Mayor and supes’ dueling housing laws: A strange and terrible saga

News broke earlier this month that members of the Board of Supervisors and the mayor were — independently and, it seems, adversarially — working on the wonky yet bewildering problem of builders’ interminable waits for site permits. This, too, was bewildering. The city needs two independent and competing efforts at site permit reform about as much as the moviegoing public needed two independent and competing films about long-distance runner Steve Prefontaine. 

And yet, that happened: “Prefontaine“ in 1997 starring Jared Leto, and “Without Limits” in 1998 starring Billy Crudup.  

And this is happening, too: Supervisors Ahsha Safaí and Myrna Melgar are crafting site-permitting legislation, and so is Mayor London Breed’s office. Nothing about this screams Highly Functional Government at Work: It’s not a great look for both sides to toil independently on the same problem for some time, either knowingly or unknowingly of the other’s efforts. Safaí also last week publicly acknowledged what every person in City Hall — and probably some of the animals — already knew: He’s considering a run for mayor. Politics and governing are not synonymous, and this will likely have a corrosive effect on this and other policy proposals. 

If you didn’t run track or grow up in the state of Oregon, Prefontaine was the James Dean of American distance runners, an enigmatic talent who died at 24 in an auto wreck. And, if you aren’t involved in building or development, a site permit is obtained after a review of preliminary drawings and documents and an accounting of life-safety and other big-picture factors. It does not enable you to start construction — there’s still all the not-preliminary documents to create, and so many other things — but you can’t get started without a site permit. Long story short: This is ostensibly a preliminary review, and you’re not supposed to expect the Spanish Inquisition. 

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, but you should in San Francisco: It can take four to 18 months to obtain a site permit, a mind-boggling amount of time for what’s supposed to be a precursory step. It’s realities like this that led to the proliferation of permit expediters and influence peddlers to both legally and illegally goose the system. 

Clearly this is a problem. And nearly everyone I talked to — developers, builders, architects, city officials, power brokers, others — was, at least, pleased that efforts were being made to address a longstanding mess. Nobody wanted to discourage city government from trying to be more efficient and more proactive. 

But nobody I talked to was convinced that either or both of these parallel efforts would accomplish their ostensible raison d’être: speeding up housing development. 

“The elephant in the room is: Will this get more housing built for people in the city?” asks one longtime San Francisco developer. And his answer is no — or at least not in the near term. 

As he and other builders pointed out, developers are, at present, already not building scores of thousands of approved, entitled units. Speeding up the site permit process would be grand but, for the foreseeable future, that’d result in builders getting their entitlements vested on a site, and then not building. 

“The bigger problem is you cannot get anything financed,” the developer continued. “Nothing is getting built. I applaud them for their efforts, but it’s not going to result in housing getting built.” 

Last week, Department of Building Inspection director Patrick O’Riordan issued a memo to his workforce, noting that site permits do not require “detailed plan review of construction documents,” and such time-consuming matters should come later in the process. 

“It’s good to see this,” an architect tells me. “I’ve gotten some really bonkers, in-the-weeds comments on site permits that are not appropriate.” 

It’s indeed good, but it’s also confusing. O’Riordan penning a memo to explain this to his staff is a bit like Giants manager Gabe Kapler having to send written notice to his players that, after they hit the ball, they should run to first base. Also, if the team had a longstanding habit of running to third, you’d think the manager could’ve, and should’ve, addressed that years ago.  

But O’Riordan seems to sense which way the wind is blowing now, with both the supes and the mayor taking an interest. What’s more, the mayor’s proffered solution would be to remove much of the site-permitting process from DBI and place it with Planning, which hardly seems to be a vote of confidence. 

The Safaí/Melgar legislation currently exists as a set of bullet points, and is on its way to the City Attorney’s office for drafting. The mayor’s office has produced some slides and a PDF.

The mayor would, as noted, shunt much of the process to Planning while the supes, who hope to introduce their legislation on April 4, would keep things at DBI, strip down the criteria being reviewed for a site permit, and make reviews concurrent, rather than sequential.

So that’s where things stand now; a deep analysis of such preliminary proposals would probably be ill-advised before the normal give-and-take of the legislative process. Ideally, the best elements of these proposals would be synthesized. But, with Safaí having kinda-sorta thrown his hat into the ring, the politics jumps from regular to extra-strength. 

So be it. Regardless of anyone’s future job plans, one wonders if the mayor has the votes at the board. And Safaí’s co-sponsor, Melgar, isn’t just a former planning commissioner and building inspection commissioner who keenly understands the city’s development process. She’s also the chair of the Land-Use Committee. That seems relevant. 

What’s more relevant, however, is: Why is this being legislated? 

“You cannot legislate a solution to a problem that is fundamentally a management problem,” sums up a longtime government wrangler. “It requires good management.”

Sometime around 1965 in New York, my father and uncle caught the Ave. J bus in the wee hours to go from my grandparents’ house on East 52nd St. to Uncle Steve’s parents’ house in Borough Park. They were the only guys on the bus, and the driver asked them to sit near him so he could have someone to talk to. 

He proceeded to drive like Steve McQueen, with little concern for stop signs or traffic signals. My father diplomatically asked the driver if he was concerned about triggering a collision. 

“Nah,” replied the driver while careening through Brooklyn. “They just got cars. I got a bus.” 

This is germane to our discussion because, when it comes to reforming the Department of Building Inspection, Safaí and Melgar just got cars. 

The mayor got a bus. 

Legislators tend to view solutions through a legislative lens, but this is not a legislative problem. The mayor does not need legislation to address shortfalls and scleroticism at DBI or any number of the city departments that work for her. She could address this administratively, tomorrow. And could have, on any of the prior 1,720 days since her swearing-in. 

So many different entities have a hand in the permitting process that this would appear to be the classic scenario in which a mayor can put everyone in a room, dictate a desired result, and demand everyone work together to make that result a reality. 

Frankly, it’s hard to think of any other solution that would work. 

“If it’s a priority for the mayor to speed up housing production, what I would do is gather every head of a department that touches the building process in the big City Hall conference room in room No. 201; Willie Brown used to have his staff meetings there,” says a former government hand. 

He’d subject them to these meetings every week. There’d be tickers up on the screen, and color coding, and a running list of every project above a certain threshold. And everyone would be asked why Project A was behind schedule, or Project B was lagging. And they’d all point fingers at each other. 

“And then you just resolve it. That’s what you have to do. That’s Management 101.”

It warrants mentioning at this point, that none of these proffered solutions would help mom ‘n’ pop overwhelmed by the requirements to put a new set of windows on their family home. The cavalry ain’t coming to help ordinary voters to navigate a process so labyrinthine it’s only missing a minotaur: “This doesn’t have anything to do with workaday San Franciscans,” affirms a longtime building inspector. 

And once you fix the site-permitting process, then there’s all the rest of the permits to deal with. Connecting a building to utility systems, for example, can take years. “It is unreal how long it takes to get permits in San Francisco,” fumes a development professional. “Un-fucking-real.”

That’s a problem. But it’s not a legislative problem. And all the legislation in the world — without limits — won’t fix it.