San Francisco would need an additional $1.3 billion in order to meet the state-mandated affordable housing production requirements set to kick in next year, according to a report from the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development.

That’s just the start: The number swells each year, topping out at $2.4 billion by 2029.

While San Francisco is still working on its “housing element” — a housing production plan every California city is required to complete every eight years — city planners face a daunting task: how to create 82,000 new homes in the eight years from 2023 to 2030, including 32,000 that are affordable to very-low-income and low-income families. The housing requirements assigned to every city are known as Regional Housing Needs Allocation, or RHNA.

The looming affordable housing funding gap was the topic of a hearing Thursday at the Board of Supervisors Government Audit and Oversight Committee.

At the hearing, Committee Chairman Dean Preston questioned whether the city was doing enough to prioritize homes for working-class residents in a city where under 20% can afford market-rate rents — which reach into several thousand a month.

“What is clear is the existing strategies are not going to get us there,” he said. “In the best-case scenario, with traditional approaches, we chip away toward our goals but we certainly don’t get anywhere near them. New tools are needed.”

While San Francisco produces more affordable housing than any other city of comparable size — it currently has 11,000 units in its pipeline — its production of market-rate housing far outpaced its affordable-housing output in the current eight-year RHNA cycle. The city built 48% of its affordable goal and 151% of its market-rate goal.

The city is currently facing stern headwinds on both the creation of market-rate and low-income housing.

The Sister Lillian Murphy Community in San Francisco is an example of affordable housing coming online in San Francisco in 2022. The city says it does not have enough funding to push toward its affordable housing goals.

Samantha Laurey/The Chronicle

On the market-rate side, development applications have slowed to a trickle as for-profit builders have postponed or canceled projects because they don’t work financially. Market-rate projects generated $208 million for affordable-housing fees in the last five years.

On the subsidized side, soaring construction costs have added millions of dollars in costs to many projects, which puts San Francisco at a disadvantage when competing against other California cities for affordable-housing tax credits and bonds.

Lydia Ely, deputy director of the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, said that the city has little or no money beyond the projects that are already in the planning or construction phase.

She said that San Francisco is “disadvantaged” by a 2020 change in the way that California divides tax credits and affordable-housing bonds, the two programs that pay for most low-income housing construction. Before 2020, San Francisco could count on receiving the OK for all of its bond and tax credit applications. Under the new system, the city is losing out to cities that have far cheaper construction costs and land value.

She called the changes “the biggest threat to our production.”

“Those sources used to come as a right, over the counter,” said Ely. “Right now they are highly competitive and oversubscribed.

“Even though we are robustly pursuing all the local sources, we cannot expect those sources to grow significantly; it’s just too volatile, and the unknowns are too unknown,” she said. “Beyond the fact that we need more, we can’t anticipate what those sources will be.”

Ely said construction costs have risen 25% in the past two years, and every project that “is starting construction is needing a couple of million more” from the city.

Preston used the hearing to advocate that the city earmark all of the money generated by Proposition I for affordable housing. Prop. I, which Preston sponsored and which voters approved in 2020, increased transfer tax on properties over $10 million.

Preston said that voters “went and created $170 million of annual revenue general fund for affordable housing, yet we seem to be in a fight every year.”

Jeff Cretan, a spokesman for Mayor London Breed, said Prop. I is a general fund tax “not dedicated to any specific purpose by the voters.”

“The mayor and the board of supervisors make decisions how to allocate the general fund during the budget process, which kicks off in two weeks when the mayor introduces her proposed budget,” he said.

JK Dineen is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jdineen@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @sfjkdineen

The post San Francisco faces $1.3 billion shortfall in quest to fulfill state housing targets appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

A heated community meeting—is there any other kind?—kicks off. A developer has bought a 1,200-square-foot single-family home in a transit-rich, highly desirable location and plans to turn it into a 19-unit building. Dozens of neighbors have banded together in opposition. The building would turn “day into night” with its shadows, they tell city officials, with one person worrying about the threat of seasonal affective disorder. It would “discriminate against families,” as the units are so small. They brand it a “dorm.” They ask why not four stories instead of six; why not six units instead of 19? “Please do not beach this enormous whale in our neighborhood,” one neighbor begs.

