On December 12, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors will vote on a resolution requiring that housing built in the city’s Eastern Neighborhoods be 64% affordable. Since no nonprofit housing has been built in the area for sixteen years, and no private builder can afford the 64% affordability requirement, the measure sponsored by Supervisors Maxwell and McGoldrick effectively ends new construction in the area. The city’s inclusionary housing law requires developers to provide 15% affordability, but that law seeks to provide affordable housing. In contrast, the 64% requirement is seen as necessary to prevent new market-rate housing from being built. Of course, Maxwell and McGoldrick’s opposition to market-rate housing is selective. The duo supports thousands of market-rate, gentrifying units in Bayview-Hunters Point, as well as luxury housing downtown. This resolution is not about stopping market-rate housing---it’s about giving Maxwell and McGoldrick control over where it gets built, and by whom.

After successfully delaying construction of San Francisco’s largest rental housing project in fifty years at Trinity Plaza, Supervisors Maxwell and McGoldrick have come up with a new scheme: a resolution that effectively rezones the entire Eastern Neighborhoods (including lower Potrero Hill) into a no-housing zone. While the measure does not ban housing, there is no developer who can afford to build a project under the resolution’s requirement that 64% of the units be affordable.

Although the Board approved a 15% inclusionary housing law earlier this year, Maxwell and McGoldrick want that law to only apply to certain developers in certain neighborhoods. For example, those desiring to build in lower Potrero Hill would have a 64% requirement, while the Lennar Corp would continue to provide affordable housing in Bayview at the lower rate.

The logic behind the market-rate housing ban is unclear. It appears to stem from a desire to stop an influx of more upscale and politically moderate voters. But while the recent Supervisor’s election raised concerns about the political impact of increased market-rate housing in District 6, the Resolution is instead largely targeted to preventing such housing in Maxwell’s District 10.

If a ban on market-rent housing is necessary to preserve low-income communities and slow gentrification, then the Board of Supervisors should be promoting new housing for the already upscale Potrero Hill area while imposing the 64% affordable housing requirement on the currently low-income and affordable Bayview-Hunters Point. But Maxwell’s resolution does the opposite.

In fact, Maxwell has been the leading cheerleader for the massive creation of new market-rate housing in the low-income African-American Bayview neighborhood. The district represented by the supposedly anti-market rate housing Supervisor will likely show the biggest increase in upscale units in San Francisco over the next five-ten years.

Further, Maxwell’s Resolution effectively banning new market-rate housing in lower Potrero Hill will not boost tenant voting power in her district. In fact, by creating the illusion that market-rate housing is being stopped rather than simply redirected to other parts of Maxwell’s district, the supervisor may be further diminishing the already decreasing electoral clout of the district’s low-income, African-American renters.

Although the Resolution was drafted in secret, McGoldrick contended at last week’s Land Use hearing that it was a product of broad community process. He favorably compared the process involving the Resolution to that of Supervisor Daly’s “backroom deal” at Trinity Plaza that the Board of Supervisors (i.e. Jake McGoldrick) allegedly now has to fix.

In truth, while there has been ample public process surrounding Trinity Plaza, there was no community meeting in which the Maxwell-McGoldrick 64% solution was endorsed or even discussed. A public records request to the Planning Department confirmed this. As Sean Keighran of the Residential Builders Association put it, the Maxwell-McGoldrick Eastern Neighborhoods resolution “is as backroom as it gets.”

This is not the first time Keighran has encountered Maxwell’s inconsistent approach to market-rate housing. In December 2004, Maxwell sponsored a one-year moratorium for various parts of lower Potrero Hill, including land owned by Keighran and two other sites owned by RBA members while excluding parcels owned by other developers. The Board of Supervisors rejected this gerrymandered approach to land use, with Board President Matt Gonzalez arguing that it was unfair to single out some builders for regulation while exempting others.

Maxwell and McGoldrick’s current resolution renews this gerrymandering of market-rate housing, but expands it citywide. Here’s the bottom line impact:

Super-wealthy downtown developers would continue to build as much luxury housing as they want, and would only have to make 15% affordable. None of these units are likely to be purchased by first-time homebuyers, and most will act as hotels for buyers from outside the country.

National, politically connected developers like the Lennar Corp and Forest City will get total control of Bayview-Hunters Point, working out backroom deals with Maxwell and the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency. None of these market-rate projects will be anywhere close to 64% affordable. Even better, Lennar knows that it can renege on any deal it makes due to its control of the Agency Commission and its support from Maxwell.

At the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, Maxwell supported Lennar’s decision to break its agreement to build 400 units of rental housing. Maxwell and the Agency Commission accepted Lennar’s claim that San Francisco faced a bad rental housing market, despite newspaper stories saying the market was “red hot.”

Maxwell’s resolution will enable lower Potrero Hill to sit fallow while the city awaits the return of manufacturing to its former industrial sites. But the resolution will not reduce the construction of market-rate housing in San Francisco. It simply shifts such housing to be the neighborhoods where politically favored developers like the Lennar Corp. desire to build.

Maxwell argued at the Land Use Committee that opponents of the measure are over-reacting, as the 64% rule is “only a Resolution.” But if it the measure is meaningless, why did she bother to draft it, quickly set it for hearing, and push for its passage?

If the Board wants to ban future market-rate housing in the city, it should pass an ordinance to that effect. But making believe that San Francisco is stopping the scourge of market-rate housing when the city is simply redirecting it to certain neighborhoods---particularly the low-income, African-American community of Bayview-Hunters Point---is dishonest.

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