Hey guys, whatcha talkin’ about?

I occasionally post articles on Facebook related to the housing shortage in San Francisco, and usually no one likes them, because it’s not really a like-able topic. Or perhaps because everyone’s newsfeed algorithm has corrected itself to carefully ignore my preachy posts. Either way, these articles are generally long, prosaic content-barfs full of history, politics, economics, and other things that are not specifically trending on Twitter, and apparently no one is as interested in zoning and land use as I am.

Even worse, these articles almost never include puns or wordplay or personification because the articles aren’t written by me.

But guys, I can personify an apartment. Hell, I’ll personify two. Here is my impression of a New York apartment building talking to a San Francisco apartment building:

NY: LOL ur so short SF: but i’m so pretty and quaint, look how pretty i am (curtsies) NY: I AM 100 STORIES TALL AND I WILL CRUSH YOU

Our housing units are too short and there are not enough of them.

Why do I care so much about housing?

Because:

I make less than six figures I got here too late to benefit much from rent control (I benefit a little, but not enough to stop me from essentially being a middle man between my employer and my landlord every other paycheck) I do not have enough saved for a down payment on a house in the Bay Area and I probably never will My landlord just asked me if I’m planning to move out and I can think of at least seven reasons (figures) why

Come November, there will be an initiative on the ballot related to our housing crisis — not to my predicament, in particular, but it’s relevant because if it passes, the city’s supply of housing will be impacted, and in turn I will be impacted, and anyone living in San Francisco will be impacted.

The ballot initiative is this:

A moratorium on market-rate housing construction in the Mission District for 18 months.

You can read it in its entirety here:

http://sfgov2.org/ftp/uploadedfiles/elections/candidates/Nov2015/MissionBuildingMoratorium_Text.pdf

or you can skip to my summary if you trust my ability to synthesize information without bias. Come on, you know you want to.

Objective-ish Summary:

The moratorium, as moratoriums are wont to do, places a hold on any residential construction in the Mission that is not 100% affordable, with affordable being defined as within reach of a household earning at or below 120% of the area median income (“AMI”). In addition, the measure requires the creation of a Neighborhood Stabilization Strategy that will “promote development of housing that is affordable to at least 33% low and moderate income households and at least 50% low, moderate, and middle income households.”

TL;DR: No new housing in the Mission unless existing Mission households, who by definition already have housing, can afford it.

Then throughout the measure they sort of crap on the SF Planning Department for not doing enough to produce affordable housing, like rezone industrial lots for residential use, then buy those lots and build said affordable housing, never mind that the moratorium itself does nothing to directly make those things happen.

Re-zone me, bro! -not the Moratorium

There’s a lot of goodies in this ordinance. Like this one, in the Summary of Findings section — the irony is astounding:

“San Francisco’s current housing policies have failed to meet their own affordable housing goals for the Mission District as well as other San Francisco neighborhoods.”

Tell me, Finders, when a city defines its housing policy as “making building housing as expensive, time-consuming, and villainized as possible”, how exactly do you expect to meet any sort of housing goals? San Francisco, politically, hates housing. And San Francisco made a point of codifying its aversion to new housing decades ago, so to stand here in 2015 and announce “We’ve fallen short of our housing goal” is like going on a strict diet and then proclaiming “We’ve fallen short of our cheesecake goal.”

Of course, any dissident will point out that this is referring to “affordable housing” specifically, not all housing. Because in this dissident’s world, it is better to have no housing than expensive housing. To acknowledge that affordability is a direct function of supply simply will not happen with this person. We’ll come back to this point in a bit.

Then there are parts that are just downright misleading.

“In recent years the Mission has seen a glut in the production of market rate housing units which are unaffordable to a majority of San Franciscans.”

Lots of issue with this claim. First: the supposed “glut” of market rate housing production. Before we dive into to the actual numbers, I want to set the mood around “glut”. Dim the lights, please. Dictionary.com provides a really fantastic definition of “glut”, which is this:

“To flood (the market) with a particular item or service so that the supply greatly exceeds the demand.”

