Supervisor Bilal Mahmood is asking the city to create a centralized database with information about all its properties, a list he hopes will be useful for identifying sites for grocery stores, food pantries, and affordable housing.
The move was inspired by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose administration took an inventory of all city-owned land and then identified sites that could be used for housing development.
Yes, San Francisco has a property database, but Mahmood wants more information for each piece of property: What it could be used for, if it is vacant or in use, and its historic status, for instance.
“We have information in a lot of different places,” said Angela Yip, the spokesperson for the City Administrator’s Office, which includes the Real Estate Division. “We don’t have one single database.”
The city lands and facilities databases, for instance, do not include information about a property’s existing leases or historic status.
To Mahmood, this fact is unsurprising. He said that last year when his office was working on legislation related to homeless shelters in the city, he discovered the city had no consolidated list of all its shelters.
That was because different city departments — homelessness, health, and housing — “weren’t talking to each other to consolidate one central list because there wasn’t technically a need to,” Mahmood said. Now, every six months, a list of all city shelters is released.
He hopes something similar will happen with the database of city properties.
“I think right now, everyone in City Hall believes that we have to make decisions based on data, but you can’t make decisions based on data if you don’t have a consolidated, clear source of that data,” Mahmood said.
Once he has the list in hand, he hopes to identify places for more grocery stores or food pantries. Both, he said, are lacking in the Tenderloin.
Last month, his proposal to tax vacant grocery stores to incentivize a new tenant to come in was shot down, but he now plans to address food insecurity in other ways, including by helping corner stores sell fresh produce.
“Supervisor Mahmood is asking exactly the right question: how do we use every resource this city has, differently and more creatively, to meet this moment?” said Tanis Crosby, executive director of the San Francisco-Marin Foodbank. “Putting underutilized resources to work to reduce food insecurity is exactly the kind of focus we need.”
Mahmood hopes that the property database will also be able to help identify sites for affordable housing development, much like it did in New York City.
“City owned property can be faster to develop,” Mahmood said, explaining that developing on city owned property is often cheaper because you don’t have to buy the land and easier because state laws have streamlined the permitting.
The city already makes an effort to evaluate if any properties it owns could be developed into affordable housing. Every year, it releases a list of underutilized properties and then evaluates whether any of those sites can be used for affordable housing.
But that list does not include land owned by certain city departments, such as SFUSD and SFMTA, which have large land holdings.
Mahmood hopes this list will be more in depth: “Step one to building on city owned property is to take an inventory analysis of what city-owned property exists.”
Someone should tell Bilal Mahmood about San Francisco’s master list of properties: https://sfplanninggis.org/pim/
Furthermore: what is the city doing with the funds it collects for the rental of Parcel K? Since San Francisco‘s unanimously voted for and supported the development of 100% affordable on this city owned land, shouldn’t the millions collected in rent money fund affordable housing development there?
Strong proposition from Mahmood, and something that would hypothetically benefit the city from multiple angles for some time. While I don’t love how much of his attention as a supe has been on the TL as opposed to my part of the district (not that I don’t understand it – TL needs the attention and I blame the Cole Valley Defection), this and his general focus on food availability citywide are strong pillars of service.
Would love to know if he has plans to lean on Sherrill about the impending closure of the Lucky on Fulton (which I learned while writing this comment is actually in D2! – the D2/D5 interface in the general NOPA/Western Addition region is weird).
Hmmmm.
The Planning Dept. already has this database — it’s called the “Property Information Map (PIM)” — and it’s broken down parcel by parcel and it is very searchable.
Fancy that!
Methinks that the compromised supervisor wants to suss out parcels for his real estate benefactors than for his constituents in need of a grocery store.
What’s the hold up with Parcel K in Hayes Valley? In 2003, the city purchased Parcel K with affordable housing funds for “the development of 100% affordable housing.” Since 2009, the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development/MOHCD has leased the parcel for “temporary use until construction of affordable housing could begin.” The interim space has been leased to PROXY which hosts retail and food, pop-ups, and an outdoor gym in shipping containers.
Over two years ago, then candidate Mahmood said of Parcel K, the City owned property at Hayes and Octavia adjacent to Patricia‘s Green:
District 5 can build affordable housing while also prioritizing vibrant, open community spaces for families already here.
This can mean building adjacent to Parcel K, or even building affordable housing on the parcel, but with an atrium on the ground floor to preserve the open space, as proposed by several Hayes Valley leaders.
This parcel has been debated for more than 20 years — it’s time we focus on progress over parcels. Let’s focus instead on where we can build affordable housing fastest, and put our attention to streamlining the permitting process which is the actual impediment to building more housing.”
I’d like to see the City propose building permanent supportive housing with onsite substance and psych treatment services at Parcel K in gentrified Hayes Valley, like the City did next to Marshall Elementary, and see how that plays out.
We are such a small city geographically. Surely we can compile such a list easily. Maybe get a big AI company to do it for free.