Nearly 50 years of protests, lawsuits and ballot battles over low-income housing have made San Francisco a nationwide model for efforts to keep urban America from becoming home to only the very rich or the very poor, according to a paper that will be released Wednesday.
The land-use struggles that continue today, along with the long-remembered urban renewal fights of the 1960s, make it easy to forget just how far the city has come toward a community-centered development plan, said Marcia Rosen, former director of the city's Redevelopment Agency and lead author of the study of the city's affordable housing policy.
"The city originally wore a black hat when it came to development, but in subsequent decades we've worn the white hat," said Rosen, now the executive director of the National Housing Law Project.
The paper, done under the auspices of Rosen's organization and the Poverty and Race Research Action Council in Washington, D.C., will be unveiled at a San Francisco gathering of fair housing and community development groups. Wendy Sullivan, an attorney and planning consultant, is co-author.
The paper gives the city's community groups much of the credit for fighting City Hall in a long-running effort to keep San Francisco a racially and economically diverse community.
"Once notorious for urban renewal that diminished housing affordability and displaced residents," the paper says, "San Francisco is now renowned nationally for its best practices in housing and community development."
Despite "limited land for development, extremely low rental vacancy rates and high demand for housing," over decades the city has developed "thoughtful policies designed to preserve and enhance housing opportunities ... prevent displacement of low-income families and create inclusive communities," the authors say.
By providing examples of local innovations that work, similar efforts can be adopted by other cities and, ultimately, find their way into federal housing policy, said Philip Tegeler, president of the action council, a civil rights policy organization.
San Francisco "provides an example of how community advocacy can work," he said. "Cities need diversity. They need workers as well as executives."
It took time for local officials to realize that. The redevelopment projects of the '60s bulldozed chunks of the Western Addition and Yerba Buena, sending poor and middle-income residents packing to make way for wider streets, commercial development and civic projects. Aging residential hotels were razed in the name of progress, with little or no concern about what would happen to the people who called those places home.
But neighborhood and tenant organizations quickly formed to battle against the demolition efforts, filing lawsuits and gathering political support. As they won some battles, they pushed ahead with efforts to provide relocation help for ousted residents, limit evictions, ban residential hotel demolitions and require low-income housing and other programs.
The city's affordable housing movement wasn't just the product of the progressive community and angry tenants. For example, San Francisco voters passed limits on office construction in 1986, a $100 million affordable housing bond in 1996 and, earlier this month, a $50 million housing trust fund.
Support for affordable housing in the city "doesn't just come down from the policy level," said Tiffany Bohee, who deals with a number of housing plans as executive director of the city's Office of Community Investment and Infrastructure. "The voters have signaled resoundingly that this is what they want us to do."
The change documented in the paper has been dramatic. Although more than 3,200 housing units destroyed by urban renewal in the Western Addition were never replaced, the Rincon Point-South Beach redevelopment project - which added 2,800 units, 24 percent of them low-income, along with commercial space, parkland and AT&T Park - was built without destroying any housing.
Rosen's paper provides a look at the nuts and bolts of the city's housing wars, showing how activists took a little-noticed, grassroots liberal cause and made it so much a part of San Francisco's political mainstream that a former tenants' attorney is now the city's mayor.
"The business community and parts of the development community have signed on, realizing that affordable housing helps jobs and the city's economy," Rosen said. "The process has been about building support in San Francisco and making it a place where nurses, teachers, restaurant workers and hotel workers can live."