Author: saveurvoice

This article originally appeared on KTVU

SAN FRANCISCO – A plan to build a skyscraper with residential housing that would tower more than 50-stories high in San Francisco’s Sunset District near Ocean Beach and the San Francisco zoo is raising debate over development of affordable housing and the desire by some neighbors to preserve the character of the area. 

Renee Lazear lives nearby and says she was stunned to see the plans filed last week by owners of the lot where Sloat Garden currently stands. 

The owners want to build a high-rise residential building more than 500 feet tall, about the size of the Embarcadero Center.

“This is like are you kidding me? This belongs downtown,” said Lazear.

Lazear says the owners have filed previous plans over the past several years, ranging from multiple 12-story buildings to an even taller skyscraper than the current plan.

She and other neighbors have formed a group Save our Neighborhoods SF, calling for the city planning department to reject the high density 680-unit project. The building would include affordable housing units which Lazear says she supports, but the group believes the size of the project would cause problems with traffic, parking, blocking sunlight for neighboring properties and disturb the character of the area. 

“We have approaching 3,000 petition signers who are opposed to this.”

“I love it. I think we need all types of housing across the city. We haven’t really built anything like that on the west side in a long time,” said Jane Natoli, who is also a San Francisco resident and serves as YIMBY Action’s San Francisco Organizing Director.

Natoli supports the project. She says YIMBY Action, is advocating for more affordable housing units.

“We haven’t historically built enough housing for 50 years. And because of that, we’ve reached this point where we’re going to see more projects like that. We’re going to see more proposals like that,” said Natoli. 

Under a state law to encourage more housing, developers of affordable housing units are allowed to build 50% more units on a property, beyond current limits.

San Francisco’s planning department says the latest high-rise plan meets those rules, but is not allowed under the city code formulas that limit the height in the Sunset District. 

In a statement, the Planning Department’s Chief of Staff Dan Sider said, “We recognize that the interaction between State and local law is complicated, but the limits are clear and the building remains a 600-foot-tall tower in a 100-foot district. We’d like nothing more than to partner with the developer to make dense housing a reality here, but we all have to play by the rules.” 

“We want more places for people to live so if they found another some other arrangements with the same number of units, I’m sure we’d be supportive,” said Natoli. “What we don’t like to see is death by a thousand paper cuts, where projects get slowly whittled down.” 

Opponents say the housing development next door has not be full since it opened five years ago. 

“We have the Westerly down here,” said Lavear, “It’s only a third occupied. There’s commercial space that isn’t occupied. And they want to put commercial space here. I really don’t understand how they think they’re going to be any more successful.” 

Lazear says instead, her group would like to see high-rises converted downtown to housing. 

“They could take all those empty and vacant units and convert them into housing for sale, housing for rent and make it truly an affordable program not a subsidy helping developers get rich,” said Lazear. 

The project is expected to go before the Board of Appeals on July 26. Both sides say they plan to show up and speak out. 

Note from Our Neighborhood Voices: First Scott Wiener came for your neighborhood – now he is coming for California’s sensitive coastlines. Help us fightback by signing up using the form at the bottom of this page.

This article originally appeared in CalMatters.

California lawmakers have been busy over the last decade trying to make it easier to build homes across a housing-strapped state. But there’s an 840-mile-long exception.

In an undulating band that generally runs 1,000 yards from the shoreline, the 12 members of the California Coastal Commission have the final say over what gets built, where and how.

Voters empowered the commission to protect the state’s iconic beaches in 1972, responding to a crisis of despoiled seas and the prospect of the Miami-fication of the California coast.

But five decades later, the state faces a different crisis as millions of Californians struggle to find an affordable place to call home. Now, a growing number of legislators and housing advocates are trying to wrest away some of the commission’s power. 

Legislation by San Francisco Democratic Sen. Scott Wiener would fast-track apartment development in parts of the state that haven’t met their state-set housing goals, exempting them from lengthy public hearings and environmental legal challenges. The coast is no exception, effectively cutting the Coastal Commission out of the process.

Commission members, staff and environmental advocates say the bill may be the most direct assault yet at the agency’s voter-backed mandate.

“Once you start exempting classes of development from the Coastal Act there will be no shutting that barn door,” said Sarah Christie, a lobbyist for the commission. “You’re going to lose some of the best things about California.”

And as rising seas threaten to bring down bluffs and flood beachfront neighborhoods, coastal advocates argue that carefully considered development is more important than ever.

Wiener and his allies reject the argument that the commission is the only thing standing in the way of a development free-for-all, since current zoning rules and environmental protection laws would still apply. Ending what has become the regular practice of exempting the coast from California’s most aggressive pro-housing development laws is also fair, they argue. California’s beachfront happens to be home to some of the state’s richest residents.

“The coastal zone is much whiter and wealthier than the rest of the state,” Wiener noted at a recent Assembly committee hearing. “The idea we would be applying state housing law inland…while we literally exempt whiter, wealthier coastal communities is offensive to me.”

Wiener said he plans to introduce tweaks to the bill before its next hearing on July 10 in an effort to “compromise” with the commission. But the two sides remain far apart.

