Last Tuesday morning before the Board of Supervisors meeting, the SF Housing Action Coalition participated in a press conference hosted by Supervisors Wiener and Farrell, to demonstrate our opposition for the Mission moratorium the Board of Supervisors would be voting on later that day.
Starting at 3pm, the full Board of Supervisors heard from almost two hundred Mission residents telling them that their Latino community is in jeopardy and in dire need of more affordable housing due to displacement, evictions and more people moving to the Mission than ever before. Their solution? A Mission moratorium to put a “pause” on all luxury development and to only allow 100 percent affordable housing to be built. The moratorium would supposedly only last for 45 days, but could then be extended for another two years. The goal is to allow the City to purchase 13 sites in the Mission that have identified as having the zoning capacity to hold more than 40 units, the threshold for affordable housing project financing. The SF Housing Action Coalition, SFBARF, GrowSF and Residential Builders Association turned out about 40 advocates who expressed the need to continue building more housing. Their views were that a moratorium is not a solution to the growing displacement the residents in the Mission are facing, and there are better solutions than to simply stop all housing production.
At 11:45PM, after almost 9 hours of testimony, the Board voted 7 to 4 to support Campos’ proposed moratorium. Since it was an emergency measure and needed 9 votes to pass, it failed. Supervisors Campos, Avalos, Kim, Mar, Yee, Breed and Cohen voted to support the moratorium. Before the vote, Supervisor Malia Cohen asked the Planning Department and Mayor’s Office of Housing pointed questions about what the moratorium would mean economically and what process was required to purchase the 13 parcels discussed. These are clearly questions that need answers in order for a pause on market-rate housing production to make sense.
Kudos to Supervisors Wiener, Farrell, Tang and Christensen for saying no to a policy that recognized a problem without providing any real solutions. In particular, rookie Supervisor Julie Christensen deserves special praise for stating, “We are here looking for a plan that’s actually going to change things for all of us. And I just haven’t seen that plan today.”
The following morning, Supervisor Campos was the guest speaker at our Monthly Membership Meeting. Read our Q+A with Supervisor Campos.
