A high-profile campaign by Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth has made San Francisco’s lack of affordable family housing a front-burner issue. The Board of Supervisors recently allocated between $10-20 million for family housing, and Coleman and other groups are pushing for 3000 affordable family units to be constructed by 2011.

But absent major zoning changes, San Francisco will have few places to build such housing. That’s because neighborhoods like the Excelsior and Outer Mission that include the most housing opportunity sites strictly limit the number of units that can be built in a project. This makes building family-size two to three bedroom apartments financially unfeasible, and explains why San Francisco has constructed so little of such housing.

As San Francisco finally builds a strong constituency for new affordable family housing, a major obstacle is being overlooked: there are not enough sites to address the need. But getting the money is only half the battle. Absent major zoning changes, San Francisco will have few places to build such housing.

Let’s start by looking where family housing is actually being created.

In recent years, the Tenderloin has been where most new family housing in San Francisco has been built. Two family projects recently broke ground, and a third site has been secured for future family housing. Absent building on a site currently occupied, there will be no future locations for family housing in the Tenderloin.

For all of the complaints about the proliferation of upscale housing in SOMA, the city’s nonprofit sector has built surprisingly little affordable family housing in that community. The Sixth Street Redevelopment Area primarily focused on housing for single-adults, and spent a fortune on the Plaza Hotel for a project that houses few or no families with children.

The Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation (TNDC), far and away the most aggressive developer of family housing, has acquired a site for this population on Mission near Seventh Street. But in the vast stretch of SOMA where complaints about excessive upscale housing are common, there are few if any sites, and no nonprofit aggressively seeking sites.

In the family-friendly Mission, the city’s decision to financially starve Mission Housing Development Corp. has resulted in the once aggressive builder creating no new family units in the neighborhood in the past decade. No other nonprofit is building such housing in the Mission, so family advocates are preventing condos from being built while hoping that a nonprofit comes along and buys the dwindling number of available sites.

The Chinatown Community Development Center (CCDC) would love to build more family housing, but cannot find sites in that fully-built neighborhood. CCDC has spent years securing a site at Broadway and Sansome, but the availability of future family housing in the Chinatown area is unclear.

This leaves the Excelsior, Outer Mission and Bayview-Hunters-Point as potential neighborhoods for multiple affordable family projects.

Each has problems, however.

The Excelsior/Outer Mission, particularly along Mission Street, appears to have a huge number of family housing sites. But the zoning restricts height and/or density to such an extent that relatively few family projects---and, to my knowledge, none with the type of deep affordability Coleman seek---can feasibly be built.

A nonprofit cannot afford to build a 20-unit affordable family project. The costs just don’t pencil out. In fact, in reviewing all of the family housing projects newly built by nonprofits in San Francisco since 2000, the smallest appears to be a 29-unit Tenderloin building. There was a 38-unit project in the Outer Mission, but most are fifty units and much more.

That’s why we will not see many new affordable family units in the Excelsior/Outer Mission unless the zoning is changed to increase height limits, and the number of allowable units in each project.

Bayview-Hunters Point has plenty of land to build affordable family housing, but that neighborhood faces a serious crisis over the future of the Alice Griffith’s public housing. Unless a solution to the project’s neglect is soon implemented (the Mayor’s Office has floated plans but nothing is firm), San Francisco could lose more low-cost family units than nonprofits will build over the next few years.

With the city giving the Lennar Corp. de facto veto power over housing plans for the entire neighborhood, only a supreme optimist would view Bayview-Hunters Point as the likely future home of a thousand or more new affordable family units. Such units could be developed along 3rd Street, but that would require the increase in heights and allowable densities also needed along Mission Street in the Excelsior/Outer Mission.

Raising height limits to 80 feet along most of the city’s commercial corridors and increasing allowable density would almost alone provide enough sites to build thousands of new family units. These 80 feet tall buildings hardly qualify as “Manhattanization,” and would be built on transit corridors so additional space could be devoted to housing rather than parking.

The reason more affordable family housing has not been built in San Francisco is not that nonprofits or city government is not “family friendly;” rather, it is because subsidizing affordable family housing is hugely expensive and cannot be done without there being enough units in the project to make it viable.

Creating opportunities for affordable family housing will not be easy. Some neighborhood groups will oppose what they will attack as an “upzoning” along their commercial strips. But this is where the organizing strength of Coleman and other family housing advocates must come into play.

Turning out a few hundred people to “convince” a pro-housing Board of Supervisors majority to fund affordable housing is one thing; organizing in neighborhoods to win acceptance of the zoning changes necessary to build such housing is a stiffer challenge, but one that the growing pro-family housing coalition can accomplish.

By increasing height limits and densities along commercial corridors, San Francisco will be able to use newly allocated funds to build the thousands of affordable family units the city needs.

Send feedback to rshaw@beyondchron.org