Women in Urbanism: Is an Affordable City Achievable?
By Chrissy Mancini Nichols
This article first appeared at Remix.com
Only if we maximize land to its full potential.
At Remix’s event Women in Urbanism: Is an Affordable City Achievable, we explored how San Francisco — where you need to earn $110,000 a year to live comfortably, and the average cost of a home is $1.5 million — can make room for everyone to thrive.
Using San Francisco as a case study for the challenges of urban affordability, we had an honest conversation with San Francisco Supervisor Katy Tang, San Francisco Planning Department’s Kearstin Dischinger, and Airbnb’s Head of Policy Research Anita Roth about the policies that make a positive impact, and those that contribute to displacement.
Here’s what we learned:
1. An inclusive city is a denser city.
San Francisco’s housing crisis can be summed up in three words: supply and demand. At just 47 square miles, and surrounded on 3 sides by water, San Francisco has an extremely limited supply of land. Compare that to New York or Chicago which have roughly six times the land area. Making the problem worse, a large portion of San Francisco’s residential buildings are only two or three stories tall. And with a population that grows by 10,000 people a year to support one of the healthiest economies in the country, there’s significant competition for those 47 square miles.
As a result, low- and middle-income newcomers are having an increasingly tough time finding housing they can afford, long-term residents are being displaced, and the transportation system is stretched beyond its capacity. This has had the unfortunate effect of slowly eroding the city’s culture and diversity.
These forces have created what Dischinger sees as San Francisco’s number one challenge: remaining equitable and inclusive.
The solution? Build taller buildings. Allowing for taller buildings provides more supply in the housing market, which ultimately makes the city more affordable to people of a broad range of incomes and backgrounds.
But it’s up to government, with public support, to promote pro-growth, dense development so that cities can become more equitable and inclusive. Because as Roth points out, a lot of forces — land use, zoning, development fees, developers — have an impact on access to housing.
In one example of policy having a positive impact on density, the city changed the zoning code to add two stories to a specific site where they hoped to build more affordable housing. Doing so enabled the developer to build more units, including 30 affordable units. Had the city not increased the density on the site, the result would have been fewer units overall with only 10 of them being affordable.
That one change promoted inclusivity and diversity because 20 families who otherwise would have been displaced, stayed in San Francisco.
We spoke with San Francisco Supervisor Katy Tang, San Francisco Planning Department’s Kearstin Dischinger, and Airbnb’s Head of Policy Research Anita Roth about the policies that make a positive impact on affordability.
2. Cities must maximize their land.
It’s expensive for developers to build in San Francisco. Land is expensive and uncertainty in the planning process (that can extend the timeline for design, permitting, and environmental review) drives up the cost of construction. Further, building height restrictions limit how many units a developer can build on a given plot.
Because developers need to make a return on their investment, they build housing that will generate the highest price — mostly high end condos out of range of low- and middle- income people.
The result—Affordable housing cannot compete with market rate and San Francisco’s land is not maximized to its full potential.
That leaves it up to government leaders to use the zoning code and create initiatives that maximize San Francisco’s land so developers can build more housing on the land they buy. In return, that land is more valuable and it becomes financially feasible to build more affordable housing.
Supervisor Tang and Dischinger teamed up to do just that through theHOME SF initiative.
Approved last May, HOME SF allows developers to make buildings up to 20 feet taller buildings, if in return they make 30 percent of the housing units affordable to low- and middle-income residents.
HOME SF could result in up to 16,000 new housing units in San Francisco with 5,000 new affordable units over the next 20 years. According to Supervisor Tang “HOME SF represents over triple the amount of affordable housing that would be created under our city’s mandatory affordable housing laws.”
HOME SF also makes affordable units available to middle-income residentswho have a tough time finding housing they can afford. Most housing programs target residents with a very low income, leaving middle-income home seekers with few resources at their disposal. HOME SF will help protect middle-income people from being displaced from the city, where the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment is $4,637.
3. We must be receptive to innovation.
If the status quo isn’t working, policy makers have to be open to trying new things.
In San Francisco, value capture has been a big win. The HOME SF program, investment in more transit oriented development, and a commitment to increasing zoning density are all things that the city is doing to maximize its land and return the value to the community.
Supervisor Tang also discussed how San Francisco recently allocated $44 million in city money to build 130 to 150 rental units of teacher housing. Will teachers want to live in what is essentially a dorm? If it’s affordable, maybe.
A controversial program the Bay Area could implement is inter-city revenue sharing. When you cross a jurisdiction you likely don’t even notice, but your tax dollar does. So to benefit people living in more affordable suburbs but working in San Francisco, is there an opportunity to share some of those tax dollars across the region to build infrastructure and provide services? After all, one city alone won’t solve these region-wide challenges.
It works in the Minneapolis region where cities put 40 percent of the growth in their commercial-industrial property tax base into a seven-county regional pool that is then distributed back based on population and need. Called “fiscal disparities” the program has helped reduced inequalities in tax rates and services. Even donor cities — those whose tax dollars are shared with other regional cities — have praised the program. For example, Mayor Jim Hovland of Edina, MN, a wealthier city just southwest of Minneapolis, likes the tax sharing program because of the “trickle effect from having a strong region.”
Supervisor Tang said it would be difficult to implement regional revenue sharing because voter mandates leave less than 30 percent of the budget for discretionary purposes. But as Dischinger said, San Francisco is capable and can afford to do progressive things.
4. Lead from where you are to create the city you want.
Supervisor Tang started out as an intern in City Hall and became a supervisor after years of working in her local district. She’s now doing more on land use than she ever thought because it can shape, change, and improve communities and have a real impact on the city overall.
This is a lesson for us all — that you don’t have to be an elected official to shape your city. There are opportunities all around you to voice your opinion and create change. Public meetings, community organizations, volunteer groups, even meeting your neighbors allow you to lead from where you are.
Missed the event? Watch the full discussion here:
