Here’s the latest in our “Meet the Candidates” series for District 5, where we ask each candidate to answer one question per week leading up to the election. All the responses are compiled onto a single page, where readers can peruse the potential District 5 supervisors’ stances on upwards of 40 topics before it’s time to vote in November.
Three candidates are challenging Supervisor Dean Preston in District 5, which spans from the east end of Golden Gate Park through Haight-Ashbury, Japantown and the Western Addition, the Lower Haight and Hayes Valley, and most of the Tenderloin.
For the next couple of weeks, we’re talking about housing. Last week, we asked candidates about what they will focus on to improve the housing situation here in San Francisco.
This week’s question is: What will be your first move as supervisor to start chipping away at this focus issue?
We asked the candidates to be specific. Their answers are below.
Note: I will be in District 5 this week on Thursday, April 18, at 12 p.m. at Alamo Square Cafe (711 Fillmore St.). Come say hi and share your thoughts.
Bilal Mahmood
Renter
I will prioritize fixing our broken permitting system. There’s too much red tape that makes it take more than 1,000 days to build affordable or middle income housing, driving up costs of development and, in turn, rent.
I will work to cut the bureaucracy impeding the permitting process — investments in technology to speed up application approvals, allowing parallel permitting and approvals, and reducing discretionary permits to effectively cut the time to build affordable housing in half. When there’s fewer obstacles, we build more homes affordably.
Dean Preston
Homeowner
As a tenants-rights attorney and affordable-housing advocate for decades, my priority is housing for low-income and working-class people.
Priority District 5 sites include the DMV lot, 730 Stanyan, Parcel K and more. In November, we’ll push for the regional housing bond and Costa-Hawkins repeal to expand rent control. We’re also launching a public bank to scale up investment in affordable housing.
My Right to Counsel law gives tenants facing eviction a free attorney, we passed legislation to ban pandemic evictions, and raised over $300 million for affordable housing by taxing the rich. I’ve voted for 30K homes, 86 percent affordable.
Allen Jones
Renter
When I think of the San Francisco NIMBY vs. YIMBY fight, it reminds me of the game show Family Feud. A clever episode addressed an old feud between two families: The Hatfields and the McCoys.
Some say this 1863 to 1891 feud between two families was over love. Some believe it was over land. Others think it had to do with a stolen pig. Nevertheless, years of ugly ensued. My first piece of legislation on the subject of housing would be a resolution declaring a truce between the Hatfields and McCoys — I mean, NIMBYs and YIMBYs.
Autumn Looijen
Renter
Have you walked by the abandoned carwash site at 400 Divisadero? It was approved for 182 homes five years ago (20% affordable), but was tied up in delays and never built.
Dean is insisting on 100 percent affordable, and blamed the Mayor when he couldn’t get it done.
We need homes on that site. I will work with the mayor and city departments to use every tool at our disposal (including our new Housing for All tools) to actually build affordable homes. If we also need to streamline the building process or take other measures, I will make sure it happens.
The order of candidates is rotated each week. Answers are capped at 100 words, and may be lightly edited for formatting, spelling, and grammar. If you have questions for the candidates, please let us know at eleni@missionlocal.com.
Read the rest of the District 5 questions here, and the entire “Meet the Candidates” series here. Illustrations for the series by Neil Ballard.
You can register to vote via the sf.gov website.
The dialog always seems to be the same: Blaming the neighbors for not wanting the next skyscraper project next door. But the reality is more complex:
1. Strong Towns just published an article that points out the un-named conflict that housing can’t be both affordable and a good investment. Nobody seems to be willing to face that homelessness and high housing costs are a feature, not a bug, of our current capitalistic approach to housing. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2024/3/27/unpacking-the-question-can-housing-be-an-investment-and-affordable
2. New housing doesn’t have to be large 6+ story developments. It’s quite a lot more expensive to build tall buildings than 3-4 story buildings PER SQUARE FOOT. They require more space for circulation, more expensive structural and foundation systems. They require professional management. Yet over the years, more and more requirements have snuck into our building codes that make building 2-4 unit buildings almost impossible: Firesprinklers, complex fire alarm systems, elevators, multiple exit stairs, parking, sidewalk improvements, the same levels of planning notification that large developments require, etc. These all make sense for large developments, but they now also apply to almost any development, including adding a granny flat in your garage.
3. SFDBI runs on permit fees: The more things they can charge for, the better their budget situation. A very expensive project nets much higher permit fees.
Because of higher per-square-foot costs, they earn bigger fees on big developments, so they will skew everything towards getting those fees, including making small developments harder to do. But small low cost developments are the only way to make low cost housing.
How peculiar that (not one but two) carpetbagging political candidates have popped into our local communities and neighborhoods to babble about their myopic fixes for San Francisco’s city wide and decades old affordable housing crisis. Is San Francisco (the second most densely built city in America) different from Palo Alto, Mountain View or Cupertino? Are all cities the same and ready for cookie cutter planning/development? Fraudster and self-described “economist” and “neuroscientist” Bilal Mahmood says yes……..San Francisco’s citywide affordable housing crisis is a “streamlining”, permitting and Tech problem that only a genius like him can fix. What does Mahmood say about the +80000 already permitted projects in the pipeline today? What would he do to compel bankers and developers to build these already approved projects? Is that Preston’s fault? It’s also pretty rich that a newb from Los Altos just discovered the former carwash site at 400 Divisadero. Local residents have been fighting with market rate developers (also carpetbaggers) and with the current mayor and her slovenly, dysfunctional MOHCD for +5 years now; the fight is over luxury housing for investors and rich people versus affordable housing for local residents, but Looijen doesn’t fathom that. Does she have a magic wand she can wave over the property to create deeply affordable homes for D5’s most needy citizens? Because that is the hold up: AFFORDABILITY. How do they do it in Los Altos? It is far easier to blame and take pot shots than it is to make policy and to build. For five years, dozens of local residents have battled our own mayor (and previous supervisor) while she attempted to sell our neighborhood to luxury profiteers. Looijen is an ideologue whose singular accomplishment (of which she is very, very proud) is assembling a pitchfork mob of angry frightened parents………ground scraping fruit. That’s not anything like the difficult and tedious work of consensus building, compromising or policy making. Thanks but no thanks.