Several city departments are changing procedures in response to complaints from those living in encampments and their advocates, and from residential and commercial neighbors.

Here are some key changes:

• Berkeley will increase trash pickups to several times a week and do more frequent street cleaning to improve overall sanitation and living conditions.
• The city auditor is reviewing the effectiveness of the city’s homelessness services.
• The police department is reducing its involvement at encampment abatement operations.
• The fire department is providing unhoused people with basic fire safety guidelines.
• The city manager’s Homeless Response Team has taken steps to improve communication with residents at the largest encampments in West Berkeley through community meetings and new “Good Neighbor Guidelines” that explain what conditions would trigger a city intervention.
• The city has also applied to the state for an Encampment Resolution Funding Grant Award to lease a motel that it would use to provide temporary shelter.

In my capacity as a professional journalist, I reported for the Public Press on the aggressive October encampment cleaning that upended the lives of more than 50 people living near Eighth and Harrison streets and brought the city’s response to homelessness under scrutiny.

I was able to document and photograph the 12-hour encounter because it affected me, too. I am part of a community of people living in tents and vehicles who have been displaced from other encampments around the city, including the Berkeley Marina, the Gilman Underpass, Seabreeze, Ashby Shellmound, People’s Park, the Grayson Street Shelter, Here/There Camp, Shattuck Avenue and the Second Street camps. 

In the wake of photographic evidence from the October encampment cleaning, which exposed the city’s poor communication, lack of transparency, and failure to provide adequate shelter and support to unhoused people, city departments are under review.

Berkeley Senior Auditor Caitlin Palmer wrote in an email that, “We plan to work on the audit in the fall and hope to issue it sometime next year.”

The Berkeley city manager in July concluded an investigation of Berkeley police officers involved in the October encampment sweep who sent text messages that the Berkeley Police Accountability Board said showed “anti-homeless and racist remarks.” The city manager’s office, which hired an independent company to conduct the investigation, issued a report that the investigation found no wrongdoing. But the office has indicated that it will not release further details from the investigation, which it deems confidential.

Aiming for Clearer Communication

Peter Radu, assistant to the city manager, said the city acknowledged that it had mishandled encampment cleanings and used “overhanded” measures that included the destruction of personal property and giving vague, sometimes conflicting instructions to encampment residents. He acknowledged his own role in those events and said that he and the city wanted to work with unhoused people and homeless advocates to rectify the situation.

“I am genuinely sorry,” Radu said to community members gathered at Eighth and Harrison streets. “We’re trying to start something new, and work more with you as opposed to against you moving forward.”

On July 10, dozens of people gathered under and around a gray shade structure at Eighth and Harrison streets. Radu addressed the crowd of outreach workers and encampment residents to tell them that the City Council would soon approve a new shelter, referring to the planned motel conversion. He did not say whether the city would close the encampment, noting that Berkeley has more unhoused people than available shelter spaces, but said that residents in the area would be prioritized. The city has not announced a date for when it plans to begin operating the motel as a shelter.

“Call it a ‘closure’ or call it something else,” Radu wrote in an email asking for clarification about future plans for the encampment. “We do have (1) an opportunity to move people inside with a new resource, and (2) we do have infrastructure repair and construction needs in the area. People cannot live in construction zones.”

Radu’s efforts to establish trust have been met with mixed reactions from people living in the camp and their advocates. While some said they appreciated this newfound willingness to cooperate, others remained skeptical.

“You had consequences from your actions and now you are here,” said Chloe Madison, a camp resident on Eighth Street. “I’ve seen this side of you before, and I’ve also seen the guy who steals people’s homes.”

Many unhoused people say they continue to feel harassed no matter how much they do to avoid residential neighborhoods, because Berkeley staffers have shuffled them around the city with repeated encampment cleanups and closures.

“Just in the past few months, like Seabreeze. I’ve had like 10 camps in the last couple of years,” said Ron, a resident from the Second Street encampment. “You have herded us here.”

To address such grievances, Radu began working with two of the largest encampments in Berkeley, located near the intersections of Second and Page streets and Eighth and Harrison streets. He said the city and residents needed to find middle ground and take a collaborative approach to addressing the sanitation issues on the streets.

“There’s a competing need for space,” Radu said at an Eighth and Harrison streets community meeting. “So, we’re just trying to find a solution that keeps everybody safe and that allows the community to kind of have a shared use of this public space.”

In April, Radu held the first of three community meetings and presented a report to people living at the Second Street encampment, and said that if residents addressed safety concerns voluntarily, the city would not enter anyone’s vehicles or tents. He said that because of fire risk, residents would not be allowed to live in other kinds of makeshift structures.

Residents who attended the meeting said they were willing to work with the city, but many also shared their experiences of repeated property loss due to previous sweeps. Ron, who gave only his first name, recounted how he lost his belongings when he arrived late during the last cleaning at Second and Page streets. He said he jumped on the back of the garbage truck to salvage his personal belongings. He was able to save a few items.

“I was five minutes late, five minutes late, and I lost everything,” Ron said at the community meeting. “I had things that I carried from town to town. I had things in there for years.”

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Alice Barbee, who lives in the unhoused community at Eighth and Harrison streets, said the city previously gave instructions, which residents followed, and then discarded their possessions anyway.

“You say to get it all across the street if you want to keep it safe,” Barbee said. “But you come and you take that stuff, too. All of it and then call it trash?”

In May, residents of both communities asked for reassurance that no one would enter their households and throw away their possessions.

“We have not been as transparent and communicative as you guys would have liked and as we could have been,” Radu said to a gathering of Second Street residents. “I just want to acknowledge there were clearly misunderstandings and miscommunications on our account.”

In May, Radu tried collaborative cleaning at both encampments, asking residents to voluntarily address safety concerns highlighted in his reports. He deemed those events a success.

“We schedule a deep cleaning together and, voluntarily, give us what you don’t want,” Radu said to Eighth and Harrison residents, noting that the city staff had hauled away 11 tons of debris the previous week from the community living near Second and Page streets. “It was all voluntary. None of it was forcefully taken from anybody. We didn’t enter any tents.”

But the city does not have a policy for preserving the belongings of someone who is not on site when it conducts a cleaning operation. This means that residents living in tents or makeshift shelters risk losing their possessions when they leave their homes.

The city has also made agreements with surrounding businesses to keep people from camping on their sidewalks. Public notices are issued to residents camping outside of designated zones along Seventh and Eighth streets citing the city’s sidewalk ordinance and prohibition of bulky items in commercial corridors. The notices direct people to a shelter that closed in December and is no longer in operation.

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Sharing Public Space

In an effort to get everyone on the same page, Radu asked a few homeless advocates to give him feedback on a draft of unofficial guidelines to maintain general cleanliness in the neighborhood and improve interactions with the surrounding business community.

Radu said he hopes the “Good Neighbor Guidelines” will help establish a better working relationship between encampment residents and the city staff. He is seeking additional community input on the draft.

But the new procedures are challenging for a few residents who sleep on the open sidewalk and struggle with mental health issues. They are in survival mode and have trouble following rules about storing their belongings and discarding food scraps to avoid attracting vermin. And so, they are constantly at risk of having their possessions thrown away during weekly street cleanings.

“The Guidelines are rules the City wants people to follow. The guidelines say ‘Please,’ but behind that ‘please’ is the threat that if they are not followed, eviction, arrest, or a citation will result,” wrote Osha Neumann, a Berkeley civil rights attorney, in an email seeking his comment on the guidelines. “The City needs to realize that a great number of the people out there have significant disabilities, mental and physical, which make following rules difficult.”

The Public Press asked for reactions to the guidelines from Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguín and all of the City Council members, about half of whom replied by email. Councilmembers Sophie Hahn, Ben Barlett, Rigel Robinson, and Mark Humbert declined to comment on the city’s response to homelessness despite multiple requests.

“These are temporary, common sense guidelines specifically for this neighborhood during the transition to the Super 8 motel,” Elgstrand wrote on behalf of the mayor. “These guidelines will help ensure the safety and security of encampment residents and neighbors.”

Councilwoman Susan Wengraf wrote that she agrees with what Berkeley city staff is doing and that “Berkeley is moving in the right direction.”

Councilwoman Kate Harrison wrote that “it is critically important that while the City makes these requests of unhoused and housed people in our community, it simultaneously provides the necessary facilities and services that allow people to follow them.”

Councilman Terry Taplin has already promulgated a version of these unofficial rules on his website as his district also grapples with homelessness. “The Good Neighbor policy both increases transparency around what triggers a city intervention and provides recommendations to better manage the public right of way better and improve traffic and fire safety,” he wrote, adding that the city could take further steps to improve encampment sanitation.

“Conditions can be improved by waste pump-out services,” he wrote, also noting that the city’s Homelessness Services Panel of Experts has also recommended expediting the search for a new parking lot for the safe parking program. But no money was earmarked for it on this budget cycle, according to Radu.

Harrison and Taplin agree that the city needs to implement other changes, such as providing more permanent supportive housing and transitional housing programs citywide, in addition to resolving sanitation issues.

The state grant would allow the city to lease the motel for two years, and the city hopes funds from Berkeley’s Measure P, which passed in 2019, would pay for three additional years.

“We are working with the County and our nonprofit service providers in finding solutions that enable us to provide access to shelter and services beyond the Super 8 motel,” Elgstrand wrote. “Even if this one location reaches full occupancy, we will continue to do everything we can to target resources to the residents of this encampment.”

Looking for Representatives to Show Up

Despite recent developments, some encampment residents said they felt frustrated and abandoned by Berkeley city officials. They wondered why City Council members and the mayor attended a recent Gilman District Business Summit to talk with business owners but had not attended any of the encampment community meetings.

“As long as you ostracize people, and their issues are not as important as others, then anger and resentment starts to come in,” Merced Dominguez said at an Eighth and Harrison community meeting, adding that she wanted to see the Gilman District’s Councilwoman Rashi Kesarwani attend a future meeting. “We just want to have a dialogue with her to work something out. This is what she was voted in to do.”

Kesarwani replied to a request for comment with a general statement but did not directly answer questions about recent policy changes and how Berkeley staff is responding to homelessness in her district despite multiple requests.

Madison, another encampment resident, expressed her frustrations over email, writing that she hadn’t heard about the business summit and questioned the timing of that meeting, which portrayed unhoused people disparagingly, blaming them for criminal behavior and causing others in the neighborhood to feel fearful.

“For you to attempt to approach us in good faith only days later is super skeevy,” she wrote to Radu. “Super cool how we’re all lumped into being scary crime doers when all I do all day is attempt to further my career in a way that works with my mental and physical health.” She added that “excluding us from that meeting allows those narratives to perpetuate.”

Radu responded to Madison that he had recommended including encampment members and community advocates at the meeting with business owners, but that the decision was not up to him.

“You’ll understand that I don’t get to make all those decisions, but since then I HAVE recommended to the business leaders that they reach out to you and try to have conversations,” he wrote, adding that “I agree completely with you that the format of the business meeting was not conducive to such trust.”

Some encampment residents are accepting, cautiously, what appear to be goodwill gestures.

“For a long time, I think it was a big battle. You guys don’t want to talk to us or work with us,” said Sarah Teague, a Second Street encampment resident, at one of the recent meetings.

“But you guys are making the initiative to come down here and talk to us personally. That’s a huge breakthrough,” she said. “I think it’s a big giant leap of faith for everybody.”

Full disclosure: Radu asked for Yesica Prado’s feedback on the Good Neighbor Guidelines and accepted a few suggestions to clarify wording but did not incorporate her other recommendations.

