Innovate to find solutions for homelessness
This article first appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle September 27 2016.
Creating supportive housing with a stackable, prefabricated building system is the most expedient and economical remedy to San Francisco’s homeless crisis. Yet the likelihood of getting these type of buildings built is in doubt. The reason: The city’s desire to house the homeless is often weaker than its willingness to deviate from standard building practices.
Panoramic Interests, a local developer, wants to build one such building. Using solid steel housing modules, it is proposing a 200-unit building constructed over a portion of the Department of Public Works parking lot at 2627 Cesar Chavez St. Panoramic seeks a long-term lease on the lot’s air rights in exchange for taking on development costs. The majority of the lot and existing parking spaces would remain usable with the units built above on a concrete podium.
Under terms outlined, the developer would require a 10-year commitment from the city to lease all the fully furnished, self-contained 160-square-foot units for $1,000 a month. The city would select the tenants. At the lease end, the city would have an option to buy the building.
This building is something the city and its homeless citizens need. It’s available at terms that work for city and developer alike. No city funds are required for construction. But these conditions might not be enough.
Countless luxury condos are built in San Francisco not because they are what most San Franciscans need, but because only this type of housing justifies the huge investments of time and effort spent navigating the city’s arcane zoning and permitting processes, not to mention its sky-high land, construction and labor costs.
In order to produce viable and economical supportive housing for the city’s homeless individuals, where social services are available on site, developers must find alternative pathways that work within the bureaucracy, yet streamline and optimize it. They need development “hacks.” Here is how Panoramic Interests would do it:
- Prefabricating the units would run concurrent with, rather than sequential to, the one- to two-year permitting process most developments require. This would halve development time and attendant costs.
- Off-site construction would mitigate some of the city’s astronomical construction costs as well as limit the inefficiencies that invariably affect on-site construction.
- The lease grant would activate unused and underutilized city-owned lots, significantly reducing land costs with few downsides to the city, i.e., it is unlikely this lot would be used or sold for other purposes.
These tactics are not contraventions of the system — they are ways of working within it.
Yet, the combination of objections — from anti-development concerns over the lease grant and labor concerns over being left out of some aspect of the project — will likely kill the Chavez project.
The death would be a silent one. The people who would be most affected by the project are the ones least able to express their disappointment. You might call them IHNBYs: I have no backyard.
The issues raised by 2627 Cesar Chavez St. are not about one company. They are about trading in what San Franciscans have — insufficient housing for homeless individuals, a lack of affordable housing in general exacerbated by systemic inefficiencies and change-resistant bureaucracy — for what San Franciscans want — more housing. The Chavez development provides one such opportunity to do something different.
Contact the Mayor’s Office at mayoredwinlee@sfgov.org to say that you want to see innovation, not just the same old practices and procedures that aren’t giving our city what we want and need.
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