Politics
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June 10, 2025
Activists are butting heads with an area preservation group over a proposal to show a part of the town’s North Seaside neighborhood right into a nationally registered historic district.
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Pedestrians cross Union Road within the North Seaside district in San Francisco.
(David Paul Morris / Getty)
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At a “Historic Housing Tour” on April 9, Jane Natoli walked attendees by means of the proposed historic district and identified the empty or broken constructions. She began at a burned-out condominium constructing on Union Road and Columbus Avenue. From there she took her viewers to see a dilapidated storefront—an auto store in a parking storage with busted home windows—and a sausage manufacturing unit that’s additionally a nationally acknowledged landmark.
“It’s a cool constructing,” stated Natoli, the organizing director for the San Francisco chapter of nationwide pro-housing group YIMBY Motion. “It was as soon as the biggest sausage manufacturing unit on the West Coast, proper? But it surely hasn’t been that for a very long time, and what it’s proper now could be an empty constructing with a car parking zone subsequent to it.”
The tour had an viewers of about thirty, principally housing advocates or historic preservationists. One was Katherine Petrin, the writer of a proposal to show North Seaside right into a historic neighborhood. Over the past 45 minutes of the tour, alongside a vibrant stretch of Grant Avenue between Filbert and Union Road, that group fell into debate about how historic preservation suits into San Francisco’s wealthy cultural historical past and the town’s pressing want for brand spanking new and inexpensive housing. “In a metropolis like San Francisco, particularly, we have now lots of conflicting views about how we honor our previous whereas making a path ahead,” Natoli stated.
Natoli helps some ranges of historic preservation. “There’s going to be some people who find themselves similar to, it is best to be capable to mainly tear something down,” she stated, “And I don’t personally agree with that.” Then again, Natoli additionally doesn’t need to overuse historic preservation, freezing neighborhoods in place. She says there’s no proper or unsuitable reply, and on her tour, she requested attendees to contemplate what a center floor would appear like: “What are we keen to stay with, and what are these commerce offs going to be?”
Housing activists in San Francisco are butting heads with an area historic preservation group known as the Northeast San Francisco Conservancy over a proposal that might flip a dozen blocks of the town’s North Seaside neighborhood right into a nationally registered historic district, doubtlessly including boundaries to redevelopment for greater than 600 properties.
Within the early 2000s, the Northeast San Francisco Conservancy employed architectural historian Michael Corbett to research the neighborhood’s architectural and historic significance. The San Francisco Planning Fee adopted their findings in 2022, with further contributions from Petrin and architectural historian Shayne Watson. “It was an enormous effort,” Corbett stated. “It took a few years to do it…Within the little preservation world it was a giant, huge challenge.” The Conservancy constructed on that work to write down the North Seaside Historic District nomination, which it says would protect a essential and vibrant stretch of San Francisco’s cultural heritage.
Present Difficulty
North Seaside was dwelling to communities of Italian and Chinese language immigrants all through the twentieth century, and was quickly rebuilt after an earthquake and hearth in 1916. The realm’s thriving nightlife gave roots to a few of San Francisco’s early LGBTQ communities, and within the Nineteen Fifties the neighborhood hosted influential beatnik writers like Jack Kerouac and the legendary Metropolis Gentle bookstore run by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The North Seaside Historic District nomination attracts connections between that historical past and the structure that characterizes the neighborhood’s older buildings, with decorative kinds that pay homage to the Italian Renaissance and just about an identical building strategies from the post-fire reconstruction interval. Corbett argues that North Seaside deserves to be protected and nationally acknowledged and that stated the historic designation, if accepted, received’t cease folks from making adjustments to the nominated buildings. “It represents the historical past of an vital a part of San Francisco in a means that nothing else does, and represents a bit of American historical past for a similar causes,” Corbett stated.
However San Francisco’s housing advocates say the proposal might gridlock the redevelopment of previous and worn-down constructions. With a purpose to preserve historic structure, buildings listed on the Nationwide Register usually face further, stricter guidelines, and redevelopment could be pricier. A 2023 report by the California Division of Housing and Neighborhood Improvement discovered that San Francisco had extra roadblocks to constructing housing than anyplace else within the state. The town’s approval course of for constructing permits was sluggish, with an objection course of that allowed people to simply block or delay improvement.
San Francisco’s housing manufacturing has fallen yearly since 2020, and a lot of the metropolis’s housing is unaffordable to households incomes the median revenue. Many important staff, corresponding to academics and firefighters, are pressured to stay outdoors the town and endure lengthy commutes, whereas different low revenue staff stay out of their vehicles or on the road. The town’s housing disaster is one piece of a a lot wider drawback, as nearly all of California renters are burdened by the price of lease, whereas nationally, US housing affordability has plummeted since 2021.
Activists and politicians are more and more attributing that disaster to dense laws and zoning legal guidelines. YIMBY activists throughout the nation have taken up grassroots campaigns and lobbying efforts to push cities to chop restrictions. In 2021, California Senate Invoice 9 allowed duplexes and cut up tons on single-family zoned tons. In 2023, Governor Gavin Newsom signed 56 payments focused at bettering California’s housing disaster. This yr, proposals within the state legislature search to hurry up and cheapen the event course of by legalizing multi-family housing close to transit stops or exempting sure multi-family tasks from evaluation underneath the California Environmental High quality Act.
