SAN FRANCISCO CITY HALL, August 10, 2015 — Wingspan staff sat down with Supervisor Scott Wiener of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors in his City Hall office to talk about gentrification and displacement in the city, an ever-controversial battle engulfing long-time residents and new ones—usually from the tech world—alike. His purview, District 8, includes parts of the hotly-contested Mission District, as well as the Castro, Noe Valley and Glen Park.

Shay Lari-Hosain: Supervisor Wiener, you are the Supervisor for District 8. You are also the chair for the SF County Transportation Authority and the Board of Supervisors Land Use Committee. First, let’s start with gentrification, obviously a loaded term. But why is it important for you, or is it important for you, to stem that tide of gentrification and evictions? Why is it important to preserve the character of the city?

Supervisor Scott Wiener: Gentrification is a loaded term because gentrification tends to result from a lot of people wanting to live in an area where there’s limited land or limited housing, and so you end of having pressure that results in displacement. Having a lot of people want to live in the city has a lot of benefits—San Francisco, with all the challenges we have, is in a better place than, say, Detroit. Cities change, and there’s no way to stop that change—

SL: —or stop demand—

SW: —and so the goal has to be to prepare for growth and change, and try to manage it, and that’s where San Francisco has fallen short. What’s happening now, people wanting to come to our city and the job growth, is all utterly predictable. We’ve seen a trend toward re-urbanization for about 30 years now. San Francisco, we were caught with our pants down, frankly, because we were acting as if we were still in the 1970s, when our population was not growing.
But we have 200,000 more people than we had in 1980. It took us a long time to even start accelerating our production of housing. And if you don’t produce housing, and the population’s growing, there’s going to be competition for housing. People with money, unfortunately, in this world, often prevail when you have that kind of competition. So our goal should have been to try to prevent that competition from happening by having enough housing for everyone.
The city did not do that due to all the different excuses for not building housing—and we’re seeing another one today with the proposal to have a moratorium on housing in the Mission, which will only make things worse.

SL: So your plan is to increase the supply of housing—that’s your proposal?

SW: We just don’t have enough housing, and it needs to be all different kinds of housing. We need subsidized below-market-rate housing, also known as affordable housing, for low-income, for moderate-income, but we also need the market to produce more housing—

SL: Where does the room come from, because San Francisco is, obviously, very cramped?

SW: We have 50,000 housing units in the pipeline. It seems cramped around here, but we’re building 10,000 units at the Hunters Point shipyard, building 8,000 units on Treasure Island, 5,000 units at Parkmerced, 4,000 units at the Schlage Lock Factory and Visitacion Valley, thousands more units in Mission Bay, the Giants Mission Rock project is two or 3,000 units, we’re building a thousand units in Upper Market—

SL: —Is it all enough to fulfill demand?

SW: It depends; we’ll see. We’re going to have to build more, not just in San Francisco, but the rest of the region too. San Francisco can’t solve it alone—but we know that we have a significant role to play because so many people do want to live in the city.
Rents in some peninsula towns are higher than San Francisco, because you have towns like Mountain View, where they have a huge amount of jobs, and they don’t build housing. The region as a whole needs more housing, and it needs to be all different types of housing—

SL: —Right, that’s my next question. How do you ensure that it’s going to be affordable? If you gave developers the right to just build, wouldn’t they build more luxury condos?

SW: I think the word “luxury housing” is a loaded term that opponents of development use. When you build new construction, it is very nice and shiny and expensive, and over time it absorbs into the general housing stock.
The argument that we’re hearing, by classifying all market-produced new housing as luxury housing because it’s expensive, is an argument against building any new housing that the government doesn’t build. And we will never have enough government resources to build enough units of subsidized housing to meet the housing goals, and anyone who tells you differently has a bridge to sell you.
I’m a big supporter of investing aggressively in subsidized affordable housing, particularly for low-income people. Our number one source of funding for low-income and moderate-income affordable housing is market-rate development. So when you start shutting down the quote-unquote luxury housing, you end up drying up a lot of your resources for subsidized, below-market-rate housing.
Over time, building more units will take pressure off of the overall market. The people who want to move into the Mission or the Castro, with means, are still going to move there. Instead of going to new construction, they’re going to compete for your housing. And there’s going to be more pressure on whoever owns your property to get you out of there, because you have a deeply rent-controlled unit and they want to bring someone new in. So it’s in everyone’s interest to build more housing of all types.

SL: Does that revenue from building market rate housing—does that come from requirements that are put on developers?

SW: Yeah. The Inclusionary Housing Ordinance provides that you have to, for any development that’s 10 units or more, build 12 percent of the units below market-rate on-site, or you have to pay a fee to go into the affordable housing fund, equivalent to 15 perecent of the value of the project. For larger projects, because they require rezoning, we typically extract a higher percentage of affordability. It can be 20, 25, even 33 percent.

SL: What changes have you seen in the neighborhoods under your jurisdiction?

SW: The cost of housing has exploded. When I moved into the Castro in 1997, I rented a one-bedroom in the heart of the Castro with a view for $1,050 a month, which I thought was crazy expensive. Now, that would be a $3,000 apartment. Noe Valley, because of its accessibility to Silicon Valley, has had explosive housing prices. Glen Park, which, even when I ran for office in 2010 still had a working class feel to it, the cost of housing has really gone up.
I have concerns about displacement, but even beyond displacement, people need to move for reasons having nothing to do with eviction. You break up with your partner, your roommate needs to bring his partner in, and people feel trapped—they feel they can’t move. And that’s really unhealthy.

SL: How do you respond, on the other hand, to tech workers who say that if they have the money, they should be able to live anywhere they want, or landlords who think it’s their right to charge market rates?

SW: I’ve never agreed with the argument that the city should try to pull up the drawbridge. One of the things that makes San Francisco so great is that we have new people who are constantly coming here, especially new young people, whether they’re artists or tech workers. They add to the city, and the city adds to them. I think it would be a dark day in San Francisco if we started trying to prevent new people from coming here.
That points, again, to the need of having to plan for it, and manage it, instead of trying to stop it from happening. I support rent control. I don’t subscribe to the school of demonizing landlords and saying that all landlords are evil. There are some really bad landlords, but there are a lot of really decent people who are landlords, and we want to treat them fairly.
But the dislocation that we would see in San Francisco if rent control went away tomorrow is terrifying, in terms of the people, long-term residents, seniors, people on fixed incomes, working-class people, even middle-class people would just be swept away, because rents would go through the roofs.

SL: The mayor hs been known to give incentives and tax breaks to tech companies. Is there a tech lobby here?

SW: There are a lot of lobbies here, from every political persuasion, including private sector, including nonprofits, including labor. We use tax policy for a lot of different things, and Mid-Market, that tax zone, in terms of tax breaks for tech, is limited to that one multi-block stretch of Market Street, a pretty small area. Most of our tech employers are not in that zone. They’re all over.

SL: Supervisor Wiener, thank you so much for your time.

SW: Thank you.

Contributing reporting: Kaity Gee
This interview has been edited and condensed for length.