District 8 candidates all want to build, build, build

Even in Noe Valley, it seems that all conversations about housing come back to the Marina Safeway.

As supervisor, how would you have voted on that proposal? That’s the question put to one of the four candidates running to replace the termed-out Supervisor Rafael Mandelman on Monday evening. 

“If they don’t want it, I’ll take it over here at Market and Church,” said candidate Darshini Patel, to the loudest applause of the evening from the crowd of 50-odd people, who had come to hear District 8 candidates talk about housing policy. 

Every other candidate at the forum — Gary McCoy, Michael Nguyen and Manny Yekutiel — agreed. All said they would support redevelopment at the Church and Market streets Safeway. 

The housing policy forum, hosted by YIMBY Action and the Housing Action Coalition at Noe Valley Ministry, showed remarkable accord between the candidates. All the candidates agreed that District 8, which stretches from the Castro to Glen Park, should and must build more housing. 

But there was one point of disagreement: their positions on inclusionary housing — the percentage of units that developers of market-rate housing are expected to set aside for lower-income buyers or tenants. 

McCoy, a former California political director for Nancy Pelosi, told the crowd “I don’t know that I would’ve made that decision on the Board of Supervisors” to lower the inclusionary housing rate from 15 to 5 percent for most new market rate housing, but that it was “important to make sure that we can pencil out a lot of these projects.” He later stated that he would have voted to lower the inclusionary requirements. Nguyen, a patent lawyer and LGBTQ rights organizer, opposed lowering the rate.  

McCoy would not be where he is today, he told the crowd, without low-income housing. He spent his 20s on the streets battling addiction, he said, and went from shelters to residential hotels to permanent supportive housing, to finally being able to rent a market-rate two-bedroom apartment with his husband. 

“There was a full ladder that existed out of homelessness that does not exist today, and we’re not able to give people the opportunities that I had,” McCoy said. “We need to be looking at the bottom, which is affordability, in that ladder.” 

In contrast, Yekutiel and Patel both supported lowering the inclusionary rate — and in Yekutiel’s case, removing it altogether for development on Market Street. Yekutiel cited a report from the city controller’s office that concluded that “the maximum economically-feasible inclusionary requirement was 0%.” 

“Even at 0 percent, it does not make financial sense to build in our city right now,” Yekutiel said. “That is why all these projects are stalled.” 

“I would like to be your builder supervisor,” Yekutiel continued, adding that his candidacy was endorsed by GrowSF and AbundantSF, while McCoy was endorsed by former Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, who has historically supported new affordable housing more than the market-rate kind. 

“I’m not interested in waving my hands around and talking about policy. I’m interested in getting housing built, units in the sky and people living in our neighborhoods,” he said. 

If elected, Yekutiel continued, he would get 10,000 new homes built in eight years, first by building 6,000 of them on Market Street between Castro and Octavia. There, he wants to remove “all the barriers towards building housing,” including inclusionary housing requirements, height limits, transfer taxes, impact fees, compliance issues, among others. 

“Let’s let people build, let’s let them build,” Yekutiel said. “Then take the property tax that comes from all those additional units and use that regular revenue to build the kind of affordable housing that the market cannot bear.” 

Yekutiel estimated that he could spur the development of at least 3,000 of those new homes on underutilized land in District 8, from the Beck’s Motor Lodge on Market Street (a legacy business), the Safeway in Diamond Heights and the Glen Park BART parking lot. Finally, another 1,000 new homes would come from incentivizing building ADUs. 

In the past 10 years, only 722 housing units were completed in District 8 — just 86 of them were in 100-percent affordable projects and 65 were inclusionary units in market-rate developments, according to the Planning Department. The majority of these units were built before the pandemic along Market Street.

The abundance of already permitted but stalled development across the city was, Nguyen said, a missed housing opportunity. Now might be the time to focus on getting developers to follow through on projects that were already approved, instead of trying to incentivize them to come up with new ones, he said. “You need to build this housing or you lose your entitlement. That could be a fun piece of legislation,” Nguyen said. 

“Housing needs to actually be produced. I want to see all the cranes,” Nguyen added. “Let’s see what it’s like as a pro-housing, anti-displacement candidate.” 

Nguyen was the only District 8 candidate who did not support the mayor’s upzoning plan, he said, because he wanted it to contain stronger tenant protections. Now that the upzoning plan had already passed, he said keeping the development impact fees and the inclusionary requirements was critical. 

“We need to actually make the developers — who are going to make a ton of money — we need to make them pay,” he said. 

McCoy, meanwhile, said that he supported the mayor’s upzoning plan, and that he would focus on reforming San Francisco’s building codes through policies like legalizing single-stairway apartment buildings and publishing pre-approved plans for ADUs so that a homeowner could get a permit to build one more easily. 

McCoy said he also supports state laws such as lot splits, building on the land of houses of worship and removing discretionary review on code-compliant housing developments. 

He also wants to follow Supervisor Bilal Mahmood’s lead to expand group housing, such as residential hotels and co-living homes with shared kitchens and common space for seniors, workers and people in recovery. 

There was no moderator at the housing panel — instead, each candidate had 15 minutes to talk about their housing platform and answer questions from audience. That may have played a role in why a forum focused on one of the most contentious issues in San Francisco politics, ended on a high note. 

“I’m just incredibly tickled how every single candidate was focused on getting more housing built,” said Stephen Dodson, a board member at SF YIMBY. “I like how every candidate wanted to have the Marina Safeway in our backyard.”