Contentious low-income housing project advances in Sunset. Could more be in store?
Sunset District resident Aloe Lai dove head first into a heated neighborhood housing debate earlier this year after receiving a flyer containing “problematic” language in opposition to an affordable housing project planned across the street from Lai’s Irving Street home.
“They were claiming that this affordable housing building would bring drug addicts and criminals and homeless people to the neighborhood and it would make it a ghetto,” said Lai, referring to a proposal spearheaded by the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corp. and the city to build low-income housing at the 2550 Irving St. site, where a Police Credit Union currently sits.
Lai, a housing organizer, immediately reached out to Sunset-based peers, who began organizing in April.
Those meetings and prior efforts by the city’s advocates to push affordable housing production westward resulted in the formation of the Westside Community Coalition, a group that runs the gamut of neighborhood residents, teachers, housing organizers and others vying to see the project through in an area that is increasingly grappling with rising housing costs. They organized at the site in May and worked for months to educate the local community and drum up support for the proposal.
“There just aren’t systems in place to protect affordability in the Sunset and there are folks in the community that really need it,” said Palmoa Hernandez, a teacher and member of WCC.
But as evidenced by the flyers that landed on the doorsteps of 2550 Irving St.’s neighbors, not everyone in the community shared that sentiment. Opponents who spoke out at a string of public hearings described other concerns about traffic congestion, transportation and contamination at the site.
The Board of Supervisors on Tuesday approved a $14.3 million loan agreement to finance the project — a win for WCC. But their effort is not about dividing a community — rather, it's about “building the best affordable housing for the Sunset” and paving the way for community and city buy-in to develop geographically diverse and equitable projects across the city, said WCC organizer Joseph Smooke.
The fight over 2550 Irving St. laid bare the city’s past shortcomings in achieving that vision. An audit of the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development (MOHCD) published in June provided evidence that the city has not prioritized funding projects in areas that historically have lagged on new affordable housing construction.
Supervisor Gordon Mar — whose District 4 includes the Sunset — called for the audit in 2019 as the city prepared to ask for voter approval for a $600 million affordable housing bond.
Funding from that bond was set aside specifically for projects on the city's west side, such as 2550 Irving St. Since then, voters also passed Proposition E, which reduced zoning restrictions and approval requirements for affordable housing.
But more attention is needed on the western part of the city, according to Mar, who is planning to hold a hearing on the audit in the fall and said that he is considering legislation based on its “analysis and the recommendations” — some of which have been refuted by MOHCD.
“I was interested in understanding why so few affordable housing dollars were being invested in the Sunset District and on the west side of the city,” Mar told me on Wednesday. “In my work on the affordable housing bond I learned that the majority of the funding for that housing was already committed to projects in the affordable housing pipeline. I wanted to understand how projects even get in the queue for this pipeline.”
Some of San Francisco’s western neighborhoods have recorded the highest percentage losses of rent-controlled units over the past decade, yet the city's efforts to preserve and create new affordable housing have been disproportionately concentrated on the eastern side, the audit noted. This is due in part to the availability of land in those neighborhoods and zoning restrictions in other neighborhoods limiting multifamily housing development.
As of 2018, five neighborhoods in the eastern part of the city held 60% of all of the city’s affordable units, and new construction funded since 2015 occurred largely in the Mission, SoMa, Tenderloin and Hayes Valley neighborhoods.
“Without coordinated efforts by MOHCD and the Planning Department to promote affordable housing development in other parts of the city, new affordable housing will continue to be built in the same neighborhoods,” the Budget and Legislative Analyst’s office, which conducted the audit, concluded.
More than half of the projects funded through the city’s "Small Sites" program — an acquisition and rehabilitation loan program for small multifamily rental buildings — are located in the Mission and Bernal Heights neighborhoods, the audit found. While the Sunset and Inner and Outer Richmond have been designated as priority areas for affordable housing acquisition along with Haight Ashbury, North Beach, Russian Hill and SoMa, these neighborhoods collectively have just 12 "Small Sites" locations out of 51 citywide.
Among the recommendations stemming from the audit is that MOHCD establish a geographic equity policy for new housing development that “considers how affordable housing needs by neighborhood will be assessed and monitored, and how geography will be considered in funding determinations for developer-selected sites.”
Recommendations have also been made to streamline MOHCD’s developer solicitation process and selection criteria, and to encourage greater diversification of its candidate pool. Between 2015 and 2019, MOHCD awarded 71% of projects to just three developers, and the number of unique developers selected for projects has declined over time, according to the audit.
In a written response on June 24, MOHCD Director Eric Shaw disagreed with the need to create a standalone geographic equity policy, and pushed back on some of the recommendations.
“Site acquisitions cannot be evaluated through a geographic lens alone, but must meet funding and principles, maximize the affordable housing units delivered, and align with overarching housing plans and strategies,” Shaw wrote. “We are committed to pursuing site opportunities in high opportunity areas and are excited to identify creative models through a newly proposed housing innovation fund. The objective of the fund is to explore alternative options for affordable housing in neighborhoods with limited site opportunities.”
Other barriers contribute to the geographic inequity, said Smooke. For one, TNDC — a heavyweight developer in the Tenderloin — is not native to the Sunset. Other neighborhoods, like Chinatown and the Mission, also have their own affordable housing developers — the Chinatown Community Development Center, the Mission Economic Development Agency and Mission Housing Corp.
“Right now, all of the affordable housing developers are based in the eastern part of the city. It's really challenging for somebody like TNDC — as we're seeing with 2550 Irving — to be able to come onto the west side and speak to the issues there and speak to people in a way that's responsive to criticism or to people's lived experience,” Smooke said. “I think that's one of the things that sparked some opposition — people don’t feel like TNDC has really approached the community in a way that's been as productive as they wanted.”
The need for capacity building on the west side was highlighted in the audit and has been on the radar of city leaders for some time.
Former District 1 Supervisor Sandra Fewer secured a $300,000 grant in 2019 to hire a consultant to create a process for identifying an existing organization that could fill the project sponsor role for the west side, or to create a new organization, according to Ian Fregosi, legislative aide for District 1 Supervisor Connie Chan who worked under Fewer. That process has been underway for about a year, and an additional $490,000 has been allocated to the effort in the current budget.
“The reason you're seeing so many resources going into the Mission to build affordable housing is because the Mission community is demanding it —you have the community and organizations in lockstep,” Fregosi said. “We really need to build that type of infrastructure on the west side to make sure that MOHCD is actually allocating money there.”