These kinds of municipal debates happen all the time in localities across the country and mostly go unnoticed. But in San Francisco, someone is watching how the city gets built, or not, and making sure people hear about it. He does so for his own edification. He is not getting paid. He is just a guy with a computer and a bit of spare time. For the past four years, Robert Fruchtman has monitored and live-tweeted dozens and dozens—and dozens and dozens—of community meetings, including this one, about a proposed development near Dolores Park. “People just have no idea what goes on with these hearings, most of the time,” he told me. “You don’t hear about it except for snippets that occasionally make the news.”

No wonder. Not everyone enjoys watching neighbors squabble over the positioning of a bike lane or bureaucrats ensure that a building has the right paperwork to add an annex. “No one’s ever going to have a land-use-and-transportation-committee-watching party the same way people have an Oscars-watching party,” Fruchtman said. But what happens at these sorts of meetings is important. San Francisco, like many cities in California, makes many property-development decisions subject to public debate. Builders, business owners, and homeowners tend not to have the right to do what they want with their properties; instead, they have to ask city officials and their neighbors to approve their plans. This policy ensures that residents of lovely, tree-lined blocks do not get surprised by single-family homes getting razed and 19-unit buildings going up. It also is how, brick by brick, block by block, San Francisco has constructed one of the worst housing crises on Earth: Such citizen actions lead to not just the so-called preservation of neighborhood character but also sky-high rents and mortgages, worker shortages, displacement, gentrification, and climate-wrecking suburbanization.

Annie Lowrey: NIMBYism has reached its apotheosis

Fruchtman has, for years, documented this process in real time, making it easier for community activists, politicians, and journalists to notice and get involved. Can the city move forward with affordable housing at 730 Stanyan Street (delayed, but yes) or permanent supportive housing at 1800 Sutter Street (no)? How about a tiny-home village at 33 Gough Street? (Finally opened last month.) Can a developer put homes at 1846 Grove Street? (Delayed for years.) Can a homeowner build an honest-to-goodness mansion at 376 Hill Street? (Yes.)

“I look for cases where San Francisco’s progressive ideals don’t match up,” Fruchtman, who is a software engineer and volunteers with the local YIMBY group, told me. One time, he called in to a planning commission meeting to hear a debate on proposed changes to an apartment building in his neighborhood. “I guess it was lucky I logged in a little early,” he said. An established ice-cream shop, Garden Creamery, was attempting to prevent a prospective soft-serve shop, Matcha n’ More, from moving onto the same block, using a provision of a state law designed to protect against environmental degradation.

Ensue public comment! The first caller asked why the question of whether two dessert shops could operate on the same block was an issue for the planning commission in the first place. The 64th caller was more blunt. “I support the new business,” the person said, per Fruchtman, whose tweet thread on the meeting went viral. “The whole process is dumb as shit.” Still, Jason Yu of Matcha n’ More ended up spending $200,000 navigating San Francisco’s bureaucratic processes. After two years of procedural wrangling, he gave up.

This kind of kudzu does not just prevent the construction of new homes or the opening of new businesses; it also has a profound effect on the size and shape of the city and on the carbon emissions of the state. Regulatory bottlenecks increase the cost of building and drag out project timelines. What would cost $250,000 to build in rural Texas might cost $750,000 in San Francisco; what would take weeks to get approval for in Idaho might take years here. Many reasonable projects never get built at all, driving up housing costs, pushing families into homelessness, sapping the city of new businesses, and squeezing Bay Area residents out to the far-flung suburbs.

In San Francisco, “Instead of bright-line rules, where a developer knows I’m allowed to build this here, everything is a negotiation and every project proceeds on an ad hoc basis,” Jenny Schuetz, a housing economist at the Brookings Institution , told me. Small-d democratic-citizen participation has led to profoundly regressive outcomes.

