District 5 candidates on how they will speed up housing

Here’s the latest in our “Meet the Candidates” series for District 5, in which we ask each candidate to answer one question per week leading up to the election. Four candidates are challenging incumbent Supervisor Dean Preston to represent District 5, which spans from the east end of Golden Gate Park through Haight-Ashbury, Japantown and the Western Addition, the Lower Haight and Hayes Valley, and most of the Tenderloin.

---

San Francisco has a new mandate from the state of California to build 82,000 new homes by 2031, with more than half of those to be affordable to low- and moderate-income households.

We’re not on track to meet this goal, and one of the big arguments in San Francisco’s housing debate — particularly as campaigning heats up in District 5 — has been over who is to blame for our slow housing development.

Much of the problem is systemic: We have some of the lengthiest timelines and processes for getting housing projects built. But the supervisor candidates say there’s more to it.

This week, we asked candidates: What do you find problematic with our housing development, and how will you improve or speed up the process?

---

The animosity between Dean Preston and Mayor Breed makes housing development in SF/D5 more challenging or impossible. That said, I support Mayor Breed, and despite my disagreements with her administration, I eschew animus in politics.

I am 100 percent opposed to the development of Parcel K. But I will support ANY development in San Francisco. The 20-year “Promise” to develop the site is past its shelf life. As a lemons-to-lemonade story due to the pandemic, PROXY helped D5 in a time of need. Development of this parcel would be a slap in the face to creativity during a crisis.

---

First, we should legalize co-housing. Century-old laws say at most five unrelated people can share a unit. This means bedrooms that could be housing people are kept off the market. This is a quick fix for in-demand housing.

But the most problematic thing about building housing in D5 is the “shadow code” — the unwritten, often surprising reasons code-compliant projects are turned down repeatedly … for 33 months on average.