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The Jobs-Housing Balance

If a city, any city, is to be a center of economic activity, not just a bedroom community for people whose jobs are someplace else, it must figure out a way to bring jobs and people physically together. It must figure out how to either house its workers somewhere near where they work, or how to transport them from their houses to their jobs. The alternative is to be unable to sustain economic activity. This is what City Planners are talking about when they talk about "The Jobs-Housing Balance", and why State and City law require city governments to address the matter of housing and affordable housing.

What the San Francisco figures show is that, at current wages and prices, about 90% of San Francisco's workforce can't afford to live here, and our ability to transport people from the East Bay, the South Bay, and places beyond, is already strained to capacity. BART, AC Transit, the bridges, San Mateo Transit, and all the rest are already bringing as many people as they can into the city to work. We are soon facing an economic meltdown in San Francisco. Going forward, if San Francisco cannot figure out a way for the people who work here to get to their jobs, our economy is going to collapse.

Fortunately, many of us have been hard at work for several years to try to avert these human, social, political, and economic catastrophes.

Working with the rest of the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition ( MAC), I was able to force the City's Planning Department to create a land-use and development plan for our eastern neighborhoods, called, simply enough, the Eastern Neighborhoods Plan. The Eastern Neighborhoods Plan is the largest re-zoning effort in the City in the last 50 years, and will set new land-use rules for the Mission District, Eastern SoMa, Potrero, the Central Waterfront, and parts of Bayview. The plan will make possible the development of as many as 20,000 new housing units, and tens of thousands of square feet of new commercial development. One significance of the planning process is that it will then be possible to:

Use zoning controls to ensure the preservation and development of affordable housing, through creating mixed use districts with affordable housing requirements; identifying and securing infill sites for affordable housing development; and preserving rent-controlled units.

Use zoning controls to promote and retain light industrial and artisan businesses through creating protected districts and uses

Use zoning controls to protect neighborhood serving small businesses through conditional use requirements and discouraging formula retail and big-box storefronts

Further protect rent control units by prohibiting demolition or conversion of sound rent-controlled units, expanding the scope and improving the enforcement of the rent ordinance

To insure that the Eastern Neighborhoods Plan is a force for good instead of evil, I, along with many others of the City's housing movement, successfully lobbied the Board of Supervisors to set standards for the adoption of an approved Plan, including the requirement that 60% of all new housing be below market rate and affordable. We cannot accept a plan which relies only on the market to produce and fund affordable housing. We've seen what that means: for more than seven years, while the community has waited for the Eastern Neighborhood plans to be completed, housing for the wealthy has been built and housing for everyone else has been an afterthought. Actually, whatever they may teach in Economics 101, in Economics 201 you learn that the market absolutely cannot produce affordable housing in an area such as San Francisco.

I have worked together with a coalition of other housing activists to significantly increase middle-class and affordable housing in the Eastern Neighborhoods, by putting the Affordable Housing Charter Amendment on the ballot in November.

The Affordable Housing Charter Amendment would make the provision of affordable housing a priority in San Francisco. The Amendment establishes a "maintenance of effort" level which is the level of current spending, and which becomes the baseline for all subsequent appropriations. It sets aside a fund of $ 30 million in new money, over the baseline money, for the construction of affordable, family housing. -in eastern neighborhoods -- And, it establishes public accountability in evaluating the City's performance and allocating funds.

The battle for affordable housing is in many ways a battle for survival - for the survival of everyone we know who is a renter, for the survival of the diversity and vitality which make San Francisco a vibrant and desirable city, and for the survival of the City itself and its economy. Much that happens this November will determine the fate of that battle.

This is an expanded version of an article by Eric Quezada published in the San Francisco Bay Guardian December 5, 2007.