San Francisco YIMBY might have sponsored a housing forum for District 10’s would-be supervisors, but that didn’t mean the candidates at the forum were completely on board with the group’s platform.
On Monday night, both J.R. Eppler and Theo Ellington agreed that District 10 needs a five-year exclusion and, in some areas, a permanent exemption, from a State Senate bill designed to spur new high-density housing development along major transit corridors. That exemption is already enshrined in law.
Potrero Hill-based attorney J.R. Eppler said the five-year exemption from the bill, known as SB79, which is currently in the mayor’s zoning plan gives community leaders essential time to figure out how to protect lower-income residents.
Theo Ellington, director of Bayview’s Ruth Williams Opera House, agreed, and offered another reason: District 10’s large swaths of industrial zones need to be safeguarded and modernized to bring jobs to Bayview, which is suffering from a high unemployment rate.
San Francisco YIMBY has yet to endorse a candidate in District 10, though it has already thrown its support behind Stephen Sherrill, who is campaigning for reelection in District 2, and Alan Wong in District 4.
After the forum, Brandon Powell, Bay Area organizing director for YIMBY, described Eppler and Ellington’s position on the SB79 exclusion as disappointing.
“Do I think they’re banking to be leads in SF YIMBY? Maybe not,” he said. “It’s misguided to have permanent exclusions,” to the bill, he said. “State laws are great. We should embrace them as a city.”
Sherrill has taken stances that SF YIMBY disagrees with; namely, the Marina Safeway project, which Sherrill opposes and YIMBY supports.
When asked whether the group would endorse Eppler or Ellington, despite their stance on exemptions to SB79, Powell responded that YIMBY doesn’t “do litmus tests.”
The deciding factor in SF YIMBY’s D10 endorsement will be based on a questionnaire sent by volunteers to four of the 10 candidates who are set to appear on the November ballot, Powell said.
Powell noted to Mission Local that the organization intended to send all candidates a questionnaire, but only four received one, which Powell attributed to an issue of “volunteer capacity.”
One of those four, likely front-runner Dion-Jay Brookter, the former chief executive officer at Young Community Developers, was noticeably absent from Monday night’s forum.
“I feel lonely without 13 other people up here,” noted Ellington, before the forum began.
Previous District 10 candidate forums have drawn criticism in recent weeks for including candidates who haven’t received any endorsements or donations, and have been criticized as unserious.
Brookter said he wasn’t invited to Monday’s forum until late Saturday afternoon, after his team asked SF YIMBY why the candidate hadn’t received an invitation or been included in promotional materials for the event.
Later that day, SF YIMBY sent out an email announcing that Brookter would be joining the forum, though Brookter’s team said they didn’t agree to attend.
Volunteer organizers said that they initially made the decision on who to invite by excluding candidates who had received less than $100,000 in donations. Brookter is more than $31,000 short of that metric.
“I was disheartened that one of the most prominent pro-housing organizations in San Francisco excluded so many of the voices fighting for the future of District 10,” Brookter said in a statement. “In a district that is so often overlooked, it is important that we make space for all voices to be heard.”
Brookter is a longtime ally of sitting Supervisor Shamann Walton, who SF YIMBY has labeled as “anti-housing” for his low voting record on measures to build, including against a 495-unit housing project near BART and MUNI and his support of 2022’s Proposition E, which required the approval of the Board of Supervisors for affordable housing projects.
In a statement sent to the media before the forum on Monday, Brookter circulated his own stance on housing, which differed little from Ellington and Eppler, and vowed to hold developers accountable, build in underused parcels, and fast-track stalled development.
Advocating for the protection of the industrial wastelands is insane. Median rent hit $4000 for 1br and our sup candidates want to protect empty warehouses from housing?!?
Bayview is also a residential neighborhood and one of the last neighborhoods in the city with a significant Black population, along with the Fillmore. “Wastelands”? Your racism is showing.
Yes Jack, full-on NIMBYism inevitably leads people down some spectacularly deluded rabbit holes.
The only use of SF YIMBY is to know which of their endorsements to vote against. Astroturf sucked when it hit the market and it still sucks.
“The only use of SF YIMBY is to know which of their endorsements to vote against.”
Personally I find 48Hills is the perfectly reliable source for that. Used to be the SF Bay Guardian but of course that failed and went out of business.
City Hall used BVHP as a back lot for decades. Its major investment in the area was the big wastewater treatment plant to process most of the city’s sewage but provided few jobs for its size and impact. To pacify the community its first expansion included construction of a CCSF satellite (on a street that was not well served by transit) as well as greenhouses (since demolished) to help buffer existing homes across the street. Its current expansion finally funded a giant community center at the prominent corner of 3rd and Evans. The city’s other major investment was construction of the 3rd Street light rail that was underutilized and loses money. Neighbors complained that hills made it hard to walk to the light rail. We hoped an airporter type shuttle would be affordable and learned that the biggest cost of running bus service is the operator regardless of passenger capacity. That brings us to SB79. New housing could improve 3rd Street and use of the T-line. Many newer homebuyers who discovered BVHP because it was less expensive and more sunny than elsewhere favor having more housing on 3rd, but not highrises. They point to mixed-use development on Ocean Ave west of CCSF as a model for how new buildings can transform a traffic sewer into a destination. But YIMBYs should know that Ocean Ave’s development was painstakingly guided by a visionary community volunteer Dan Weaver who prevailed over SF Planning staff. BVHP also possesses visionary volunteer residents in whom city hall ought to place its trust and authority.