That small-d democratic participation is not very democratic, for one. The kinds of people with the time and energy to show up at community meetings are disproportionately white, disproportionately old, and disproportionately wealthy, as my colleague Jerusalem Demsas has noted. They also tend to be conservative, in the sense that they like things the way they are and do not want to see 19-unit buildings going up in their neighborhoods. “Even in highly diverse communities, development meetings are dominated by whites who oppose new housing, potentially distorting the housing supply to their benefit,” one study found.

Jerusalem Demsas: Community input is bad, actually

The meetings tend to be formal. But people’s participation tends to be, well, a little unmeasured, Fruchtman told me. “Hysteria,” he said. “There’s often a sense of hysteria at these meetings that is not reflected in what you read in the press.” He recalled the time that a person described his fight to prevent the construction of a navigation center for homeless services as a kind of personal “Little Bighorn.” Or the time another person objected to the conversion of a parking lot on the grounds that it would increase traffic. Such rhetoric is “intellectual malpractice,” Fruchtman added. And the intemperate rants of the people who show up matter, as city officials hear such impassioned claims mostly from a privileged class trying to keep things as they are.

The flip side of so few participating so much is that everyone else participates so little. Who can blame them? So Fruchtman shows up. Trying to rent here was what got him interested in YIMBY politics in the first place, he told me. “I had dropped out of graduate school and got a job offer out in Silicon Valley,” he said. “I was trying to line up an apartment before I got to the city. And I realized how bad it was. Besides the sticker shock, it was the fact that anytime I emailed anybody or called anybody about an apartment, every single time, they said it was taken. Trying to get an apartment a month out or even a week out was impossible.”

He did find a place, in time. And part of his motivation for going to or calling into or watching so many public meetings is that he came to San Francisco to find himself and his community—and it pains him that others might not be able to. “One reason I wanted to move to San Francisco specifically is, as a gay man, it really always stood out to me my whole life as a place where I could be accepted,” he told me.

The NIMBY tide is finally beginning to recede in the state and the city, thanks to activism and the rise of YIMBY elected officials. A flurry of bills have streamlined the permitting process and exempted more projects from discretionary review, as well as allowing property owners to build structures like casitas by right. Still, the state is short of millions of housing units, and the thirst for apartments and homes in San Francisco feels unquenchable.

A bunch of 19-unit buildings are what the city needs, if not what its residents want. At that meeting, after they made their complaints, the builder responded that their proposed changes would make the project financially infeasible. A city supervisor worried that the tall building would “blow through” the objections of the community. The board gave a kind of go ahead for the developer to build. Now the project is tied up in litigation. It may never break ground.

The post One Man’s Quest to Repair San Francisco’s Housing Disaster appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

Here was the plan being described to him, as far as Supervisor Matt Haney could parse it: In late 2018, San Francisco had embarked on a quest to design its own garbage can — from scratch. By the summer of 2021, two-and-a-half years later, an industrial design firm had completed the conceptual drawings for three models. In July, the Board of Supervisors would vote on spending $427,500, much of it to manufacture and test five prototypes of each model. The price tag for each prototype was estimated at between $12,000 to $20,000 apiece.

That was, in fact, the plan. So, Haney was confused. 

“I realize we’re pretty far down the path here already,” he said at a Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee meeting July 21. “But why did we choose this path to begin with? And why are we still doing this rather than putting out a bunch of different types of cans that already are produced, that are much cheaper, that are already performing well … in some other place … and then making a decision based on this? This is a very expensive, much longer, uncertain process that we’ve chosen.”

The Public Works department had an answer: Those other cans? Not sexy enough.  

San Francisco is “obviously very unique, and we weren’t happy with the look of those cans,” said then-interim Director Alaric Degrafinried, referring to the aesthetics of the off-the-shelf models. 

Some of the existing cans — the ones that cost much, much less than our prototypes and have performed ably elsewhere — may fulfill the actual, functional requirements of a trash can. But, again: Not sexy enough.    

They may not “necessarily be as pretty and as pleasing to the eye as the cans that are being designed for us right now,” Degrafinried said.

