If you live in the Mission district of San Francisco and want to get involved, come to the Mission YIMBY general meeting at the end of November. I'm one of the organizers and we're looking to grow our membership base! https://www.facebook.com/events/771212863081381
"If you live in the Mission district of San Francisco and want to get involved, come to the Mission YIMBY general meeting at the end of November."
I am genuinely interested in what it means to be a Mission district YIMBY.
The recent history of housing politics in the Mission have pitted left-liberal progressives against housing development on the assumption that: new development will be market rate, this will bring "tech workers" and gentrification, ergo: new housing will (paradoxically) force more existing mission residents out of housing.
So it has been left-liberal, progressive, tenants-rights NIMBYs vs. gentrifying developers (and sometimes, very explicitly, "tech-bus-riders")[1][2][3].
BUT, the YIMBY movement in general seems to present itself as a left-liberal, progressive response to incumbent property owners.
Given that context, what kind of reception does "Mission YIMBY" receive and where does it fall in the politics of what is the Mission district in 2017 ?
Most of the opposition to housing I've seen in the Mission has been to infill. Look at the controversy over development at the 16th street mission BART station. This would be dense housing in an urban core literally on top of public transit. It would displace a... Burger King. I find it hard to swallow that Burger King is a core component of a sustainable, progressive urban landscape, while high density housing with easy access to public transit is not.
If you look at the original plans for the 16th Street/Mission Station, you'll see it was intended to be built as part of a multi-use complex with housing, offices and shops. This was killed off in the wake of community opposition that it would---among other things---destroy the character of the neighborhood because of how the urban renewal projects in San Francisco of the 1970s came to be seen as threatening the very thing YIMBY seems to be trying to restore: affordable housing.
The real problem seems to be that people have forgotten why certain rules were put in place. BART was largely built as a cut and fill effort; this caused very real problems for businesses along Market and Mission as it was being built since they were harder to get to. It is likely that most people in San Francisco were quite aware of another famous victim of urban renewal in Santa Monica and what it could do to the character of a neighborhood. Coupled with what was happening with the redevelopment in South of Market and the Financial District, it is understandable that voters decided to pull the brakes on this nonsense. The problem, of course, is that like tax cuts, these rules are nigh impossible to revise once in place even if the situation has changed.
Anti-gentrification isn't the same thing as xenophobia. It's not a fear of new (or even rich) people entering the neighborhood, it's the fear of even higher property values raising property taxes and rents for existing owners and renters, respectively.
The problem is that it's a virtual impossibility to build enough housing throughout the Bay Area in a short enough amount of time as to have a meaningful decrease in property values in every neighborhood, thus preventing gentrification. So in the real world, with limited yearly construction, developers' aims will be to build upmarket housing.
You can't really work around this without dictating to developers what they can and cannot build. SF tried to do that with community approvals being a way for the community to de facto dictate to developers what they can and cannot build, but it's clearly not working.
> So in the real world, with limited yearly construction, developers' aims will be to build upmarket housing.
I don't understand the line of thinking where this itself is a problem. Who cares what the new housing is, what matters is the total supply of housing. If we build new affordable housing, then lower-middle-class people will move there and upper-middle-class people will move to the older buildings. If we build new upmarket housing, then upper middle class people move there and lower middle class people stay in existing housing.
The problem with building only affordable housing, is that 1. it doesn't seem like you could ever build enough because as soon as you do you create pressure for more people who qualify to move to the city, and 2. there will always be a step function where someone just barely doesn't qualify for affordable housing but can't afford market-rate housing because you've been restricting the supply. Building a lot of both is the only reasonable way forward.
> If we build new upmarket housing, then upper middle class people move there and lower middle class people stay in existing housing.
If the Mission were a closed population, I would agree with you. However, there's a pool -- or rather an ocean -- of people on the housing market: people in different parts of the SF, people looking to move to the bay, etc. If the upper middle class in the Mission got new housing, I don't see the landlords dropping rent prices so the lower middle class can afford it, when someone from one town over is willing to pay the same or even +10% over their competition.
> Building a lot of both is the only reasonable way forward.
I agree with you here. I think new housing supply should meet demand across the market. My guess is that _new_ housing supply could be 10x what it is now in the bay.
There's something about the housing market in general that's different from typical goods markets. People buying a car don't care as much about depreciation, whereas people buying a house expect it to appreciate as much as possible over time. It's some kind of positive feedback mechanism that counters the typical negative-feedback that lowers price as supply meets demand. There's probably a name for this kind of market but I'm unfamiliar with it.
The outsiders are coming in anyway, renting existing Mission apartments when their leases are up. New buildings are not required to stimulate new residents - that’s already happening.
(New buildings can make a previously-ignored place newly attractive, but usually we’re taking about neighborhoods that are already popular and/or have good immutable features like proximity and transit access).
If you come to the meeting, we'd be happy to talk more about these things in detail! Politics in SF is very complicated and fraught with strange alliances.