The post Berkeley Says It Was Aggressive in Homeless Encampment Sweeps, Promises Reforms appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in late May gave the 22-year-old complex a failing physical inspection score of 40 out of 100 as part of its regular oversight process to ensure safe conditions in subsidized housing.   

Andrew Ten, a HUD public affairs officer whose jurisdiction includes San Francisco, wrote in an email that issues related to building exteriors, systems and other health and safety concerns contributed to Plaza East’s failing score.  

Failing scores “are not a common experience, but it does happen,” Ten wrote.  

Neither McCormack Baron Salazar, which owns the complex, nor the San Francisco Housing Authority have responded to requests for details regarding the failing score. Pedro Abril, who works for the John Stewart Company, which provides management services for Plaza East, said at the meeting that the complex is filing an appeal with HUD regarding certain line items noted in the inspection, but that reversing those may not give the property a passing score of 60.  

HUD expects the San Francisco Housing Authority to immediately correct and document the correction of the most pressing health and safety issues at the 193-unit complex, and the federal agency will conduct a follow-up inspection in a year, Ten wrote.  

Of all public housing sites in the country, 13% failed their most recent inspections, according to data posted on HUD’s website, which includes inspection data through October 2022. Prior to the May inspection, HUD last inspected Plaza East in January 2017 and gave it a passing score of 82. HUD paused on-site visits during the pandemic.  

Additional Plaza East units had been repaired since the May report, and repairs had been completed on 154 units, according an email sent Tuesday by the Housing Authority. Because every single unit needed emergency fixes, 39 still await repairs.  

San Francisco gave McCormack Baron Salazar a $2.7 million loan to fix habitability issues at Plaza East in April 2021. A schedule outlined in the loan indicated that the work would be completed by May 30, 2022. As of this week, the company had used about 66% percent of the available loan, according to Audrey Abadilla, a communications and outreach associate at the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development. 

At the meeting, Joaquín Torres, president of the Housing Authority Commission, expressed frustration at the slow pace of repairs and poor oversight by McCormack Baron Salazar.   

“I just want to say again, as I did last month and the month before that, that these gaps in repair service are quite simply not helping any of us achieve the goal of building confidence and trust with the residents,” Torres said. “The rate at which these issues are being quote resolved or quote addressed is something that is tremendously disappointing right now. And I want to be sure that this is something that is taken seriously, because the manner in which we’re getting this information — or rather not getting information — continues to be extremely dispiriting.” 

The city hands out loan money through reimbursement, which the recipient can request once a month. The Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development aims to process requests within 30 days. The contractor making repairs at Plaza East typically does about $50,000 worth of work and then stops until the reimbursements come through, which can result in interruptions of two to four weeks, Jerry Johnson, an associate project manager at McCormack Baron Salazar, said at the recent Housing Authority Commission meeting.  

Other factors contributed to slow repairs, including staffing shortages and supply chain delays related to the coronavirus pandemic, a transition to new property management, severe winter weather, and resident concerns regarding repairs and relocation efforts, Abadilla wrote. McCormack Baron Salazar managed Plaza East until it hired the John Stewart Company, which has managed the property since June 2021.  

On top of the approved loan, the city has provided an additional $160,000 loan to McCormack Baron Salazar because the company “didn’t have the operating funds to support their portion of the services contract” for the 2022-23 fiscal year, Abadilla wrote in an email. 

Operating funds will continue to be a challenge for Plaza East in its current configuration, according to a written statement from the Housing Authority. 

“The existing funding model is not able to consistently and substantially address all necessary repairs,” according to the statement. “In the short term, all repairs are prioritized by health and safety. In the long term, Plaza East must be rebuilt, which will provide brand new units that our residents deserve and higher operating subsidies to keep those units in good condition.”

In a March 2021 interview, Adhi Nagraj — who at the time was McCormack Baron Salazar’s senior vice president and director of development, and is now the company’s chief development officer — blamed a lack of federal funding for ongoing maintenance issues, saying that dwindling federal subsidies have led to a situation where there is not enough funding for repairs. The company cited the decline of federal funding for public housing as part of the rationale for the company’s plan to tear down the complex and replace it with a mix of market-rate and subsidized units. 

Redevelopment plan and next steps 

In August 2022, McCormack Baron Salazar and the Housing Authority submitted a preliminary proposal to the San Francisco Planning Department that included replacing Plaza East’s existing 193 public housing units and adding 270 market rate and 292 affordable units that would be rented below market rate to tenants who qualify by income. This proposal almost quadruples the existing number of units, and could add 200 to 300 more units than a plan to redevelop the site from two years ago. 

The future of Plaza East Apartments has been up in the air since January 2021, when McCormack Baron Salazar requested permission from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to demolish the then 20-year-old public housing complex and rebuild it as a mixed-income site with 450 to 550 units. This proposal was supported by Mayor London Breed and the San Francisco Housing Authority. 

HUD denied that request in March 2021, determining that the costs of rehabilitating the complex did not meet a high enough threshold to merit demolition and redevelopment according to the program under which the developer originally applied.  

The developer is working on next steps to seek approval from the Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors for the current proposal. Housing Authority representatives hope the application will be submitted this year, according to a statement sent in response to questions about the proposal.

“We are hopeful that pending additional discussions with the community, an application will be submitted this year,” according an early May statement from the Housing Authority. Once that happens, the project approval process is expected to take about two years before construction can begin.  

Supervisor Dean Preston, whose district includes Plaza East, called living conditions there “unacceptable.” 

“My office has stood with tenants demanding repairs and a tenant-led process for planning the future of Plaza East,” Preston said in an emailed statement. “We successfully pushed for $2.7 million that was released for repairs at Plaza East, and won $20 million in last year’s budget for life-safety repairs in public housing which the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development continues to delay. It’s time for the city to listen to residents, finish the emergency short term repairs, and create a real tenant-supported plan for the future of Plaza East.” 

McCormack Baron Salazar did not respond to multiple requests for comment regarding the ongoing repairs or future plans for redevelopment of the site.  

Following HUD’s rejection of its 2021 demolition plans, McCormack Baron Salazar has shifted gears to focus on a different HUD program. This would involve tearing down the existing property and converting it to a new operating model, which “offers the best financial resources to rebuild the existing public housing units at Plaza East and secure ongoing subsidies that are stable, predictable, and greater than those provided through the Public Housing program,” according to a statement from the Housing Authority.  

Many tenants oppose rebuilding the site as mixed-income housing, and at least 100 of them signed a petition last June asking the developer to consider alternatives, such as rebuilding the site as 100% affordable housing. They said the developer should not move forward without tenant input and transparency.  

“We want to make sure that we’re not played,” resident Yolanda Marshall told Mission Local last June.  

Poor conditions and ongoing vacancies 

Department of Building Inspection records document a history of problems at the site, including leaks, mold and pest infestations. In November 2021, several tenants whose units received emergency repairs said the fixes were inadequate. As of June 6, Department of Building Inspections records showed 11 unresolved complaints and 28 outstanding code violations at Plaza East, bringing the total number of violations at the site to 136 since 2004. 

A group of 18 tenants at Plaza East sued for damages in May 2021, alleging that their units posed “severe health and safety hazards,” citing habitability issues such as mold growth, leaks and vermin. The plaintiffs also alleged that the building’s management, which was McCormack Baron Salazar at the time, harassed them and refused to carry out necessary repairs. The group settled in January, though the terms of the agreement were not divulged by the plaintiff attorneys or accessible online.  

Since the owner initiated emergency repair work, vacancies at the site have gone up.  

As of June 1, there were 25 vacancies at Plaza East, according to an email from the Housing Authority. At the start of the repairs process, there were 20, nine of which were supposed to be immediately repaired and leased out to new tenants, according to the loan agreement.

Vacant units at a public housing site reduce the operating subsidy provided by HUD, wrote Ten, the regional public affairs officer at HUD, adding that it is in the Housing Authority’s best interest to maximize occupancy.  

Both the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development and the Housing Authority are concerned about long term vacancies, but Plaza East is not filling vacant units unless they are being used to house existing Plaza East residents. Such practices are common at large public housing properties slated for redevelopment, Abadilla wrote.

The Housing Authority and the site property manager, the John Stewart Company, are responsible for filling vacancies, according to a statement from the Housing Authority. However, “even if all units on site were occupied, Plaza East would still not receive enough subsidy to pay for all necessary operating costs.”

UPDATED 06/07/23: This article was changed to indicate that emailed statements sent by Linda Mason, general counsel for the Housing Authority, should be attributed to the San Francisco Housing Authority, not to her individually.

The post Emergency Repairs in Public Housing Complex Are Behind Schedule as Owner Advances Redevelopment Plans appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Sea level rise is forcing cities around San Francisco Bay to weigh demand for new housing against the need to protect communities from flooding. Builders say they can solve this dilemma with cutting-edge civil engineering. But no one knows whether their ambitious efforts will be enough to keep newly built waterfront real estate safe in coming decades.

Meanwhile, developers are busy building — and telling the public that they can mitigate this one effect of climate change, despite mounting evidence that it could be a bigger problem than previously believed.

On Treasure Island, a flat tract of 20th-century landfill with epic bay vistas, workers have poured the foundation for a 22-story tower, the first of six planned high-rise buildings, and broken ground on an affordable housing complex. Another, for families and unhoused veterans, is nearly complete. Townhomes, retail space and a waterfront transit hub are also in the pipeline. All told, the $6 billion development would be home to 20,000 people or more.

Engineers for the public-private consortium transforming the island, Treasure Island Community Development, say they are pursuing aggressive sea rise adaptation strategies. Improvements include raising some of the land by several feet, preparing a buffer zone for future levees and pumps, and setting aside low-lying open space that could convert to floodable marshland as higher bay waters spill onshore.

This is not a cheap endeavor. The development group’s director, Bob Beck, did not return multiple emails and phone calls regarding costs for this work. A 2011 report by the city of San Francisco, which includes Treasure Island, estimated that “geotechnical stabilization” measures would cost $137 million. Storm drains, soil grading and landscape and open-space improvements would add about $120 million.

Dilip Trivedi, the site’s project manager with international engineering firm Moffatt and Nichol, has been touting the consortium’s efforts for more than a decade. He said in a recent interview that the most built-up parts of the island should be safe from sea rise through at least 2070. Fifty years or so is a reasonable planning horizon for new developments, he added, and additional phased seawall construction can help future generations stay a step ahead of ever-higher tides.

“When you put together significant infrastructure, you don’t want to have to maintain it for about that time,” Trivedi said. “It is what we call project life.”

Climate scientists, however, commonly try to predict sea rise out at least to the year 2100, a time when some current schoolchildren could be octogenarian residents of the island.

Every contemporary climate model predicts that, even with deep carbon reductions starting this decade, several feet of sea rise are locked in. The debates for climate adaptation strategy are how many feet and how far down the road we should consider.

With ever more sophisticated climate predictions, the outlook for sea level rise has continued to darken, indicating that current trends will likely accelerate through the end of the century. In one pessimistic scenario — which researchers say is among the possibilities in a “business as usual” global greenhouse gas emissions future — much of the island could find itself underwater frequently, and some of the most developed areas could occasionally be threatened with flooding.

To home in on Treasure Island’s future, the San Francisco Public Press asked researchers at the United States Geological Survey’s Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center, based in Santa Cruz, to provide an analysis of storm conditions under various climate scenarios using sea rise projections by the Ocean Protection Council. They found that bay waters could surge higher than the developers have long been saying publicly.

In that analysis, by 2100 there is a small but not insignificant chance of 4 feet, 11 inches of sea level rise — slightly more than what the island’s engineers have accounted for. Adding in the effects of tides, weather and other transient events, such as in the kind of extreme storm seen once in a century, that total could be 2 feet, 11 inches higher.

The resulting surge would, at least temporarily, send waves 1 foot, 2 inches higher than the lowest ground floors of some planned housing complexes.

While the project’s engineers never address this possibility in their public narratives, documents they have prepared show they have known about similar scenarios for years.

Their own maps, which superimpose flood conditions on existing land elevations, line up fairly closely to the Geological Survey’s map data. Yet the engineers have chosen to downplay the likelihood of these outcomes as they pursued permits to build, arguing that novel construction technologies could make the development invulnerable to flooding under any reasonable course of events.

In a 2016 sea rise adaptation filing with a regional watershed agency, Moffatt and Nichol included six maps showing potential flood conditions in each construction phase, side by side with maps showing how the planned short- and long-term sea level rise protections would prevent inundation. 

One map shows 4 feet of sea rise. Before any land improvements, nearly the entire island would have been inundated — up to 8 feet in places — during flooding calculated by FEMA to have a 1% chance of occurring per year. Another part of that document showed a graph that indicated a 4-foot rise was possible by around 2093. The Geological Survey’s analysis of the Ocean Protection Council extreme scenario for 2100 puts sea rise closer to 5 feet.

But Trivedi said that the raising of the land under many of the buildings, plus additional shoreline improvements, would protect key infrastructure. Beside that map, the engineers showed how the existing 3.5-mile perimeter wall could be raised by 1 to 3 feet, depending on location, which they said would keep much of the island dry, although a note appended to the diagram said: “Does not show intentional flooding from managed retreat on northern and eastern shorelines — TBD.”

Within the last year, regulators have started questioning whether the steps developers are taking are sufficient to guarantee that the island remains dry in the long term.

“This is a community that will be around a while,” said Ethan Lavine, chief of permits for shoreline development for the Bay Conservation and Development Commission. “At a certain point in time, they will need levee protection.” Lavine’s office is pressing Trivedi and his colleagues to use a more cautious view of climate change when assessing whether Treasure Island’s flood prevention techniques can handle what nature might throw at them. 

When evaluating permit applications, government agencies require developers to reference the “best available science” to assess threats from climate change. In October 2021, the engineers issued an update to the 2016 filing. In it, Trivedi compared his firm’s sea level rise expectations against studies by several scientific bodies, including California’s Ocean Protection Council and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. His preferred predictions minimized the effect of the worst-case scenarios. The only needed change, he argued, would be to move up the time frame for planning adaptations by as much as five years. 

Yet climate policy experts point out that with significant scientific papers being released each year, guidance for builders has become a moving target. Because they admit a great deal of uncertainty in their predictions, scientists always publish their results in charts that consider an array of environmental assumptions.

That gives developers leeway to choose which predictions to focus on when describing the risks to their capital investments. Treasure Island could be the most expensive local project in the region’s history to take advantage of this ambiguity.

Projecting Optimism

All of Trivedi’s recent public statements conclude that the likelihood of the gloomiest climate scenarios is remote, and that the level of risk to property and lives is insignificant given the proposed engineering fixes. But a close examination of the 2021 adaptation plan offers a few reasons for concern:

• It dismisses high-end forecasts, in which global warming accelerates due to uncontrolled carbon emissions.
• It selectively cites climate models that make planned infrastructure appear sufficient to virtually eliminate future flood risk.
• It focuses on relatively short time frames, such as 20 or 50 years, while offering little specificity about expected conditions at the end of the century, which falls within the lifetimes of some children alive today.

Trivedi said in an interview that for planning purposes, he is focused on one recent predicted milestone: 3 feet of sea rise by 2080. In that circumstance, the ground floors of most buildings, to be built upon a now-elevated development pad, would still have a buffer of nearly 4 feet above the average highest tide of today.

He also asserted that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a scientific committee organized by the United Nations, recently reported sea rise could be less severe than previously forecasted, based on the track record of recent years. “What has been observed is that sea level rise is not tracking” to the most pessimistic scenarios, he said. But there are reasons to question his conclusion.

The localized scenario for 2100 examined by the Geological Survey — the one resulting in water levels 1 foot, 2 inches above some developed areas — relies on a climate change prediction assessed to have a probability of 5%, that is, a 1-in-20 statistical chance of occurring. That prediction was published by the California Ocean Protection Council, a body of experts organized by the state government, in recent guidelines for community planning.

Trivedi said the international group’s current report indicates there’s “low confidence in that scenario happening.” When asked for a citation to back up this claim, Trivedi referenced a “localized model” of the findings from NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and five other federal agencies.

A report these agencies jointly issued in February 2022 in fact gave a more nuanced view. In a section titled “Future Mean Sea Level,” the authors did exclude one scenario used by the Ocean Protection Council that had been labeled “extreme” and not given a numerical probability. But that is not the scenario Trivedi said the group ruled out. This same report indicates that the West Coast is likely to see 4 to 8 inches of rise over 30 years, accelerating later in the century.

Regardless of the pace of the increase, Treasure Island developers say they have contingency plans relying on future residents or taxpayers to fund the construction of progressively higher walls around the urban zone — several feet every few decades. In its latest update, Moffatt and Nichol said sea level rise of 1 foot by 2043 would trigger the plan to elevate the perimeter.

A strategy reliant on levees might seem risky in light of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when faulty engineering of levees led to catastrophic flooding of parts of New Orleans that sit below the level of the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. In light of this recent history, Bay Area regulators are starting to ask whether the Treasure Island plan is entirely watertight.

A March 2022 letter from the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, the agency that issued the island’s 2016 permit for waterfront areas, called the update too optimistic and tolerant of long-term flooding potential.

“Public access along a shoreline and a big mixed-use development require using a medium-to-high-risk projection for sea level rise,” said the commission’s planning manager, Erik Buehmann.

Re-engineering Shaky Ground

On an island built by the government generations ago out of rocks, soil and dredged sand, preparing high-and-dry land would be difficult even if it were not in an earthquake and tsunami zone.

In numerous reports and public presentations, Trivedi has said construction workers have elevated land on the 100-acre development pad to 3 feet, 6 inches above the “base flood elevation” — a height calculated by Federal Emergency Management Agency representing a 1% chance of flooding each year. The homes, hotels and businesses there will be set back from the shoreline by 200 to 300 feet on most sides and as much as 1,000 feet from the northern shore because that area is more prone to flooding. Building is planned to roll out in phases through 2035.

Workers have spent years using cranes to repeatedly drop heavy weights to compact the soil. They have driven vibrating probes into the earth, filling the holes with concrete for stabilization. They then piled 1 million cubic yards of soil atop the compacted layer. These measures are intended to prevent the kind of ground liquefaction seen in the Marina District and elsewhere during the devastating 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Other geological improvements include inserting vertical wick drains, akin to long drinking straws, to help remove water from the soil as it compresses. These techniques have been used by civil engineers around the world for more than 30 years to develop areas without easy access to bedrock.

Trivedi said these measures, together with a jagged, rocky seawall raised to allow for just over 1 foot of sea rise, would help take energy out of large waves, and the setback would use the landscape to dissipate any possible overtopping before it reaches valuable structures.

At the same time, the engineers have recognized that much of the island — particularly the low-lying northern end — are indefensible. Areas that have flooded in the past will eventually be sacrificed to rising waters. That strategy has immediate, concrete consequences: Dozens of existing structures, including homes of about 3,000 people currently living there, are set to be demolished to create open space. Over time these areas could be turned into tidal marshland to protect the newly developed areas from storms.

Regulators Balk at a Sunny Assessment

The Bay Conservation and Development Commission, the agency most empowered to weigh in on new waterfront building, is hamstrung by a legal mandate to regulate only what happens 100 feet inland, regardless of elevation — an artifact of legislation dating from before climate change was a dominant concern.

The 2016 permit the agency issued for improvements on Treasure Island’s margins, including a ferry terminal, required adaptation updates every five years. Moffatt and Nichol’s 2021 update concluded that the original adaptation plans needed few changes, except for possibly needing to accelerate, by five years, the planning process for building higher perimeter levees.

Regulators balked at the assessment. In a March 2022 letter, the commission advised Moffatt and Nichol to plan more conservatively. The agency demanded consideration of a 1-in-200 chance sea rise scenario, in which seas rise 6 feet, 11 inches by 2100. Adding in a 100-year storm surge, waves could plausibly overtop portions of the sea wall along the southeastern side by about 1 to 2 feet, and along the northern end by about 1 foot. That is an even worse outcome than that predicted by Geological Survey’s localized flooding model.

The commission said Moffatt and Nichol seemed too dismissive of chances that things could go wrong.

“The permittees decided to design the project considering very low risk of sea level rise related impacts” the letter said, noting also that engineers seemed too focused on the short time horizon of 2080.

Trivedi counters that the Treasure Island development was never built upon projections of a certain sea level happening by a certain date, because seawalls can, for all practical purposes, be built arbitrarily high, on whatever schedule is needed.

“We adopted an approach where we decided on an allowance we are building into the project,” he said in the interview. “As future projections come out, we will adjust the date of the adaptation.”

Commission staff met with planners from Moffatt and Nichol last summer to work out the requested additions to the 2021 adaptation strategy. Buehmann, who worked on the original permit, said follow-up discussions were to be expected because the Treasure Island permit was the first since the commission began requiring builders to submit sea rise assessments. “We didn’t expect it to be perfect the first time,” he said.

Whatever comes of this process  which Trivedi referred to as merely “an internal thing” that was required for the filing — the adaptation plan is unlikely to change significantly, because the development pad is already in place and huge construction cranes are sprouting up on Treasure Island’s skyline. What is left in the playbook is raising future seawalls, ceding the northern open space and the installation of pumps.

Government officials have long acknowledged the inevitability of Treasure Island’s relying on artificial barriers. In 2015, Brad McCrea, regulatory program director at the commission, told the Public Press: “At the end of the day, this will be a levee-protected community — there’s no getting around that.” Since then, agency staff have not changed their view.

Rapidly Outdated Climate Science

To determine how high to raise the building pad, Treasure Island builders consulted several climate studies published as early as 1987 and as recently as 2007. At that point, scientists were predicting that by 2100, oceans could rise as much as 4 feet, 7 inches.

This forecast was echoed by a state panel of scientists and policy experts in 2009, when then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger visited Treasure Island to announce its findings and call for better sea level rise mitigation.

Moffatt and Nichol then relied on these studies to anticipate that the oceans would rise 3 feet by 2075. So the company proposed raising the development pad to 3 feet, 6 inches above the predicted levels for a once-in-a-hundred-year flood.

Moffatt and Nichol did not spell out a rationale for setting the height of the development pad, as the Public Press reported in 2010. The firm did argue that raising it higher could create other problems, such as jeopardizing the island’s stability under the weight of packed soil and adding expense. “At some point it doesn’t become cost-effective — it’s a matter of acceptable levels of risk over your planning horizon,” Trivedi said in an interview then.

To be sure, when Treasure Island plans were drawn up, scientific modeling showed wide uncertainty about how much global temperatures could increase. In 2009, scientists around the world were saying that oceans could rise anywhere from a minimum of 3 feet, 3 inches to a maximum of 4 feet, 11 inches by 2100. At that time, the effects of ice melt from land via glaciers, snowpacks and ice caps were little understood.

Today, European and U.S. scientists using satellite imagery to measure the shape of Greenland’s ice sheets say melting is outstripping gains from snowfall. In a paper published last August, they found that no matter how much countries curb emissions, seas will rise by a minimum of 11 inches from this effect alone.  

