Thu, 3 Feb 2022
To San Francisco Planning Commission:
This letter is in response to Supervisor Aaron Peskin’s recently introduced ordinances to restrict the definition of group housing (Board File 211299) and to prohibit new group housing entirely in Chinatown and the Tenderloin (Board File 211300), as well as recent Housing Accountability Act violations disapproving group housing (3832 18th St and 450 O’Farrell St).
Group housing is currently defined in Planning Code §102 as basically housing without full cooking facilities. Examples include nursing homes, student dormitories, and pre-WWII SROs, which typically have no private kitchens and no private bathrooms. A 2005 code interpretation 209.2(a) Group housing with limited cooking facilities allows group housing units to include a mini-kitchen. After this interpretation, the Planning Department has received several applications for group housing mini-studios for the general public that include a private bathroom and private mini-kitchen. In contrast to the old SROs of Chinatown and the Tenderloin, which are often about 100 sq. ft. and have no private bathroom or cooking, the new group housing developments are typically about 300 sq. ft. including the bathroom.
The striking thing about the conversation about modern group housing is how scattershot and contradictory the arguments are.
At the 450 O’Farrell St hearing, Aaron Peskin paradoxically complained that some of the units (which were about 800 sq. ft.) were too big to be group housing and that they should be bigger residential units instead. He paradoxically complained that the group housing units had too many cooking amenities and that they should have an even bigger kitchen instead. He implied that it is objectionable for a product to offer more amenities than is traditional for that category. I wonder what he would say if he encountered an iPhone: “An telephone with a camera inside it undermines the concept and definition of telephone!!” (video at 2:24:00).
Peskin used the 2005 code interpretation as evidence that group housing residents are “transient”, despite the obvious counterexample of the SROs of Chinatown and the Tenderloin, which are preserved precisely because they house long-term residents.
Peskin complained of a “glut” of group housing, but his evidence was severely lacking: A 2020 AUUR Report on pre-1981 SRO buildings indicated that many owners self-reported having >50% vacancy due to COVID-19. The city agreed to purchase the 1321 Mission Street Panoramic formerly student housing building to use as homeless housing (Hoodline). Neither of these indicate that there is a glut warranting clamping down on development.
For 3832 18th St, Rachael Tanner speculated that residents won’t be able to get a mortgage on a studio condo with a mini-kitchen (although denying loans is not her job), and Theresa Imperial complained that on-site inclusionary condos often have high HOA dues (even though these modest group housing units would likely have had lower than average dues).
At one meeting, Rachael Tanner asked that the project be modified to have a fully furnished kitchen in the common room. Then, at the next hearing, she contradicted herself and demanded that the development remove the common room entirely and almost all the other common space (bicycle parking, mailboxes).
Many of the arguments against modern group housing developments are disingenuous and nonsensical. And they almost never focus on the core of the issue.
The first of Peskin’s ordinances (Board File 211299) would prohibit mini-kitchens, require common space in area at least 25%×private floor area, require at least 50% of any common space to be communal kitchens, and prohibit on-site inclusionary group housing condos. Student housing and low income housing are exempt from these area limits. This threatens to put an end to private group housing developments in San Francisco, as the arbitrary prohibition of amenities basically forces them to have an undesirable floor plan similar to the old SROs.
It’s hard to see how Peskin’s ordinances would make group housing better. If you lived in a group housing building, would your life be better if you had a private mini-kitchen area, or would your life be better if you did not have one? Virtually everyone would prefer having the private amenity. And if not enough food storage space is a problem as he claimed, how does eliminating all private cabinets help? Where do the ratios of common space to private space come from (and what counts as common space)? And the exemption of dorms and low-income housing is a red flag: if his definitions don’t work for the prototypical examples of group housing, why should they work for group housing intended for the general public?
It is clear to me that the first ordinance does not exist to make future group housing facilities better in any way, but instead to make group housing so undesirable that no one would want to build one in the future. I think this makes it a de-facto downzoning under SB 330 that violate state law.
The second ordinance (Board File 211300) prohibits new group housing in Chinatown and Tenderloin entirely (even for low income households). This is an explicit downzoning, but it is written to go into effect when one of Rafael Mandelman’s fourplexes ordinances goes into effect (Board File 210564 or Board File 210866) so as not to be prohibited under SB 330.
Even when detractors of group housing identify real differences between group housing and dwelling units, they often miss the core reason that Group Housing has become popular in San Francisco.
Peskin’s arguments focus on whether a mini kitchen in group housing bends the rules. But the mini kitchen is just the price of admission. I’m sure that these developers would love to include a full-sized refrigerator and oven, if the Planning Code allowed private kitchens in group housing, ceteris paribus.
The real reason that developers choose group housing is the other rules that change when you create a “group housing” building vs. a “residential” building. Specifically, the group housing density limit §208 is about 2.8× to 3.6× the dwelling density limit §207, and the open space required for each residential unit is 3× the open space required for each group housing unit §135. So to understand whether group housing is an evil loophole or an affordability godsend, we need to understand whether these zoning codes are fair or outdated.
In my opinion, the dwelling density limit §207 is a long-obsolete zoning code that makes San Francisco unaffordable. It was obsolete a generation ago when everybody built an illegal ADU to help each other afford the city, and it is even more obsolete today given exponentially growing rents. The BoS has slowly increased the limit (through both city-enabled ADUs 207(c)(4) and state-mandated ADUs 207(c)(6)), but it is still far too low in most neighborhoods, especially given our upcoming 80,000 minimum of units we are expected to produce in the upcoming RHNA cycle. In the modern form-based use districts (e.g. UMU), there are no dwelling density limits, so the sky doesn’t fall when we eliminate them.
As for the open space requirement, this exists primarily for the comfort of the residents rather than due to any impact on anyone else, and what any person “needs” is highly subjective. It’s telling that there is almost an order of magnitude difference between the largest requirement (300 sq. ft. in RH-1) and the smallest requirement (36 sq. ft. downtown).
Given these reduced space requirements, group housing is allowed to be much more numerous than residential units. They can also be smaller, but so can residences with kitchens (see Efficiency Dwelling Units that Scott Wiener legalized in 2013 but as far as I know are unused). Because of this, small studios fill a niche in providing modest housing to small households who otherwise are forced to find housemates in larger units.
Instead of downzoning to eliminate group housing units with desirable amenities, we should do the opposite: upzone residential density limits and open space requirements so that developers can simply add a kitchen to each small studio that they build. I guarantee that if you allowed them to have a full-sized refrigerator and oven, developers would add them. This solves the problem of food security for residents of the new small studios that Peskin is wringing his hands over!
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