By Rachel Brahinsky

"I have this recurring dream. I'm on a stage with the curtain drawn, and there's this big bear – and the bear and I are wrestling," longtime San Francisco housing activist Calvin Welch relates. It's early afternoon and he's leaning into the large conference table at the center of his Haight Ashbury office, talking about the things that keep him up at night. In his dream, there are people in the audience facing the stage, but they don't know Welch is battling the beast, because nobody has pulled the curtain open.

For those who know Welch, it's not too hard to analyze his dream. As project director of the Council of Community Housing Organizations, a group of nonprofit housing developers, Welch is in a constant contest with the forces pressuring San Francisco to become an ever more exclusive city – a place where new housing development is primarily for the rich. Those forces tend to have a lot of dough, and a lot of influence.

Hence, the bear.

Over the next several months, Welch's bear will become increasingly visible, as officials finalize a batch of key development plans that promise to change the face of the city in ways that remain to be seen.

On May 6, for example, the Planning Commission approved plans for Rincon Hill, in the northeast corner of SoMa. Now the Rincon design heads to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for a series of hearings. That plan is notable for its 500-foot towers, which will alter the city skyline dramatically. The outcomes of Rincon and other massive plans that are underway have the potential to affect the tens of thousands of housing units planned for the eastern span of the city over the next decade. In total, city planners are looking at approving a maximum of around 43,000 new housing units throughout SoMa, the Mission District, Potrero Hill, and Bayview-Hunters Point.

The big questions are how much of the new housing will be affordable, and how much of it will be designed to meet the housing needs of existing city residents. The Rincon plan, which could bring more than 4,000 densely packed housing units to the city, is largely geared toward the wealthy and is laden with luxury condos boasting panoramic views. Many of these may serve as second homes for people who don't currently live in San Francisco. Around 700 of the units are slated to be priced at certain affordable levels so far, but in its May 6 vote the Planning Commission left the affordability question open for the supervisors to settle, which means the supes will determine if more apartments will be made affordable, and if so, how low the prices will go.

Following on Rincon's heels will come designs for the Transbay and the Mid-Market redevelopment areas, which in turn are likely to be used as a blueprint for the flood of other development plans coming in their wake. With guidelines for so many housing units coming so quickly, seemingly minor tweaks could have a major impact on the city's makeup.

Picture the quirky streets of the city's eastern side transformed into glassy, chain-laden shopping strips where only the wealthy can shop or sleep. Picture even more of the city's low-wage workforce having to blow a big chunk of their monthly take on the daily commute into the city for work. Without a concerned public pushing for a different housing vision, that's what the eastern side of San Francisco will be like very soon, because those are the projects that make the most money for developers.

The ripple effects of the housing debate are many. While everyone agrees we need more homes, there is firm disagreement over whether it's OK for housing to displace the remaining blue-collar industry in the city (see "Leaks in the Plug," 12/22/04).

In planner-speak, these businesses are called PDR; they employed 44,949 people in the eastern neighborhoods last year. As Welch points out, the current plans for "Transbay and Mid-Market are at maximum housing densities. If you apply the same in the eastern neighborhoods, then PDR is dead. It is the soul of the city at stake." According to Welch's analysis, some 15,400 such jobs could be lost from the rezoning in the eastern neighborhoods.

Given the typical speed of housing development here (only a couple of thousand units are built in San Francisco each year), these plans could take decades to carry out. But the controversial decisions are being made right now. Will the new developments represent a final squeezing out of the city's poor and working class? Or can the projects be used as a vehicle for keeping families (with kids, who are slipping away from the city at an alarming rate) and low-income folks in town?

"The San Francisco we know is at stake," Sup. Sophie Maxwell told the Bay Guardian recently. "The city that has its arms open to people of all economic stratas is at stake here." Maxwell's called for a May 18 hearing to consider the city's housing needs and ways to keep lower-income people here. Later in the summer she's planning hearings on an economic development policy that could do the same.

There are lots of issues to weigh. For example, Maxwell said, "We have this crisis with Section 8," the federal housing vouchers that are slated for gutting. "Are we building to help those people? Who are we building for?"

Follow the hearings on these plans and watch for meetings of the Planning Commission, Redevelopment Commission, and the Board of Supervisors on the city's Web site: www.sfgov.org.

E-mail Rachel Brahinsky