Focusing Locally

The U.S. Geological Survey developed the Coastal Storm Modeling System to help protect waterfront communities. It simulates the forces behind wave and wind data and translates them into local flood projections that include tides, storm surges, waves and seasonal events such as El Niño.

The Public Press requested that the agency simulate a small section of San Francisco Bay, in the vicinity of Treasure Island, relying on probability scenarios for global sea levels in 2100 developed by the California Ocean Protection Council in a 2018 guidance paper. This report offered up sea rise projections of likelihoods as high as 50% and as low as 0.5%. 

The Ocean Protection Council’s examination of a wide array of probabilities heavily influenced the Bay Conservation and Development Commission’s critique of the Treasure Island adaptation update. The commission’s biggest concern was that change might happen faster than the engineers were anticipating.

[Explore sea level rise scenarios using Climate Central’s interactive tool. Here we show floodwaters at 7.8 feet above the present-day high tide line. ]

But Trivedi said the Ocean Protection Council’s past predictions had already failed. “If you look at the year 2022 projections, follow the OPC formulas,” Trivedi said. “We should have seen about 8 inches of sea level rise since 2000. In reality, it has been about 2 inches or less.”

Most forecasts predict increased global temperatures due to persistent carbon pollution. But the emissions projections are still hotly contested.

The Ocean Protection Council examined two emissions scenarios. One assumed that carbon dioxide output doubles through 2050. The other imagined more aggressive greenhouse gas reductions — 70% by 2050 and “net zero” emissions by 2080.

For the purposes of seeing how bad things could plausibly get, the U.S. Geological Survey used a midlevel emissions scenario. This decision was based on detailed simulations into the next century of swell and waves along the Pacific Ocean. What the researchers found was that paradoxically, milder greenhouse gas levels generated worse storms for California’s coast than do extreme ones. 

“What’s really changed in the research community is that worst-case scenarios have become more common,” said Patrick Barnard, a research geologist with the agency. “The state is asking communities to prepare for these.”

This approach helps waterfront areas learn to be more risk-averse to protect property and lives.

Avoiding Mistakes of the Past

Foster City is paying a high price for waterfront sprawl. Like Treasure Island, the mid-Peninsula community 25 miles to the south was built entirely on landfill, not unusual in the Bay Area, where efforts to accommodate population growth stretching back to the Gold Rush consumed most of the wetlands and tidal marshes.

Foster City did have worries about flooding decades ago. It is shot through with artificial waterways, including two sloughs, several small canals and an artificial lagoon. Barely above sea level before being developed, it would not exist if not for its levees and seawalls. 

Yet, in 2014 FEMA informed Foster City officials that new studies showed the levee system was neither strong nor tall enough to withstand a major storm and the large waves that would result. Update the seawalls and levees, or the entire city would be designated a floodplain, the agency said. 

Sixty years ago, developers there hauled in tons of sand to raise the land several feet to construct thousands of homes in what became a 33,000-resident community. That was a time when climate change was not a part of city planning vernacular. Today workers are busy widening and raising levees and adding interlocking steel plates as a bulwark against the storms federal regulators warned of, as well as rising seas.

But Treasure Island, which is slated to add 8,000 units of housing to accommodate more than 20,000 residents, is still more than a decade away from build-out. What the engineers put in place there in the next few years could avoid Foster City’s mistakes — or compound them.

To be sure, some cities are starting to alter blueprints on pace with the evolving science. In October, the Port of San Francisco announced it was collaborating with the Army Corps of Engineers to study how to shore up the city’s seawall along its eastern waterfront, from Fisherman’s Wharf to the Hunters Point Shipyard, to combat both sea rise and earthquake risk. This area includes attractions like the Chase Center sports arena, a project green-lighted before a city-commissioned study surfaced that predicted flooding from sea level rise in the new Mission Bay neighborhood, as the Public Press reported in 2017.

Port officials now say they anticipate 7 feet of sea level rise by the end of the century. That is 2 feet, 5 inches higher than the level Treasure Island’s developers are planning for in their adaptation strategy.

The Port’s yearlong effort will consider elevating barriers along the Embarcadero, installing a system of locks at Mission Creek and buying back and cleaning up privately owned landfill areas around Islais Creek to return them to the tidal zone.

Not Easy to Abandon a Home

In the grips of a housing affordability crisis, San Francisco needs new construction. But is a flood zone the wisest place to build? That could depend on how long we expect buildings to last.

Barnard, of the U.S. Geological Survey, has traveled to many communities, including Okracoke Island, part of North Carolina’s Outer Banks, to assess how to protect people from storms. In September 2019, Hurricane Dorian shut the island down to visitors. For residents, it was hard to consider leaving a place they have inhabited for seven or eight generations. “You can’t detach people from their place, or their heart,” Barnard said. “They’ll stay until water is up to their nose.” 

Before the developers moved in, Treasure Island had roughly 3,000 residents, according to the 2020 Census, many living in homes built for the U.S. Navy in the mid-20th century when it was a military base. Nearly half have a household income less than $50,000, and many do not speak English. 

Now these residents are on tenterhooks. Under an agreement with the developer, people who lived on Treasure Island before 2011 are guaranteed new affordable and rent-controlled units. But the wait times and other inconveniences have been tough. Everyone is living in a construction site with an unreliable electrical grid that browns and blacks out frequently. 

The new units are supposed to be comparable to what they had, but longtime islander Christoph Opperman said they have been offered “interim” units that, for example, might not have enough space for a family, or lack laundry facilities.

“They’re picking us off one neighborhood at a time by making us do two moves,” Opperman said. “We’re not entitled to just anything on the island, but we are entitled to fair treatment.”

Treasure Island’s planners are essentially acknowledging that they must sacrifice part of the island to the bay, even while pursuing a more built-up urban environment just several hundred feet away. This combination of advance and retreat is all part of the plan, the engineers say.

Asked whether he would move to Treasure Island, Trivedi did not hesitate to say yes, observing that no part of the Bay Area was completely free of danger.

“I don’t see why not,” he said. “I mean, should people be moving to San Francisco, because of the seismic risk? Buildings are being designed to codes. And flooding is the same way.”

A version of this story was republished in partnership with Inside Climate News.

This reporting is supported by grants from the Solutions Journalism Network’s Business and Sustainability Initiative and by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Correction 5/4/2023: An earlier version of this story misstated the process the U.S. Geological Survey used to report an extreme flood projection for Treasure Island. The model upon which it was based was produced not by the agency, but by the Ocean Protection Council. Also, the likelihood of that scenario is higher than originally given — 5%, not 0.5 %.

The post Promising to Prevent Floods at Treasure Island, Builders Downplay Risk of Sea Rise appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Urban renewal was a publicly and privately funded effort across the U.S. wherein local governments acquired land in areas deemed “blighted” — often using a racially biased lens — through eminent domain, forcibly displacing residents and demolishing existing buildings with promises to rebuild. In San Francisco, urban renewal targeted Black cultural centers and neighborhoods, uprooting thousands of families and destroying lively, well-established communities.

Seeking the “relative acceptance” of Black musicians in France, Leslie Crawford left San Francisco to pursue his musical career in Europe. The move did not go well.

“My dad died of an overdose in France and never returned home alive,” Majeid Crawford wrote in an email. “I blame urban renewal in part for my dad’s death and many others who died from broken spirits and hearts.”

Crawford’s story is one of thousands illustrating the far-reaching effects of urban renewal on San Francisco’s Black communities. Today, he is executive director of the New Community Leadership Foundation, a nonprofit partnering with the city of San Francisco to find people displaced by urban renewal — and their descendants — who might qualify for residences here through the Certificate of Preference Program. Certificate holders move to the head of the line to get into city-funded housing.

Though the program has existed for decades, the city is giving it renewed attention as the Board of Supervisors prepares to review a draft Reparations Plan to address historic harms against Black San Franciscans at a meeting March 14.

Because of high demand, San Francisco runs a lottery for city-funded affordable rental housing and units available for purchase. When individuals apply for units in a particular building, those with certificates of preference are placed in a separate category giving them priority over all other applicants. Then, their applications are reviewed for eligibility. If an applicant is eligible for an available unit, it will be offered to them. The process starts from scratch in each new housing project that is built.

Recent California legislation requires that San Francisco’s certificates of preference — and similar programs in other municipalities — be extended to descendants of people displaced due to urban renewal.

“If you get it, it’s the golden ticket,” said Cathy Davis, executive director of Bayview Senior Services, a nonprofit that provides housing and other services to seniors. The agency asks everyone who walks through its doors, mostly African Americans over the age of 50, for a childhood home address to see if they may be eligible for a certificate.

The Certificate of Preference Program is not new; the first certificates were issued in the 1960s as homes were razed and families were displaced from neighborhoods like the Western Addition and SoMa, though many of those certificates were never honored. The New Community Leadership Foundation hopes to change that and reach newly qualified descendants.

Historical wrongs

A federally and city-funded program, urban renewal led to the displacement of as many as 20,000 San Francisco residents — most were Black, though some were Japanese and Filipino. Writer James Baldwin famously stated after visiting San Francisco in 1963 that urban renewal “means Negro removal.”

It was an era of false promises: “Residents and businesses were given worthless promissory notes that they could one day return, but historically certificates of preference have not been tracked and have rarely been honored,” according to a draft reparations plan prepared by San Francisco’s African American Reparations Advisory Committee.

At the same time families were being forced from their homes, “a San Francisco Redevelopment Agency survey showed that 34 out of every 35 apartments in the city prohibited African Americans, and the housing that was available was typically segregated, substandard, and expensive,” according to a report from the University of California, Berkeley. Many families moved to new neighborhoods in SoMa, Mission Bay and Hunters Point, and were displaced a second time when parts of those neighborhoods were seized under eminent domain and razed for redevelopment.

Renewed efforts and key changes

In November 2022, the New Community Leadership Foundation partnered with Lynx Insights & Investigations, a private investigation firm, and began scouring records for the names of people who were displaced and their descendants and trying to track them down. They have reached hundreds and anticipate reaching “well over a thousand” in the next two months, Giles Miller, a principal investigator at Lynx, wrote in an email.

Many of the people who were displaced remain in the greater Bay Area, Sacramento and Southern California. People also moved to Texas, the Carolinas and Georgia, Miller wrote.

This renewed tracking effort is benefiting from two key changes: a 2021 law that makes descendants of people who were displaced eligible for certificates, and a stronger commitment by the city to search for and alert people who may qualify.

The search starts with a document called a “site occupancy record,” which families filled out when they were initially displaced. Investigators cross reference the names on that list (heads of households and dependents) with commercial databases to find potential certificate qualifiers and their descendants, relying on tools like social media when the databases fall short.

Though many initial attempts are unsuccessful, the group is persistent in leaving voicemails and speaking with relatives. Once potential qualifiers are reached, they are referred to the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, where they are instructed to fill out a certificate request form and may be asked for additional records such as birth certificates.

Since the Certificate of Preference Program was established in 1967, almost 7,000 certificates have been issued by city agencies. In ensuing decades, the program expanded at various stages to include not just displaced heads of households, but other adults who were household members, children who were displaced, and most recently descendants of those who were displaced. But until now, the program has been underused, in earlier decades due to city government not honoring certificates, and more recently due to lack of trust and a lack of information in the communities it is meant to serve.

Of the nearly 7,000 certificates of preference, only 1,483 have been exercised. In January 2022, the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development began issuing the first certificates to descendants of people who lost their homes during urban renewal, and since then has issued more than 30 new certificates to children and grandchildren of displaced residents. As of December, 914 certificate holders were in contact with the office and about 100 were actively applying for housing opportunities.