“The idea we would be applying state housing law inland…while we literally exempt whiter, wealthier coastal communities is offensive to me.” – State Sen. Scott Wiener, Democrat from San Francisco

The tension between the state’s aggressive housing goals and its longstanding commitment to coastal preservation is particularly acute in Southern California, where the latest round of state housing goals shifted the bulk of the region’s planned growth from inland communities — the traditional, sprawling outlets for pent up housing demand — to coastal ones. That includes cities like Santa Monica, Malibu, Los Angeles, Encinitas and San Diego, all of which fall at least in part, if not entirely, within the coastal zone.

“If you have the Coastal Commission, with their ‘less is more’ mindset saying, ‘no, you can’t build here’…how are cities even supposed to attempt to achieve meeting that (housing) goal?” said Elizabeth Hansburg, executive director of People For Housing, a pro-housing advocacy group in Orange County.

Christopher Pederson, who served as chief counsel for the commission before retiring in 2018, said it’s possible for the state to build up the coast while maintaining “really strong protections” in undeveloped coastal land and for delicate ecosystems. In fact, he said, if the alternative to building in dense coastal cities is encouraging car-oriented sprawl in the exurbs, the two goals may necessarily go hand in hand.

“From an environmental perspective, from a climate policy perspective, from a housing perspective and from a transportation perspective, I think it makes a lot of sense to encourage more multifamily housing in the coastal zone,” said Pederson.

Will the Coastal Commission hold the line?

This isn’t the first time the Legislature has taken a crack at the Coastal Commission’s authority. It’s not even the first time this year. 

San Diego Assemblymember David Alvarez, a Democrat, introduced a bill in February that would encourage developers to set aside units for lower income residents by allowing them to build higher and denser projects. The bill builds on past “density bonus” policies that have made their way through the Legislature. But unlike its predecessors — and unlike some of the most significant housing bills in recent years, including one that allows the construction of duplexes in areas zoned for single family homes across the state — Alvarez’s bill explicitly went out of its way to include the coastal zone. 

Then, in April, the bill reached the Assembly Natural Resources Committee and a coastal exception was added back in. 

Chair Luz Rivas of Arleta, and other Democrats including Gail Pellerin of Santa Cruz and Dawn Addis of San Luis Obispo, made clear at the hearing that overriding the commission was a no-go.

Alvarez accepted the change rather than see his bill die. But he was visibly frustrated. 

“I heard a statement that coastal access is important and that people should have the opportunity to visit the coast,” he said, referring to one of the commission’s key mandates to keep California beaches open to the public. “People should also have the opportunity to live on the coast, not just visit the coast.”

“The ocean is coming”

So far Wiener’s bill has not met the same fate, though it goes before the same committee later this month. His bill also, arguably, represents a bigger challenge to the commission’s authority. 

In most of the state’s cities and counties, proposed multiplexes and apartment projects are allowed to skirt lengthy public approval processes. Instead they get automatic approval as long as they check the right boxes — among them, offering a certain share of units at below-market rents or prices and abiding by stricter labor standards.

But the Coastal Commission doesn’t do box checking. 

Along much of the coast, the commission has to approve city growth and zoning plans. In neighborhoods especially close to the water, foes of proposed developments can appeal directly to the commission.

And in cities that haven’t come up with their own coastal protection plans, which includes about a quarter of coastal cities including Los Angeles, the Coastal Commission enforces the law alone, armed only with the Coastal Act. And the act itself is fairly light on specifics. 

That’s for good reason, said Christie, the commission lobbyist.

Ensuring that a proposed development is built “far enough away from an eroding bluff that it’s not going to fall into the ocean in 20 years, there is no objective standard that can speak to that complexity,” she said.

“It’s going to be a managed retreat or an unmanaged retreat because the ocean is coming and nature bats last.” – Sarah Christie, Lobbyist for the Coastal Commission

Climate change and rising sea levels add yet another level of complexity and another reason not to rush development, she added.

“The last thing that California should be doing is concentrating more new development in these hazardous flood-prone areas,” she said. “It’s going to be a managed retreat or an unmanaged retreat because the ocean is coming and nature bats last.”

That view is shared by all 12 members of the commission, who are appointed by the governor or the Legislature. 

“We take a lot of time and effort in evaluating each and every project that comes before us,” said Commissioner Dayna Bochco during a June 7 hearing. “You can’t just make a mathematical formula as to what works in any given project on the coast.”

The commission voted unanimously to oppose Wiener’s bill.

Must fit plans for California coast

The bill does include its own set of checks on which projects get the red-carpet treatment and which get closer review.

In order to receive the fast-tracked approval process, the land in question already has to be zoned by local governments for housing. A proposed building has to have pre-existing “urban” development on at least three of its four sides.

According to estimates put together by California YIMBY, a pro-housing development organization that supports the bill, of the nearly 1.5 million acres within the coastal zone, the bill would allow for streamlined development on just 277,160 acres. The vast majority of the land — wetlands, floodplains, beaches and river channels — either are explicitly exempted from the bill or aren’t zoned for housing by locals.

“Approximately 85% of the Coastal Zone is already excluded from the bill. The remaining 15% are existing urbanized, developed communities,” Wiener said in a written statement. He added that the state “can’t afford to continue excluding these areas if we are to meet our climate goals — the lack of housing in coastal zones these exclusions produce already means coastal workers have to drive 10% more on average than their inland counterparts.”

