San Francisco London Breed, here at her annual State of the City address, in San Francisco on March 7, has directed the Planning Department to do more aggressive planning on housing.
Millions of dollars in state funding lost. Kitchen remodels put on hold indefinitely as the city is barred from issuing the permits. A wall of skyscrapers along Ocean Beach the city is powerless to stop.
Last year, San Francisco avoided this nightmare by passing a bold “housing element,” a state-mandated blueprint for how it will add over 82,000 homes by 2031.
As part of that plan, the city promised to lift bans on taller, denser housing across wide swaths of the city — enough to add 36,000 homes through this one change alone.
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Last year the city unveiled the details: Taller buildings would be allowed along some streets in western and northern San Francisco. Predictably, NIMBYs complained the modest plan went too far.
However, the opposite is true. The city blatantly ignored a major promise to the state: to conduct a data-driven analysis to prove that its plan was ambitious enough to actually add 36,000 new homes.
This is no laughing matter. If the state finds that the city hasn’t kept its word and “decertifies” San Francisco’s housing element, the city will face dreaded consequences, including the loss of state transportation and affordable housing funds. Far from an idle threat, the Department of Housing and Community Development has already revoked certification for neighboring cities — and there is no doubt San Francisco is in the state’s crosshairs after the city’s repeated violations of state law.
San Francisco’s failure to analyze what its plan would accomplish is especially shocking because the city has tools to easily do so — it simply chose not to.
So, as housing wonks with graduate degrees in statistics and social science, we did the analysis — and the results show that the city’s plan is four times too small.
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We came to this conclusion by first placing a public records request to get access to the city’s data and models for how it predicts housing development. We then used these same tools to analyze the city’s proposal. According to its tools, the city’s plan would add fewer than 8,000 units by 2031 instead of 36,000, or only about 22% of what is required.
The main reason the city’s rezoning plan will add so little housing — and that a plan to add 36,000 homes must be so ambitious — is that the vast majority of addresses “rezoned” for taller buildings will never be developed into new housing. This is simply because many existing owners won’t want to redevelop their properties, often since it won’t make financial sense. Indeed, the city’s analysis shows that even areas with the strongest development potential have only a 1% chance of being developed in any given year.
That’s why Mayor London Breed’s announcement Wednesday that she is directing the Planning Department to be more ambitious with its plans to add those promised 36,000 homes — could not have come at a better time. The Planning Department must rethink its illegal plan, and now it has the mayor’s direction to do so. Encouragingly, her directive reminds planners to zone for housing that has a feasible chance to be built, such as eight-story buildings near transit corridors.
Developing a plan ambitious enough to actually add 36,000 homes in San Francisco isn’t easy, but it’s entirely possible. You can do it yourself.
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Using the city’s tools, and with generous feedback from Planning Department staff, we created a web app at rezonesf.org that lets you build your own compliant rezoning plan for 36,000 new homes.
Doing so will show you that meeting the city’s promise to the state is entirely possible while following sound urban planning principles. For example, adding to the existing city’s plan by allowing eight-story buildings within an easy walk of major transit stops on the west side, lifting arbitrary caps on the number of homes allowed in buildings of a given size and revitalizing key commercial corridors with housing, would, according to the city’s models, easily add 36,000 homes.
But there’s more than one way to add 36,000 homes. Allowing six-story buildings citywide would also more than satisfy the state’s target, even while avoiding certain neighborhoods with historical patterns of displacement the city categorizes as “priority equity geographies,” such as the Mission district.
The fact that most upzoned addresses will never become new housing is also why NIMBYs scared by the city’s plan should calm down. Fear-mongering renderings that depict city streets being transformed into solid walls of 16-story buildings are a fantasy; most rezoned blocks won’t see any changes at all, and the changes that do occur largely will be spread out.
The only certain thing is that under state law, vast swaths of the city must be rezoned before January 2026. The question is not whether this will happen, but where. We invite anyone complaining in vain about state law to instead use our tool to come up with their plan that would satisfy state requirements.
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This includes the city. San Francisco has long had the tools that power our app. It must use them.
While Mayor Breed’s announcement is a step in the right direction, what counts is whether the city puts forward a plan to actually add the 36,000 units it promised to the state — and so desperately needs.
Salim Damerdji and David Broockman are volunteer leads with San Francisco YIMBY.
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