MOIRA O'NEILL'S RESEARCH LEADS TO FIRST-OF-ITS-KIND REVIEW OF SAN FRANCISCO HOUSING POLICIES AND PRACTICES

The State of California recently released an accountability review on San Francisco's housing policies and procedures. The Housing Policy and Practice Review was informed by a rigorous, objective academic investigation led by Moira O’Neill, Associate Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning at UVA and Associate Research Scientist at UC Berkeley’s Institute for Urban and Regional Development. The investigation included in-depth data analysis, interviews, and feedback from a multitude of stakeholders in various roles. The full academic report from O’Neill, which includes contributions from University of Virginia Urban and Environmental Planning students and recent graduates, is included with the Housing Policy and Practice Review.

This first-of-its-kind review reveals that San Francisco practices related to housing are out of compliance with state housing laws and negatively impact development. The analysis highlights a history of practices and patterns that have created decades of costly building delays in the city, which has the longest timelines and some of the highest procedural hurdles in the state for advancing housing project to construction. Combine with some of the highest housing construction costs in California, the policies create a barrier to addressing the community's unmet housing needs.

“San Francisco’s notoriously complex, cumbersome, and unpredictable housing approval process came onto the state’s radar for good reason...” said the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) Director Gustavo Velasquez. “[In the review]... we name very specific actions to bring the City into compliance with housing law...Ultimately, these efforts will help stem the tide of displacement and make it possible for working class families to return to the City.”

The report sets course to remove barriers to housing production, across a number of key planning and land use law issues. Some of these include eliminating subjectivity in planning review, reforming local CEQA practices and administrative appeals processes, standardizing and expediting post-entitlement permitting, and increasing accountability in the housing approval process. 

O'Neill expanded on the results of the research and its goal to assist policymakers in decision-making and housing reform: "Our conclusions are data-driven,” she said. “The research conducted for this project further expanded our existing robust housing dataset, allowing us to understand the decision-making patterns that delay or deny housing development in San Francisco. My colleagues and I design research to provide insights useful to policymakers. Our hope with this work was that the state would be able to use the findings and identify actionable strategies and best practices to align local housing policies, laws, and planning practices with state requirements and priorities.”

Reporting for the New York Times on the issue, Heather Knight wrote that O'Neill underscores that contradictory policies are part of the problem. "...O’Neill said that San Francisco had progressive, inclusionary rules, such as strong tenant protections and wide swaths of land zoned for dense housing. But it also has housing practices that have resulted in a city that excludes middle- and lower-income workers."

“It’s a progressive city, but there’s this contradiction,” said O'Neill. “It’s really, really important to highlight not just for California, but for the country, how it’s possible to use procedural rules to be exclusive and block the ability to house people.”

Examining Local Law, Policy, and Planning Practice on Development in San Francisco Using CALES

Report in Support of San Francisco Policy and Practice Review


Authored by:

Moira O’Neill (PI)  
Vivek Adury  
Eric Biber (Co-PI)  
Deborah Le-An Tan  
Laura Tepper  
Ivy Wang

Acknowledgments:  
The following students supported building the entitlement dataset and related data cleaning and analysis for this research during the 2022-2023 academic year: Claire Ching, Riya Chopra, Ryan Denker, Olivia Anne Drew Grimes, Rachel Kinzer, Riley Layman, Lily Roberts, Jackson Smith, and Jenny Tsing. Also, Tim Dodson supported data collection related to determining project intake and notification dates.

Prepared for the California Department of Housing and Community Development in partial fulfillment of contract #22-30-002.