Wiener and his allies also reject the idea that proper planning for rising oceans requires detailed, site-by-site analysis. The senator’s office pointed to voluntary planning guidelines produced by the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission and San Mateo County Flood Control District. The San Mateo County planning document builds on nationwide flood risk mapping from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Though his office has yet to provide details, Wiener said his proposed compromise language to the Coastal Commission includes preserving the current discretionary review process for the most at-risk slivers of the coast and adding specific “objective development standards” around rising sea levels.

Not that anyone can say with certainty how much shore the sea is likely to swallow across the entire coast in the coming decades.

“Everybody admits that it’s not a hard science, it’s probabilities,” said Joseph Smith, a land-use consultant for California Coastal Works who advises developers and governments navigating the Coastal Act. “But if it is absolutely important to get housing into the coastal zone, then yes, you could pick a number.”

Building a California coast for all

The commission and its defenders say pro-housing advocates and legislators are picking on the wrong enemy.

For the first decade of its life, the Coastal Commission was empowered to make the construction of affordable housing a condition of its approval of residential projects. In 1981, the Legislature took that power away over the commission’s objections.

Revoking that power will “make sure that the ability to live near the coast is reserved for the wealthy,” then-Chairman Lenard Grote warned at a legislative hearing at the time.

Susan Jordan, founder of the nonprofit California Coastal Protection Network, is a familiar face at the state’s public hearings, where she regularly challenges oceanside projects for violations of the Coastal Act. A recent win: the Poseidon Water desalination project in Huntington Beach, which the Coastal Commission rejected last year.

“The Legislature ‘broke’ it and now it needs to ‘fix’ it,” Jordan said in a statement.

The commission’s supporters regularly stress that it has never rejected a proposed affordable housing project.

But for many developers — including those who build deed-restricted units for lower-income residents — the possibility of years of delay with no certain outcome has created a “chilling effect,” said Jeannette Temple, a San Diego land use consultant.

“If you’re an affordable housing developer, you’re already operating on the margins, so most of the time my clients, and people my clients know, don’t even look in the coastal zone,” she said. “In my opinion it’s just another kind of redlining.”

Eight-story condo buildings rising above the billionaire bedroom community of Los Altos Hills? Hundreds of apartments flanking the sprawling single-family subdivisions of Brentwood? A hundred and fifty homes perched high on a bucolic hillside in rural Marin County?

These aren’t part of some fictional “Supersize the Suburbs” version of Monopoly.

They’re among a growing number of jumbo housing projects developers are scoping out in the Bay Area’s most exclusive neighborhoods. And to the horror of some longtime residents, local officials could be helpless to halt construction.

It’s all thanks to an until-recently forgotten provision in state housing law meant as a penalty for cities that fail to do their part to alleviate a deepening housing crisis. Developers have begun invoking the rule — dubbed the “builder’s remedy” — in hopes of pushing through projects that are much bigger than local zoning restrictions typically allow.

So far this year, at least 34 such projects totaling more than 6,400 units have been proposed across 11 local cities and counties according to a Bay Area News Group survey of local officials and planning documents throughout the region. Many of the proposals target affluent areas that have long resisted large housing projects.

When the state passed the “builder’s remedy” rule three decades ago, it was envisioned as a “nuclear option” to spur cities to follow through on their housing responsibilities, said Matt Regan, a housing policy expert with the pro-business group Bay Area Council, which helped draft the legislation. But until a Southern California developer invoked it last year, hardly anyone had heard of the provision. And even if more developers had been familiar with it, most would’ve been wary of upsetting local officials whose support they need to build most projects. But fed up with the red tape of the local permitting process, some now see the rule as a prime opportunity.

“Those nuclear buttons are being pushed,” Regan said.

Cities and counties where developers have proposed “builder’s remedy” projects include San Jose (15 projects), Mountain View (five), Palo Alto (three), Los Altos Hills (three), Brentwood (two), Menlo Park, San Mateo, Pleasanton, Sonoma, Fairfax and Marin County.

Many of the proposals call for high- and mid-rise projects along main thoroughfares and commercial centers in Palo Alto, Mountain View and neighborhoods across San Jose, or adding dozens of units to already planned developments, including in downtown San Mateo. Other proposals, including in Los Altos Hills, lay out new plans for multifamily housing in almost exclusively single-family neighborhoods.

One of the main reasons the proposals target wealthy cities is that developers can charge higher rents and sale prices to offset the reduced revenue from the portion of affordable units they’re required to include in their projects.

Exactly how many “builder’s remedy” projects are in the works is unclear: The state housing department doesn’t keep a tally, and it’s likely developers are attempting to use the rule in other cities as well.

According to housing advocates’ interpretation of the law, any city without a state-approved plan for meeting its future housing goals must accept a “builder’s remedy” project, so long as at least 20% of the units are cost-restricted at affordable rates. In the Bay Area, local governments had until Jan. 31 to get approval for their housing plans and guarantee they avoided all consequences, but only a handful met the deadline.