Reparations connection

Reinvigoration of the Certificate of Preference Program comes at a time when the city has renewed efforts to right past injustices. San Francisco leaders are considering reparations and other potential responses to the historical wrongs of slavery, redlining, urban renewal, displacement and other ongoing disparities. The Board of Supervisors is slated to hold a hearing March 14 on the draft of the city’s Reparations Plan.

In it, certificates of preference serve as one of several mechanisms that could establish whether a person might be eligible for reparations. Suggestions related to certificates of preference include offering certificate holders automatic qualification for city-funded units and first right of refusal for any rental or home ownership opportunities rather than making them enter the citywide affordable housing lottery, giving them stipends to assist with relocation costs for moving into any housing in the city, creating a more transparent process for residents to determine whether they qualify for certificates, and allocating more money for promoting the program and toward displaced resident location efforts.

To Brittni Chicuata, economic rights director at the Human Rights Commission, whose role also includes management of the San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee, certificates of preference are one piece in a puzzle of housing policies outlined in the plan.

“The hope for the housing solutions and recommendations is that there would be kind of a coordinated action or just understanding there’s the ecosystem of housing,” she said, noting such programs as down payment assistance and access to federally subsidized housing. “It takes multiple levers to actually make any progress.”

Employing certificates of preferences in conjunction with the reparations plan “creates a huge opportunity to prioritize this group of people,” she said. “If the city made that political and policy decision to only give housing to people who are on this list until that list was exhausted, that would be reparations.”

Remaining questions

Given the history of racial terror, distrust and shortcomings of San Francisco’s past governmental response to urban renewal, some community leaders still have questions about the scope of the certificate program and the larger affordable housing system within which it exists.

The Rev. Amos Brown said he doesn’t want policy solutions to solely focus on those displaced and their descendants, but to have a broader scope that applies to Black people more generally. Urban renewal “was not done individually, it was done to a group,” he said.

Urban renewal did “indescribably psychological damage to black folks,” said Brown, pastor at the Third Baptist Church in San Francisco and leader of the San Francisco Reparation Task Force’s health subcommittee. Brown is also president of San Francisco’s NAACP chapter and serves as vice chair of California’s Reparations Task Force. In addition to bearing the trauma of these memories, Black San Franciscans today also carry the burden of lower median incomes, more housing instability, and worse health and education outcomes compared with their white counterparts. Black households in the city earn on average $30,000 — less than a quarter of the median white household income.

A lot of people affected by urban renewal who qualify for certificates are struggling to get housing in the lottery system, which Davis of Bayview Senior Services called unfair. Eliminating the lottery for certificate holders, as the reparations plan suggests, could remove this barrier. Davis also said she wants to see the program expanded for those who were displaced in public housing, who do not currently qualify.

Crawford acknowledged that some people who have certificates of preference simply cannot afford available units, even when they are designated “low income,” but said that the program creates an important opportunity for those who were harmed to return to San Francisco, and could act as a galvanizing effort to unite community nonprofits on myriad issues related to affordable housing.

“Billions of dollars of wealth have been stripped from the Black community in San Francisco as a result of urban renewal, redlining and other government policies,” he wrote. “The Black community pulled themselves out of the ravages of Jim Crow just to have everything stripped from them. Reparations is needed to give back what was stolen.”

If you or a family member were displaced during urban renewal and may qualify for a certificate of preference, click here to see a list of affected addresses and here to submit an online application. To find out if you may qualify to be a Certificate of Preference holder, you can visit www.findmysfcp.org, email certificate@findmysfcp.org, or call 415-275-0035. For more information about the Certificates of Preference program, visit this city website.

UPDATED 3/3/23: Additional details were added to the resource information section at the end of this article.

The post Housing Program to Redress Urban Renewal Could Get Boost From SF Reparations Plan appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Not hitting the Jan. 31 deadline to pass the city’s plan, called the Housing Element, would have resulted in an immediate loss of hundreds of millions of dollars from the state for affordable housing and transportation.

It would also have made approvals for some new buildings automatic. Many city permitting and construction regulations would have gone out the window, and the state could have levied monthly fines up to $100,000.

Still, not everyone is happy with the plan.

One advocate for affordable housing, Sarah “Fred” Sherburn-Zimmer, executive director of the Housing Rights Committee, called these threats “state blackmail.” Community groups that want more homes for the working class worry that even in the current plan, displacement of low-income residents of color is possible because it focuses too much on building market-rate apartments.

Though the Board of Supervisors unanimously passed the Housing Element, several supervisors have questioned whether under the new plan affordable housing would get built. “The devil is going to be not in the Housing Element itself, but actual implementation along the way,” said Aaron Peskin, who this month once again took the job of board president. Executing on the plan, he said, is “going to be a lot of work, and is easier said than done.”

Others have expressed less concern about affordable housing than what they call the overemphasis on high-density infill development in their neighborhoods. Over all, the pro-housing construction lobby has expressed satisfaction with the city’s new plan.

Of the 82,000 units the plan envisions, 46,000 must be affordable. That would be a tall order, as that goal is more than six times the affordable housing erected in the last eight-year cycle ending in 2021.

The Planning Department said the plan centers on community needs and racial equity. As the Public Press previously reported, some advocates said it falls short on those goals.

For San Francisco, retaining control means Planning will continue to have significant leverage over what gets built, and the Board of Supervisors will still enjoy discretionary approval powers.

But there’s still one more danger on the horizon: If the city does not make significant progress toward its targets, the state can impose streamlined approval for projects that meet state requirements and disregard city rules.

The plan will become law after it goes to Mayor London Breed for her signature.

Other local newsrooms have covered angles on the Housing Element that deserve a closer look:

• How the affordable units will be funded is still a looming question. As Miriam Chion, director of community equity at the Planning Department, said in a Land Use and Transportation Committee hearing Jan. 23, “We don’t have the money for 46,000 affordable units.” (48 Hills) In the same meeting, she did clarify that the city needed to “get organized in a slightly different way to produce the housing or to retain the housing that we need.”
• Supervisor Dean Preston has introduced legislation allowing nonprofit organizations to sue the city if affordable housing goals are not met. (San Francisco Chronicle)
• As we noted in our previous coverage, affordable housing advocates pushed hard for land banking — purchasing land for future development without a specific project in mind.  The Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development indicated this is not a strategy it is actively pursuing, and it has also not spent any of the $250 million raised by Proposition I of 2020 for affordable housing. (San Francisco Standard) The office on Friday issued a call for grant applications to nonprofit organizations totaling $40 million. (Mayor’s Office)
• One of the main ways to build more housing is to change zoning in areas that have seen little change in decades — especially in the western side of the city. The Housing Element includes a self-imposed deadline of October 2026 to make these changes. (San Francisco Chronicle)

What are your thoughts on the supply of affordable and market-rate housing? Let us know!

The post Plan for 82,000 Homes in San Francisco Moves Forward, Under Pressure From State appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

San Francisco took steps to get ahead of the crisis: A spokesperson from the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing said the agency increased street outreach and the number of shelter beds available in anticipation of the storms. But as of a week ago, some people said they were having a hard time accessing shelter beds and other resources to protect them from the rain.

We talked with more than two dozen people about the challenges of finding shelter in eight San Francisco neighborhoods over three days during the storms at a time when several shelters were close to capacity, according to the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing’s dashboard. We talked to many people in vulnerable situations who did not have the ability to search online to figure out where shelters were or how to get to them. Also, the city’s shelter dashboard does not explain clearly which shelters have beds available in real time.

For several weeks, intense rain and wind caused power outages, downed trees, and led to flooding and mudslides. From Dec. 26 to Jan. 18, there were 1,711 reports of flooding to San Francisco’s 311 service center, as well as 1,125 reports of damaged or fallen trees, excluding trees that were vandalized. An additional 1,355 reports were generated about tents or vehicle dwellings, and were coded as “Encampment Cleanups” in a Department of Public Works database. About 60% of these reports were duplicates.

“We have set inclement weather protocols,” Denny Machuca-Grebe, a public information officer at the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, wrote in an email. “Once we see a forecast of less than ideal weather conditions, we put the protocols into action.”

“We are increasing wellness checks, looking throughout our shelter system to flex some capacity where available, discuss with our city partners as to whether a pop-up shelter would be needed, and staff up to support these operations,” Machuca-Grebe wrote in a follow-up email. He also noted that the Homeless Outreach Team deployed extra workers encouraging people exposed to the elements to come inside.

But while we were out reporting, we came across one man in the Tenderloin who had been shivering under the rain for at least an hour before we called the Street Crisis Response Team, which sent representatives to check his vital signs and take him to a shelter. During an early-morning break between storms, we also saw city workers clearing an encampment in the Mission where residents were offered shelter. Those who declined the offer were asked to pack up and move all their possessions — many moved around the corner or across the street — so the Department of Public Works could clean the sidewalk before the next day’s rain.

The department “sheltered an additional 100+ people every night throughout the storm activation,” Machuca-Grebe wrote. He said that extra beds are available during storms on a walk-in, first-come first-served basis for one-night stays Monday through Thursday, and for three-night stays for those who arrive on Fridays.

The Department of Emergency Management also reported that the city’s Healthy Streets Operation Center, a group focused on coordinating efforts among city agencies to address homelessness and street health, had engaged with 160 people living outside in various neighborhoods between Dec. 29 and Jan. 14. Less than half of those people accepted offers of shelter. The department also said that staff from several city agencies transported a total of 410 people to winter shelters.

SEEKING FOOD AND SHELTER 

Friday, Jan. 13 

10:58 a.m. Inside St. Anthony Foundation, a social services hub for low-income San Franciscans, dozens of people are eating hot meals and warming up in the dining room. Outside, a 58-year-old man named Tim says that he doesn’t know where he will sleep tonight. His belongings are gathered in a duffel bag and a suitcase, which later will fall open as he boards the No. 7 Muni bus heading toward the Haight and Outer Sunset neighborhoods.

When asked what the city could be doing to better support people like him, Tim answers quickly: “We’re not getting housing over here. Been waiting a long time.”

11:30 a.m. Down the block at St. Boniface Catholic Church, nonprofit employees help people identify their belongings with numbered tags so they can retrieve them later from the canopy outside. The church welcomes those seeking a place to rest every day until 3 p.m., giving them a break from the elements and a place to wait their turn to take a shower or do their laundry at St. Anthony’s across the street. Two police officers stand inside the doorway, serving as security.

“There are a lot more people because it’s raining. People are trying to get out of the rain,” says a St. Anthony Foundation employee standing outside the church.

11:45 a.m. Back at St. Anthony’s dining room, many older people are coming and going –– some of them appear to be residents of the senior housing on the buildings’ upper floors. People continue to leave their property at the entrance. They leave bikes and shopping carts covered with umbrellas and sleeping bags, attempting to shield belongings from the rain, but most of their property is already wet.

One man who commuted from his home near San Francisco International Airport for a meal says that 20 years ago he volunteered at Glide Memorial Church helping feed people experiencing homelessness, and laments that “now things are so damn expensive.” He says he isn’t homeless, but relishes the spinach and other food he can pick up from the foundation.

12:11 p.m. At Hyde and Turk streets, the “urban oasis” park is mostly empty during a light drizzle. Urban Alchemy employees, who manage the oasis, sit under canopies and play music. Department of Public Works employees sit in another area of the park, gazing at their phones.

12:15 p.m. On the way to our car, we see a man in drenched clothing, shaking uncontrollably under an emergency blanket. We guess that he has been there for at least an hour, as we passed him on our way to St. Anthony’s. It is no longer pouring rain, but when we speak to him, he can only muster a few words, sharing his first name and that he is cold. We go to the car and grab socks, a towel, a sweater and a tent, and return to offer these to the shivering man. But he can’t stop shaking from the cold, and we think he needs a more serious intervention.

