Chronicle Goes into Attack Mode to Serve Landlord's and Real Estate Interests

Chronicle Goes into Attack Mode to Serve Landlord's and Real Estate Interests
by repost Tuesday March 09, 2004 at 01:59 PM
EDITORIAL
S.F.'s challenge to build homes
Tuesday, March 9, 2004

ACTIVISTS AND OFFICIALS in San Francisco have shown a remarkable ability to hinder or defeat public-policy measures designed to improve city life, whether they deal with homeless reforms or trying to build middle-class housing.

The recent defeat of Proposition J, a Chamber of Commerce-sponsored initiative to provide incentives to developers to build housing for middle- class workers, is just the latest example of a civic solution being buried by a consortium of tenant and anti- development groups.

Rather than acknowledge that the city desperately needs middle-income housing for schoolteachers and firefighters, special-interest groups waged a factually challenged smear campaign to defeat the plan to bring sensible, high- density housing downtown and along the central waterfront.

This week, however, Mayor Gavin Newsom fought back, saying he won't let obstructionist politics determine the city's future housing policy. Newsom announced that he will set up a housing task force comprised of many of the housing "advocates'' who have failed to bring new housing to San Francisco. Among those invited to participate are Board of Supervisors President Matt Gonzalez and housing activist Randy Shaw, head of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic.

It's a shrewd and sensible move for Newsom, who is basically telling the naysayers to come up with a workable housing policy that will address the city's severe housing shortage as opposed to killing plans they themselves didn't -- or couldn't -- develop.

Providing incentives to developers to build workforce housing (as Proposition J attempted) would be a good place to start. Expediting construction permits for affordable housing will be a must for a city that has fallen woefully short of meeting its housing goals. According to city planners, San Francisco is building only 1,000 new units annually when it needs 2,700 just to keep up with the demand. As long as the demand outpaces the supply, home prices will continue to skyrocket.

According to a recent report, an income of $124,000 was needed to purchase a median-priced home in the Bay Area. But the area's median income is $92,000, which explains why San Francisco, which has the most expensive housing market in the United States, also has the lowest rate of home ownership of any big city in America.

That may be comforting for tenant activists who use the skewed homeownership ratio to wield political power, but it's a damaging fact for a city that needs taxpaying homeowners to sustain the economy, improve the public schools and become stakeholders in the community. It's no surprise that many San Francisco residents have fled to the suburbs in search of reasonably priced homes while the rhetoric and finger-pointing about the lack of housing continues unabated in the city.

Newsom said his goal is to "build some trust and some bridges'' among the many activists and politicians. If the obstructionists can put their petty squabbling aside, perhaps the city can build some housing as well.

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