Lack of light. Shade. Noise. Parking. And who could forget “neighborhood character?” These are the issues San Franciscans opposed to new housing development have cited for years. But these weapons, once deadly, seem unable to pierce the armor of new state laws.
That hasn’t stopped people from trying. An entirely affordable housing development known as the “Marvel in the Mission” could break ground at 16th and Mission streets by December, but it is facing last-minute pushback from neighbors who say they are worried about children’s Vitamin D levels.
The stated concern is that the building will block sunlight from the yard at Marshall Elementary School, increasing students’ risk of eye disease, depression, and Vitamin D deficiency. The fears are backed by the community organization People Organizing to Demand Environmental and Economic Rights, or PODER, and others.
“We know sunlight is medicinal for children,” one mother said in Spanish at a recent outreach meeting about the project.
But UCSF professor of medicine Dr. Daniel Bikle says that’s a flimsy objection to new housing.
“Come on, a shadow over a schoolyard? That’s pretty lame,” Bikle said. “There are a lot of ways to get Vitamin D if people are really worried about it. Give the kid a pill — lots of parents do that already.”
But residents are worked up anyway, perhaps because in the face of cascading legislative and cultural victories by the YIMBY movement, they’re running out of ways to influence the direction of change in their neighborhoods — even when the concerns they’re flagging are more serious than kids developing rickets on the foursquare pitch.
“I think [developers] feel that, with the streamlining, they don’t have to engage with the community,” said Reina Tello, a PODER organizer.
Evidence of that can be found six blocks south of the proposed site of the Marvel, where a notorious landlord has won approval to build a tower on the footprint of his last building, which burned down, killing one person. That project has been dubbed “La Muerte de la Misión,” or “the death of the Mission.” The contrast between the two plans — the Marvel and the Muerte — shows how new laws allow developers to build desperately needed housing but also eliminate regulation for bad actors.
‘The best system’
On a recent morning at Marshall Elementary, kids played basketball and chased one another around the blacktop. Two hid behind a shed in a game of hide-and-seek. Others laughed and jumped in small groups. Most of this happened in the section of the yard shaded by trees.
The building slated to rise above the schoolyard was conceived as a market-rate development that opponents quickly dubbed “the Monster in the Mission.” But after a seven-year fight spurred by fears of gentrification, the original developer walked. In 2022, the city turned the project over to community developers Mission Housing and Mission Economic Development Agency, which designed a 100% affordable housing complex in its place.
Some of the same people who fought the Monster have given the developers a piece of their minds at four meetings in five months. Unsurprisingly, the shadow isn’t the only concern — parents are also worried that the planned permanent supportive housing units will bring more drug activity to the area. Some think 16 stories, the height of the tallest tower in the new development, is too tall for the area (“neighborhood character”). Many say the Mission has already shouldered more than its fair share of housing construction, and wealthier neighborhoods should pick up the slack.
A few years ago, this may have been enough to stall the project — shade concerns were a central pillar of the effort to convert the Monster to the Marvel — but a raft of new state laws has ended that.
“The best system is where you set clear rules ahead of time, whether it’s about housing development or small-business permits,” said state Sen. Scott Wiener, perhaps the leading YIMBY voice in Sacramento. “Then, if someone complies with those rules, they get their permit quickly.”
This is a far cry from how permitting worked in San Francisco even a few years ago, when the Board of Supervisors blocked a nearly 500-unit apartment building planned for a Nordstrom parking lot in SoMa, but the system has changed rapidly. This is partly because of laws like Wiener’s Senate Bill 423. That legislation, which took effect last summer, eliminated the appeals process known as discretionary review for most projects. This means angry neighbors can no longer delay lawful projects by demanding additional environmental or other review processes.
The law has helped cut the average approval time in San Francisco from more than two years to seven months.
Other laws made it easier to build fourplexes and harder to limit tall buildings. Even more legislation aimed at streamlining new housing — and a citywide rezoning plan — is on the way. Now, most housing proposals within area height limits will be approved, whether neighbors like them or not.