12:37 p.m. We have trouble finding the right phone number. When we call a number that we find on the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing website, we reach an answering machine. Next, we call 311 and are transferred to the non-emergency police line, where we finally reach a dispatcher. She asks a series of questions about the man’s physical appearance and his demeanor. Does he seem violent? Does he have a weapon? We answer “no” to both. We tell her that he is cold and wet.

1:04 p.m. The Street Crisis Response Team arrives in a red van with three passengers. Two paramedics prepare to take the man’s vital signs. “I can shake him and have him get up, but he’ll be pissed,” one of them says after asking the man several questions: Does he know what city he’s in? San Francisco. When did he last use drugs? Three hours ago — fentanyl. Does he want to go to shelter, or stay where he is? Shelter. One of the paramedics calls SoMa Rise, a program that connects people with substance use issues to services — such as medical care and housing — to find out if they had room for the night. Now the man is standing, and his breath turns to steam as it leaves his mouth. The paramedics bring him a gray women’s jacket that is slightly too small, two large blankets and a dry pair of pants for him to change into in the van.

Eventually, the paramedics pack up the dry clothes and blankets they brought in a plastic bag, help the man into the back of their van and take off.

3:36 p.m. We drive to the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood to visit the Vehicle Triage Center, a city-run parking lot where people living in recreational vehicles can park and access showers, bathrooms and social workers who offer case management. At the entrance, we meet James, a new RV resident. James says he’s turning 65 in a week. After the Hunters Point Expressway flooded, James and other vehicle residents who had parked near there were welcomed to move into the lot, he says. James moved into his RV after losing his job in 2020 during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic. He describes his new living quarters as “better than nothing” and “better than getting towed.” He says he believes the program staff are “doing the best they can,” while also providing breakfast and dinner. Propane tanks and generators for heating and cooking are not allowed at the triage center, and so the city stores them for RV owners at the back of the lot. James hopes the program will connect him to permanent housing. “I am just waiting for them to call if they are going to give me a house,” he says.

4:29 p.m. A van is in two feet of water at Hunters View Expressway next to Candlestick Point State Recreation Area. Vehicle residents lived along this roadway for years before it was flooded during the recent atmospheric river storms. Sewage has leaked into the San Francisco Bay after storm drains overflowed here and around the Bay Area.

4:35 p.m. The Vehicle Triage Center is surrounded by water, with the bay on one side and flooded streets in other directions. It is windy here and feels a lot colder than other parts of the city. On a stretch of gravel, we meet Rafaela, a resident of the Candlestick RV Park, a private park next to the city’s Vehicle Triage Center. Rafaela is 30 years old and works at San Francisco International Airport. On rainy days, she finds it challenging, even scary, to drive to work. “I drive at 25 or 30,” miles per hour, she says. On the worst days, she has not been able to drive to work. During this dry spell, Rafaela is out walking her dog, Coco, and doing her best to avoid the flooded park.

4:57 p.m. At the United Council of Human Services — aka Mother Brown’s — a dining room, shelter and city-sanctioned campsite at Jennings Street and Van Dyke Avenue in the Bayview, people are queuing up for tonight’s 5 p.m. meal: bread, fish and rice.

“We are definitely hitting capacity,” said Quincy Carr, a Mother Brown’s employee who used to stay at the shelter himself. St. Anthony Foundation and sometimes even nearby hospitals will drop people off at this shelter, which has a capacity of about 50, to stay for the night. Though people do sleep there, it does not have beds, only tables and chairs. Sometimes people sleep in a portable toilet outside the building. People can bring in service animals or personal items, but no mattresses or bedding are allowed to avoid a bed bug infestation, Carr says.

5:46 p.m. We meet Javon while he is standing in line for a meal. He came to San Francisco after Hurricane Katrina decimated his home town of New Orleans in 2005. Mother Brown’s Dining Room is a resource hub to him and people in the neighborhood, but Javon thinks “it needs to be fixed up and remodeled.” He says he has had trouble finding a job while living outside and says that it’s hard to keep himself clean and presentable for the workday. He lived at the sanctioned tent encampment next to Mother Brown’s building, where tents are raised on platforms a few inches off the ground, but the street still floods. He says he is grateful for shelter, but the rules are strict. “We gotta follow rules, but they start being abusive,” Javon said. “It’s mental abuse.”

Javon says being a black man experiencing homelessness presents bigger challenges. “We are the only race that has to keep starting over,” he says, adding his feelings about local government and elected officials in San Francisco: “They don’t value life. There’s no equality. Some people can just eat and go to school, but I can’t.”

8:58 p.m. We arrive at St. Mary’s Cathedral just before the shelter there stops its official intake for the evening. The church functions as an emergency shelter at night during San Francisco’s rainy season as part of the Interfaith Winter Shelter program. The church infamously made headlines in 2015 for periodically using automatic sprinklers to spray people who slept on its steps.

But the entrance to the shelter is hard to find. We walk all the way around the church and try two locked gated doors before someone inside spots us. The site supervisor, Regina, estimates that about 60 people will spend the night and leave by 7:30 a.m. Two weeks ago during a storm, there was a blackout at the site, but she says the shelter was able to get its hands on lamps, a generator and other supplies to stay open. Regina says that a family stopped by earlier today and told her they were having a hard time finding a shelter, but they were unable to stay at St. Mary’s as the cathedral shelter does not allow children.

In his email responding to our questions about shelter availability, Machuca-Grebe wrote: “For families with children and young adults, they can visit one of the Access Points in the community to request placement into an emergency shelter. Families may also access shelter at Buena Vista Horace Mann by calling or walking up to the program. Additionally, pregnant persons may access family congregate shelter through calling Hamilton Family Emergency Shelter.”

WEATHERING THE STORM

Saturday, Jan. 14 

9:54 a.m. More than a dozen people wait just outside the doors on all sides of the Main Library near Civic Center before it opens at 10 a.m. Near one entrance, we meet a woman who has lived outside without a tent for over a year. She says she went to a shelter last night for the first time as she had no bedding and felt sick with a cold. “It’s hard for women to get in’’ a shelter, she says. “There are more beds available for men.” She says she prefers to keep to herself, but her personal items were stolen a week ago, including a bag with her social security card and birth certificate. She tells us that she filed a police report at the Tenderloin station but didn’t receive any response.

10:24 a.m. Once the doors open, the woman and others rush in. Inside the library where it is warm, people who spent the previous night outside now surf the internet, sort through their belongings in quiet corners and hunker down at the desks among the bookshelves.

10:46 a.m. A Street Crisis Response Team and Sheriff’s van pull up outside the library. Later, a Homeless Outreach Team van drives by a man covered in a sleeping bag and emergency blanket sitting in the Muni bus stop. We stop to talk with him. He says his name is Michael and that he is hungry. We offer him some food; he smiles and softly murmurs to us to have a good day.

12:34 p.m. At 24th and Mission streets, Isolina is smoking cannabis out of a 7-Up can. Several other people take shelter from the drizzle under the eaves of the McDonald’s building. Though Isolina expresses interest in staying in a shelter, she says she does not have a phone or know where the nearest shelters are. We write down the address of the nearest walk-in shelter for her — the Dolores Shelter Program —and call the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing’s hotline to leave a message telling them where she is standing and that she has expressed interest in going to a shelter. We do this even though the chances are slim that this will lead to her getting help, as the website notes that calls made on behalf of people experiencing homelessness will not be returned.

Damian Pierce, 26, approaches us after seeing us speak with Isolina. Weathering the storms “sucks and it’s f—ing freezing,” he says. “I wake up all wet and it’s miserable.” Though he is 6 feet 7 inches tall, he says he only eats three times a week, and most of his meals consist of fruit that he resorts to stealing. He doesn’t have a phone and for the past week has been sleeping in a tent outside of a building that’s for sale. “I try my best to keep, like, prim and proper and what not,” he says. “I just need a safe, not wet place to sleep.”

Pierce says he has struggled to find long-term aftercare for his alcoholism and has been searching for over a year. He says he was able to get sober during a three-day treatment in Santa Rosa, but he was immediately put back on the street and found it hard to avoid drinking and suicidal thoughts.

2:07 p.m. We stop at an encampment next to a PG&E facility in the Mission District. Some camp residents are tidying up around their tents and makeshift shelters. On a fence nearby, blue city posters in Spanish and English discourage people from pitching tents near doorways, fire hydrants or public restrooms, and from occupying more than a few feet of the sidewalk. PG&E has also posted signs on its fence, more clearly stating, no camping allowed. A paper notice stapled to an electricity pole announces that there will be an “encampment resolution” at 7 a.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 17.

3:31 p.m. A dry spell that lasted for a few hours breaks when rain and hail start coming down. In Hayes Valley, while pedestrians seek cover, a woman kneels and washes her head with rain water from the street. She splashes her face a few times before getting up, and searches for food in a green compost bin outside a café. She doesn’t find anything she wants and leaves visibly upset.

3:46 p.m. A dog stands in the rain near Larch and Franklin streets in the Fillmore District. After a short smoke break, his owner ducks back under their makeshift shelter of plastic tablecloths, cardboard and a set of metal rails typically used for crowd control.

3:51 p.m. A few blocks away, a man stands under the pouring rain wrapped up in a plastic bag, waiting for the traffic signal to change at Eddy and Franklin streets. His two-person tent and personal belongings are drenched. The slope of Franklin Street carries a stream of water toward the corner where he is camping.

4:16 p.m. It’s after 4 p.m. and staff at St. Anthony’s Foundation are done serving meals for the day. Across the street, people seek shelter from the rain. They appear to be cold and wet as they carry their belongings in plastic bags and small suitcases. The warming center at St. Boniface and laundry services nearby are also closed for the day.

4:34 p.m. The rain stops for a few minutes. Behind the Best Buy store in the Mission District, Kevin secures a rainfly cover over his tent to prevent water from leaking inside his sleeping quarters. He uses garbage bags to cover up any openings. The winds have been so strong that “it feels like everything is going to be blown away,” he says. People at this encampment have been using sandbags from nearby businesses to prevent the wind from flipping their tents over. After his last camping site was flooded, Kevin moved to this area. He had lost almost everything in the previous rainstorm, including his bedding. “I was all soaked inside my tent like a wet puppy,” he says.

5:13 p.m. A man sits outside his tent on a plastic bucket and chats with his partner on Cedar Street in the Lower Nob Hill neighborhood. They share a laugh and the man raises his drink to make a toast. He takes a drink and hands her the bottle. Before it starts raining again, he stretches the top cover on their tent, shaking off the pooled water and throwing another layer of clear plastic over the structure.

5:21 p.m. As rain continues, people stand outside the Next Door Shelter on Polk Street in the Lower Nob Hill neighborhood, waiting for intake to start. Those seeking a place to stay need to line up early as shelter beds are offered on a first-come, first-served basis.

5:28 p.m. Across the street from the Next Door Shelter, four people take cover from the rain at a construction site as they wait for the doors to open. A man huddles in a plastic poncho he received from St. Anthony’s Foundation, trying to keep warm. A woman sits on her electric wheelchair, keeping her service dog close.

5:30 p.m. The rain continues on and off for the rest of the night. A person rests inside a soaked tent on Cedar Street, leaving a grocery cart outside with their finds of the day: a pair of Converse shoes, some clothes and a few plastic bottles to recycle.