Four months later, just 28 of the 109 cities and counties in the region have gotten regulators to sign off on their every-eight-year plans, which together aim for a roughly 15% increase in the Bay Area’s total housing stock.

With the specter of more potentially controversial proposals on the horizon, cities across the region are under growing pressure to get their housing plans in order — while some local officials are developing legal strategies to stop any “builder’s remedy” project from getting off the ground.

“They’ve been feeling the heat,” said Forrest Linebarger, a Peninsula developer behind one “builder’s remedy” project in Mountain View and two others in Los Altos Hills. “A lot of affluent cities are struggling with this process.”

When Los Altos Hills residents learned of proposals to build more than a hundred apartments, condos and townhomes across three sites in the wooded Silicon Valley suburb, they were predictably aghast.

“I think it’s wrong — totally wrong,” said Duffy Price, 89, who’s lived in Los Altos Hills for over 40 years and is the former editor of the town’s quarterly newsletter. Price worries that adding more residents to the oak-dotted hills would hinder evacuations during a wildfire. She also wants desperately to protect the “rural quality of life” of the town.

“Let us preserve what is the heritage and the natural beauty of Los Altos Hills,” she said.

In response to the outcry, the town hired a public relations firm to take a more “offensive position to explain our perspective” after becoming the “poster child of the builder’s remedy” in local news reports, City Manager Peter Pirnejad said during a February council meeting.

Los Altos Hills also retained a lobbyist to help convince the state to approve its plan to add 438 new homes. In May, the town joined cities, including San Francisco and Oakland, as one of the few local governments with a state-certified plan.

But even with state approval, housing advocates and developers say Los Altos Hills should still have to accept the “builder’s remedy” proposals because they were filed before the town got the OK from regulators. Los Altos Hills, however, has indicated it could argue that an earlier version of its plan was in “substantial compliance” with state law and therefore would be free to deny them.

To complicate matters, housing advocates with the California Housing Defense Fund, contend Los Altos Hills’ plan, while adding some multifamily housing, doesn’t go far enough. They have threatened to sue to invalidate it. For its part, the town said in a statement it worked closely with the state housing department on its plan and touted the finalized version as a “significant milestone in our ongoing efforts to meet the housing needs of our community.”

Cities and towns, including San Mateo, Menlo Park, Atherton, Woodside, Lafayette, Concord and Pleasanton, have also indicated they could deny “builder’s remedy” proposals regardless of state approval of their plans, according to housing advocates.

“Every city should be making every effort to get a certified housing (plan),” said Pleasanton City Councilmember Julie Testa, an outspoken critic of the state’s push to build. “But at the same time, there has to be a point at which the overreach and subjective process has to be corrected.”

Linebarger, the Peninsula developer, said he’s prepared to sue Los Altos Hills if the town denies his two 54-unit senior housing projects on nearby lots sandwiching a single-family home on Mora Drive. (He expects Mountain View will likely approve his project in that city.) Linebarger said recent state laws should give him the upper hand in a potential court case.

“The legal landscape is changing all the time,” he said. “I think cities that are trying to keep housing from us are on the wrong side of history.”

Earlier this year, a state appeals court held that judges should defer to the state on cities’ housing plans unless regulators’ decisions are “clearly erroneous or unauthorized.” While many legal questions remain, the opinion means “cities that want to go up against the determination of (the state) are going to face a tough road in persuading the court to side with them,” said Daniel Golub, a San Francisco real estate attorney with the firm Holland and Knight.

In Southern California, Santa Monica recently struck a deal with a developer to allow 10 scaled-down “builder’s remedy” proposals rather than risk going to court over the high-rise projects. Housing advocates say that could embolden more developers to use the rule to gain leverage in getting projects approved.

Already in Marin County, a Michigan-based real estate private equity firm has threatened to use the provision to develop 150 homes in rustic Lucas Valley if his original 39-home application is denied.

Regan with the Bay Area Council said the tactic could be spreading.

“We’re starting to see real legit household-name developers utter the word ‘builder’s remedy,’” he said. “They’re starting to look at this as this is the silver bullet we’ve been looking for.”

This article originally appeared in the SF Chronicle. By J.K. Dineen

Marin City native Bettie Hodges has spent a half a century battling for equal access to education, decent housing and employment opportunities for low-income African Americans in one of California’s wealthiest counties.

In 1979, she founded the Marin City Community Development Corporation, which for years built low-income housing in a neighborhood that has by far the highest percentage of African Americans in the county. She was part of a group that sued the county — twice — to force integration of the school district. She runs the Hannah Project, an education nonprofit.

“We have been fighting for years in this community to be respected by the county, to have a place where Black people could simply live,” she said. 

Given her long track record of community involvement, Hodges says she and her neighbors were shocked when they learned last year that a 74-unit apartment complex proposed for the heart of Marin City had been administratively approved in late 2020 by county officials without any public hearings or notice to the community.

The development at 825 Drake Ave. was approved under SB35, which allows builders to increase density and height, as well as bypass local planning approval process, in exchange for including more affordable units. While the law is seen as a tool to take power away from NIMBY obstructionists who oppose multifamily development, Marin City residents point to the fact that their community of 3,000 is, in stark contrast to most of the county, made up mostly of low-income multifamily developments.