Six days later, Haney again questioned the process. “It was a decision that was made by the former DPW (Public Works) director” — accused federal criminal Mohammed Nuru — “and was a decision that the current DPW leadership is not even fully aware of in terms of why that decision was made.”

Still, Haney, like all his colleagues on the Board of Supervisors, approved the plan to spend $427,500. We’re moving forward in the next stage: prototype manufacturing and testing of the cans we opted to redesign from scratch. Why? 

This is a story examining San Francisco’s bizarre pursuit of the perfect trash can: the time it has taken, the stunning amount of money being spent, and the baffling lack of curiosity on the part of many of San Francisco’s elected representatives and media observers in questioning the proposal by San Francisco Public Works to spend $427,500 to produce 15 prototype cans. Ultimately, San Francisco will spend millions of dollars to custom-produce 3,300 public trash for its use. 

How many millions remains an open question: The city’s initial request for proposals, in 2018, envisioned a top price tag of less than $1,000 a can. But that price has at least doubled, and could now hit as high as $5,000 a can, Public Works administrators indicated in the discussions on the process. They have since stepped back from those statements, but really, no one knows how much the cans will ultimately cost. 

What we have are estimates. San Francisco will spend from $6.6 million to $16.5 million to replace the city’s existing public trash cans, and those are estimates made at the present moment. Who knows what things will cost when the manufacturing actually commences. 

“The idea that San Francisco is so unique that we need a separate trash can from anyone deployed in any city around the world is preposterous,” Haney told Mission Local this month. “It’s something that reflects a broader and deeper brokenness of city government and the services it provides.”

Why did San Francisco decide to design its own trash can? 

The final decision on San Francisco designing its own trash can was made in 2018 by then-Public Works boss Nuru. While staff contributed input, Public Works spokeswoman Beth Rubenstein said, the last word went to Nuru, who, in January 2020, was arrested by the FBI and charged by the Department of Justice with fraud and lying to a federal agent. ​If convicted, he faces up to 25 years for various schemes, gifts and bribes; Nuru was the first domino to fall in San Francisco’s ongoing federal corruption scourge. 

While we cannot know what was in Nuru’s head in 2018, the fraud charges and litany of horrific details revealed by local and federal probing since January 2020 might have suggested to supervisors in 2021 that they take a closer look at the $427,500 they were being asked to spend at Nuru’s insistence. 

Already, they knew, Nuru had been responsible for a $5.2 million contract to buy the earlier, much-maligned “Renaissance” trash cans from Alternative Choice. That company, intriguingly, is under the aegis of former permit expediter and contractor Walter Wong, a longtime Nuru running buddy who has since pleaded guilty to federal fraud and money-laundering charges, and has cooperated with the feds to take down other San Francisco city officials. 

Other than Haney, however, no one appeared inclined to buck a decision Nuru had made. And, while Haney raised salient questions during hearings, he never pressed hard for answers — and, like his 10 colleagues, eventually voted to stay the course.   

Rubenstein from Public Works explained that in 2018, the department could not find a trash can that fulfilled an exacting list of features: a rolling inside can for easy emptying, a sensor to alert workers when a can is full, durability to withstand street life, and be tamper-proof. 

And “obviously,” she added, “they needed to be aesthetic.”

There were no off-the-shelf models that met most of those requirements, except for the Bigbelly. But those, at a cost of about $3,900 a can, were deemed too expensive. Nor were they particularly attractive, she said. The PEL can also fit most of the requirements. It costs $6,400, Rubenstein wrote in an email. At present, she wrote, these were “the only two off-the-shelf cans that we’ve found that come close to satisfying most of our programmatic requirements.”

Bigbelly cans are now used by several San Francisco Community Benefit Districts, which impose a local tax on businesses to cover special services, such as extra trash collection and street cleaning. The Tenderloin Community Benefit District, for example, installed 68 Bigbelly cans in a 26-block area. It rents them for $150 a month, or $1,800 a year each.    

Trash talk

Are we comfortable with a trash can that is effective, but it may not look as attractive on the streets?

