The Long Reach of San Francisco’s Housing Crisis

Scratch at a problem for San Francisco, and you’ll find an issue that underlies almost all of them: the city’s intractable housing crisis. A new documentary “Fault Lines,” on Apple TV follows three storylines connected to the lack of housing. There is a homeless family’s attempts to get into a permanent home, a Sunset neighborhood’s fight over an affordable housing project and the ugly competing campaigns for a ballot measure. We talk with the film’s director and an expert in the city’s housing troubles about how San Francisco got into the crisis, what we might be able do about it, and what the rest of the country can learn from our troubles.

This partial transcript was computer-generated. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

 

Alexis Madrigal: Nate, the documentary follows three story lines. Let’s start with one that is kind of the battle we see in all kinds of cities, and it’s to build an affordable housing development. This one is in the Sunset. How many affordable housing developments have been built in the Sunset?

 

Nate Houghteling: Well, this is the very first one. Yeah. And, yeah. I think we got in on the ground floor of that whole process and kind of saw why it was the one and only. Since then, there have been a few others that have popped up. But, yeah, this was quite literally ground zero.

 

Alexis Madrigal: Wow. For people who are outside of San Francisco or just, like, live in a different part of the city, maybe just, like, describe the Sunset and sort of what’s the housing stock out there?

 

Nate Houghteling: Yeah. So the Sunset is an idyllic neighborhood. It is kind of the suburban meets urban. You know, you can see downtown, in the distance, but the birds are chirping, and it is two stories all the way to the ocean. Really, the west side, because of zoning restrictions, has been, yeah, two stories, you know, for the last, hundred years. So, it’s a very beautiful neighborhood. I also live out in the west side. I live in the Richmond, and there’s a lot to love about it. But if you start to dig into the history of how that all came to be, it’s a little more complicated.

 

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah. So what is the history of things, or at least trying to get things built out there? Was it basically, like, people didn’t try and build apartment buildings? Or was it that they couldn’t, even because of zoning, build apartment buildings? Like, what happened out there?

 

Nate Houghteling: Yeah. I mean, I mean, I’ll pass it off to Annie to to talk a little more about the history of San Francisco and zoning regulations and kind of how the east and west side have been split. 

 

Annie Fryman: Yeah. Alright. Put me on the spot. So I’m actually a resident of the Sunset, so I can speak, first hand as well as professionally. So the Sunset district, for a very long time, that geographic quadrant of the city was actually sand dunes. It was pretty undevelopable based on the norms of the time.

 

Alexis Madrigal: Are we talking about the nineteenth century?

 

Annie Fryman: Nineteenth century into early twentieth century. Okay. And, essentially, most of the sunset was built in the post World War two boom. Right? So with all of the norms and ideals of that time, we were building a lot of car infrastructure. We were building nice suburbs. There were a lot of young families that could afford to get a mortgage or get a loan or buy this brand new home.

 

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah. The federal housing programs. FHA, GI bill, that kind of stuff.

 

Annie Fryman: Exactly. And there are, interestingly, there are throughout the sunset a handful of scattered, nonconforming apartment buildings. Right? You’ll walk through the Sunset, and every, like, eight blocks, ten blocks, you’ll see this, like, out of nowhere eight story apartment building that looks old, but it’s an eight story apartment building. And you kind of wonder, like, how did this happen?

 

Annie Fryman: The Sunset District actually didn’t have a lot of rigid zoning restrictions through the mid twentieth century. And so although most of the homes were built as tract homes, right, it’s the same exact box for several blocks in one direction, you could build taller. And so especially for workers, there are apartment buildings there. And then in the nineteen seventies, the city enacted this down-zoning. So they actually reduced or established height limits in most of those neighborhoods. And only in the nineteen seventies did the Sunset District get a strict short height limit. And so there’s actually a lot of these older buildings. I live in one, a rent controlled ten story old building in the Sunset, and it’s really interesting to look out the window and sort of see those layers of history and deduce how that has happened over time.

 

Alexis Madrigal: That’s so interesting. So let’s talk about this specific project. It is kitty corner from one of these apartment buildings, right, at =Twenty Sixth and Irving. That’s quite tall. What was the project? Who was trying to put it in, Nate?

 

Nate Houghteling: Yeah. So the group that was there was the Mid Sunset Neighborhood Association, and, they were, kind of entrenched against it. And the developer was TNDC, what Tenderloin Neighborhood Development. Yeah.

 

Nate Houghteling: Yes. And so, you know, it was a pretty classic San Francisco divide between a developer that, you know, wants to accommodate the neighbors and, you know, some of their demands on the project. And the neighbors kept on ratcheting up, sort of what they wanted. And, at some point, they kind of couldn’t come together, and so it ended up spilling into the courts. And the TNDC invoked SP 35.

