Planners recommend changes in density bonus housing program

A plan to allow developers to build taller buildings in exchange for creating extra affordable housing should be scaled back to focus initially on vacant parcels such as gas stations and parking lots, the San Francisco Planning Commission has ruled in a recommendation to the Board of Supervisors.

After a seven-hour hearing Thurday that featured a parade of residents mostly railing against the affordable housing bonus program — or AHBP — the commission decided the program should start with the 215 “soft sites” where less than 5 percent of the parcel is covered by an existing structure.

Most of the soft sites are located along commercial strips like Van Ness Avenue, Ocean Avenue, Geary Boulevard, Irving Street, Balboa Street, Lombard Street, Geneva Avenue and outer Mission Street.

[...] planning staff should do a more detailed survey of another 3,500 sites across the city that could be candidates, study potential businesses displacement and consider refining the definition of affordable housing to include more lower income residents, commissioners said.

County of Napa, which the court ruled that local governments must follow the state law or offer their own version of a housing bonus plan.

Even after it was amended to exempt properties with rent control housing and exclude the demolition of any housing — residents said the rezoning would drive out small businesses, destroy neighborhood character and make it more difficult for the Planning Commission to alter or block infill projects.

At the Planning Commission meeting Thursday, city staff pitched the program as an effort to reach middle-class households earning between 100 and 140 percent of the area median income — between $71,000 and $99,000 for a single person or between $101,000 and $154,000 for a family of four.

While critics paint the proposal as a massive giveaway to developers, some builders say that they would not take advantage of it because any gains from additional height would be negated by the requirements to build more below-market units.