feature
In Conversation with a New Generation of Housing Leaders
by Emily Landes
Earlier this year, the San Francisco Housing Action Coalition held a forum on affordable housing and posed some tough questions to what it dubbed, “a new generation of housing leaders” in San Francisco: Fred Blackwell, executive director of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency; Michael Cohen, director of the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development; and John Rahaim, director of the Department of City Planning. Below are excerpts from that event.
Q.Michael, what is your agency doing to create more affordable housing?
Michael Cohen: A big part of our office is working on very large public-private development projects: Mission Bay, Treasure Island, Transbay, Candlestick Point, etc. And in all those projects, what we are trying to do from a government perspective is leverage land value to create public benefits like parks and affordable housing. We are blessed in that regard. Many cities in America don’t have the ability to create value by simply allowing people to build.
The other major function that we play is as a facilitator. I’ve described San Francisco on many occasions as being a little like 14th century Italy. There are a number of separate city-states, and our job is to try to provide a little context and coordination.
Q. Is there enough staffing and are salaries high enough to attract the kinds of professionals you need?
John Rahaim: It’s a tough question because we are funded about 85% from fees through the development process. And that other 15% usually applies to the long-range planning group. If I have a concern about staffing, it’s always on that 15% side, which is the side that tends to get whacked during tough years because while those people don’t work directly on the entitlement process, they certainly set the stage for how the entitlement process will work in the future. That’s what the Eastern Neighborhoods plan and the Market-Octavia plan are all about.
I should back up to say that I have about the same number of long-term planners here as I had in Seattle and, of course, it’s never enough. But my colleague in Portland has about double that number, which is even higher per capita. So, it’s an interesting comparison to see how those cities work.
Q. What are the biggest challenges in the planning department right now?
JR: There are some serious issues in the entitlement process. Time is money and we all know that. It strikes me that it does no one any good, whether it’s a project sponsor or a project opponent, to have an entitlement process that lasts four or five years. So we are taking a better look at the process to see how we can better meet everyone’s goals.
Q. Where does rent control figure into a discussion about affordability?
Fred Blackwell: Affordable housing is not just a crisis of production. It’s a crisis of preservation, and we have got to have protections for people who are on the lower end of the economic rung by stabilizing their housing conditions.
That said, we haven’t really taken it on and had a constructive conversation about how to address the challenges that are associated with rent control and balance that with the folks who actually need rent control to maintain their residence in the city.
Q. How is redevelopment going in the city and how do the redevelopment agency’s efforts contribute to creating affordable housing in the city?
FB: The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency is probably the most significant financial supporter of affordable housing development in the city, and we do it through several mechanisms. We use tax increment financing to acquire parcels, fund predevelopment costs, provide gap financing for construction and we have a number of programs for affordable housing on the rental and the ownership side. So there’s a variety of programs we’re working on.
Although we are the most significant supporter of affordable housing, we also put that into the context of the neighborhood, which means that we have to put this conversation on how much and how affordable into the context of a broader conversation about what communities want to see. What is a healthy neighborhood? Who benefits from development? Who moves into the houses? Who plays in the playground? We are engaged in a whole variety of neighborhood revitalization effort. You can go to Mission Bay, where we’re contributing to building a community from the ground up, or to the Western Addition or Bayview-Hunter’s Point, where we already have a community and the challenge is to figure out how the investments in affordable housing, open space and economic development fit into the existing structure. When we talk about affordability, there’s a lot of discussion about what it means when we say that. Are we talking about 20% of the area median income or 120% of the area median income?
There are some very significant challenges and questions that we need to answer when it comes to an affordable housing agenda for the city overall, and more specifically when we talk about the very specific neighborhoods that we end up engaging as redevelopment areas. Each one of those areas has a very different need and a different set of expectations when it comes to affordable housing.
Q. When we deal with gentrification versus revitalization, is the government as constructive as it could be?
FB:There are a few things that are important to highlight. What I’ve been noticing is that the conversation has been narrowed to a conversation about affordable housing, and the conversation about community benefits associated with redevelopment has to go beyond that. They have to get into the notion of economic development, jobs and amenities in the neighborhood. There are those that would argue that places like Bayview-Hunter’s Point and Western Addition have their fair share of affordable housing, and what’s needed for the folks who have lived through years of disinvestment and neglect are the amenities that are available to a lot of the people in the rest of the city. In fact, a lot of them own their homes. So the question is: how do we best keep people who own their homes in their homes and make sure there’s money available to rehabilitate those homes? There are questions about open space. If people don’t view their neighborhood as safe, then the areas of open space aren’t really available to them. So there are a lot of things that need to be infused into the conversation.
As far as the government’s role in gentrification, there are policies that are out there that we need to talk about to really get into this debate. One point is that when people were displaced in the Western Addition by my agency 40 years ago, they were given a Certificate of Preference, which means that you move to the front of the line when new housing is in development in the city by the redevelopment agency. That is a program that has been neglected; we have lost track of the people with these certificates. We need to do more outreach to find these people. So, if you think about those people being able to come back to the neighborhood as a result of new development, that creates a whole new conversation about gentrification.