STARTING OVER BEFORE THE RAIN 

Tuesday, Jan. 17

A police squad car pulls onto 19th Street from Harrison Street as a group of city employees rounds the corner. One woman wears a black jacket that reads “Homeless Outreach Team,” and three men wear beige vests with “Encampment Resolution Team” emblazoned on the back. At least two police officers and a fire department captain are also part of the group. They are later joined by more police officers, a social worker from the Healthy Streets Operation Center and at least one observer from the City Attorney’s Office. The fire captain is often the first to approach tents.

“Are you interested in going inside today?” is typically his first question as the group reaches each tent, sometimes preceded by “they are gonna clear all this out today. We have to clean the sidewalk.” Some encampment residents are not near their tents or belongings and their neighbors try to explain where they are, such as one man who is at court. The fire department captain shakes the tents from the outside, sometimes moving makeshift tarps to peer inside and see if anyone is there.

The team approaches a two-person tent where the man inside speaks little English. Bobby, a worker from the Encampment Resolution Team, speaks to him in Spanish. He asks, “do you want to go to a shelter or a navigation center? It’s still raining.” The man chooses neither, indicating that he doesn’t trust city employees. Bobby later meets Armando and helps him put a wrap around his hand after Armando says that he thinks he has a broken wrist and might need a cast.

Though it is dry today, members of the city team say they are trying to clean up the area before the last wave of predicted showers arrives tomorrow. The Homeless Outreach Team has been conducting encampment cleanups throughout the storms with advocates stating in court that the city continued to remove people from the street without providing shelter, violating a Dec. 23, 2022, injunction issued by a federal court as part of an ongoing lawsuit between individuals experiencing homelessness and San Francisco, though officials say the city is complying with the order.

One encampment resident, Dwayne, says that the mood among members of the Homeless Outreach Team has been more tense since the injunction was issued. In the past, his belongings have been thrown out by the team, he says. Three months ago, a pregnant woman staying in a tent next to him was at a doctor’s appointment when city workers arrived and prepared to throw away her belongings. “They let me grab what I could, like maybe five bags,” he says, “and they threw the rest away. It’s ridiculous.” Starting over without anything is hard, Dwayne says, which is why he is hesitant to go to a navigation center, where he says his belongings were once thrown out when he missed a check.

Although the city is not allowed to force people to move their dwellings, it “may continue to ensure sidewalks are not obstructed and are usable for everyone. And, the City may still ask unhoused people to move temporarily for cleaning activities,” Jen Kwart, director of communications and media relations at the City Attorney’s Office wrote in an email.

During ensuing hours the morning of Jan. 17, camp residents ask what shelter options are available today, but city employees are vague. The Departments of Emergency Management and Homelessness and Supportive Housing did not respond to our questions sent by email asking how many people were offered shelter and the number of shelter spaces available Jan. 17. A representative from the Department of Emergency Management wrote in an email that 10 people accepted shelter offers that day.

Most camp residents choose to stay in the area. They gather their possessions and move across the street or around the block while seven Department of Public Works employees use rakes and shovels to scoop up items left on the sidewalk. A ski, an old television, a garbage can filled with black tubing and a torn foam mattress cover sit among the articles that have been sifted through by residents and are now being tossed into the Department of Public Works dump trucks.

Once the tents have been moved, the streets nearby get a power wash ahead of the last of the atmospheric rivers expected to roll through the next day.

The post Facing Brutal Storms, Homeless People Encountered Hurdles to Finding Shelter appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

San Francisco’s Planning Department says this year’s Housing Element is the first to center on race and equity, but housing advocates say the eight-year plan doesn’t include a comprehensive strategy to build enough affordable housing.

For the first time, San Francisco’s comprehensive housing strategy plan recognizes housing as a human right and explicitly names race and equity as focal points. But community advocates say the document prioritizes market-rate development over the needs of the communities the city says it wants to serve. 

Called the Housing Element, the eight-year plan that California cities and counties must submit to the state for approval is a blueprint for local governments to show how they will keep up with population growth. San Francisco has been charged with building 82,000 units between 2023 and 2031, of which almost 57% must be affordable.

The plan notes that, “San Francisco’s housing problem is a racial and social equity challenge and an economic problem,” and later acknowledges that “many communities of color, especially the city’s Black and American Indian communities, have experienced deep, multi-generational, dispossession, harm, and near erasure, experiences that have yet to be fully told, documented, recognized, and repaired by City actions.”

To address some of these harms and commitments it made in 2020, the Planning Department branded this Housing Element as the city’s first housing plan centered on racial and social equity.

However, many community activists said that, while recognizing and rectifying the harms of discriminatory housing policies is a worthy goal, the plan doesn’t create a roadmap to deliver on those aims.

“I don’t feel like we’ve created a plan yet that we’ve set up to succeed,” said Charlie Sciammas, policy director at the Council of Community Housing Organizations, a grassroots coalition of advocates and developers focused on affordable housing and low-income communities. “It’s great to have all the lofty goals, but if the city hasn’t committed to put in place all the pieces we need to make sure we can bring it to fruition — that means a strong start to our public investments, and transforming our public institutions to truly prioritize affordable housing — it’s hard to count this as a win.”

The department began by researching and drafting key policy ideas to share with the public, before asking communities to reflect on the draft ideas and share their own housing challenges. It then updated the first draft based upon these interactions, returning to communities once again to refine policies. In these periods, the Planning Department also carried out focus group discussions with vulnerable populations and collaborated with community-based organizations on informational meetings and listening sessions, including events in Cantonese and Spanish, holding hearings open to the public and conducting a survey of residents.

In recent weeks, the department has been moving to finalize the draft, participating in a meeting at the Board of Supervisors and holding several commission hearings open to the public.

Housing development in San Francisco has not kept up with goals set by the state for the most recent housing cycle, with only 34% of the target for affordable housing units being produced. In contrast, developers built more market-rate units and achieved 150% of the city’s goal for that type of housing.

Data from the Planning Department shows that more market-rate housing is being produced in San Francisco than required under the 2014 Housing Element, but not enough affordable housing is being created to hit the 2014 targets.

Community-driven solutions

Dozens of San Francisco residents, many of them identifying as people of color or low-income, showed up in person and virtually to a Nov. 15 Board of Supervisors hearing to air their concerns about the city’s plan. Groups like the Race and Equity in All Planning Coalition, a coalition of 39 community-based organizations that came together during the pandemic, have also raised concerns.

“There’s a lot of interesting language in this housing element around centering on racial and social equity, and the three dozen or so organizations that are in the Race and Equity in All Planning Coalition from all over the city feel like it really doesn’t do that,” said Joseph Smooke, one of the group’s organizers. 

Smooke later credited the Planning Department for making some revisions based on the coalition’s feedback, but said, “what we’re looking at is a Housing Element that removes communities’ voices, and does not prioritize affordable housing.”

In a document critiquing the city’s plan and proposing their own strategies to build affordable housing, the coalition described the city’s proposed Housing Element as “largely a market-based housing production plan that assumes three insufficient strategies for affordable housing.” The coalition’s document, known as the Citywide People’s Plan for Equity in Land Use, draws on development ideas generated by local communities and neighborhoods as the basis for its equitable-strategy action plan regarding affordable housing production and displacement prevention.

Authors of the People’s Plan maintain that the proposed Housing Element relies on market-rate development to achieve race and equity goals. They criticized this framework, saying that developers prioritize profit over racial equity and that building more market rate housing will not lower prices due to the commodification of the housing market.

“Instead of trying to fix displacement with displacement, we’re trying to demand creative strategies for affordable housing, such as funding for small affordable housing projects, buying existing buildings, the small sights acquisition program,” said Amalia Macias-Laventure, a member of West Side Tenants Association, at a rally before the Board of Supervisors hearing on Nov. 15.

“In my lifetime alone, I’ve seen family after family, community member after community member, move out of San Francisco because they simply cannot afford to live here,” said Arianna Antone-Ramirez, a citizen of the Tohono O’odham Nation and a board member and adviser at the American Indian Cultural Center. “It’s insulting to our community when the Planning Department wants to come to us and ask us to think creatively about fitting in market rate housing with the affordable housing to be built.”

Another partial solution raised by the coalition and the Council of Community Housing Organizations was encouraging the city to increase land banking for affordable developments — i.e., purchasing land for later use without a specific development plan in mind.

Sciammas said that affordable developments have a hard time competing with market-rate developers and other private investors to acquire sites.

Sciammas commended the Planning Department for naming land banking as a “major strategy” in the most recent draft of the plan, but wrote in an email that “Our biggest concern is that the policy action will not go very far without a major commitment of public investments and a realignment of the city’s approach to affordable housing.”

Members of the coalition also pushed for community input in identifying possible sites and an increased role for the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development and housing-focused nonprofits in preparing for more affordable site purchases and eventual housing production.

No silver bullet

Speaking to the criticisms outlined in the Peoples’ Plan, the Planning Department cited economic barriers.

“Some of the community leaders within that organization want to elevate the affordable housing or housing that is produced by government and nonprofit organizations, and we are with them,” said Miriam Chion, the department’s community equity director. “At the same time, we have an economic paradigm within which we function, which requires private investment, and our job is to guide those private investments. We would be failing if we didn’t provide that.”

Chion emphasized the department’s efforts in reaching out to and listening to affected communities as it went about creating the Housing Element, which community advocates also recognized.

“We’ve made a concerted effort over the last two years to reach out to communities that haven’t typically been a part of these discussions, especially communities of color, lower income communities, to get their voices in,” Chion said. “It was going to them, to where they were, and having the conversations with them on their own terms.”

While the plan describes various communities’ desires to hear the city acknowledge and repair past harms, Planning Director Rich Hillis did not point to specific strategies when asked to explain how the city would do that.

“There’s not one silver bullet,” Hillis said. “There’s a host of actions, which is why this document is as long and dense as it is.”

New state requirements

San Francisco’s intention to address equity in housing align with California’s new requirements to “affirmatively further fair housing” in housing elements. This means adopting measures to combat discrimination, desegregate neighborhoods and transform racially concentrated areas of poverty into “areas of opportunity.”

Since 2005, only 10% of new affordable housing in San Francisco has been built in “higher opportunity areas” — defined by higher incomes, home ownership rates, and educational, employment and health outcomes. These areas also have higher concentrations of white households. The Planning Department points to zoning as one driving factor, noting that 65% of the land in these areas is limited to one or two-unit residential zoning.

In the new plan, the Planning Department recognizes the historical reasons for those differences, and proposes some policies in response. One of the biggest divergences the department sees between the current element, which covers 2015 through January 2023, and the proposed element is the fact that the new plan considers the differing needs and histories of neighborhoods across the city.

“We treat communities a little bit differently in this,” Hillis said. “We’re trying to build housing in those well-resourced neighborhoods that haven’t seen a lot of housing, and focusing efforts and actions around housing stability.”

San Francisco’s new Housing Element proposes rezoning to hit state mandates and developing more housing in well-resourced neighborhoods.

“We’ve got to engage with and build trust with communities,” Chion said. “Communities used to fight against the Planning Department and the Planning Commission — we welcome the challenges but it is also important to build collaboration. This Housing Element points us in that direction.”

However, some community advocates said the plan broadly focuses on development in these areas when it should be focuses on affordable development specifically.

“What we’re seeing is the planning is basically directing a density strategy instead of actually directing an affordability strategy,” Smooke later said in an interview.

Examining history and its ongoing impacts

The challenges communities of color face with housing instability are deeply rooted in the region’s history. The Bay Area was the birthplace of many exclusionary housing policies that are now common across the country.

