In a city where the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment recently hit $3,700 and homelessness surged 17% over the past two years, the most appropriate question about Mayor London Breed’s plan to speed affordable housing production is whether it goes far enough. Breed has proposed an amendment to San Francisco’s City Charter to limit bureaucratic delays of fully affordable and teacher housing, which is about the least the city should be doing in the current environment. But the Board of Supervisors is hesitating to expedite even that narrow subset of residential development.

Breed needs six of the 11 supervisors to concur to put the measure on the November ballot, but with the deadline approaching next month, The Chronicle reported that only three of them — Vallie Brown, Ahsha Safaí and Catherine Stefani — are on board. The rest appear determined to uphold the supervisors’ tradition of resisting every effort to ease residential development no matter how badly it’s needed — which is, after all, how the city got in this mess.

This is the same board that, in April, voted 9-2 to oppose state Sen. Scott Wiener’s legislation to legalize higher-density housing near public transit and 10-0 to block a South of Market apartment building on the grounds that it would reduce a neighboring park’s annual sun exposure by 0.38 percent.

Introduced in April, Breed’s charter change would create an “as of right” streamlined review process for applicable developments that meet zoning and other standards, eliminating opportunities for objections to minor details, challenges under the California Environmental Quality Act, and appeals of Planning Department decisions. It would expand on the state-mandated streamlining of certain residential developments under Wiener’s SB35, which includes projects in which 100% of units are designated as affordable to families earning up to 80% of area median income. The mayor’s proposal extends streamlining to projects in which all units are deemed affordable to those earning up to 140% of median income or in which two-thirds of units are reserved for public school teachers or City College instructors.

As such, the amendment seems to anticipate a simplistic objection frequently raised to streamlining measures: that they promote market-rate housing that only the wealthy can afford. This proposal applies only to affordable housing, which even the city’s most dedicated housing crisis deniers claim to support.

The resistance has therefore been forced to grope for other objections, pointing to the mayor’s “top-down” approach or defending the sacrosanctity of the Charter and the right to endless appeals. Most absurdly, Supervisor Aaron Peskin told The Chronicle that there simply is “no rash of affordable projects being stopped or slowed down.”

Before last year, the Mission District had gone a decade without a fully affordable housing development breaking ground even though several were in the works. The city’s only teacher housing project, planned for an Outer Sunset school district site since 2017, is not expected to be finished until 2022 (an issue more specifically addressed by a separate mayoral proposal to rezone public property for affordable housing). And an examination of the difficulty of building in San Francisco by UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation found that “the most significant and pointless factor driving up construction costs was the length of time it takes for a project to get through the city permitting and development processes.”

The mayor has indeed identified a real problem for the city’s affordable housing. The trouble is that most of the supervisors lack the will to build toward a solution.

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