Will San Francisco Finish Anti-Tenant Land Use Legal guidelines?
Expanding Power Beyond “Landed Gentry”
San Francisco prides itself on protecting tenants. But empowering renters is another matter.
Few renters sit on key city policy making bodies. Tenants are rarely appointed to the Planning Commission and Board of Appeal. This is true despite both bodies deciding land use cases directly impacting renters’ lives. Pro-tenant San Francisco even denies tenants the right to file signatures for appealing conditional use approvals, reserving that power to property owners.
This latter discrimination is about to change.
Supervisor Myrna Melgar, backed by Supervisors Aaron Peskin, Shamann Walton, Dean Preston, and Hillary Ronen, is moving to equalize tenant appeal powers. As her press release puts it, “Excluding the majority of San Francisco’s population harkens back to the days of only the ‘landed gentry’ having voting rights. Supervisor Melgar’s legislation adds leaseholding commercial and residential tenants to the list of allowable signatories to restore basic fairness.”
This reform is long overdue. Absentee property owners should not get more say about neighborhood land use issues than longtime tenants in the community.
I know what some are thinking—why give more people the right to appeal housing approvals? Isn’t the appeal system already broken?
But so long as San Francisco allows such appeals it should not discriminate on the basis of wealth and class in the power to file.. Tenants deserve equal rights.
San Francisco and other cities that promote “diversity” and “inclusion” must do a better job extending these principles to tenants. Tenants deserve equal rights to appeal land use decisions and far more representation on key city commissions than they have ever gotten.
Disempowering tenants
Melgar’s measure was introduced a day after a virtually all-homeowner California Assembly defeated AB 854, which stopped speculator evictions under the Ellis Act. The measure fell short for many reasons, but it doesn’t help that there are far more landlords than tenants among California Assembly Democrats.
Almost all state legislators are homeowners. Renters are a rarity despite their large numbers across the state. Even in majority tenant San Francisco, only two of eleven supervisors are tenants (Haney and Walton).
Why are renters so rare on key San Francisco land use commissions? Why does a “pro-tenant” city give tenants less power over land use decisions than it grants absentee landlords?
A lot has to do with a long legacy of San Francisco treating tenants as undeserving of equal representation and rights. After all, discrimination against tenants in land use matters is nothing new.
In 1987 I authored a law requiring public sign posting of notices of applications for renovations to buildings over four units. I did so to protect tenants living in buildings whose owner planned major renovations that could displace them. Prior to our law many tenants first learned that a renovation was planned for their building when they got an eviction notice. By then it was too late to appeal the permits; stopping the eviction once landlords had “all of the necessary permits” became an uphill fight.
Sponsored by Supervisor Nancy Walker (one of only two strong pro-tenant supervisors of the 1980’s, along with Harry Britt), our sign posting law passed. It made a huge difference.
Tenant notification about renovation plans often prevented landlords from carrying out their displacement strategy. Once the tenant got notice, attorneys from my office (the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, publisher of Beyond Chron) would request formal notification of permit issuance from the Central Permit Bureau. We could then file our appeal within the then short ten day period for challenging these permits at the Board of Appeal.
My colleagues and I spent a lot of evenings down at the Board of Appeals after the sign posting law passed. We won so many cases that fewer landlords used questionable renovations as an eviction strategy.
The Tenant Perspective
Homeowners can also appreciate the renter experience and support tenant protections. But the lack of tenant representation on land use and transit bodies is inexcusable in 2022. When I wrote a charter amendment in 1994 creating a Building Inspection Commission (Prop G) I mandated a tenant seat. It may be the only body that has this representation requirement other than the Rent Board, which includes equal numbers of tenants and landlords despite there being far more of the former in San Francisco.
San Francisco should mandate tenant seats on the Planning Commission and Board of Appeal. Maybe Melgar’s measure will awaken the Board to this need.
I was reminded during our long struggle to pass AB 854 (Ellis Act reform) how many elected officials across the state do not understand the tenant experience. It’s a big problem. Cities should at least do their part by finally giving tenants the commission representation and equal legal powers they have long deserved.
Randy Shaw
Randy Shaw is the Editor of Beyond Chron and the Director of San Francisco’s Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which publishes Beyond Chron. Shaw’s latest book is Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America. He is the author of four prior books on activism, including The Activist’s Handbook: Winning Social Change in the 21st Century, and Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century. He is also the author of The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco
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