Uncertainty creates risk, according to a report by California Department of Housing and Community Development, and risk influences what developers will proposed to build in the city of San Francisco.
In a report released Wednesday, the housing agency found that affordable developers who worked in neighboring cities said they could not work within San Francisco because entitlement — the review phase that precedes the application for a building permit — was too uncertain and difficult.
It takes an average of 523 days for a housing project to be entitled in San Francisco, compared with 385 days for the next slowest city in California, according to the housing agency. After a project is entitled, it takes an average 605 days for the permit to come to approval. This comes as the city is under pressure to meet its state mandated goals to accommodate 82,000 new housing units by 2031.
San Francisco has added layer upon layer of unnecessary discretion and bureaucracy for decades, and certain members of the Board of Supervisors have refused to enact the mayor’s reforms … Sen. Scott Wiener
“This audit puts cities across California on notice: there will be no more leniency for illegally obstructing housing construction,” said Senator Scott Wiener, author of SB 35, the state’s housing streamlining law that was recently renewed by the Legislature as SB 423.
“San Francisco has added layer upon layer of unnecessary discretion and bureaucracy for decades, and certain members of the Board of Supervisors have refused to enact the mayor’s reforms, even those they agreed to in certifying the City’s Housing Element earlier this year,” Wiener said. He stated there is a need to move faster to meet our state housing goals and alleviate the affordability crisis that is ripping families from communities and sending prices skyrocketing.
Discretionary vs. ministerial approval
The HCD handed the city 18 required actions and 10 recommendations with deadlines ranging from two years to 30 days. The report asked whether San Francisco is fully implementing key state housing laws, such as the Housing Accountability Act and the Permit Streamlining Act, and it found they were not. It also sought answers to why the city takes so long to review and approve projects.
“That’s where we get into the ministerial versus discretionary review,” said Moira O’Neill, the principal investigator of the study by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Urban and Regional Development that informed the HCD’s action.
The study compared the planning practices of San Francisco to 28 different jurisdictions. It analyzed the city’s planning data and interviewed 100 stakeholders from the city’s executive and legislative bodies, planning staff, housing advocacy groups and both affordable and market-rate developers. Significant findings were revealed in the entitlement approval process. O’Neill said that with discretionary approval, a local government body can impose conditions of approval; and in some situations, they may be able to hold back that approval or deny it.
The study illustrates discretionary approval with an example of a neighborhood organization expressing concerns about a proposed development in the Mission District. The neighbors said the harm was related to the cumulative impact of seven other projects proposed for the immediate vicinity of Mission Street. They requested a discretionary review and asked the planning commission to consider ways to preserve the cultural and economic diversity of the corridor.
“When you are creating your policy through project-decision by project-decision by project-decision, you could intuitively guess it’s very piecemeal in that approach, right?” Moira O’Neill, UC Berkeley’s Institute of Urban and Regional Development
“A ministerial process is the opposite of discretionary,” O’Neill said. “If you propose something that conforms to the law, and meets the objective design criteria, you have a certainty of approval. In San Francisco, there is no local ministerial approval process, so the state has created one for every jurisdiction where it applies through Senate Bill 35.” The SB 35 process falls into the ministerial review category.
If a city fails to meet housing production targets, the state law kicks in for qualifying developments, but qualifications are stringent. The project can’t be on environmentally sensitive land, it must be affordable and multifamily, for example. San Francisco’s planning department still determines which projects qualify for the SB 35 process.
Part of the hesitancy is related to the city’s values, the study said, such as its admittedly racist urban renewal practices in the 1970s and 80s. The city more often considers each proposal individually, rather than establish sweeping zoning plans. Confidential stakeholder research interviews cautioned that proposals to rezone need to be coupled with local ministerial processes or the rezoning will leave the existing inequities in place.
“When you are creating your policy through project-decision by project-decision by project-decision, you could intuitively guess it’s very piecemeal in that approach, right?” said O’Neill summarizing what the stakeholder told them.
“A zoning process is where you might engage interested stakeholders to talk about what the law should be for all parcels. And in that moment, you might decide you want to have one kind of process, a ministerial process for example, for the types of development that you believe are your highest priority. For certain projects, you don’t want there to be as much time spent on the approval process.”