans for ADUs so that a homeowner could get a permit to build one more easily.\u00a0<\/p>\n

McCoy said he also supports state laws such as lot splits, building on the land of houses of worship and removing discretionary review on code-compliant housing developments.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He also wants to follow Supervisor Bilal Mahmood\u2019s lead to expand group housing<\/a>, such as residential hotels and co-living homes with shared kitchens and common space for seniors, workers and people in recovery.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There was no moderator at the housing panel \u2014\u00a0instead, each candidate had 15 minutes to talk about their housing platform and answer questions from audience. That may have played a role in why a forum focused on one of the most contentious issues in San Francisco politics, ended on a high note.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m just incredibly tickled how every single candidate was focused on getting more housing built,\u201d said Stephen Dodson, a board member at SF YIMBY. \u201cI like how every candidate wanted to have the Marina Safeway in our backyard.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Even in Noe Valley, it seems that all conversations about housing come back to the Marina Safeway. As…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":430115,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[109695,35072,1011,101,103,102,104,106,105,169352],"class_list":["post-430114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-district-8","tag-election-2026","tag-housing","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news","tag-supervisor-race-2026"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=430114"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430114\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/430115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=430114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=430114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=430114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}