MARCUS’ Top priority

Housing for everyone, everywhere.

Toplines

• There is nothing wrong with having the development of housing move through a city department for permits and inspection, but San Francisco’s process is so complicated and drawn-out that it is one of the biggest sources of corruption at City Hall. The permitting process should be a completely “by right” process in which housing development that is within zoning and up to code gets approved by default through city staff.

• Legalize housing everywhere: apartments, duplexes/triplexes/multiplexes, student housing, and affordable homes are banned across residential areas across the Bay Area and state. This is a holdover from mid-century housing segregation that, to this day, keeps neighborhoods racially and economically homogenous. This must end.

• Strengthen and expand affordable housing by providing density and height bonuses to 100% below market-rate housing projects, enforcing Section 8 compliance and maintaining a city-wide rental unit registry, and allowing the development of tall, dense housing above BART and Muni underground stations.

• Eliminate density caps and height restrictions within two blocks of transit corridors on which transit runs at a frequency of 20 minutes or fewer.

• Create automatically-triggered anti-eviction and rent moratorium protocols for when the economy takes a nosedive.

• Strengthen tenant eviction protections by legally mandating disclosure of tenant rights during move-ins and move-outs.

• Reduce stringent affordability requirements in San Francisco back to the prior 10% on-site/12% in-lieu fee requirement but require on-site, integrated below market rates be deeded for no less than 50 years at those rates.

• Eliminate negative incentives to blocking housing by completely eliminating minimum parking requirements, forgoing level of service considerations when making changes to arterial roadways, weight public benefits greater when hearing concerns of existing homeowners and merchants.

• Tackle the primary structural barrier to making housing more affordable: Prop 13. With cities being robbed of a core financing structure as a result of Prop 13, they’ve turned to creative, albeit onerous, excessive, and cost-prohibitive fee regimes to fund their operations. Without Prop 13 incentivizing cities to welcome jobs but refuse to add housing and thus drain city coffers further, cities would have the funding they need to not see the addition of more homes in neighborhoods as zero-sum to the city’s existing budgetary restrictions.

A stagnant economy. A refusal to build housing for anyone. An ever-changing Board of Supervisors with a non-changing belief that no new housing is necessary. All of this for decades on end.

This is the story of how San Francisco became the single most expensive city in America in the 2010s and how it may sadly continue to be in the 2020s if we maintain our current state of affairs.

As the local economy picked up after the first tech bubble of the early 2000s, San Francisco willfully chose to not build nearly enough of the housing needed to keep families in this city. As a result, when the economy picked back up in 2011 and faced quarter after quarter of exponential job growth through to 2015, new residents of means crowded out existing residents in the existing supply of housing. Whether it was apartments, condos, houses, the lack of supply of housing to meet the rising demand led to skyrocketing costs and the loss of countless former residents and families unable to pay the exorbitant cost of rent.

We are not here by accident.

San Francisco is one of the few cities in the United States run by a consolidated city-county government. Divided into eleven distinct districts spanning dozens of neighborhoods, San Francisco’s City Hall is dominated by council-members we refer to as Supervisors and, unfortunately, parochial politics. While a far cry better than how elections used to be run - on a citywide scale - district Supervisors are beholden to vocal constituency groups in their respective districts

At the turn of the last decade, Bay Area governments projected hundreds of thousands of new jobs as a result of the growing tech industry and the service sector growing in tandem to accommodate it. But by 2017, the Bay Area added 42% of the jobs it expected to add by 2040. The nine counties that make up the Bay Area added 30% less than what was projected to be made by that same point in time. 

Now we’re in a new decade, ever closer to the middle of this century yet since 2011, while 531,400 new jobs were created in the Bay Area, only 123,801 new housing units were built. This means for every fourth job that was made, only one new unit of housing was built. Some perspective, in the same time frame, San Francisco has added only one new unit of housing for every...eight jobs. That’s eight workers competing over every single new unit of housing; eight families outbidding each other for every new home; eight students, creators, seniors who must compete with each other to get the shelter we know is a human right.

There are far too many self-ascribed progressives and otherwise left-wing-minded individuals who believe the Bay Area - and California at large - does not have a housing shortage and that the fundamental economic principles of supply, demand, and pricing relative to both do not apply to us. They’re wrong.

When cities and towns across the Bay and over greedily pursue nothing but job creation but shirk their state-mandated responsibility to build the housing for those incoming workers, existing residents are pushed out, the effects of gentrification are magnified tenfold, and the effects of climate change only worsen. When current residents must compete with new and other existing residents over existing housing stock - instead of newly-built housing going to those who are coming here for work - they get pushed out farther and farther from the Bay Area. Because the metro Bay Area is where the well-paying jobs are, unless displaced residents are willing to abandon familial, community, and professional ties to the area and move out of state, they commute farther and farther from other parts of the state. This poses many problems: first the emotional and physical toll of displacing residents and their children from the communities from which they were raised, second, the cultural cost of losing so many existing residents and people of lower incomes unable to stay, third, the environmental cost of both lengthening commutes into Bay Area jobs centers and forcing housing development on otherwise undeveloped suburban and exurban land (also known as greenfield development) which further encroaches on wildfire-prone areas. The cost of not building housing in dense, urban areas, makes problems for people and communities all over the state and make life more unlivable for everyone.

Simple-minded individuals opine that the solution would be to have less jobs or less people and that housing should be built elsewhere, just not here. This is a mode of thinking that is just two steps away from an embrace of eugenics and is barely a half step toward the kind of anti-urban, anti-diverse community mantra preached by Trump and his cronies. Liberal-minded folks in cities like those in the Bay Area have a moral imperative to not embrace anti-housing stances that are ultimately anti-people.