Let’s Talk About 730 Stanyan
The site of the troubled former McDonald’s in the Haight carries lessons for how we can solve our housing and homeless crises.
There’s been a lot of discussion about 730 Stanyan Street, the former McDonald’s site in Haight Ashbury. Recently, the discussion has been about the “safe sleeping” tent proposal and implementation. But we shouldn’t lose focus on the 100% affordable housing that will eventually be built on that site.
In 2016, I was at the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development on the team that worked on private/public housing partnerships. We worked to make sure the City received public benefits from housing developments, such as transit, parks and especially affordable housing.
I also helped create a housing opportunities “blueprint” for District 5, focused on finding public and private land to build affordable housing. My team and I came across the McDonald’s site and heard they may want to sell the property. That was big news because McDonalds always struggled with safety at that location. The City Attorney’s Office was forced to threaten a lawsuit over unaddressed safety issues.
(The current supervisor has access to this blueprint and should be using it as I did, to identify new sites for housing throughout the district.)
When I became Supervisor, it was a priority for me to obtain the funding to build 100% affordable family housing. I worked with Mayor Breed and the other Supervisors to raise the housing bond to $600 million and to have 730 Stanyan as one of the sites to receive the funding to build.
This site would have been a private developer’s dream, right across from Golden Gate Park. But instead, because of the actions we took last year, it went to nonprofit developers. It will house formerly homeless families and working families that make just $15 an hour — working families who can’t otherwise afford to live in the city where they work.
It’s great the City and private donors have put families in hotel rooms and are identifying safe sleeping sites, but the long-term solution to homelessness and housing insecurity is getting moving on more permanent housing at sites like 730 Stanyan.
But the fight isn’t over, and in fact it’s just beginning.
First, we need to get this approved to house as many families as we can, and we can’t let the entrenched opposition that’s always ready to fight us with appeals to planning approvals and building inspections, lawsuits, and many other trick they regularly use to block apartment buildings and that we know they will use again to derail this opportunity to create stable and affordable family housing.
Second, we can’t stop here. Let’s not get bogged down on this one site and pretend it is the fight for the heart and soul of our neighborhood. It isn’t, and this isn’t the only site that can become a home for families or those facing homelessness. In the housing blueprint that my team and I developed, we found that there are dozens of sites that could be used to build thousands of housing units. We’re talking about parking lots, underused city land, and dozens of sites that are simply not the best use of that space for our community.
It is absolutely incumbent on our current and future District 5 Supervisor to find sites like this one (and all the others I’ve already identified) and do what it takes to get apartments built. It’s our responsibility to do this for affordable housing, for families, for getting people off the street, for embracing and supporting our diversity, and for the vibrancy of our neighborhoods.
Opponents of housing will always want to discuss the height of the building and the character of the neighborhood, but that’s just a delay-until-defeat tactic. Instead, it’s time we talk about how many families will be able to have a secure home in a great neighborhood. District 5 residents are some of the most compassionate people I’ve ever met, but we no longer have the luxury of time, and we’re out of patience. Too many lives are at stake. We need housing and we need it now.
