See how they run: Aaron Peskin visits the zoning panic zone

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Mission Local is publishing campaign dispatches for each of the major contenders in the mayor’s race, alternating among candidates weekly until November. This week: Aaron Peskin. Read earlier dispatches here.

It’s a Monday night, but the nave of the Noe Valley Ministry is packed with well over 100 people. They’ve come to hear from Board of Supervisors President and mayoral candidate Aaron Peskin, District 8 supervisor Rafael Mandelman, and a panel of speakers put together by Neighborhoods United, a coalition of more than 50 neighborhood associations across the city. The topic is zoning, and the crowd is anxious.

Neighborhoods United is there to talk about the evils of an imminent boom in new apartment buildings, brought on by rezoning in the western neighborhoods, and changes to permitting at the state level. Mandelman is there to talk about how maybe we shouldn’t freak out right away. Peskin is there to campaign, but in his own particular way, which is to say that there will be discussion of variable floor plate sizes and the history of the I-Hotel.

Neighborhoods United goes first. 

“We’ve had some feedback from certain people saying that it’s fearmongering to share these images,” says historic preservationist Katherine Petrin, as a slide of a giant gray rectangle blocking the Golden Gate Bridge appears on the screen behind her. “We really do not believe that’s true. We’re sharing them to show you what’s possible. Not to create fear, but to make you aware. Next slide, please.”

Neighborhoods United is behind these renderings, which show San Francisco being menaced by giant gray and white rectangles — massing studies meant to show how tall buildings can get along certain streets once the rezoned streets are combined with the state density bonus.

In short, says Petrin, a state bill authored by Sen. Scott Wiener (SB423) and a verdict from the state’s Regional Housing Needs Allocation (which says that San Francisco hasn’t built enough new housing) means that, as of June 28, anyone with plans to build multi-unit housing in San Francisco can do so if they follow certain state guidelines. Builders no longer need to assess environmental impacts (CEQA) or follow neighborhood notification requirements. This permit party will last until 2031, when the Regional Housing Needs Allocation will once again crunch the numbers and determine whether the city is meeting its housing goals.

Based on who is talking, the next years are going to be either the bad old days of redevelopment come to smash everything San Franciscians hold near and dear, sowing the earth with generic condo towers, or not really that bad. But again, SB423 only went into effect on June 28. The future is unwritten. So far, the only well-known change to future San Francisco is an eight-story, mostly market-rate housing project at 1965 Market St. that, following June 28, dropped new plans to the effect of “Surprise! We’re 23 stories tall now!”

A forum like this one is invariably going to draw large numbers of the kind of politically engaged people who are going to take the time to vote in November. They are also an intense place to be, even if you aren’t running a political campaign. Passions ride high. Residents who moved to neighborhoods that were zoned single-family housing, and who were already outraged at the city’s western neighborhoods rezoning plan (now quite modest in comparison) are, because of the intersection of SB423 and state density bonus regulations, are not even sure what kind of a building they can anticipate being angry about. In other words: a tough crowd.

At one of Neighborhoods United’s June events, District 7 residents booed their supervisor, Myrna Melgar, for her support of upzoning transit corridors in the western neighborhoods. Upzoning allows for more housing to be built on a single parcel, generally by raising the height of the buildings, but also by increasing the amount of square footage on a lot that can be dedicated to housing, so that, for example, the owners of a single-family home can build another house in their backyard.

At the District 7 event, held at the Scottish Rite Memorial Hall in West Portal, some attendees expressed opinions that were a vivid reminder of where the term NIMBY came from. A few shouted angrily about the seven stories of affordable senior housing slated to replace an old Motel 6 at 1234 Great Highway — how it was too tall, too close to the water, what if homeless people ended up living there? (“Don’t we want to give housing to people who are on the streets?” asked Supervisor Joel Engardio. “Especially seniors?”) Melgar didn’t speak at the forum, and left before the Q&A portion. “If I lose this election on this issue, then that’s the right thing to do,” she told Mission Local reporter Kelly Waldron.