Kate Voshell has labored on tasks that pushed previous San Francisco’s restrictive zoning legal guidelines to construct inexpensive housing within the metropolis’s Mission District, and thinks that San Francisco’s housing disaster is at a tipping level. “The most effective device we have now to combat that—the ready-made, off-the-shelf device that we have now to take care of that—is dense city infill housing,” stated Voshell, an occasions chair for “District 9 Neighbors for Housing” and a staffer for the group improvement nonprofit Capital Affect Companions.
As extra laws passes to encourage infill tasks, rich neighborhoods within the Bay Space are more and more laying declare to regulatory labels that might exempt them from new guidelines, permitting them to forestall or delay new improvement. In April 2022, the Bay Space neighborhood of St Francis Wooden, which was established in 1912 with a clause stopping folks of shade from proudly owning property, efficiently utilized for historic designation, permitting it to bypass state legal guidelines that might have enabled the development of recent housing. The identical yr, a neighborhood affiliation within the Baywood neighborhood in San Mateo filed to show their neighborhood right into a historic district after a brand new resident made plans to tear down his dwelling and construct a bigger one with a unit for his mother-in-law.
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Critics see the North Seaside historic district as an analogous try to freeze new improvement. Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) informed the San Francisco Chronicle the proposed North Seaside historic district is “abusive” and would cease new housing building. The State Historic Sources Fee has pushed again the proposal’s listening to twice, first on the request of San Francisco Mayor Dan Lurie and once more over issues that the nomination hadn’t fulfilled a regulation requiring that they notify property house owners.
However Corbett stated the proposal isn’t a response to current pro-housing laws. “We’ve been engaged on this for 45 years, and we simply lastly obtained it accomplished,” stated Corbett. “That’s why it’s occurring now.” Whereas Corbett didn’t write the ultimate proposal, he stated he doesn’t imagine it provides important boundaries to new housing, since most buildings included in his survey of North Seaside’s historic assets already face further necessities from the California Environmental High quality Act.
Natoli stated the historic district itemizing might nonetheless exempt these buildings from sure legal guidelines aimed toward growing housing manufacturing by streamlining environmental evaluation processes.
To encourage assist for the nomination, the Conservancy hosted its personal housing excursions in early April, led by native tour guides, journalists, and Petrin herself. These excursions started the week after the “Historic Housing Tour” hosted by YIMBY Motion. On April 19 at 10 am., native information Blandina Farley led a tour from Cafe Triest on Vallejo Road, the place the baker gave them a few of his Spanish bread. Then she led them down previous Broadway and detoured into Chinatown to see Kerouac Alley and Metropolis Gentle bookstores. Farley stated she’s lived in North Seaside since leaving New York within the Nineteen Seventies. She landed in Los Angeles, then San Anselmo, then wound up in San Francisco, the place she moved from condominium to condominium and lived briefly in a warehouse on the foot of Telegraph Hill. At this time, Farley lives in a rent-controlled condominium, and has for many years. She stated she watched lease rise within the late Eighties and the early ’90s, as wealthier tenants crammed the flats that she’d as soon as bounced round in as an artist leaping between jobs.
“It’s so charming and great, and we have now chocolate retailers, bakeries. We now have eating places, Italian meals. We’re close to the wharf. You recognize, everyone needs to return right here,” Farley stated. “After which they got here right here, and all of the rents went up. And now individuals who got here right here to stay, and who created this complete setting of artwork and appeal, can’t afford to stay right here anymore.”
Farley isn’t a member of the Conservancy, and he or she stated she’s not aware of housing politics. However she helps the Conservancy’s nomination to make North Seaside a historic district. Whereas she is aware of there’s a housing drawback, she doesn’t belief new builders to not leap for revenue on the expense of the neighborhood’s magnificence. “I actually look in direction of all of San Francisco coming again and thriving, in a means that’s genuine, so we don’t grow to be some type of high-rise metropolis,” Farley stated. “North Seaside, which we’re speaking about, may be very very particular.”
The Verity Residence Constructing, a burned-out facade that after hosted 23 condominium items and a restaurant, is on the heart of that very same debate. In early April, the proprietor was speeding to push by means of controversial plans to tear down the façade and construct a taller mixed-use challenge earlier than the nomination might be heard at its anticipated listening to on Could 9. If handed, the nomination might topic these plans to further environmental evaluation and discretionary motion by a number of native commissions and boards, and planners have expressed issues that the challenge might grow to be inconceivable.
YIMBY Motion’s historic housing tour on April 9 began and ended on the Verity constructing. Natoli stated she sees it for instance of the North Seaside historic district nomination’s overreach, and a case the place freezing the neighborhood’s buildings doesn’t preserve the district’s character. “When our neighborhoods’ constructed setting doesn’t change that a lot, or we spend lots of power preserving what they appear like, then who’s in them adjustments, and who has entry to them adjustments,” Natoli stated. “What’s our obligation? What’s our responsibility? How a lot will we protect? How will we protect it? And who does that affect?”
Ella Curlin
Ella Curlin is 2025 Puffin pupil writing fellow specializing in masking housing for The Nation. She is a journalist and pupil at Indiana College.
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