In San Francisco, zoning was used to criminalize the Chinese community. The Cubic Air Ordinance and anti-laundry laws targeted Chinese communities in the 1870s, though both were found to be illegal in court. The former required 500 feet of cubic space for each person in a lodging house and was used to jail thousands of Chinese residents, while the latter gave the Board of Supervisors the ability to restrict where laundries could be located, the majority of which were operated by Chinese people. An outright attempt at segregation, the Bingham Ordinance, passed in 1890 and banned Chinese residents from certain areas of the city — giving them 60 days to move or be charged with a misdemeanor and face jail time.

Racial covenants were common between the late-nineteenth and mid-twentieth century, wherein white property owners and developers would write in clauses that barred people of color, especially African Americans, from buying or renting property.

Another policy, redlining, which began in the 1930s and was named for the colorful maps used to demarcate areas deemed “hazardous” for lending, denied borrowers access to credit based upon the racial or socioeconomic makeup of their neighborhoods. These maps contributed to divestment in Black communities and segregation across the country.

In the 1950s, San Francisco began planning the demolition of areas deemed “slums” or “blighted,” many of which were Black cultural hubs, in the name of urban renewal. The Western Addition was one such neighborhood. It encompassed most of Japantown and the Fillmore District — known then as the “Harlem of the West” — which itself was populated by Black communities in the wake of the forced internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. All in all, more than 20,000 families were estimated to have been displaced through the razing of these thriving neighborhoods.

Today, communities are still dealing with the fallout of these discriminatory policies regarding housing access and wealth building. The Urban Displacement Project found that 87% of San Francisco’s formerly redlined neighborhoods are currently undergoing displacement. San Francisco’s Black population declined by 41% between 1990 and 2020. American Indian and Alaskan Natives are also experiencing displacement, with their presence in the city dropping 16.7% between 2014 and 2019.

On Dec. 15, the Planning Department will hold a hearing to adopt the final draft Housing Element, which must be adopted by the city by Jan. 31 and found compliant by the state if it hopes to avoid fines, losing out on affordable housing funding sources and other penalties. Chion of the Planning Department said on Tuesday that the plan is close to being adopted in accordance with state guidelines, saying that only three minor changes still remain.

The post Advocates Say SF Housing Plan Falls Short on Racial Equity appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

In a recent Public Press poll to gauge residents’ opinion of the city’s thorniest issues, San Franciscans made their top concerns crystal clear: housing affordability, homelessness and the cleanliness of city streets.  

More than 200 people shared opinions with the Public Press when asked to identify the most pressing concerns in their supervisorial districts. Most participants completed the brief survey online early this fall, with about 15% replying in person to surveyors seeking diverse respondents in supervisorial districts with competitive races. A small number of respondents said they worked in the city but lived elsewhere. 

While concerns varied by district, housing, homelessness and street hygiene emerged as key issues. Aggregated concerns about different kinds of crime came in as a close fourth. City residents were also able to weigh in on these thorny matters in the Nov. 8 general election. 

Results are still rolling in that could decide several close contests. Based on the latest vote tally from the Department of Elections: 

• Neither of two competing efforts to streamline San Francisco’s building permitting process with stated goals of building more affordable housing has secured 50% of the vote. After hanging on for several days by a razor thin margin, over the weekend Proposition D drifted further away from victory, while E has lost.  
• Proposition M, a progressive empty homes tax meant to give owners incentive to rent out vacant units, passed and stands with almost 54% “yes” votes.  
• Proposition C’s proposed increased oversight of the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing was also voted into law.  
• Proposition B, which overturns a decision made by voters in 2020 to create a new Department of Sanitation and Streets, received strong support with about 75% “yes” votes, returning street-cleaning duties to the Department of Public Works.  
• Voters seem to have upheld Mayor London Breed’s choice for District Attorney in a closely-watched race after months of debates on the role of the DA in addressing crime. Brooke Jenkins declared victory in the race Nov. 9, though her closest challenger John Hamasaki has yet to concede.  

With the potential failure of both D and E, survey respondents’ concerns regarding the new construction of affordable housing may not see much progress as a result of this election. Many respondents noted the lack of affordable housing as a major concern, oftentimes linking the housing crisis with high costs of living and homelessness. 

In August, the California Department of Housing and Community Development announced an investigation into housing policies and practices in San Francisco to understand why the city’s permitting process is so lengthy. It is the first investigation of its kind in the state.  

Gov. Gavin Newsom also reported on Nov. 3 that he is pausing the distribution of $1 billion in funds meant to address the homelessness crisis. Money from the Homelessness Housing, Assistance and Prevention grant program was meant to go to jurisdictions across the state, but Newsom said he will hold onto funds until local leaders meet up in mid-November to identify more aggressive strategies to reduce homelessness. 

The confusion of having two similarly worded competing measures may have undermined the ability for either to pass.  

Jason McDaniel, associate professor in the department of political science at San Francisco State University, said he believes the dueling measures are a sign of polarization and dysfunction in the relationship between the Board of Supervisors and Breed. 

“There’s not a lot of trust, there’s not a lot of signs of working together,” he said. “And so, when you see these dueling kinds of ballot measures, what you’re seeing is they don’t feel like they can govern and legislate — board and mayor together — on important decisions on housing policy.” 

More broadly, McDaniel said he sees two competing ideologies in the city, noting their presence in mobilizing around the DA’s race as well as various housing measures. 

“We have two kind of highly organized and competitive political factions in the city,” he said. These two factions are often referred to as progressives and moderate-liberals, though McDaniel “doesn’t love these terms.” As he sees it, the progressive faction is further left and usually positions itself in opposition to policies of political leaders such as Breed and state Sen. Scott Wiener. The moderate-liberal faction “mostly descends from the Willie Brown coalition, inherited by Gavin Newsom and Ed Lee.” 

These two groups are also “really good at making connections with voters — they care about, they listen to voters, they want to represent them.” In this way, McDaniel said, voter concerns are an important driving factor in what issues are central to elections.  

For voters, filling out ballots can already be time consuming even without the complexity of competing ballot measures.  

Survey respondent James Aldrich, who listed bike and pedestrian safety as his main concern, said “I think of myself as politically progressive, and yet, it’s pretty confusing when you try to figure out what is the solution” to some of the city’s biggest issues, such as the housing crisis.  

Transportation Priorities

Another hot issue for survey respondents that appeared on the ballot was the question of closed streets and car access. Much like the contentious split on the two affordable housing measures, voters and survey respondents had strong opinions regarding the potential re-opening of streets such as John F. Kennedy Drive and the Great Highway.  

Proposition J, which affirms the Board of Supervisors’ decision to close a portion of JFK Drive permanently to cars, passed. Its counterpart, Proposition I, which would have overturned a previous Board of Supervisors’ decision and reversed the city’s eventual closure of a portion of the Great Highway, was trailing by close to 30%.  

Richard Rothman, a native San Francisco resident who lives in District 1 and has followed local issues for several years sees the outcome of Propositions I, J, and L as reflective of a division between the eastern and western parts of the city. “I’ve never seen the city so divided,” he said. “Nobody wants to sit down and compromise; it’s either my way or no way.”   

Transportation concerns weren’t limited to closed streets. For survey respondents, concerns around transportation revealed a vast array of perspectives regarding whose transit needs should be centered in city policy — pedestrians, bikers, drivers, seniors, people with disabilities and various combinations of those groups. 

Some respondents called for improved Muni service and better traffic control. After a $400 million Muni bond failed in June, elected officials were hoping a different ballot measure could help tackle some of the city’s public transit woes.  

Proposition L, a proposed extension to San Francisco’s existing 0.5% sales tax, is the only measure on the ballot requiring a two-thirds affirmative vote to pass and currently stands at 71% “yes.” If approved, L would fund programs ranging from basic transit maintenance to large-scale transportation projects, as well as increased paratransit services and pedestrian and bike safety measures.  

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Designed to combat San Francisco’s long-standing housing shortage, an empty homes tax on the November ballot, Proposition M, would apply to multi-unit residential buildings with prolonged vacancies. Voters will decide the fate of the measure that has garnered support and criticism for its exemptions and low tax amount. Read our full analysis of Proposition M by Camellia Burris: “Would Tax on Vacant Homes Be Enough to Push Owners to Lease Empty SF Units?”

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The second of two bills meant to expedite the approval process for affordable housing, Proposition E — aka the Affordable Housing Production Act — was written by District 1 Supervisor Connie Chan and sent to the ballot by a 7-4 by the Board of Supervisors in late July. The proposition is supported by Board of Supervisors President Shamann Walton, along with Supervisors Aaron Peskin, Dean Preston, Hillary Ronen and Gordon Mar, as well as the San Francisco Democratic Party, the Council of Community Housing Organizations, the San Francisco Anti-Displacement Coalition, the San Francisco Tenants Union, the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco and several political clubs. It is also supported by labor groups including the San Francisco Building Trades, the San Francisco Labor Council, United Educators of San Francisco and United HERE Local 2.

This measure requires more than 50% affirmative votes to pass. In the event that both Proposition D and Proposition E pass, whichever measure gets more votes will go into effect, nullifying the other.

The two proposals will go before voters three months after the California Department of Housing and Community Development launched an investigation into San Francisco’s housing policies to understand why the permitting process takes so long in a city with a massive affordable housing shortage — the first investigation of its kind in the state. A November 2021 study found that the median approval timeframe for housing developments in San Francisco was 27 months. While the city is hitting its state-mandated Regional Housing Needs Assessment Goals, it is doing so by underproducing affordable housing and overproducing market-rate housing.

Certain new housing developments are subject to approval by various city boards and commissions, and are also required by state law to be reviewed under the California Environmental Quality Act, which has been cited by Supervisors in several controversial rejections of housing developments, including a proposed 495-unit mixed-income building at 469 Stevenson. Lengthy permitting processes can increase the cost of affordable housing construction.

Under Proposition E, projects that meet specific requirements would be exempt from review by the Planning Commission, Board of Appeals, Historic Preservation Commission, Arts Commission and the Board of Supervisors with one exception: Projects would still be subject to discretionary funding approval by the Board of Supervisors (and thus, potential CEQA review) in certain situations.

The types of developments that would be covered by the proposal include 100% affordable multifamily housing, educator housing projects with all units occupied by at least one employee of the San Francisco Unified School District or San Francisco Community College District, and mixed-income projects where 29.5% of units are affordable.

Dubbed by Chan as the only bill that would create “truly affordable housing,” this proposal sets the income cap for a unit in a 100% affordable project at 120% of the area median income, a lower cap than in Proposition D. The average income for an entire project would remain at the current state-set 80% of area median income, compared to Proposition D’s raised threshold of 120%.

Proponents of the measure also note that it will “bring greater transparency and accountability” by requiring the city to create a report tracking the city’s progress and spending on housing. Also, the bill requires that additional on-site units include at least 30% two-bedroom units and 20% three-bedrooms to create homes suitable for families. Another key difference from Proposition D is the required use of “skilled and trained” laborers who have completed specific apprenticeship programs.

Opponents of Proposition E criticized the continued CEQA oversight and discretionary review by the Board of Supervisors, and dubbed the measure a “poison pill.” They claimed that Proposition E would block the production of affordable housing because the number of required affordable units in some projects is so high that it make projects financially infeasible. They also criticized the measure’s requirement for “skilled and trained” laborers, saying that it will limit the work pool. Opponents include GrowSF, the Housing Action Coalition, Nor Cal Carpenters Union and SPUR, an urban planning think tank.

The Housing Action Coalition, a proponent of the competing Proposition D, sued to block Chan’s measure from appearing on the ballot using the same California law it criticized Proposition E for allowing — CEQA. However, a judge ruled in August that the measure could stay on the ballot.

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