Peskin also supports the plan to upzone the western neighborhoods, which is good, because he helped write it. He also voted for numerous other things that District 7 residents are furious about — the constraints reduction ordinance, for example, which, made it easier to build new senior housing, shelter and group housing (like the former Motel 6). At the District 7 forum, Peskin both acknowledged this, and pivoted towards a common enemy. “I voted for those things to show the state that we’re putting our best foot forward, that we’re trying to meet those mandates, and that we are being real about it.” Instead, he said, the state has only demanded more. “I don’t think the state is doing this because they care about development. They care about getting rid of all of our local laws that protected our neighborhoods. That’s what this is really about.”

Peskin’s stump speeches always vary depending on who is being addressed. At District 8, his speech consists of:

Flattery: “One thing I know is that we have the smartest electorate that anybody could ask for.” 

History: “By the way, those laws that were used for redevelopment, those were state laws. Those were not local laws. I also want to remember things like the fight over the International Hotel, where we ripped down low-income, and we ended up paying the bill for that years later, when we rebuilt it after it laid vacant for three decades.” 

The current state of construction financing: “Over 70,000 units are fully approved and shovel-ready. The reason they’re not being built isn’t because of bureaucratic problems and YIMBY/NIMBY neighbor fights. It’s because interest rates are too high. I probably should have realized this years ago, but the city and county of San Francisco are actually able to issue tax-exempt bonds for infrastructure, and housing is infrastructure.” 

Architectural wonkery: “We’ve passed legislation to make it easier to convert vacant offices. I always warn people: Don’t think this is a panacea. The larger, big floor, plate-glass-window buildings are not going to be right for conversion to residential, but the smaller ones with the smaller floor plates, openable windows, five stories are perfect for adaptive reuse”

A reminder that San Francisco’s agonizing slowness when it comes to building permits are as much, if not more, the result of corruption than they are bureaucracy-as-usual. “It’s never fun to say we have a Department of Building Inspection that has been riddled with corruption. We have a Department of City Planning that doesn’t have a lot of work because not a lot of stuff is being built, but it still takes months and months to get a hearing for a conditional use. We need better management to fix it. So thank you all for coming tonight.” 

Peskin is navigating a tricky balancing act in this election. His natural base of voters is progressive, which includes homeowners who are not keen on changing their neighborhoods. His other base is community activists who are extremely keen on building more affordable housing for seniors, families, teachers, and other San Francisco residents who can’t keep up with the stratospheric cost of real estate. He managed to thread the needle as Supervisor for District 3, but now he’s having to do it for an entire city.

Mandelman, meanwhile, is not presently running for public office, and is less diplomatic. He suggests, cheerfully, that the state may not have wrestled environmental and neighborhood notification requirements from San Francisco residents for absolutely no reason at all. He invokes the Kamala Harris meme. “You did not fall out of coconut trees,” he says. “There is a context for this conversation. There is a grievous, serious statewide housing affordability crisis, and some of us do believe that that crisis is not just related to a shortage of regulated affordable housing.”

A lot of new construction — in District 8 and around the city — between now and 2032 could actually be pretty good down the line, even if it’s sometimes bad, Mandelman continues. “Thirty or 40 years from now, it could result in us not having a housing crisis. Some of it may be really stupid, and threaten the demolition of buildings that we care about. But the folks in the state legislature — and it is not just Senator Wiener — are doing what legislators do, which is try to come up with some way to respond.”

“The state has passed — this is the area where I agree with the presenters — a slew of laws,” says Mandelman. “They don’t know what all these laws do. We don’t know what all these laws do. We don’t know how all of this is going to play out.”