The 1-acre site at 825 Drake Ave. is a skinny strip of land that overlooks Richardson Bay, where Hodges’ father — like thousands of workers who migrated from the South — toiled in the shipyards during World War II. In those years, racist covenants prevented African American families from leasing or buying property in most of Marin County, leaving Marin City as the only option for households looking to live close to the Marinship, where 93 cargo ships and oil tankers were built between 1942 and 1945.

The Drake Avenue site is across the street from George Rocky Graham Park, a popular playground, and backs up to Village Oduduwa, a low-income senior complex. The project would be built with modular units, which will be produced at a factory in Idaho and then trucked to the site. Residents say the building would create traffic hazards at the playground and block the air and light of the seniors above. They also say the new development will be unaffordable to locals and doesn’t have nearly enough parking — just 24 spots for the 74 apartments. 

“We worked hard to have that housing built — we thought it was important to have a place for our seniors,” Hodges said. “Now to have this big ugly building blocking their light … We feel like it will disrupt the quality of life of our community in a major way.”

While already controversial, backlash to the Drake Avenue project exploded a few weeks ago when an article appeared in the weekly Pacific Sun newspaper in which one of the developers called residents of the historically Black Marin City “communists” who “just want free handouts.”

In the interview, Alexis Gevorgian of AMG & Associates — the company that is working on the development with the Pacific Companies — blamed project opposition on “30 people” who want to “screw it up for 150 to 200 people.”

“Those 30 people, they don’t care. It’s all about them. ‘Give me more. Give me more vouchers. Lower our rent,’ ” he was quoted as saying. “I’m just a builder coming into a hornet’s nest. All I want to do is build. You don’t like it, don’t live there.”

The comments were condemned by Supervisor Stephanie Moulton-Peters, who represents the southern portion of Marin County. She called the statements egregious and said “they show an utter disregard for the African American community in Marin City.”

Caleb Roope, CEO of the Pacific Companies, said Gevorgian is no longer working on the project.

“The comments were inappropriate and I know Alexis regrets making them,” said Roope. “It makes a tough situation certainly worse. I am having to deal with the fallout and the hurt feelings, which are justified.”

Roope said he is working on a redesign of the project that would add more parking:  “My goal is to get to a one-to-one parking-to-unit ratio.”

While the project is a 100% below market rate development, Marin City residents say even the subsidized rents are far more than locals can afford. The income limits that define rents are based on the “area median incomes” of the county, rather than Marin City. Thus, rents at 825 Drake would be set at 80% of area median income, which would mean that a single person with an income of $116,000 could qualify. That is about three times the median income in Marin City.

Already, the Marin City Housing Authority agreed to provide 25 Section 8 vouchers for the Drake Avenue building, which would bring down rents substantially in one-third of the units. 

Roope said he is exploring ways to bring rents down further.

The debate around the project comes at a time when the California Department of Housing and Community Development, empowered by laws like SB35, is putting pressure on local jurisdictions to produce more housing or risk losing state funding. Like cities and counties across California, Marin is  scrambling to finalize its housing element, the state-mandated plan requiring the county to plan for 3,569 units over the next eight years. Of those units, 1,734 must be designated as affordable to lower-income households.

While the current draft of Marin’s housing element includes four Marin City projects totaling 286 units, the county is focused on spurring residential building in parts of the county “that don’t have much higher density housing now,” according to Sarah Jones, director of development for the Marin County Community Development Agency.

Three of the four Marin City projects were proposed several years ago, before the housing element process started. And the 286 units is about 100 fewer homes than is planned for Strawberry, an affluent, unincorporated town next to Tiburon that is home to a 127-acre former seminary that a group has been trying to redevelop with housing. 

“We’re eager to see more housing that’s affordable for Marin’s workforce throughout the county, especially in our high resource neighborhoods,” Jones said.

Moulton-Peters said the “current project shows a lack of understanding and complete disregard for this historic African American community.”

“I do not think this is what the creators of SB35 had in mind,” she said. “We need truly affordable units, and we need a smaller project, with less units on this site.”

As an unincorporated part of the county, Marin City residents have long complained that their voices are ignored, according to resident Marilyn Mackel, a retired attorney.

“There is a plantation mentality,” said Mackel. “Let’s call it what it is. It’s making decisions that affect people’s lives without including them.”

With 825 Drake, those feelings have intensified.

“I think people were offended that we didn’t know about a project of this size and scale, that we didn’t hear about it from the county until they had approved it,” said Mackel. “If those developers had come and talked to the community at least you would have had the respect of communication. We might still have a fight, but at least talk to people.”

While it’s hardly surprising that Marin County neighbors would band together to block development — from Belvedere to Strawberry to Lucas Valley, affluent Marin residents have a long history of torpedoing housing proposals — the debate over 825 Drake is unique, Hodges said.

“I would dare anybody to call me a NIMBY,” she said. “I have street cred for all the projects I have supported, all the meetings where I have spoken in support of affordable housing.” 

Hodges and other opponents are petitioning both county and state officials to reconsider funding for the project. 

Meanwhile, Roope said the easiest thing to do would be to “abandon the project” and return the tax credit money that has already been awarded to the development. 