Then-Interim Public Works Director Alaric Degrafinried

In many ways, replaying the meetings in which the city’s elected representatives discuss the decision to move forward on a $427,500 expenditure that will lead to a potentially far greater expenditure was reminiscent of Joan Didion’s scathing 1996 review of Bob Woodward’s style of portraying political events through the eyes of the main actors. She refers to Woodward as a stenographer rather than an inquisitive journalist. “These are books in which measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent,” she wrote in the New York Review of Books. The same could be said of the discussions at the July 21 Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance committee and the July 27 full board meeting. 

With the exception of Haney, who received virtually no assistance from his colleagues, the supervisors focused on the existing cans, blaming them for the city’s trash problems. In both meetings, the green-hued, so-called Renaissance cans purchased from the Wong-associated company took on an anthropomorphic role of a wayward resident: unattractive, prone to create trash and attract dumping, and requiring far too much upkeep. 

San Francisco’s existing trash cans. Photo by Lydia Chávez.

At the July 21 meeting, District 11 supervisor Ahsha Safaí lamented that the current trash cans “blended so much into the landscape that at some point, in many ways, they just weren’t necessarily something that people respected and people used in the right way.” 

“They often make areas more dirty, not less,” added District 9 Supervisor Hllary Ronen at the full board meeting. 

Residents, then, were not to blame for dumping; the current trash cans caused dumping. Public Works and Recology were not responsible for failing to pick up trash, the trash cans created trash. 

Only District 7 Supervisor Myrna Melgar suggested that other factors might be in play. “ I just hope that we also pay attention to the picking up of the trash in those new, more attractive and better-designed cans,” she said. 

In the end, Degrafinried lamented, “we” have to make a decision. The “we,” in this case, appeared to be the supervisors. The decision, from Degrafinreid’s point of view, was this: “Are we comfortable with a trash can that is effective, but it may not look as attractive on the streets?”

His assertions might have elicited further questions from our elected supes on the alternatives; on what Public Works had learned in the nearly three-year process about the other available cans, such as prices and consumer satisfaction in the cities that used them; on whether San Francisco’s exacting requirements were simply too demanding; on how the initial $1,000 cost constraints in the RFP had spiraled out of control. 

But no one pressed Degrafinried.

Haney’s challenges also opened a door to potential follow-up questions: “One of the designs, it’s almost identical to a style that is in Washington, D.C.,” he offered at that same meeting. “So it’s just a surprise to me that there weren’t other ways to do this.”

Neither Safaí nor Gordon Mar, his colleagues on the Budget and Finance committee, pursued mention of the D.C. can (it costs $987, but has no sensor) or the other alternatives, including New York’s  $632 can, Sacramento’s $1,300 can; or the Los Angeles model at $449.51. Again, San Francisco simply wanted more than any of these other models offered. 

Instead of probing, Safaí spent most of his time making it clear that he wanted the prototypes tested in his district. 

“They look sleek, clean, (and it) looks like they’re easy to service and maintain and monitor,” Safaí said of the cans that are, indeed, sleek and appear to check nearly all the boxes of what Public Works wanted. “Appear,” however, is the operative word. They are only conceptual designs. As of yet, not even engineering drawings exist. 

The three models proposed by the Institute for Creative Integration that will be tested in the coming months. Photo by Lydia Chávez.

Nonetheless, Safaí noted that, in his district, “We’re ready to accept them.”

On July 27, the $427,500 expenditure to move forward with San Francisco’s quest to design the ultimate trash can from scratch was approved by all 11 supervisors. 

In explaining his “yes” vote, Haney wrote: “I can’t accept any further delays. This needs to get done. Voting down the expenditure altogether, which is money that had already long been set aside for this purpose, would have just set us back, possibly for years. The main concern I’ve had is not only with the cost, it’s how bungled and long of a process this has been.” 

And, now, that process continues. 

The supes moved on to other matters. The press, which enjoyed high-trafficking stories about the city’s inability to proffer a functioning trash can that costs less than a Yugo, moved on, too.

Is it now time to consider alternatives? 