At the District 8 forum, at least the outward appearance of the crowd is calm. If they are particularly upset about rezoning the western neighborhoods, it’s not apparent. No one gets up and yells when Mandelman tells the crowd that maybe this showdown with the state is their fault? He hedges this one. “There are people in this room who could argue that the local communities in California have brought this on ourselves, and we don’t deserve to be regulating our own land use. I think that probably goes too far. But it is undeniable that we have HCD looming over our shoulder, looking at every move that we make, and getting ready to work with our Attorney General to do all sorts of terrible things to us if they think we’re not serious about housing. That is the context for this.” 

Mandelman also warns the crowd to be careful about how they push back. The Regional Housing Needs Allocation says that San Francisco needs to build 82,000 units of housing, 46,000 of which need to be affordable. Several people, including Petrin, have floated the idea that the 46,000 units of affordable housing is an “unfunded mandate” and, therefore, illegal. Any tools that San Francisco wields successfully to block new construction may also be taken up by neighborhoods in Silicon Valley that really could stand to add a few apartments, Mandelman notes. “I would question whether we want to make it easier to protect the rights of Hillsboroughs and the Athertons.”

Instead, he suggests focusing less on how to stop new eight- and 12-story buildings in their district, and more on what they can do to manage them. How can they make sure that demolitions of existing buildings won’t affect rent-controlled tenants? How quickly can they move to protect historic buildings that are not yet formally recognized as such? How can they make sure that new developments aren’t just seven-story single-family homes, which are already a thing in District 8 and, he adds, “a personal hobbyhorse of mine.” 

At this, the crowd gets excited. Here, at last, they are on familiar ground. The last decade has brought a wave of mansionification (or re-mansionification, in some cases) in District 8. While the state’s upzoning only applies to multi-unit buildings, a local permitting fiction used to obtain mansion-level housing is to buy a multi-unit building and then carve out space from other apartments until all is left is one big apartment with a tiny guest house or two.

In a little under 10 minutes, Mandelman has cheerfully lobbed a wide array of digs, subtle and not-so, at Neighborhoods United and their presentation. “Well,” he says, “I think those are all the combative things that I was going to say. Your priorities matter. There are multiple perspectives on this, and I think you shouldn’t assume people who want to see more housing in the city are developer shills or, you know, bad people.”

He’s also said nothing but flattering things about Peskin. “In every legislation we’ve done — and President Peskin has been a leader on this— we have tried to make sure that if there are demolitions, they will not impact rent-controlled tenants. We can talk about whether our protections are strong enough or not, but that is a commitment that I think your Board of Supervisors has, and the planning department has agreed on.” Peskin also, he adds, has been working hard to try to get what Mandelman describes as “really actual historic buildings” protected. There are only a few hundred buildings in the city right now that are protected as historic, and, says Mandelman, “if the changes to permitting are effective and do spark a wave of development. We may come to regret the fact that we did not move with alacrity.”

More intensity comes out during public comment, though Peskin is gone by then. “Based on everything that I have read, the presentation that we heard tonight is a gross misrepresentation of the reality of the heroic legislation passed by my state senator, Scott Wiener,” says one person into the microphone, shaking with what looks like it could be either anger or excitement.

Meanwhile, Peskin finished his talk by continuing to split the difference between appealing to and offending residents. “We have a very generous electorate. Just last March, even though everybody was very frustrated with so many things, we all voted by over 70% to pass a $300 million affordable-housing bond. In the twenty-four years that I’ve been on and off the Board of Supervisors, we passed over a billion three in affordable housing bonds, because we actually care about our lower income neighbors and we want to live in a diverse city.” He brought up the Shirley Chisholm apartments in the Richmond — five stories of affordable rental housing for SFUSD teachers and employees, built on SFUSD land — as an example of what is possible. “The only shame of that was that those 140 units were oversubscribed by a factor of five.”

It is, fundamentally, an earnest appeal to go into the weeds of zoning and permitting together; maybe not so different from Mandelman’s talk, after all. “What I’m really calling for,” said Peskin, “is a sensible policy discussion.”