But he is not ready to give up. “My job is to talk to the neighbors and mitigate as many of their concerns as possible,” he said.

Reach J.K. Dineen: jdineen@sfchronicle.com

By Carmela Guaglianone 

San Francisco has a tall task ahead of it: 82,000 homes by 2031. And now, The City is staring down a tall solution — just one of what will need to be many like it. 

CH Planning LLC, a developer based out of Nevada with a portfolio of skyscrapers in the region, has proposed a 589-foot tall, 50 story, mixed-use structure overlooking the Pacific. 

Yeah, you read that right: 50 stories on The City’s west side. 

The structure, proposed this week and first reported by SFYIMBY, would sit at 2700 Sloat Boulevard in San Francisco’s Outer Sunset District, in the lot that currently hosts the Sloat Garden Center and a parking lot.

The proposal from CH promises 712 apartments of varying size, with 344 studios, 184 one-bedrooms, 114 two-bedrooms, and 80 three-bedrooms. Affordable units, for households bringing in 80% of the Area Median Income, will make up around 16% of the stock. 

Housing will account for 506,790 square feet of the total 616,180. The rest will be distributed among retail spaces, a 212-car basement and bicycle parking.

Amenities in the plan include a commercial gym, an indoor community facility, an open-air terrace and dog run and other yet to be determined programs. The building, as proposed, would be the 12th tallest in The City, according to SFYIMBY. 

But, as goes building in San Francisco, the project is not without controversy. 

CH’s proposal plans to bypass the height restrictions by leveraging the State Density Bonus program, which allows developers who include affordable housing to increase project density by up to 50%, and taking a creative approach to San Francisco’s zoning regulations. But that approach, the Planning Department explained to the San Francisco Business Times, isn’t actually cutting it. 

The issue comes down to the “bulk code,” which limits — you got it — the bulk of a project. CH’s proposal establishes one base podium with four slender towers on top, each separately compliant with the bulk code. While this design isn’t specifically prohibited by the code, the Planning Department has issued an interpretation that opposes the design. Their department would consider all the towers together on account of the single podium. 

Instead, Planning has suggested four podiums, one per tower. But according to the developer, that plan would make the project too expensive. 

The two sides have been communicating back and forth on the bulk issue, but have yet to reach an agreement. 

Dan Sider, chief of staff for the Planning Department, has told the San Francisco Business Times that the code interpretation is “nothing new,” meant to keep developers from “trying to argue something that is inarguable.”

But CH Planning LLC founder, Raelynn Hickey, still intends to argue. Hickey expressed to SFYIMBY that “The City will need to approve the project, and they know it.” It all comes back to those 82,000 homes staring San Francisco down. 

“The city needs to supply the Outer Sunset area with 11,000 new housing units in just over 7.5 years, and approval of hundreds of small projects is not going to get them anywhere near that state requirement,” Hickey told SFYIMBY.

This article originally appeared in the Davis Vanguard

Sacramento, CA – A coalition of communities are pushing back on recent housing proposals, and warn that SB 423, a permanent extension of SB 35, “gives developers unlimited ability to develop nearly anything, anywhere in California.”

Recently Senator Scott Wiener introduced legislation that would make SB 35 permanent.

But for some, that means it would “permanently strip local communities of nearly all important land use decisions.”

The group calls itself Our Neighborhood Voices and describes itself as a “non-partisan coalition of residents and elected officials from every corner of California who believe that land use decisions should be determined by local communities and their elected leaders – not one-size-fits-all laws from Sacramento and for-profit developers.”

Our Neighborhood Voices is organizing to qualify a citizen-led ballot initiative that they say would “protect the ability of local communities to adopt laws that shape local growth, preserve the character of neighborhoods, and require developers to produce more affordable housing and contribute to the costs associated with it.”

Opponents note that while “the legislation – SB 423 – is touted as a tool to solve our affordable housing crisis, local elected leaders say that the legislation undermines local democracy by removing the ability of communities to plan and prepare for what is built in their neighborhoods.”

They explain, “It also can accelerate damaging ‘Builders Remedy’ projects across the state that see massive projects built in residential neighborhoods without adequate planning for water, schools, transit, safety fire danger and other priorities.”

SB 423, they argue, “also removes vital protections in our Coastal Zones – something no other housing bill has dared to do. Californians have consistently supported protecting our coasts – this bill removes many of those protections forever.”

“I was hoping SB 423 might be a tool to help us solve our affordable housing crisis, but it is not,” said Susan Candell, Lafayette City Councilmember. “Instead, it is the state’s final end game to undermine local democracy in cities and counties, and unleash unlimited development, including the ‘Builders Remedy,’ even in our treasured coastal zones.”

According to a release on Wednesday, opponents argue, “SB 423 can potentially release the ‘Builders Remedy’ where developers can just about build anything, anywhere.

“SB 423 is a permanent extension of SB 35 – a 2018 law that forces local governments to approve certain developments under a streamlined process if they fail to build, not just approve, but build enough housing to meet their Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) numbers.

“Complex interactions with many other bills lead cities again to be subject to the ‘Builders Remedy’ in 2025 for Southern California and 2027 in Northern California.”