“People can still participate when the rules are being set, and in a lot of our state housing laws, we still require engagement with neighbors,” Wiener said. “But it’s not an unending process.”
Lost levers
Not everybody is caught in the tide of YIMBY glee.
Six blocks south of the Marvel, Hawk Lou recently won approval to build a 181-apartment tower at the site of his last building, which burned down in a deadly 2015 fire due to his alleged neglect. (Lou, the landlord, failed to fix faulty wires and broken fire alarms, according to a lawsuit his tenants brought against him.) Despite opposition from community groups and even vocal YIMBY Sam Moss, who said the city should “deny him permits every step of the way,” Lou’s proposal is in line with the law, so the Planning Commission approved it.
YIMBY Action local organizing director Jane Natoli said the development at 2588 Mission St. is a special case.
“The Hawk Lou situation is complicated, because people are seeking extrajudicial relief through the housing process,” Natoli said. “Our permitting system isn’t equipped to deal with that.”
In other words, wronged tenants should be seeking justice via tort law, not permitting law, and claims of deadly negligence should be adjudicated in courtrooms, not at Planning Commission meetings.
Attempts to reach Lou for comment were unsuccessful.
But in the absence of effective enforcement against so-called slum lords, the convoluted appeals process was the only recourse some residents felt they had. Now, even some people who recognized how desperately the system needed to be overhauled say the new regime is lacking in vital checks.
Tenant advocate Shanti Singh said organizing by residents played a major role in turning the Monster to the Marvel, mitigating what she says could have been a surge of gentrification that priced out longtime neighborhood denizens.
“I think the 22nd and Mission development is an example of that not being replicable anymore because of these laws,” she added.
Singh said the city does not have a coherent public investment strategy for affordable housing.
“So essentially, the only recourse that people had to get affordable housing in their neighborhood was to go through the same channels that the honest-to-God exclusionary people were going through,” Singh said.
That led some people to conflate the two groups — homeowners trying to protect the value of their property and poor renters desperate for somewhere to live — and dismiss the latter group’s concerns.
Tello is one of the leaders of the effort to pack meetings with the Marvel’s developers. The PODER organizer is skeptical of the new state laws and said all the YIMBY legislation in the world won’t create buildings in the current economic climate.
“The reality is that there’s no construction resulting from all the deregulation,” Tello said. “There are thousands of entitled projects in SF that are not being built, not because of opposition but because of construction costs.”
Indeed, more than 44,000 entitled units remain unbuilt, the Planning Department confirmed, the vast majority of them in mega-developments like those planned for Stonestown and Treasure Island.
YIMBY lawmakers say neighbors should seek justice through democratic and legislative processes — not in appeals against law-abiding developers.
But community organizers lament that developers can now easily choose to ignore feedback from neighbors. In the case of the Marvel, Mission Housing and Mission Economic Development Agency have hosted a series of outreach meetings by choice. Those meetings have left some residents feeling unsatisfied, but at least there has been communication — other developers, like Lou, might choose not to consider resident feedback at all.
The Marvel’s developers announced Thursday that they would not cut any units from the project, following a community vote. Barring further contests, hundreds of families and formerly homeless people will be able to move into housing at one of the city’s most vibrant, transit-rich intersections. That’s a good thing, YIMBY sources say, even if it means brushing off some concerns from people who live nearby.
Tello said her group will not sue to decrease the buildings’ height but still thinks tenants shouldn’t have to rely on the willingness of developers to hear them out. “Accountability is really hard to find nowadays,” she said.
As for the nutrient concern, Bikle (of UCSF) said San Francisco’s latitude means people can’t produce Vitamin D in the winter, anyway. We make up for it in the summer — when classes are out.
And kids have plenty of opportunities to get sunshine outside of school, he noted: “We’re not London in the 17th century.”