Uh, have you seen the demand to live in the Mission? You really think there is too much housing on the market and not enough interested renters? Pretty sure those expensive, shiny new buildings aren’t sitting empty. What I would give for a true glut of market-rate housing! I want to wear a t-shirt that says “San Francisco House Party: GLUTS ONLY”.

But that is all semantics, and I don’t think the author of this Ordinance believes in words as much as I do. So let’s dig into the actual numbers behind this claim.

Hi, I’m back. I didn’t even have to do much digging. The SF Planning Department issued this really nifty report on housing production that kindly provides this detail for us. They even charted new construction by neighborhood. Guess how many market-rate units were produced in the Mission last year?

75.

75 new, market-rate units. Yeah, didn’t even crack three digits.

Some glut, right?

I will add that this number was higher in 2013 — 242 total units — but I still have a hard time calling this a “glut” in a city of 800,000 people.

And now let me pose this question to you: How many new, market-rate paying people do you think moved into the Mission last year? Do you think it was 75? Or was it more than 75? Have you seen Valencia St. recently? Now put in the last piece of the logic puzzle:

Did only producing 75 new market-rate units stop hoards of market rate renters from moving into the Mission? Where do you think those new renters moved into, if not new, market-rate buildings? What do you think is going to happen if the Mission produces zero market-rate units, as this initiative proposes? Do you think it will stop rich tech people from moving into the Mission, like it supposedly should have done when only 75 units were produced?

Look, the moratorium — and its advocates know this — is a punt, not a solution. Mission activists want a buffer against what they view as encroachment on their territory, an interim period to develop a more long term strategy to protect the Mission.

And, in spite of all my criticisms of this measure, I’m sympathetic to its aim. I agree that preserving diversity — of the economic, social, and ethnic varieties — is important in a city that is rapidly flooding with people who are predominantly well-paid and from relatively homogeneous backgrounds. I agree we should work to prevent the rapid displacement of long term residents.

It is the mechanisms with which this initiative aims to achieve these goals I take issue — mechanisms which outright deny the existence of the laws of supply and demand. And at the end of the day, I really, really believe in supply and demand.

And it bothers me that the proponents of this measure are using the above aims — preserving diversity, preventing displacement — as a proxy for what the moratorium actually is. Their sell is this:

“Do you care about preserving the diversity of the Mission? Do you think we should take measures to keep people in their homes? If your answer is yes to these questions, vote yes on the Moratorium.”

This is misleading and dishonest. You can be in favor of protecting the Mission from losing its cultural diversity and character and against the moratorium on market-rate housing. In fact, if you want to help the Mission keep its character, you should be really, really against the moratorium. The moratorium is tightening our city’s belt when we are already housing-starved.

Even if you don’t live in the Mission, you need to pay attention to this. This is not just about the Mission.

We all need to send a message that San Francisco needs more housing, and the act of stopping construction, even temporarily, and even in just one neighborhood, continues a legacy of misguided, short-sighted, and ultimately harmful policy action for San Francisco.

We need to reach a point where housing “activists” might still dream up misguided policies like this one but are immediately discouraged because they know SF voters will never tolerate it. We need to reach a point where the political pulse of this city is one that beats for everyone, and not just a small, hyperlocal group who — good intentions aside — refuse to cooperate in the broader regional picture. San Francisco needs to stand up for itself, literally. We need to erect new, tall residential buildings to house the influx of people who want and can afford to live here, or they will keep fighting over the limited housing stock we have now.

Well, we’ve come a long way. I’ll end this post the way I started, with some good old fashioned housing dialogue:

SF zoning law: “You want to build housing on this mostly empty shitty industrial plot? Psh, not on my watch! I have obsolete rules to enforce!” Empty warehouse: “But I’m soooo lonely” SF zoning law: “You’ll be quiet if you know what’s good for you!” Empty warehouse: “My life is meaningless”

Don’t let San Francisco pass another zoning control that limits the ability to build new housing.

Vote No on the Moratorium.