In the far northwest of San Francisco, it’s rare to find support for the city’s plan to increase density and height limits in the less-developed, yet “well-resourced” neighborhoods that dominate the Westside.
But some 20 people at a Richmond District community meeting on Monday evening indicated that YIMBYs may have a small toehold of support here.
Yvonne Perez, a homeowner in the Richmond since 2017, said at the meeting that she understands her neighbors who are concerned about views being obstructed, or fear change. She used to be one of them.
“I wasn’t sure what to make of the upzoning plan. I didn’t want the Richmond to become downtown with all the high-rises,” she said. “But once I understood what it actually meant — more families, more younger generations — it changed my perspective.”
Now, she wants others to have a change of heart, too.
The Richmond is known for single-family homes and duplexes, and has seen limited development in the past decade: Only some 400 units were completed in the Richmond, while the Mission added more than 4,000 units. The city is mandated to build 82,000 housing units by 2031.
In the past, at hours-long City Hall hearings, the majority of the hundreds of public speakers have opposed the upzoning plan. YIMBYs hope to change that.
The meeting, sponsored by the local YIMBY chapter Grow the Richmond, invited planning department staffers to present the city’s zoning plan and answer questions.
The attendees asked: What’s the protection for tenants and small businesses? How much more population growth is expected? Is the infrastructure ready?
Chuong Vu, a tenant in the Richmond, moved there from the Panhandle just three weeks ago with his wife and 8-month-old baby. They wanted to live in the Inner Richmond initially, but as the apartment search went on, he found himself going “west and west and west.” At an open house in the Inner Richmond, there were 20 other people in competition for a unit.
“It was really hard to find housing,” Vu said, explaining why he attended the YIMBY meeting: He wants more density in the Richmond. “I don’t want to do this again the next time I look for housing.”
That sentiment was echoed by others in the meeting.
Lisa Chen, principal planner from the Planning Department, walked through the new zoning plan, cautioning the audience that the additional housing units won’t all immediately get built. Listening to Chen, Vu was concerned.
“It’s not gonna do enough,” Vu said. On a zoning map handed out to the audience, only parcels along transit corridors would see increased height limits. “Why is it only directly on the transit lines? What about the adjacent lots?”
“We are stuck in the 1950s,” one attendee said, cracking a joke about the one- or two-story buildings on Geary Boulevard. The crowd chuckled.
“Why isn’t the whole Richmond more orange?” another attendee asked, referring to the parts of the zoning map allowing for 85 feet, or eight stories. Only parcels along Geary Boulevard, Fulton Street and part of California Street were marked orange.
The height limit in the Richmond tops out at the corner of Geary and Arguello streetsr, at 140 feet or about 14 stories. But other parcels, like the ones that stretch along Balboa and Clement streets, are capped at just 65 feet, or six stories.
“It’s been challenging,” Chen said to the audience, which was not her usual crowd in this part of town. “Every neighborhood we go to, there’s a lot of resistance to that idea of adding height. So we’ve been trying to just make sure that there’s no area that’s targeted more than another.”
The Richmond has not been fertile ground for urbanism and the YIMBY movement. Residents by and large like its single-family homes, and they like to drive.
In 2022, only 35 percent citywide voters supported Prop. I to bring cars back to John F. Kennedy Drive in Golden Gate Park, but 43 percent of District 1 voters supported it. Last year, though 54.7 percent of citywide voters favored closing the Upper Great Highway to cars, only 36 percent of District 1 voters did.
But Steven Shoemaker, the YIMBY volunteer organizer of the Monday meeting, is optimistic.
“There may be more support for denser housing than people expected,” Shoemaker said. And, even though it’s nice to hold events with people who agree with each other, he said, the next step is to leave the echo chamber.
“What we want to do is create as many opportunities as we can to get the kind of pro-housing voice out there and create a different forum for those conversations,” he said.
The neighborhood actually has a lot of renters: According to the 2023 American Community Survey, Inner Richmond is 58 percent renter-occupied, and Outer Richmond 53 percent.