At this point, the city has spent nearly three years and paid out $143,886 to the Oakland-based Institute for Creative Integration, according to its contract with Public Works. While not exactly chump change, it is still only a fraction of the $427,500 the city will now spend to manufacture the 15 test cans and the millions it will spend in mass-producing what Haney referred to this summer as a “designer” can.

But, as of last week, no contract has been signed between APROE and the city for the next stage. So perhaps it’s not too late to raise a few questions. For example: How did a trash can become so costly? 

The 2018 Request for Proposals (RFP) included a stipulation around costs, limiting bidders to “a combined unit cost of less than $1,000 each.”

Design criteria. San Francisco Public Works, RFP, Nov. 21, 2018, Design for SF’s new public trash receptacles.

The Institute for Creative Integration, one of two companies to compete for the project and the ultimate winner, reaffirmed that per-unit cost of $1,000 per can. That limit, however, never came up at any of the July meetings where supervisors considered the cans.  

By then, the predicted price of the mass-produced can had skyrocketed. Mission Local and The San Francisco Chronicle reported Public Works’ estimated cost of the 3,000-plus cans at $2,000 to $3,000 apiece, but Public Works acknowledged in hearings that it could be much higher. 

Haney asked the Public Works representatives at the Budget and Finance committee meeting on July 21 if the ultimate cost of the new design would be comparable to the off-the-shelf models the city planned to test in the $3,000 to $5,000 range.

The department would “come up with something that would be comparable to the cost of an off-the-shelf can, maybe slightly higher,” said Lisa Zhou, the Public Works project leader. “We don’t know. But if it were, it wouldn’t be significantly higher.“

Zhou never explained how the cost had jumped from $1,000 to potentially upwards of $5,000. No one ever asked about this, either. 

In a subsequent private meeting, Haney said, Public Works changed the estimate. “They told me that, actually, they believe that these can potentially be equal to or even cheaper than the off-the-shelf models,” Haney said when asked about the discrepancy. “I said, that’s not what you said in the committee. And they said, well, actually, that was wrong. We do believe it will be cheaper.” 

We don’t know what that belief is based on. 

Rubenstein did not recall such a high estimate and wrote in an email that the department aimed “for the lower number of $2k but need to give a range as there are many variables whose cost we cannot yet predict (for instance, design details, material cost, supply chain issues and manufacturing location which impacts shipping cost).” 

Shin Sano, the CEO of the Institute for Creative Integration, which has designed the three prototypes, thanked me for my insistent interest in their process but declined to answer a list of questions. Instead, he said, he would forward the questions to Public Works. 

Tom Dair, the creative director who submitted the proposal, never responded to an email asking for an interview. 

“Everyone was a little stumped” 

Steve Thompson, director of marketing and sales for BearSaver and Securr, which sells BearSaver trash bins, represented one of the seven companies that attended the 2018 pre-proposal conference meeting with San Francisco Public Works. 

Thompson’s company has sold some 1,000 trash bins to San Francisco parks, but designing a from-scratch concept model is not something that Securr does, he said. In his 22 years in the business, he added, he had not heard of a city designing a model from the ground up. 

A representative from another company, who declined to speak on the record, said “everyone was a little stumped” by Public Works’ decision to design its own model. He did not attend the meeting because, he said, his company would never do that; they make their own designs for sale. 

“There are companies who have done the research and groundwork … companies that have spent millions of dollars on how to build a smart trash can that makes sense. So the city is going back into the R&D portion of it and starting from scratch. Honestly, I don’t really know.”

Branch Creative, a San Francisco-based industrial design studio owned by Josh Morenstein and Nick Cronan, attended the pre-bid conference meeting in November, 2018. Earlier that year, the company had been one of two finalists for a different city project that involved designing new public toilets, and had lost out to another firm.

After that happened, Rubenstein, who had been the Public Works administrator on the toilet project, reached out in August, 2018, to see if Branch Creative would be interested in submitting a proposal to design a new trash can for the city, Morenstein said.  

They were. “We just wanted to do the project. We were like, ‘this sounds really cool,’” said Morenstein. “You know, I grew up in the city. My family had two long-term businesses here, we wanted to design something for the city.”  (Morenstein’s father owned a foundry in the city, and his family owned Just Desserts.)

