Dangerous Last Minute Changes to Housing Element Threaten to Force More Residents from their Homes and Neighborhoods

PRESS RELEASE FOR Thursday, December 14, 2022

San Francisco is headed to a new phase of urban renewal that will tear through communities in the same way Redevelopment did, razing homes and businesses with little regard to the displacement, trauma and disconnection that will result from last minute changes to the City’s Housing Element.

San Francisco’s Housing Element will guide the City’s housing policies for the next eight years. Changes to the Housing Element posted on December 6, 2022 (the redlined version) include new provisions in the "Reducing Constraints" section that completely undermine Planning's stated goal for the Housing Element to be “centered in racial and social equity.” The Housing Element is coming to a vote for final adoption at the SF Planning Commission this Thursday, December 15.

What community advocates are calling the “Developer Dirty Bomb” (Implementation Actions 8.1.5 through to 8.1.8) will nullify every attempt at equity in the Housing Element. Without any community input, large swaths of the city will be up-zoned and primed to be destroyed and rebuilt with luxury housing, while current residents and businesses in communities of color and cultural districts will be pushed out by developers eager to profit from development incentives provided by the City.

“With a Hail Mary lobbying push, developers and investors have stripped away measures for affordable housing and social and racial equity and replaced them with policies that prime our city for urban renewal-style demolition and displacement. That’s what ‘additional constraints reductions’ and ‘additional rezoning outside of Priority Equity Geographies’ mean. The language is so broad and permissive, there will be no checks on what gets torn down and developed,” says Jeantelle Laberinto of the Race & Equity in all Planning Coalition (REP-SF). 

“Growing up in the Fillmore/ Western Addition, it was physically apparent that our neighborhood was extremely deprived and our neighborhood didn't look like others. As a child, I always thought Black people must have done something wrong for our community to be so desolate. Later, I learned about the effects of Redevelopment, the destruction of Black home ownership and Black-owned businesses that left our communities dismantled and scattered. We have not recovered from the traumas it caused. Because of the displacement of Black people, generations behind me have no place to call their own. We are treated as strangers in our community,” says Ericka Scott, San Francisco African American Arts & Cultural District.

 “Now the cultural district that I work in located in the Bayview Hunters Point is being targeted in the same way, except this time, they’re calling it ‘rezoning’ and 'removing constraints' instead of Redevelopment. We must not repeat the mistakes of the past and the City should instead focus their efforts towards affordable housing and support for small businesses,” Scott continues.

Low-income communities of color must continue to have a voice in the decisions that directly target their homes and families. Civic participation is fundamental to our democracy and communities’ self determination. REP-SF is demanding that all last-minute provisions designed to silence community voices be removed.

REP-SF has already told the Planning Department that previous provisions already threatened Redevelopment without any attempt at relocating people displaced from their homes. These new provisions take this existing threat, and doubles down, going from bad to exponentially worse.

“Everything the community has fought for the past two years to make the Housing Element finally responsive to the needs of low-income and communities of color, and all of the protections within Cultural Districts, will be wiped away by these new Actions which are clearly in violation of the City's legal obligation to Affirmatively Further Fair Housing,” says Erick Arguello, Calle 24 Latino Cultural District.

REP-SF has been providing input into the Housing Element for the past two years. When the coalition saw that the Planning Department’s drafts failed to create the affordable housing San Franciscans need, we published The Citywide People’s Plan to show how community-led solutions can ensure San Francisco meets its ambitious Housing Element goals of about 47,000 new units of affordable housing in the next eight years.

"The developer lobby failed to get Proposition D passed in the last election, so now they're doing an end run around voters so that they can give more power to developers through these sneaky, last minute changes to the Housing Element," says Don Misumi, Richmond District Rising. "This is a dangerous precedent and it will be disastrous for low income, Indigenous, Black and other communities of color."

REP-SF is a coalition of nearly 40 grassroots organizations, cultural districts, neighborhood groups and affordable housing developers who work together to ensure a future with diverse communities, stable, affordable housing and equitable access to resources and opportunities.