“Our population is stagnant, and it is getting older,” she said. “I would love to see younger people being able to afford to live here and also to be more vibrant. We have so much potential here.”
“Most people live in the Richmond, Sunset because they love the neighborhood character, and most people don’t want it to change,” said Steven Huang, who came to the meeting from his Sunset home. “But even if we do nothing, change still happens. So, how can we proactively make it continue to be a nice place to live?”
YIMBY snake oil is bullshit. But they won, progressives led by the nonprofits did not even put up much of a fight.
These west siders are San Francisco’s true NIMBYs, forcing upzonings and condos on the east side while losing their shit at the prospect of having to take what they’ve dished out.
If the supervisors end up rejecting plans that meet RHNA targets, and if the State finds the City out of compliance, then the builder’s remedy kicks in and as of right approvals are allowed under current zoning. This means that the already upzoned east side will take the greatest hits again.
When all else fails, punish the east side.
Ad nauseam with the same tired old lame and false YIMBY 101 talking points. Time and time again, the data shows a complete disconnect between density and affordability. Trickle down density DOES NOT SOLVE AFFORDABILITY OR CREATE AFFORDABLE HOUSING. Pitting low income elders, Black and Brown people along with working families against one another so that the unborn fetuses and offspring of wealthier, entitled 20 and 30 somethings (who choose to reproduce) will have homes one day in the future is silly.
YIMBY is nothing but a cult of bought-and-paid-for developers’ sycophants masquerading as “eco-futurists” – and they could not be further from reality. The useful tools of a massively wasteful landfill-filling private equity cabal run by multi-millionaires and billionaires only cement their dark-monied grip on our local politics, and everything they propose is a removal of our longstanding basic safeguards, rent-controlled and below-market-rate-housing generally, and in fact large swaths of the middle class that they don’t care to represent whatsoever. We need to get Scott Wiener and his corrupt monied gang of tools out of office, ASAP. Tearing out housing and putting it in the landfill to rebuild all over with bland, crappy “density” designs is not only pound-foolish, it will DESTROY the neighborhoods that people have invested their hard earned livelihoods over decades and replace them with market rate techie-blowhards paying inflated market-rate private equity profit price-gouging. If YIMBY tools are going to go around spreading their ridiculous propaganda to gin up transplant tourist political support, LOCALS need to GET THERE and PROTEST THE CRAP OUT OF IT. Their lies must be met with the outrage and eyeballs equal or greater to their Billionaire paymasters’ ad doles, or we’re just giving up and letting the faux-futurist BS artists destroy our fair city. It’s happening in realtime, right now – MAKE SOME NOISE! Liars out of SF!
Those in the photo look like privileged gentrifiers. Do they support the legislation’s lack of demolition controls that will result in evictions and the displacement of current residents who are low income seniors? The Richmond has a different kind of “rich” history……..where households include 3 and 4 generations of Black and Brown working families living under the same roof. Will these people be displaced? Exisiting affordable housing is stable housing and must be protected unless you want more elders and families with kids living on our sidewalks and streets.
Rents and availability of units should be coming free once this POS & the ice nazis get rid of all the immigrants. FUCK TRUMP!!! We love immigrants!
Density does not equal affordability. Look at Vancouver BC.
Exactly, they knock down long term housing that is below market rate by a lot, and they put up market rate housing that’s 3x the price, smaller, uglier, unfriendlier and much, much more corporately controlled. The age of the independent landlord they want to bring to a close, replaced by private equity gougers. Scott Weiner is a liar, Yimby tools lie more often than they breathe. NEVER TRUST THEM. They will be peter-principled up to higher office by doing the developer $ dance long before any actual housing is even built. It’s disgusting, these clowns have to go back to NYC and Paris and Prague already with their faux-futurist grifting.
