SF Mayoral Race Could Turn on Wedge issue: housing

Battle lines are forming for the future mayor of San Francisco over housing development.

Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin has planted seeds for a possible mayoral run in the November election, with Mayor London Breed defending her seat by attacking his voting record on development, the San Francisco Standard reported.

Breed didn’t hold back, hurling criticisms that may end up highlighting a key wedge issue in the mayoral race: housing.

“I’m sick of his shenanigans,” said Breed about Peskin on the steps of City Hall. “You wonder what’s gone wrong with this city? Everywhere you look around, there’s a way to say ‘no.'”

Breed’s comments follow frustrations among YIMBY activists who claim that Peskin has been testing the waters in recent months on whether San Franciscans are skeptical of building more housing.

While a pushback against development could help Peskin win the mayors’ seat should he decide to run, the city faces a chronic shortage of affordable housing.

“This isn’t his first anti-housing action,” Jane Natoli, organizing director for San Francisco’s YIMBY Action, said during a rally this week. “He’s actually accrued quite a long list, even recently.”

YIMBY activists point to two recent Peskin votes.

Early last month, Peskin was the sole vote in supporting opposition to a plan to convert a 112-year-old medical library designed by Albert Pissis into 24 homes in Pacific Heights.

Late last month, the city passed an ordinance introduced by Peskin that imposes density limits in neighborhoods of North Beach. Peskin said the law was needed to protect century-old buildings in a place with some of the city’s oldest buildings.

The density controls affect the Northeast Waterfront Historic District, the Jackson Square Historic District and the Jackson Square Historic District Extension.

Peskin said the ability to build dense high-rises in those historic neighborhoods isn’t part of the city’s state-mandated plan to find room for 82,000 new homes by 2031.

“We need to figure out ways to make sure we don’t end up with a series of Fontana Towers along the Embarcadero,” Peskin, pointing to a pair of 18-story waterfront condo buildings built in 1963 next to Fort Mason, told the Standard. “I don’t think we have to destroy the city to save it.”

This week, pro-housing activists continued to vent frustrations with Peskin after he made changes to a housing bill sponsored by Breed and Supervisor Myrna Melgar — who described Peskin’s additions as a “poison pill.”

Breed and Melgar’s bill would allow for denser housing along some commercial corridors, part of a wider effort by the city to comply with its housing plan.

Peskin’s changes would require that any additional units built within a lot be subject to rent control, a policy that YIMBY activists claim discourages construction by making projects not pencil out. The changes also propose that if units are added to a lot, the city can’t use the state’s density bonus to boost a building’s height.

The Land Use and Transportation Committee sent the amended bill to the Planning Commission.

Peskin said Breed was “politicizing something rather than having a mature policy conversation,” and told the Standard his suggestions were “going to be good for the people that we want to provide residential dwellings for.”

“So, why is the mayor out there on the steps of City Hall?” Peskin asked as he was leaving the board’s chambers. “Because it’s election season, and maybe, although I haven’t declared, I might be her opponent. It’s a political game. But this is politics. I asked for it.”

— Dana Bartholomew