Attack of the million-dollar condos

By Tim Redmond

MISSION STREET BELONGS in San Francisco. So do Clement Street, and Cortland Avenue, and Fillmore Street, and Valencia Street, and Ocean Avenue, and Haight Street, and West Portal Avenue, and Third Street. And the corner of 18th and Castro, and Ninth and Irving, and 18th and Connecticut, and Broadway and Columbus, and a hundred other places where you walk around and say: This is an amazing city.

Fourth and King Street isn't one of those places. Aside from the ballpark, which is, after all, a ballpark, which makes it kind of inherently cool, you could pick up the tall, secure, architecturally dull residential buildings, the gourmet Safeway, the Starbucks, the Quiznos, the Borders Books, the upscale, hip, white, young professionals and plop them in the middle of ... Fort Lauderdale. Or Houston. Or maybe Pleasanton. They could go anywhere.

And some people think that's the future of San Francisco.

• • •

The very first issue of the Bay Guardian ever, the one Bruce B. Brugmann and Jean Dibble took around to try to line up investors, back in 1966, had a cartoon on the editorial page by Ted Rasmussen showing two men, one older, one younger, staring out from the Top of the Mark (AD 2000) at a jumble of high-rise buildings, freeways, and cars. "Time was you could see the Bay from here, Ralph," the old guy says. His young pal responds, "How quaint."

The point was that the Bay Guardian was, and would always be, a newspaper by and for the neighborhoods, against greedy developers and their City Hall allies, and for the preservation of one of the world's great cities.

When the urban environmental movement exploded into life in San Francisco, in the late 1960s, the small "fortnightly" paper was right in the middle of it. In 1971, with the help of an intern crew, the Bay Guardian produced the first-ever study of the costs and benefits of high-rise office development in San Francisco, concluding that those big glass-and-steel towers actually cost more in city services than they paid in taxes. That helped boost the first anti-high-rise ballot initiative, led by dressmaker Alvin Duskin, although downtown money still carried the day.

But the activists didn't give up, and neither did the Bay Guardian, which kept fighting. Against the destruction of the International Hotel (the center of a low-income Filipino community). Against the demolition of the City of Paris Building, an architectural landmark that was in the way of a new Neiman Marcus. Against the eviction of the Goodman Building tenants (who represented the city's working artists). Against the efforts of Mayors Alioto and Feinstein to turn downtown San Francisco into another Manhattan.

And, of course, downtown and City Hall kept arguing that development was necessary to create jobs. In 1985 we demolished that last argument with a major study by Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist David Birch that showed how small, locally owned, independent businesses were creating all the net new jobs in the city. A year later the voters approved a sweeping slow-growth measure known as Proposition M.

• • •

Although city planners sometimes seem oblivious, markets and economies change. These days nobody wants to build commercial office space. The strategy of making San Francisco a headquarters for finance and Pacific Rim trade has failed. The jobs that were supposed to come with all that construction have, to a significant extent, moved out of town. The dot-com boom, which was the Next Big Thing, is long over, and the multimillion-dollar hip office spaces built for Internet entrepreneurs are going begging.

Now the developers all want to build high-end housing. And the city is prepared to accommodate them.

Nobody at City Hall in the 1970s and 1980s ever asked whether San Franciscans – the people who actually live here – really wanted their city to be another Manhattan. Nobody seriously thought about whether the consequences of the widespread displacement that accompanied the dot-com boom was worth what turned out to be a very short-term gain. And now, with everyone in town talking about a housing crisis, very few people are asking the real question:

Who are we building all these million-dollar condos for – and is that the kind of city San Francisco wants to be?

Think about it: The lowest-priced "market-rate" housing units being built in the city today – these are one-bedroom units – go for roughly $500,000. As we point out on page 16, that requires an annual household income of about $175,000. Only a small percentage of San Franciscans can come close to affording that.

And as these condos go marching down Third Street, they will drive out neighborhood businesses, especially light industrial businesses, and they'll drive up real estate values in existing neighborhoods. That's fine, actually good, for a lot of people who own homes that they bought many years ago and want to cash in on and retire. We're seeing that happen all over the Bayview, where older, middle-class African Americans who bought houses and commercial property many years ago are finding themselves wealthy beyond their dreams. Naturally, many of them are getting out of town.

But the next generation of teachers, nurses, Muni drivers, carpenters, and cops will never be able to buy the houses that are now on the market, and eventually the remaining middle-class neighborhoods will be fully gentrified.

And the people who don't own property, the ones who can't just cash in and go – the tenants and particularly the people who live in the apocalyptically squalid public housing in Hunters Point, where raw sewage flows down the hillside in streams – will be even further marginalized as the city becomes ever more the home of the very rich and the very poor.

• • •

And yet at the highest levels of the San Francisco Planning Department, all that anyone's talking about is more condos. "It's all about the money," one planning insider told me. "They just want those development fees. There's no planning vision at all."

I can look out my window, on the second floor of the Bay Guardian Building, on 17th Street at Mississippi, and see the future of the central waterfront unfolding, day after day. The big concrete monster called Mission Bay keeps growing (I used to be able to see the scoreboard at SBC Park from our roof; now it's a wall of buildings). There's a warehouse next door to us that handles chemicals for the printing industry; one of developer Joe O'Donoghue's guys has bought the building and plans to put up 12 new housing units. And as you ride the Third Street bus south, past the palm trees and fancy ironwork of the new light-rail line, you can almost feel a wave of bulldozers pushing the development along.

There are, of course, other options.

San Francisco ought to be building a sustainable economy. That involves creating and preserving jobs for people who live and work here and building housing to meet the needs of the community, not the desires of developers. It means preserving – with very strict laws – the light industrial jobs and locally owned small businesses in the eastern neighborhoods. There are plenty of places to start.

A North Beach-style moratorium on formula retail – that is, chain stores – in Potrero Hill, the central waterfront, and the Bayview would slow the displacement of local businesses. New zoning controls could keep the condo crush from pushing out industry. (Sup. Sophie Maxwell's interim controls for Showplace Square and Potrero Hill expire in December; she should push for permanent controls that don't exempt any of the proposed new projects for that area.)

But there's a more dramatic step that ought at least to be considered: Why not enact a five-year ban on all new market-rate housing in San Francisco? Just stop the development, right now, until this city can sort out its priorities, plan for a sustainable future, and figure out what kind of a community the residents want to build.

If the developers squawk, fine: When they come to the table with plans to build, say, 10,000 units of permanently affordable family and workforce housing – homes that a majority of the city, including currently homeless people, could afford to rent or buy – then we'll start talking about lifting the market-rate ban. (It's entirely possible to build middle-class housing and make a profit – you just can't make an obscene profit.)

There are all sorts of serious problems in this city, and frankly, another 40,000 million-dollar condos aren't going to solve any of them.

This is the next battle for San Francisco. And there's no time to lose.

E-mail Tim Redmond at tredmond@sfbg.com.