 

Nate Houghteling: That allowed them to, streamline and and kind of, get the project through. And in the film, we capture a lot of the committee meetings. We sat through many, many, many committee meetings. Yeah. Around this project. And so for the first time, the developer, you know, kinda had the tools to to move forward with the project.

 

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah. What would have happened to this project, which is now nearing completion?

 

Annie Fryman: I can see the crane from my window tracking it.

 

Alexis Madrigal: What would the normal process have been like, and what was the sort of post thirty five, process?

 

Annie Fryman: So, pre- SP35, which was a law that I actually wrote, as a staffer up in Sacramento State Capitol. So pre- SP35, the process was essentially the city has rules on paper that have to do with zoning, with permitting, with environmental standards, all of that. And before SP35, the city did not have to follow their own rules when it came to what they did and did not have to approve. And so, for example, you could have a property that the city says on paper, you’re allowed to build eight stories, forty apartments, you know, within this shape and size. And then when someone proposes a building that’s eight stories and forty apartments, the city could say, well, we didn’t really mean it. We actually meant four stories, and it has to look this way. And, really, we only want six apartments. But if a neighbor doesn’t want six apartments, they can veto it into oblivion and essentially make it zero apartments. And so if you’re someone trying to build, it’s actually exceptionally challenging to be able to predict what am I allowed to do and what kind of guarantee the city will let me let me do? And this was actually something that is the normal standard mode of process in San Francisco for generations. And so when you were trying to build affordable housing on the west side, you had to do a really, really serious risk assessment ahead of time. Because if there was someone in the vicinity who didn’t want affordable housing, they could block affordable housing. If the board of supervisors was feeling political pressure against that affordable housing, they could block the affordable housing. And so if you were someone who wanted to build, you’re like, is this actually worth it? Like, is it actually worth trying?

 

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah. Because what were the venues for that veto? They were essentially the board of supervisors or some other set of things? The planning commission, board of appeals, and

 

Annie Fryman: There’s so many. So, I would say the most commonly used one was a process that sort of exists within the planning department called discretionary review. And that means that any person in San Francisco could file this paperwork. If you’re a neighborhood association, you get to do it for free. And it says, hey. We don’t like this. We don’t necessarily have to have a good reason. Sometimes people did, some didn’t. And that would essentially put everything on hold and hold up the permit, block the permit until it could get scheduled at a planning commission hearing, which sometimes was six months out. And then depending on how the planning commission ruled, you could also appeal that up to the board of appeals or these different bodies.

 

Annie Fryman: The board of supervisors also had a hand. So discretionary review was the most common one, but there was also, you know, I can get into all the jargon, but, like, conditional use permits, which get reviewed at the planning commission. There’s CEQA, which is actually a body of state. That is because San Francisco allows or allows for all of those projects to be a sort of subjective judgment of a public official, all of a sudden, the second you have subjective judgment, the state environmental law kicks in. And so you also had that world or body of law to sort of block things. I think discretionary review, though, was most commonly used because it was cheap. You didn’t need a lawyer. The decks were stacked in your favor, and you didn’t have to live, like, in a certain vicinity. I could have filed a discretionary review to block an ex boyfriend I was angry at six miles away across town if I wanted to. And that’s how the project is designed. And

 

Nate Houghteling: We spoke a lot to the developer, the lead developer on the project, who wouldn’t be on camera in an interview for legal reasons. But, you know, he had lines in his, on his face, everyone, for a different project that he had tried to do to get started in the Sunset. And I think the thing that they spoke to again and again was just the uncertainty. It wasn’t that it was the length of the timeline or the hurdles. It was that you didn’t know at any phase what was gonna happen, and so that just made each individual project untenable. 

 

Alexis Madrigal: I mean, you also spent a lot of time with the neighborhood group too. I mean, what were they saying their issues with the building were?

 

Nate Houghteling: Yeah. So that was one thing that was really important to us. In what has become a kind of nimby, yimby fight, it often has felt to me like the groups are yelling at each other from thousands of miles away and are not really looking for common ground. And as a result, the issue is becoming, you know, more polarized. So we really wanted to dive into that group and understand them, you know, just as we understood the unhoused family looking for burden supportive housing and kind of give them a chance to make their case and sort of walk them out in their shoes as well. So, yeah, it was a really interesting process. We spent a total of two years with that group. And, you know, when I tell you I’ve been to community meetings, when I tell you I’ve been to living room meetings, I’ve seen them all. And, you know, I think one thing we found is that there was a real diversity of issues within that group. It wasn’t a single one, it wasn’t just the toxins. It wasn’t just the parking. It wasn’t, any one thing. But when they get put together, it kind of becomes like this knot that is impossible to untangle.