Supervisor Jake McGoldrick: Save Existing Housing

According to the California Association of Realtors, the median priced home in San Francisco was $746,000 as of May 2006. This is 365 percent higher than the national average.

While the national home ownership rate is approximately 69 percent, only approximately 35 percent of San Franciscans own their own home. This means that the majority of market-rate homes for sale in SF are priced out of the reach of low- and moderate-income households.

One of the reasons why San Francisco's residential real estate is amongst the most expensive in the United States is because the City's existing housing stock is being replaced by newly built market rate housing, which prices out a majority of San Franciscans.

Market rate housing expands housing for the "haves" while the inflated prices makes it more difficult to attain home ownership for the middle class and for young families. The newly built market-rate housing also displaces the "have nots" from rental housing.

Indeed, it is becoming less feasible to build rental housing, even though the need for it continues to grow.

What can we do as San Franciscans to allow an entry point for young couples and to ensure that families are not priced out of our City?

We need to reverse this trend and find a way to ensure that housing production for the sake of ever greater profits does not occur at the expense of neighborhood preservation and the retention of affordable housing.

Currently, it is city policy that we retain the existing supply of sound housing and that the supply of affordable housing be preserved and enhanced. It is also city policy that existing housing and neighborhood character be preserved and protected in order to ensure the cultural and economic diversity of our neighborhoods.

The City's planning practice has strayed from its own policies. One way to remedy this is to discourage the demolition of sound and entirely adequate existing housing. We also need to decrease the number of dwelling unit mergers and conversions of rental housing, which actually causes rental units to shrink in number at a time when our housing needs are increasing.

A common practice is for developers to represent their projects as alterations or major alterations of a home when in reality it is often the demolition of a single family home. The Planning Department has allowed this to happen time and time again over many years. Because supply and demand elasticity does not exist, there is no way to build enough housing to meet the needs of our existing population. Therefore, we need to look at solutions beyond building affordable housing.

We have already lost our lower income families. Can we afford to lose our middle class families too? Balance in public planning is key. It is critical that we use public resources to maintain our City's character.

Major Milestone Reached in Doyle Drive Plan
The San Francisco Transportation Authority, which I chair, acted at its meeting on Sept. 26 to name Alternative 5, Presidio Parkway, as the preferred alternative to be identified within the Final Environmental Impact Statement/Report for the South Access to the Golden Gate Bridge: Doyle Drive Replacement Project.

This is a major milestone in the advancement of a project to replace a vital but aging link in the Bay Area transportation system. Doyle Drive serves as the southern approach to the Golden Gate Bridge, winding one and a half miles through the Presidio of San Francisco. Once the Army's premiere west coast installation, the Presidio is now a National Historic Landmark District and part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, the world's largest national park in an urban setting.

The Transportation Authority has forged a partnership with a host of federal, state and local agencies involved with this complex undertaking. These agencies include the Federal Highway Administration, Presidio Trust, Department of Veterans Affairs, National Park Service, California Department of Transportation, Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District, the State Historic Preservation Officer and others.

Alternative 5 would replace the existing Doyle Drive with a new parkway with six travel lanes plus an eastbound auxiliary lane between the Park Presidio interchange and a new Presidio access at Girard Road. The parkway would feature wide landscaped medians and would consist of a high-viaduct, two short tunnels and a low causeway over a depressed Girard Road.

The Authority is pushing ahead with engineering design pending adoption of a final environmental document due early next year. The project is expected to garner significant financial support from the infrastructure bond (Prop 1A) which will be on the ballot Nov. 7.

Jake McGoldrick is a San Francisco supervisor representing District 1.