Mission District activists released a study yesterday that shows that only eight of 287 condominium units recently built in the Mission house families with children. The report by the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition calls on the Board of Supervisors to reject at today’s meeting proposed new condos at 2660 Harrison Street, and urges the Planning Commission to assess the cumulative impacts of the production of market-rate housing in the Mission. But the demographics of market-rate projects are only part of the problem. San Francisco’s family exodus has also been caused by nonprofit housing groups’ failure to meaningfully increase affordable family housing in the Mission and citywide. Land for affordable housing is growing scarcer and more expensive, and trying to stop private development while not aggressively pushing for affordable family housing is a failed strategy.
The press release from the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition regarding the upscale demographics of new Mission District condos harkens back to the group’s similar arguments made during the dot-com boom. The intervening seven years saw a slowdown in Mission District development, but nearly everything that gets built—and the report includes twenty properties—serves a much higher income level than the existing neighborhood.
In 2001, the Board of Supervisors tried to protect the Mission from gentrification by passing a moratorium effectively barring market-rate housing in the Northeast Mission industrial areas. But lots are for sale in other parts of the neighborhood, and, in the absence of competition from affordable housing developers, they will be purchased for market-rate development.
Mission Housing Development Corporation has a long history of building high-quality affordable family housing, but the group has spent the past three years trying to extricate itself from a staff-Board conflict that resulted in the group’s loss of Community Development Block Grant money. MHDC wants to build family housing, but conflict with the Board of Supervisors hampers its capacity.
In MHDC’s absence, other nonprofit groups have failed to pick up the slack. With nonprofits not actively seeking affordable family housing sites in the Mission, these properties will necessarily go to market-rate developers.
In some ways the situation in the Mission parallels that of SOMA, whose activists also bemoan the influx of market-rate housing while seeing few sites going for affordable family housing. SOMA has had far more upscale development; and has seen tens of millions spent on affordable housing for seniors and homeless persons—but new affordable family housing remains rare.
SOMA has the very aggressive Mercy Housing, along with Citizens Housing (the nonprofit offshoot of A.E. Evans & Co.), TNDC and TODCO. The first three of these groups have the capacity to build hundreds of units of family housing in SOMA, but to my knowledge none are currently involved in a single new family project.
How can this situation change before all potential sites are gone?
The Mayor’s Office of Housing apparently believes family housing gets the biggest bang for the buck in Visitacion Valley, and wants to direct its resources there. But the city better move quickly as the once ample land opportunities in SOMA are quickly drying up and competition for Visitacion Valley property may soon increase.
A policy that focuses solely on stopping market-rate housing will not stop families exodus from San Francisco, because that requires that the city move affirmatively to build new affordable family housing opportunities. For all of the meetings, speeches, and pledges, no action toward this goal has been taken.
And the problem is not a lack of money. While there are insufficient affordable housing funds to meaningfully address San Francisco’s housing crisis, millions of dollars continued to be squandered due to a citywide inclusionary housing law—which requires developers to fund affordable housing– that fails to ensure affordable housing for families.
On Thursday night the Planning Commission will consider Supervisor Daly’s measure to improve the city’s inclusionary law. When you see the strong opposition to this extremely moderate (and, by Daly’s standards, incremental and reformist) measure, it will become clear why the universal rhetoric supporting families with children remains unmatched by action.
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