So they drafted a proposal that went back and forth between Branch Creative and Public Works, according to Morenstein, who scrolled through old emails as we spoke. On Oct. 9, 2018, Morenstein said, they got an email asking if there was an expiration date on their $60,000 fee proposal. 

“We said ‘no,’” Morenstein said. Then, on Oct. 11, they got another email saying that Branch’s $60,000 design proposal was actually one of the strongest, but that  “upper management has decided to revamp the process and solicit proposals through a formal process,” Morenstein said. 

Morenstein and his partner were stunned and felt “dicked” around because they assumed they were close to a deal. Nevertheless, they attended the November meeting, which Morenstein described as confusing. 

“There were a lot of open issues,” Morenstein said, explaining that Lisa Zhou, the administrator, was unclear on what the city wanted and there were too many open-ended questions, such as whether the inside can was to be off-the-shelf or also a new design. (Ultimately, the three conceptual designs used both original designs for the inside can and off-the-shelf models.) 

Instead of submitting a proposal again, Branch Creative opted out.

And, like the price of the trash can, the price of the contract also jumped. 

Public Works’ RFP set a price tag of $85,000. The only other bid of the seven companies that attended the pre-bid meeting was submitted by Yamamar Architecture. Its price was $79,048. Yamamar could not be reached for comment. Its phone number no longer works and an email to Karen Mar, who submitted the proposal, bounced back. 

The Institute for Creative Integration’s winning bid was $143,886, more than double the amount Branch Creative had proposed in a pre-bid offer, and 69 percent higher than the initial price suggested by the RFP. 

San Francisco Public Works, RFP, Nov. 21, 2018, Design for SF’s New Public Trash Receptacles. Page 1.

Other models, other price points

Thompson from Securr still hopes that San Francisco tests one of his off-the-shelf models. It does not have a sensor system, but the city could contract with another company to do that.

Screenshots of the can Thompson would like to see the city test. It has no sensor. It sells for $1,600.

However, he warned, “simplicity is the key to a successful (trash) can.”  

He was unenthusiastic about the proposed prototypes using stainless steel. 

“They are just going to get beat up,” he said. “It’s a material that you might use for inside a hotel, but not on a city street.”

He understands, however, the lure of stainless steel. It’s attractive.

Jenny Frankel, the senior planning and development strategies manager for Seattle Public Utilities, just purchased 150 cans from Thompson. She warned at the start of our conversation that she could talk trash all day. 

The cans she purchased have no sensor, but she loves the way they can be lifted and dumped by the trucks and the wrap-around art feature. In her experience,  “There is not such a thing as a perfect public litter can,” Frankel said. “Different neighborhoods experience different issues. One can may work really well in one area and will do very poorly in another area.”

She’s hopeful about the 35-gallon trash cans Seattle has purchased.  She would have liked them to be less expensive, but steel costs went up and the art added to the final price. Each can costs $1,400.

Portland, another city Haney mentioned in the hearings, also purchased cans in 2020 from Thompson. They meet all of San Francisco’s requirements except the sensor. “We are considering adding them to some of our containers to prevent missed collections,” Quintin Bauer, public trash collection program manager for Seattle. But Portland is still assessing different solutions. 

No can is perfect, he cautioned. Cans require maintenance, cleaning and graffiti removal. Is it tamper proof? No can is, but, he wrote, “the locks are quick and simple to repair.” He likes the stainless steel, which, he wrote, “is very strong, but can be damaged if they are hit by cars at high speed.”

Portland pays $1,417 for the 35-gallon can and $1,851 for the 65-gallon can.  

Thompson would like San Francisco to try a similar can. He’s enthusiastic about the art wrap. Sensors could be added by another company. The one he has in mind for San Francisco costs around $1,600, including shipping, he says enthusiastically.   

It’s unclear if his can is on San Francisco’s list. Despite nearly three years of work, it’s unclear if San Francisco has a list. 

The post Rubbish odyssey: San Francisco’s weird, pricey quest for the right trash can appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.