JR: There’s a tendency here to argue over fairly small details and not discuss the bigger picture. I think the housing element and the general plan update is the place to have that discussion. That discussion really needs to be about where the city should grow and how it should grow. Where do we want density? Where do we want amenities? It needs to happen at the 5,000-foot level.
From the perspective of my department, zoning is a very blunt instrument and it does not achieve all the results that we think it can. A colleague in Texas made bumper stickers that say, “World peace through better zoning” because of this expectation from everyone that zoning will solve all their problems. So, in my opinion, the housing element and the general plan is where these various issues of economic development, housing and amenities need to happen.
Q. Does the overwhelming community involvement in San Francisco lead to a slower planning process?
FB: I think that one of the things that people trumpet in San Francisco is the level of engagement in the democratic process here—everything from the voting process to the land-use process. But one of the things that has struck me is that, while we have that perception, when you walk around City Hall it’s actually a very small number of people who are walking those halls and influencing those people. We’ve got to enlarge the circle of participation in these things, but we have to do it in a way that is manageable. We have to get beyond the traditional gatekeepers, but we also have to make sure that the larger group of people that we engage are making informed decisions.
Q. How can the government have a role in creating more green affordable housing?
MC: San Francisco has staked out a very strong position that we have a local, regional, national and international obligation to establish a new paradigm for development. You see it not only in the new green building code, which is the most stringent in the country, but also in Treasure Island, which is widely regarded as one of the most sustainable large development projects in U.S. history. It is much easier to build in sustainable concepts when you start early, at the land planning level. It’s harder in an already built environment, so we need to understand how we can get the most bang for our buck. I don’t think we have a choice; I think we have to figure out how to do it better.
JR: I think there are some misperceptions about green building standards. One is that they cost a lot more; in fact, the analysis that we did with developers in Seattle shows that, at worst, there’s a 2% increase in cost and many developers saw virtually no increase in cost, as long as they started from the very early stages. But, also something to consider are the operational costs, and green buildings generally cost less to maintain and create energy for. It’s something that I think the affordable housing community should race to support.
Q. Part of the benefit of building green has also been a fast tracking of those projects. How can we speed up the planning process for all developments?
JR: The slowness of the planning process is a function of several things that we need to get a grip on. One—and I think the Eastern Neighborhoods Plan is an excellent example—we bit off much too big a geography in that planning process. In my mind, that’s the number one lesson learned.
The second thing that happened is that the scope of that project continually changed. It was originally intended to do one set of things around certain zoning issues and it grew up into this massive process that included everything from impact fees to public amenities, all of which are important to do in the planning process. But when you add that to the huge geography that we looked at, it’s no wonder it took many years to happen.
Q. How does your vision for the city compare with that of your predecessor, Dean Macris?
JR: Dean is often characterized as someone who never saw a high rise he didn’t like. I think that’s a really unfair characterization. High rises have their place in every city, in my view, especially when it comes to issues of climate change and sustainability. I think the city has to accept a regional responsibility for growth. That doesn’t always mean high rises are the solution. I think we need to look carefully at that.
In Seattle, for example, the building code allows for five stories of wood-frame over two stories of concrete. It’s a density about the same as Paris. I’m not frightened of the “Manhattanization” of some of the city; however, I think we need to look at different ways of improving density.
Q. How bad is the subprime mortgage crisis in the city, and how can we help on a local level?
FB: There are some parts where it’s quite bad and parts where it’s not. When the meltdown started to occur, we started to look at our portfolio. We’ve been called paternalistic in the way that we promote homeownership, but as a result of that paternalism folks are not able to engage in that second market that has been the downfall of so many people in the city. At the same time, what’s quite alarming is that the folks who have fallen victim to the subprime market are the ones in the neighborhoods where we have the biggest fears about gentrification. In the Bayview, for example, we talked about the high homeownership rates; there are a number of seniors who have refinanced and are on a fixed income. They are in very dire straits right now.
There are things happening at the state level that would allow redevelopment agencies statewide to use tax increment financing to help people who are in those dire straits. There are things that can be done from an advocacy point of view with government in partnership with nonprofits. There are some groups that have been doing some yeoman’s work in educating the community about this issue and advocating with the banks about helping people with their refinancing.
Q. Does the foreclosure crisis indicate that we pushed homeownership too hard to people who weren’t ready?
JR: What’s a bigger crisis for homeownership in my view is just the affordability issue. The mortgage crisis is a problem nationally. My sense is that it’s not as big a problem in the city as in other parts of California, or the Bay Area. But clearly, the two are linked. The increase in housing prices over the last decade has contributed to the mortgage crisis.
Q. Is there enough coordination between your departments?
FB: There are some subtle things that are changing in terms of the relationship between the redevelopment agency and the planning department, and one of those is the entitlement process.
For a long time, the agency acted as the affordable housing developer, the economic development engine, the department of public works and the planning department for the areas that we redeveloped. More recently, we’re not creating a whole new set of codes and zoning regulations, but using the existing planning code, which I think is the right way to go because it requires us to have that coordination.
Unfortunately, I think that it’s the people who are on the front lines who are having lunch together more than John and I.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of the SFAA or the SF Apartment Magazine. Emily Landes is the managing editor of SF Apartment Magazine. Copyright © 2008 by Black Point Press. All rights reserved.