The RHNA numbers—which are set every eight years—“laid out impossible goals this cycle,” argued Jovita Mendoza, Brentwood City Councilmember. “Virtually no cities or counties will be able to meet their RHNA numbers. Cities and counties are now set up to fail, and as a result, local governments will lose their ability to have a say about what gets built in our communities. Instead, under SB 423, that approval process will be turned over to developers permanently.”

The group also argued that while coastal zones have been protected from profit-driven overdevelopment since the passage of the California Coastal Act of 1976, “This new proposed legislation would virtually undo decades of work to protect California’s coastlines.”

“Now local oversight, those who are the stewards of the coastal zone, is removed. Instead, those decisions are handed over to developers and their allies in Sacramento. We all know we need affordable housing in every part of California, but this bill drastically reduces the required affordable units,” said Redondo Beach City Councilmember Nils Nehrenheim.

By: Dustin Gardiner for the SF Chronicle

As cities across California try to avoid complying with new state housing laws, Attorney General Rob Bonta is asking state legislators to give him another tool to rein in scofflaw municipalities.

Bonta’s office is sponsoring a bill that would give the attorney general the unconditional right to wade into any lawsuit filed over a potential violation of state housing law.

The measure, Assembly Bill 1485 by Matt Haney, D-San Francisco, comes as Bonta has increasingly sought to expand the state’s role in enforcing housing laws as California falls deeper into a housing shortage. Bonta’s work is only expected to grow as cities face aggressive state-mandated targets to build far more units by 2031.

Haney said while some cities have been good actors, there are numerous localities where NIMBY (Not in My Backyard) politics motivates local officials to make it too burdensome to approve new housing in existing neighborhoods.

“There are localities all across the state, unfortunately, who are trying to make their areas no-new-housing zones,” Haney said. “And that’s a violation of state law. The attorney general has to have the tools to combat that.”

Two years ago, Bonta’s office created a Housing Strike Force. It’s a special division within his office that’s designed to hold cities accountable for skirting laws the Legislature has passed in recent years to fast-track some local processes that are often used to fight denser housing, including planning, zoning and permitting approvals.

But housing advocates and the attorney general’s office said the office has sometimes been constrained or delayed in its ability to intervene in lawsuits challenging roadblocks to proposed housing.

For example, in October, Bonta’s office requested to intervene in a lawsuit against the city of Anaheim after it denied a permit for a project to convert existing housing into a transitional home for formerly homeless women. Nearly six months later, the judge still hasn’t decided whether to allow the state to join the case.

That’s because, under current state law, the attorney general needs to get a judge’s permission to intervene in a third-party lawsuit filed to challenge a potential violation of state housing law. Haney said that has delayed Bonta’s involvement for months in some cases — and could allow judges to block him outright.

AB1485, which Haney plans to unveil Tuesday, was written in partnership with Bonta’s office and the Housing Action Coalition, an advocacy group frustrated by cities’ attempts to block new housing laws.

While the attorney general already has the ability to file lawsuits against cities that violate housing law under a public right of action, many housing lawsuits in the state have come from YIMBY (Yes in My Backyard) groups. Housing activists said such cases filed under a private right of action are needed because Bonta’s office alone cannot police the sheer volume of violations.

Todd David, special projects director for the Housing Action Coalition, said it’s important for Bonta to be able to easily intervene in those lawsuits because he can be more strident in confronting cities than developers, who are often fearful of having their projects stymied further.

“This is another tool that indicates to recalcitrant municipalities that the state is really concerned about this issue,” David said of AB1485.

Housing advocates said they expect the number of lawsuits Bonta files to rapidly accelerate as the state tries to force cities to meet their housing targets. California must construct 180,000 units, including 80,000 affordable units, each year to keep pace with existing housing demand. The state is only constructing about 80,000 units per year.

“The attorney general is going to be more and more involved in implementing and enforcing state housing laws,” said state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, who is co-authoring the bill with Haney. “That’s a big, powerful message that when we pass a state housing law, it’s not a suggestion, it’s a requirement.”

Wiener said the attorney general’s intervention in private lawsuits is also crucial because developers who file lawsuits are typically fighting for a specific project. He said Bonta has a broader public interest to protect the enforcement of state housing policy and to prevent a patchwork of legal interpretations that could be harmful.

Bonta echoed that sentiment in a statement, saying his office wants to easily wade into cases where the enforcement of housing law is a statewide concern. He said the bill would “maximize” his efforts to fight for better access to affordable units.

“Ensuring that all Californians have access to affordable housing is a top priority for my office, and we’ve been actively working to enforce state housing laws and address our housing crisis,” Bonta said.

You may have heard that the Governor and the Attorney General recently announced a lawsuit against Huntington Beach for simply exercising their right to speak out about land use decisions and the future of their community. And this follows another twelve lawsuits against a dozen Bay Area cities by developer-backed groups. Is your city on the list?

15 Cities Facing Lawsuits Over their Housing Element:

1. Belvedere
2. Burlingame
3. Cupertino
4. Daly City
5. Elk Grove
6. Fairfax
7. Huntington Beach
8. Martinez
9. Novato
10. Palo Alto
11. Pinole
12. Pleasant Hill
13. Richmond
14. Santa Clara County
15. Sausalito

If your city isn’t on this list – it soon could be… unless we organize and fight back.

