What is UPZONING?

Mayor Daniel Lurie’s “Family Zoning Plan” proposes the most drastic zoning changes ever made to the San Francisco Planning Code—and possibly to San Francisco. It will have an outsized effect on the Richmond District. 

Two-thirds of the City will be affected by a plan that allows for the demolition of houses, apartment buildings, small businesses, venues, places of worship, to be replaced with for 14-story development along many major commercial corridors and 4 and 6-plex development in residential neighborhoods. It is a complete redevelopment of our City that, if passed, will result in innumerable irrevocable historical and cultural losses.

The Housing Element law allows the State to force cities and towns throughout California to build thousands of new units, whether or not it is feasible to do so. If not, an unheard of and unprecedented rule called the Builder’s Remedy kicks in: if a city doesn’t build according to the housing mandate, a developer can circumvent all housing regulations to build whatever they want.

While San Francisco has over-built its share of market-rate housing many times over, it has only fulfilled about one-quarter of the affordable housing that it has committed to build. As we have all seen, market-rate has been prioritized time and again.

In fact, the Planning Department’s own study found that no project currently meets minimum profitability. Under an improved economic outlook, multi-unit apartment buildings would only be profitable for the developer to build—if each unit is rented for $4,600 or more per month. With these metrics, affordable housing will never be built.

At the same time that the State and the Mayor’s Plan is demanding the development of 80,000 new units, there are currently at least 34,000 units sitting vacant throughout San Francisco that could be used to house people. What is to say that when new units are built, they will not also sit empty? Shouldn’t we start with making those empty units available?

In San Francisco, like many major cities, real estate speculation causes housing to function as an uninhabited real estate investment rather than a viable place to live. There is no guarantee that if new units are built, they will be affordable, accessible, or even made available as places for San Franciscans to live.

The cost for this gamble is too great. Thousands of historic buildings housing both homes and businesses would be displaced, destroying the very fabric of our neighborhoods that took generations to create.

Sixty years ago, Civic Redevelopment was proposed by City Hall as a strategy to increase the quantity and quality of housing units in San Francisco. It failed on all counts: tearing down more units per capita than it replaced and destroying vibrant neighborhoods in the process. The same forces that ushered in one of the most ill-advised planning failures in San Francisco’s history—the Mayor’s Office, the Planning Department and planning organizations like SPUR—are now championing a plan that will prove to be equally catastrophic.