Inside the Marina Theater on Tuesday, a different kind of show was playing out. It wasn’t just the smell of stale popcorn permeating the air but tension and anxiety.
Cow Hollow residents, most of them homeowners, packed into the movie palace for an informational town hall about the city’s plan to allow developers to build higher and denser properties across swaths of the neighborhood. Attendees at times broke into applause or jeers, depending on who was speaking.
The anxiety was familiar: fear that upzoning would threaten the status quo of San Francisco neighborhoods, some of which have remained largely unchanged since the 1970s.
“It’s terrible,” said Leslie Dickey, 60. “It’ll change the character of the city forever, and it can’t be undone, like the Salesforce Tower.”
The bad news has been a long time coming. Per requirements under the state-mandated housing element, the city must approve an upzoning plan that allows for 36,000 homes to be built by January 2026. Should it fail, San Francisco could face fines and lawsuits, lose state funding, and potentially lose local authority to regulate whether projects get built in accordance with the city’s planning code. California has mandated that by 2031, San Francisco must approve 82,000 new homes. In 2024, the city built just 1,205.
Under the plan, Cow Hollow would see height limits increased to at least 65 feet at Lombard Street, going up to 160 feet closer to Van Ness Avenue. Chestnut Street and parts of Union Street would see height limits increase to 65 feet.
Tim Breece said high-rises can be eyesores, citing the controversial Fontana Towers, and can make a neighborhood feel unpleasant.
“It creates windy, dark corridors,” he said.
Susan McBride, 82, said she’s skeptical that any housing that gets built in the city will be affordable for middle-class residents. YIMBYs argue that as more housing is built, economic forces will drive down rents.
“I think it’s going to benefit developers,” she said. “I don’t see the housing including teachers, police officers, nurses, which is what we need right now.”
Addressing the crowd, Cow Hollow Association leader Lori Brooke said the city’s rezoning plans and the target for 82,000 new homes in six years are “complete overkill, with the risk of changing the feel and scale of our neighborhoods.”
Brooke, who also leads United Neighborhoods SF, contends that the upzoning plan will result in displacement by incentivizing developers to buy out tenants and demolish apartments and small businesses in order to build larger projects.
“The upzoning plan won’t deliver affordability; it will do the opposite,” she said in an interview before the town hall.
Rachael Tanner, director of citywide planning, said demolition, followed by displacement, is an unlikely threat. Only 269 units of housing have been demolished since 2012, and 4% of no-fault evictions over the past decade have been due to demolitions, told the town hall.
“Evicting people to demolish a building is not a problem,” she said in an interview after the meeting.
Tanner did concede that small businesses in upzoned areas could be displaced due to new construction. She said SF Planning is working to create aid programs to mitigate those potential impacts.
“That’s a solvable problem,” she said.
An April 17 memo from SF Planning said 53 businesses within rezoned areas could be displaced annually due to new development; however, that displacement wouldn’t be imminent, as new development is “unlikely to be more than a parcel or two at any time in any one neighborhood.”
Supervisor Stephen Sherrill, who represents the area, said he is “concerned” about the affordability of housing but disagreed with claims by some residents that the upzoning proposal runs counter to affordable housing goals.
Sherrill said he wants the city to focus its efforts on lowering impact fees and development timelines to bring down the cost of housing construction. It costs roughly $1 million to build one unit of affordable housing in the city, he said.
“With upzoning, we have the opportunity to build housing at all affordability levels,” he said. “We don’t want all luxury housing.”