Housing Fail on Aisle 9: Safeway Deals Miss the Mark
The SF Chronicle recently published a story about yet another large Safeway site being gobbled up by private developer Align Real Estate in the wake of numerous zoning changes which have sparked successive land grabs. Affordable housing advocates have expressed dismay that these large opportunity sites were not prioritized for affordable housing, and worse that the on-site affordable units included are below local “inclusionary housing” standards.
While the City’s inclusionary laws currently require projects with 25 units or more to set aside 15% of the total for below market-rate (BMR) rentals, developers have been able to circumvent those requirements due to a host of State-sponsored loopholes.
The Safeway site on Mission Street in the Bernal flats is projected to net 370 units – with only 13.7% of the rentals being affordable. This is a particularly disturbing loss for a neighborhood whose area median income is $150,000 a year and where displacement has put Latinos in the minority population. Clearly the neighborhood needs guaranteed affordable housing!
The La Playa Safeway site is projected to build 526 rentals with even less affordability at 12.9% – a significant affordability loss for the Outer Richmond neighborhood.
The Fillmore Safeway site will do the bare minimum of 15% affordable housing on-site out of 1,800 units, while significantly shrinking the replacement grocery store in size and selection.
Why Does This Matter?
The State has tasked San Francisco with building 46,000 units of affordable housing by 2031 – with almost 50% of those units expected to be entitled and in the pipeline by this January. With a month out, San Francisco has about 17,000 units of affordable housing entitled and stuck in the pipeline without financing – 36% of the total need, and with no clear vision for how to build the homes San Franciscans need. And everywhere we are seeing the City settle for less than the bare minimum, without mapping and mandating a clear vision for how we will deliver these homes. Even on the City’s own properties, SF officials are killing affordable housing. The long-awaited affordable housing development at the Potrero MUNI yard saw 335 units of affordable housing evaporate overnight, after years of pre-development work with community groups.
And at last Monday’s Land Use & Transportation Committee meeting, Supervisors Melgar and Mahmood killed amendments put forward by Supervisors Chan and Chen to create an Affordable Housing Special Use District using public sites called out in Mayor Lurie’s “Family Zoning Plan”.
The City is working against itself – but it doesn’t have to be this way, as articulated by our Director, Sunny Angulo, in the SF Chronicle:
“The city could have been at the table with Safeway. My understanding from community advocates in the neighborhood is that they have been looking at this site for many years. This is what the people that actually build affordable housing have been saying for years: You need site control, negotiating power and leverage,” said PROPEL’s Director Sunny Angulo, who worked as a legislative aide in City Hall for more than a decade. “What are we doing about affordability? That is the city's responsibility.”
For the past year, affordable housing advocates have been voicing concerns about State and Mayor Lurie’s zoning changes, given that “opportunity sites” are not earmarked for binding affordability mandates. The City has long taken issue with the process of “land banking”, but it’s a credible and critical land use policy that would acquire and set aside land for the development of affordable housing. Instead, Mayor Lurie’s zoning plan creates a “non-contiguous SFMTA Special Use District”, which prioritizes the land for revenue-generating profit, i.e. market rate residential and commercial uses. This flies in the face of 2015’s Proposition K – adopted by over 70% of voters – which affirmed that the highest and best use for public land is affordable housing development.
Land is a precious, tangible asset and in 7x7 San Francisco, the scarcity of developable land drives inflated costs. When land use policies do not enable non-profits to secure priority funding or leverage negotiating power, they are not able to secure site control of opportunity sites. They lose out to better-capitalized corporations, and we lose out on options for affordable housing.
The City can create that leverage for affordable housers, by passing an Affordable Housing Special Use District and tying it to creative financing models, like WHAMI. The Office of Economic and Workforce Development (OEWD) is filled with talented real estate negotiators, and can be proactively working with the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development (MOHCD) to convene a strategy around large opportunity sites and ensuring we are meeting our affordable housing delivery mandates.
Quintin Mecke, executive director of the Council of Community Housing Organizations (SFCCHO), lamented the abdication of leadership by the City that is not creating an affordable housing financing and delivery strategy:
“If the public sector is not stepping into this moment with a vision for what public sector involvement looks like for financing, for site acquisition, then it feels like [the government is] retreating from that role.”
And while the Mayor’s Family Zoning Plan does have a list of potential “low-income sites” which are good candidates for affordable housing, it’s just that: a list. A list targeted to private market-rate developers, underscoring that the City has no plan of its own to build affordable but is relying wholly on the invisible hand of the market. These “low-income sites” should frankly be 100% affordable – instead, the City is offering additional streamlining for private developers if they commit to 20% affordable on-site, but of course, they can sidestep that requirement and still obtain additional streamlining with only a 14% commitment to affordable units. (This is because State Senator Scott Weiner applied SB 423 to San Francisco 6 years ago – policy at work, gang!)
What Can We Do To Push Better Policies?
We can let our elected officials know that their lack of leadership and vision is hurting community stability, at a time when we are experiencing record evictions and a soaring cost of living. San Francisco electeds can raise the inclusionary requirements, and State legislators can course-correct the loopholes they’ve created to squirm out of our local laws.
We can push them to bring all relevant city departments to the table to create an Affordable Housing Plan for San Francisco that includes landbanking, a Special Use District for public land, and finally leveraging the affordable housing funds and financing programs that are being reallocated or sidelined. We can push our State Legislative Delegation to do their jobs, and bring home the bacon – while they’ve passed hundreds of deregulation and decontrol laws, we haven’t seen the funding to recapture any of the value we are giving away. Boo!
There is a public Working Group meeting for the Potrero Yard coming up on December 9th at 5:30pm – you can come and support the affordable housing advocates demanding the City keep its commitment and figure out how to build the full project.
PROPEL is co-hosting a Mission/Bernal Mixer at El Rio in January, if you’re interested in learning how to plug into organizing efforts to push for more affordability at the Mission Safeway site, community determination and transparency. We’ll keep you posted!