California cities – and ultimately taxpayers – shouldn’t be threatened with lawsuits just because they want some control over the direction of their own neighborhoods. We all know that our state needs more affordable housing, but developers should work with communities and their local elected officials to build housing where it makes sense.

Tens of thousands of Californians have joined our movement – but we need your support more than ever. With your help we can restore our right to speak out about the direction of our neighborhoods and work towards housing solutions that serve our communities – not just developer interests.

Join our movement today and help us fight to restore our neighborhood voice with statewide ballot initiative in 2024.

This article was originally published in the Mercury News

By: Katie Lauer

ORINDA — How can cities balance new state guidelines restricting development in high-risk wildfire zones with parallel — and often conflicting — mandates for aggressive housing construction?

In vulnerable areas like Orinda, where virtually the entire hillside city is subject to high fire risk, many local leaders say they are doing the best they can. But critics who think they aren’t doing enough to keep the city safe have reached out to the California Superior Court to weigh in on the conflict.

Orinda is home to nearly 20,000 residents living across roughly 13 square miles of rolling, dense hills and secluded valleys nestled in between Berkeley and Walnut Creek along Highway 24.

In January, the Orinda City Council adopted “Plan Orinda,” a roadmap to meet the California Department of Housing and Community Development’s lofty mandate to build 1,359 new units of housing by 2031. This looming need to boost residential housing development sparked rezoning efforts, including on Orinda’s wildfire-prone hillsides.

In addition to the housing plan, the city has also made headway on its own Downtown Precise Plan and Safety Element. Although wildfire risks connected to each of these three long-range planning efforts was analyzed with a single Environmental Impact Report, Orinda’s topography, low-density land use patterns and existing traffic infrastructure continue to fuel fears of wildfire hazards.

The community group Orindans for Safe Emergency Evacuation (OSEE) are concerned that the environmental plan failed to adequately analyze how much the proposed housing plan may hinder the ability of current and future residents to evacuate during a wildfire.

As most of the upcoming units will be developed near the city’s downtown BART station and along main arterial routes, group spokesperson Michele Jacobson said the biggest concern is how the city will alleviate several traffic “chokepoints” in close proximity to wildland-urban interfaces and very high fire hazard severity zones.

Jacobson — a former Orinda Planning Commissioner who worked in urban planning for more than 30 years — argues that while the city’s impact report acknowledges that housing could hinder evacuations, the planning documents do not follow through on California Environmental Quality Act requirements to develop location alternatives or plan mitigations to reduce those risks. She is disappointed that there isn’t more specific data available for elected officials and residents to pore over.

“If you just look at the Oakland Hills firestorm and flip it to the other side of the hill, that’s what Orindans are nervous about,” Jacobson said in an interview, referring to the fire that burned 18,000 acres, destroyed 3,500 homes and killed 25 people in 1991.

OSEE filed a petition on March 2 for the courts to intervene.

In October, State Attorney General Rob Bonta crafted suggestions to help cities navigate wildfire risks and state requirements while building new housing. Those guidelines advised developers to include road improvements to projects, install hydrants in areas that lack adequate access, avoid building on steep slopes in fire-prone areas, and the use of fire-resistant materials beyond the minimum code requirements. While those guidelines are voluntary, legal risks may arise if they are ignored.

Some cities have already started trying to find a compromise. In Saratoga, the city council opted to review housing development proposed for its South Bay hillside on a case-by-case basis, rather than require each proposal to include costly improvements like new roads and hydrants.

By creating new plans tailored to a community’s specific area, housing planners can simultaneously consider and bypass state guidelines in an attempt to make the process easier — and less expensive. Without the change, Saratoga’s city attorney said Bonta’s guidelines could have made several properties in the city “undevelopable.”

For now, the city of Orinda stands by its “Plan Orinda” roadmap. The city’s final impact statement contains a “Statement of Overriding Considerations” that explains how, even after fleshing out mitigation measures — mostly on par with Bonta’s guidelines — Orinda’s mandated development would still present “significant and unavoidable” impacts on local wildfire risks, despite efforts to alleviate the problems.

According to Planning Director Drummond Buckley, the city also continues to utilize Measure R tax funds to pay for wildfire improvements, and a separate evacuation analysis was completed months before the environmental plan was approved in January — two years ahead of schedule, prompted by community input.

The city’s “evaluation and consideration of wildfire, evacuation, and related issues” are included in environmental impact plan and the record, Buckley wrote in an email, adding that the city would not comment on the community group’s lawsuit.

Local housing advocates, meanwhile, say that while new housing will undoubtedly create wildfire risks, the very existence of Orinda does, as well.

“So many people in these communities oppose affordable housing that it can be hard to separate out the good faith concerns about wildfire evacuation from bad faith concerns about low-income housing, which are expressed as wildfire concerns,” said Kevin Burke, a local software developer who serves on the board of East Bay for Everyone. “But if that’s the case, then it sounds like a horribly dangerous situation, and we really shouldn’t be letting anyone live in (very high risk fire safety zones) where others might threaten their evacuation.”