Critics of Sen. Scott Wiener’s housing bill missed the mark because their math is wrong.
Late last week, Luis Granados and Erick Arguello claimed that building more market-rate housing in the Mission “harms our most-vulnerable community members.” The authors cited the laudable goal of protecting “low-income communities of color” to argue for amendments to SB 35 in a San Francisco Examiner oped. SB 35 streamlines approvalfor “infill” housing.
Newcomers are displacing San Francisco’s vulnerable low-income communities at an alarming rate. When we talk about a housing crisis we’re not being hyperbolic. The median cost of housing in San Francisco is 222% higher than in the rest of the state, pushing prices of previously affordable dwellings far out of reach of people who have lived here for decades. People are being evicted left and right, literally living in the streets because their incomes haven’t risen anywhere near as fast as rents.
Granados and Arguello argue that “Luxury development greatly exacerbates the cycle of gentrification and displacement in the Mission and in similar vulnerable low-income communities across the state,” and “market-rate developments are often a short-term catalyst for displacement.”
Bad legislation disproportionately hurts our city’s most vulnerable. If we want to reduce gentrification and displacement we must understand whether new market-rate housing causes evictions. Luckily, two recent data-based, empirical studies help answer this question.
But first, describing new housing as “market-rate” and “luxury” somewhat obscures the truth. One reason San Francisco added six times as many jobs as it did housing units between 2010 and 2015, and is as a result experiencing the worst housing shortage in the nation, is thatbarriers to building jack up the price of housing.
When you raise the cost of housing, most “market-rate” housing in San Francisco necessarily becomes “luxury” housing. Everything from permits and permit fees, environmental impact reports (EIRs), affordable housing mandates/inclusionary zoning ordinances, local ballot measures, and parking requirements make it harder and more expensive to build any new housing. Voters, not renters and buyers, decide what gets built and where.
Gentrification and displacement happen when prices for existing homes rise much faster than the incomes of the people who live in these homes. So more housing would have to raise prices for existing stock to create more gentrification and displacement.
The data is clear that building more housing does not increase the market price for existing houses and apartments. Two recent reports show that building more housing of all kinds, including market-rate housing, decreases gentrification and displacement in vulnerable low-income communities.
The first comes from an alum of the San Francisco Planning Department. “Luxury housing is not to blame for San Francisco’s affordable housing crisis,” Urban Institute Data Scientist Graham MacDonald wrote of the data.
“The primary factor [in housing prices rising so much faster than incomes] is that the demand for housing in the region has outstripped new supply.”
Building more luxury housing doesn’t exacerbate gentrification and displacement. It actually does the opposite, according to California’s oldest public policy research center. In a recent report from the Institute of Governmental Studies entitled Housing Production, Filtering and Displacement: Untangling the Relationships, Miriam Zuk and Karen Chapple wrote, “At the regional level, both market-rate and subsidized housing reduce displacement pressures.”
MacDonald recommends looking into solutions including easing regulations on second dwelling units on single-family lots, reforming state environmental regulations, and streamlining approval for “infill” housing (which SB 35 does). All these solutions have potential, except, writes MacDonald, “preventing new market-rate—or luxury—housing.”
Yet preventing new housing is exactly what Granados and Arguello’s “solutions” are likely to do.
For example, their “safe harbor provision” would exempt neighborhoods like the Mission from SB 35, meaning they can continue to block new housing developments. Again, this would mean the overall supply of housing in the Mission stays steady while demand continues to rise faster, which is how we got the crisis in the first place and is exactly how to stay in crisis mode indefinitely.
They also want to increase the affordable-housing requirement. But Brian Hanlon, a leader with the California Renters Legal Advocacy and Education Fund, points out that SB 35 requires developers who build in San Francisco to offer 50% of units at below-market rent because we will hit our low RHNA targets for market-rate housing. Further rising these requirements is likely to reduce the overall stock of housing, further exacerbating gentrification and displacement.
I’m glad to see Granados and Arguello fighting on behalf of the Mission against gentrification and displacement. But Granados and Arguello didn’t link to or even mention any research or data to support their claim that building more housing in the Mission will exacerbate gentrification and displacement.
The amendments Granados and Arguello propose will likely decrease new housing production in the Mission. And based on the data, the likely outcome of less housing is more gentrification and displacement. Low-income, vulnerable communities of color deserve field-tested, empirically sound solutions. Protecting those communities from displacement requires building more housing, not less.
Cathy Reisenwitz writes about software for a living, sex on the side, and policy for fun. Her column “Unintended Consequences” appears regularly in the Bay City Beacon. She’s pro-sex, pro-feminism, and pro-market. Sign up for her newsletter and follow her on Twitter.
Photograph by Christina B Castro.
Become a Supporting Member today, and receive our exclusive Beacon Briefings - a must-read, weekly summary of everything happening at City Hall. For just $7 a month, get an inside look at San Francisco politics!
