A group of Mission District neighbors will try to persuade the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday to support their appeal of sections of the 100 percent affordable housing project at 16th and Mission streets.
The group would like to see homeless families instead of tenants who have experienced addictions. However, since the building is already fully entitled, a state law approved in 2018 prevents such appeal. Instead, a half dozen or so neighbors are appealing the Department of Public Works’ approval of the project’s “parcel map subdivision.” The map divides the complex into three different parcels.
“This is essentially like a loophole that they discovered where they could try to appeal the issuance of the addresses,” said Sam Moss, executive director of Mission Housing, which is developing the project with the Mission Economic Development Agency.
That first phase of the project is a nine-story 136 unit building of permanent supportive housing. It reserves housing units for people who are, or have, experienced homelessness and or addictions. The front of the building will be on 16th Street between Capp and Mission streets.
Moss said “the building will house formerly homeless individuals and champion housing first ethos,” an approach that prioritizes housing homeless individuals first before stabilizing the prospective tenants. It also removes requirements on sobriety or absence of criminal history, as defined by the California Department of Housing and Community Development.
The building will have social services and case management on site, according to the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, the agency working in partnership. When asked if substance use disorder treatment will be present on site, the agency said that it is too early to say.
In their argument for the appeal neighbors say they disagree with the height of the buildings, effects on traffic and parking as well as the worsening of street conditions that such housing could bring.
Currently, most of the behavioral facilities and shelters are concentrated in the Tenderloin, SoMa, Bayview-Hunters Point and the Mission.
Neighbors say their main concern is who the permanent supportive housing may bring to the neighborhood. They instead want developers to turn the building into family housing, like the other two buildings.
“I think that there is a very high concentration of services in the 16th and Mission neighborhood,” said Aaron Wojack, a nearby neighbor who is supportive of permanent supportive housing, but criticizes the high concentration in the area and the impact on those nearby, like the children at Marshall Elementary, who could witness firsthand the consequences of worsened street conditions.
Wojack worries that bringing people who may have, or have had, addictions to the neighborhood can pose a risk to them given the proximity to ongoing drug dealing and open air drug use.
While the city has made strides in controlling the unpermitted vending and open-air drug use on the west side of Mission Street in the last four weeks, the east side of Mission Street has proven more resistant. However, the Mission Street Team, which has been working in the area since mid-March, has continued to try new strategies and by the time the development is up, the issues there could conceivably be resolved.
The neighbors appealing the approval, however, are leery.
Wojack said the developers failed to listen to neighbors’ concerns and that they only held meetings addressing the height of one of the buildings and the shadow effect at Marshall Elementary.
“It seems like putting gasoline on a fire. I feel like that could make it hard to resolve drug use and drug dealing in the neighborhood,” Wojack added. “I don’t understand the logic of that decision.”
In a response submitted to the Board of Supervisors ahead of Tuesday’s meeting, Public Works kept to the specifics of the appeal on the basis of the subdivision maps. It wrote that the appeal “fails to identify any concern related to the proposed land subdivision that would be grounds for denying the division of the existing parcel into three parcels or reversing the approval of the Tentative Map.”
Public Works wrote that other concerns should be brought up to the Planning Department and/or the Department of Building Inspection.
The Planning Department also kept its response focused on the subdivision, writing that it approved the tentative map on May 28 after finding the application in compliance with the planning code.
Moss, for his part, believes the neighbors’ appeal is an effort to delay the construction and potentially kill the project.
“The community has been working on this for over a decade. Hundreds and hundreds of community members have asked for permanent supportive housing, have asked for very low income housing, have asked for affordable housing for families and seniors and individuals, and that’s what we’re delivering,” said Moss.
Dr. Margot Kushel, the director at UCSF’S Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, said that though she sympathizes with neighbors who feel concerned about the high concentration of resources in an area, studies on permanent supportive housing have shown crime does not increase in the surrounding neighborhoods.
The developers plan to offer mental health services on the ground floor.
The first phase of the project is fully entitled and developers aim to break ground by the end of the year. The project’s total cost is $111. 4 million and its funding is a mix of federal credits, tax equity bonds, city funding, a private commercial loan and about $54.5 million in tax credits. An application for the credits has been submitted to the state’s Tax Credit Allocation Committee and a decision is expected early next month.
Developers will have six months to break ground after the tax credits are awarded. If they fail to do so, they could make their applications uncompetitive with the committee for five years.
“Supportive housing is a protected category of housing in California law … You can’t have extra rules for that kind of housing and use the fact that it’s going to have a certain class of people as a reason for turning it down,” said Mike Rawson, director of advocacy and litigation at Public Interest Law Project, a state supported center that provides support to all local legal aid societies in the state. “The city knows this, so the city is probably going to reject their appeal.”
Mission District supervisor Jackie Fielder said on Monday she could not comment on how she would vote ahead of an appeal.