The Richmond representatives, the “Urban Planners”, and YIMBY community has a lot it can do to convince the residents it cares about the residents, especially the elderly. Let’s start with areas in front of their houses where we all walk each day in our community to the neighborhood markets and merchants. I personally see little care or “urban planning” addressing the issues of lack of landscaping maintenance, lack of sidewalks maintenance where broken concrete is hazardous and the city is willing to make its marks in green three times yet hasn’t repaired it for years. The increase of PG&E pole installations this year and wires draping and Xfinity cables wrapped and sloppily hanging through our neighborhood streets this year are only going to increase. So tell me Urban Designers. Let’s talk about Planning for the Future! Think in 3D. While you tear up our streets along Geary into 2027 and 19th Avenue, again. When is street work going to be done at night when no one is on it? Like in the big cities? Thanks for listening.
Not all “transit corridors” are the same. Designating Geary for high-rises makes sense and might even look ok (e.g. the new low-income residential building on Geary & 6th Ave). But other Richmond streets that are mostly residential would be overwhelmed by taller buildings. It would be less difficult to gather YIMBY enthusiasm if individual sites were nominated for development rather than blanket stretches just because they’re deemed transit corridors, ignoring the actual streetscape. I met a guy from a hipper part of town who was advocating for westside development. Wonderful. But he didn’t even know there’s a Sunset Blvd out there!
“Transit corridors”. They’ll also need to bring in transit. As in, real transit, not what’s in place now or some other form of rinky-dinky BRT.
Why is Downtown Dan Lurie cutting funding, service and MUNI lines across the city. There will be no “recovery” or neighborhood “abundance” with robust, efficient, well funded public transit. Waymos, Ubers and Lyfts are private transit for profit.
Correction: There will be no “recovery” or “vibrant” neighborhood “abundance” WITHOUT robust, efficient, well -funded public transit throughout the city
It depends how you define recovery and vibrant, doesn’t it? If you’re a multi-millionaire who demands the existing residents of SF who aren’t you and yours be forced out and replaced with market rate transplant techies going into debt despite their trust funds, ‘recovery’ simply means removing the middle class that is being priced out slightly before they actually become homeless and require services. If they can get rid of lower and middle class families and anyone not involved in AI somehow, they think that’s ‘recovery’ and for them, quite ‘vibrant’. We’ve seen this before, the locals have.
‘“Our population is stagnant, and it is getting older,” she said. “I would love to see younger people being able to afford to live here and also to be more vibrant. We have so much potential here.” ‘
This woman should be terminated immediately for denigrating D1 residents in favor of hypothetical new residents with different demographics.
Praying for Both Sides
Seriously, SF does not need 82,000 units. SF population declined 100k in the pandemic and 50k came back, we are no longer growing and no one is immigrating here. The demand does not warrant this excess. People don’t seem to realise this is just a way for politicians and developers to make deals, it’s not because we actually need more units in SF.
If you want to free up some housing, just repeal rent control – and poof, lots of units will become available at more affordable rates than new construction – so no need to build any more.
And there are huge parts of the Bayview that aren’t developed at all! Why aren’t they putting in low-income housing there where NOTHING EXISTS? Because that’s not nearly as profitable, that’s why! These grifters have one God and it is money, not fair housing prices or equality. Run the YIMBY liars out of town!
It’s more like 50k fewer residents over the last few years, but still, valid point. We don’t need 82k new units for the foreseeable future. Especially when it’s just studios and 1BRs. What we do need is workforce family housing that’s affordable. Nobody’s talking about that. To your second point, rent control, I believe you’re overestimating how many boomers are sitting on dirt cheap pied-a-terre’s and the like. Would be cool though to get an actual count or accurate estimate.
“So, how can we proactively make it continue to be a nice place to live?”
For starts: Not by installing monstrosities like they did at the former SFUnion site on Irving. The neighbors fought it tooth to nail, and you can see why. Brutalizing a neighborhood like that isn’t going to generate a lot of good will, put mildly, for building more.
If Matt wiener and his real estate tycoon friends want to live in Manhattan, they should fucking well move there. “We had to destroy the city to save it” sounds, well, stupid.