Last week I did a presentation and moderated a panel with new City Councilmember Rob Johnson. The slides I used to set up the panel are above. Basically I told a story about how politics and the need for a victim (renters), a villain (builders and developers), and a hero (politicians) has over shaped and impacted our discussion on housing. As I pointed out last week too, stories matter. My view is decidedly pessimistic. I see the Council influenced too much by angry neighbors looking out for their own property values by keeping new people out with lots of red herrings about design and height and parking; they just don’t want anything to change. Ironically, they often use high rents (caused by their resistance to new housing) as the basis of making their case the builders of housing are greedy. Put all this together and you get a recipe for more and more rules, taxes, fees, and limits to new housing and higher rents. Then repeat. It’s what I call the San Francisco Death Spiral.

Johnson sees it another way. He is more optimistic about what’s going to happen as Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning (MIZ) makes its way through the neighborhoods. He’s optimistic.

• The last election (including his) didn’t reward anti-growthers with any significant wins. In fact, Johnson argues, there was an explicit rejection of NIMBYism; some candidates ran on it and outright lost because of that view;
• Johnson thinks the neighborhood world is divided into thirds, with one third being mostly anti-growth, a third being open to it depending on what it is and where it is, and a third that genuinely embrace growth; and
• Johnson sees the apparent fervor of support for the broader Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA) recommendations as being a sign, also, that the city at large wants to support growth.

I had to say at the panel that I totally disagree. While his first point is demonstrably true–NIMBY candidates running on that platform lost–he’s missing the fact that district elections mean that Councilmembers are going to have a lot more pressure from a smaller, more neighborhood specific perspective making demands on them. While Councilmembers might play off opposition in their district by casting a losing vote on something local but also knowing the outcome because of yes votes from other districts, that may not always work; this is especially true of the area wide upzones called for in the Grand Bargain. Neighbors showed support last year not for upzones but for downzones; either the Council was just plain wrong to listen to those people (Johnson’s NIMBY third) or those same people will be out in force to oppose the Grand Bargain. Will there be enough support from everyone else to give Councilmember’s comfort to proceed anyway, undoing what they did just last year?

I tend to agree that, for the most part, there is a hard core of support for growth and a hard core opposition. I am not sure it so easily divided. One thing the City could do to make this work in favor of good housing policy that welcomes growth, is bring back Neighborhood Development Managers (NDMs). The NDM role was critical in addressing the sometimes small but significant doubts neighbors had about change and growth. Listening to neighbors and getting concessions or compromise from builders through diplomacy was something NDMs could do to turn doubters of growth in to supporters of growth and new housing. But the City isn’t doing that today; mostly the City is pushing unit counts and mandates for rent restrictions, hardly something that will ameliorate the neighborhood concerns about parking, noise, height, and overworked infrastructure.

Lastly, as I have pointed out, I still here people everywhere, even on the panel and out in the wider community, talking about HALA and the Grand Bargain as if they are interchangeable or the same. Many if not most of the vocal and public supporters of upzones are non-profits housing builders and other social service organizations that will see direct cash subsidies from fees paid by downtown developers as part of the bargain. They love the Bargain. But what’s in it for the neighbors? More growth and development, exactly what’s been causing all the friction. Sure people are showing up to meetings and cheering HALA, but are those neighbors? Or are those people who support growth generally and supporters of the non-profits? I can’t say I’ve seen a surge of neighbors enthusiastic about more density because it will include rent restricted units.

I find Councilmember Johnson’s optimism refreshing. In a way, I hope he’s right, not because I think MIZ will work, but because perhaps there is a mostly silent middle in the neighborhoods that is waiting to be tapped. Maybe those folks in the middle, whether it is a third of neighbors or more or less, will show up and cancel out the red herring NIMBYs that have dominated the process. It’s too early to tell. But perhaps that optimism will get more people interested and spark a rebirth of the neighborhood planning movement that died at the end of the 1990s that turned skepticism into support.