“Doom to Bloom”: Community Rejects Mayor’s Developer Giveaways & Demand People’s Plan

PRESS RELEASE FOR Wednesday, June 28, 2023

“We need to go from doom to bloom, with our communities flourishing instead of being shoved further into the 'Mayor's Doom Loop,’” says Jeantelle Laberinto with Race & Equity in all Planning Coalition (REP-SF). “Mayor Breed’s housing streamlining legislation, coupled with her proposed budget cuts, will worsen inequality and homelessness, and displace low-income and BIPOC families and children out of their homes.” 

Mayor London Breed’s housing streamlining legislation, which will be presented to the public for the first time in front of the SF Planning Commission this Thursday, is full of developer giveaways that promote more surplus housing that most San Franciscans can’t afford. Meanwhile, the Planning Department and the Mayor continue to have no real plan for affordable housing. 

The Race and Equity in all Planning Coalition (REP-SF) has developed the Citywide People’s Plan with member groups representing thousands of residents across the city. The Citywide People’s Plan lays out a comprehensive plan to put affordable housing first, speed up permitting with a community first approval process, and protect residents from displacement. “What we need is truly affordable housing as laid out in the Citywide People’s Plan and the Mayor’s legislation does nothing to house our essential workers and most families. Instead, we are going to see evictions and demolitions of housing and small businesses at levels not seen in San Francisco since Redevelopment,” says Laberinto.

The Mayor is introducing this legislation to instruct the SF Planning Department and other city agencies how to implement the Housing Element, the state mandated policy that guides San Francisco's housing policies for the next eight years. Such implementation instructions can be proposed by both the Mayor and the Board of Supervisors. The state is requiring that SF permit over 82,000 units of new housing during this period of which at least 57% of the units should be affordable for people with extremely low, low and moderate incomes. 

Rather than building for San Franciscans’ needs, Mayor Breed is focusing on developer giveaways that will set SF on a track to repeat the same failures of the previous 2014-2022 Housing Element. During those years, SF overbuilt market rate units by almost double and under-built for low-income residents by almost half. Mayor Breed and the Planning Department are pushing this streamlining of even more luxury condos at a time when the city has an astoundingly high residential vacancy rate of 15% and a declining population. Despite the surplus in supply in San Francisco’s market, housing prices are still out of reach for most residents. 

“With this legislation, Mayor Breed is telling working class families like mine that there is no place for us in San Francisco”, says Reina Tello, with PODER. “Families like mine are under attack in San Francisco with the budget cuts to tenant protections and affordable housing. We wouldn’t even qualify for what little affordable housing the Mayor’s plan would produce. Where is the love, San Francisco? What we need are the solutions in the Citywide People’s Plan and continued investment in SF’s pandemic recovery.”

Underpinning the Mayor’s legislation and its developer giveaways are incentives for demolitions of existing housing which will result in the increased displacement of long time tenants resulting in San Francisco repeating the harms of Redevelopment and urban renewal that demolished BIPOC owned housing and businesses in the Fillmore, Japantown and South of Market from the 1950s to the 1990s. In fact, the geographic scopes of the Mayor’s legislation and other Housing Element implementation legislative proposals cover a far greater area of San Francisco than the relatively small historic Redevelopment Project Areas. 

In the Housing Element, the SF’s Planning Department acknowledged the displacement risks will occur during the implementation process and recommended increased funding for tenant legal defense and counseling. Instead, the Mayor has decided to gut tenant protections and habitability enforcement in this year’s proposed budget. The Mayor’s legislation also moves to remove public notices and hearings for demolitions, which are vital means to protect tenants from displacement from predatory landlords and developers. The developers will not be held accountable for evictions and scare tactics preying on longtime, low-income tenants, such as seniors. To make matters worse, Mayor Breed is taking funding meant to house homeless families (Prop C dollars) and funding to acquire affordable housing sites (through Prop I funds for a nation-leading program called Housing Preservation Program) to instead increase the SF Police Department's budget. 

"We need homes not jails. Instead of policing us, the Mayor should be doing everything in the City’s power to keep San Franciscans in their homes and build truly affordable housing, including acquiring sites to build throughout the City,” says Christen Alqueza of Richmond District Rising. 

Rather than creating an actual plan and budget for new affordable housing, the Mayor merely created an Affordable Housing Leadership Council to publish a report that isn’t even due until next year. As a whole, the Mayor’s planning and budget policies will increase inequality, evictions, slum conditions, hunger, permanent homelessness, and policing to control the human toll of her austerity measures, all while catering to predatory and speculative real estate.

“Doom is the new blight. It’s like the Mayor wants to further the blight conditions in certain neighborhoods, setting them up to deteriorate, just like they did during Redevelopment, to justify demolishing them in order to build luxury condos,” says Don Misumi of the Westside Tenants Association. “Japantown was completely demolished and rebuilt and now neighborhoods like the Richmond, the Sunset and the Haight have the urban renewal target on their back. The worst part is that communities don’t know the extent of how the policies will affect them.”

REP-SF urges residents to turn out June 29th to the Planning Commission hearing and demand the City reject Mayor Breed’s legislation and enact the Citywide People’s Plan! For a more detailed analysis on why we must reject the Mayor’s streamlining legislation and enact the solutions from the Citywide People’s Plan, see REP-SF's letter to the Planning Department.