The Long Reach of San Francisco’s Housing Crisis
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From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal. Scratch in an urban problem in San Francisco and you'll find one issue that underlies almost all of them. The city's intractable housing crisis. A new documentary, Fault Lines, on Apple TV follows three storylines connected to the lack of housing.

a homeless family's plight, a Sunset Neighborhood group's attempt to block an affordable housing project, and two ugly competing housing measure campaigns. We talk about the West Side, what stops building, and the nature of the housing crisis. That's all coming up next, right after this news.

Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Today we're talking about Fault Lines, a new documentary out on Apple TV from the local production house Portal A. Fault Lines is a multifaceted examination of the local housing crisis and the way that it's playing out in individual families, neighborhoods, and even political campaigns.

Kind of no matter where you are on the spectrum of the politics of housing, you will find something to love and something that rankles you in the positions that people in the film take. And that's probably a good thing. It's rare to find a venue where different positions are in conversation with each other. And if you listen to this show regularly, you know why. Here to talk with us about Fault Lines, we're joined by Nate Hodling.

Nate, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. Appreciate you having me. So we're, oh, actually, Annie, let's bring you in too. Annie Freiman, Director of Special Projects at Spur, also joins us. Welcome, Annie. Thank you. Let's do this. Nate, the documentary follows three storylines. Let's start with one that is kind of the battle we see in all kinds of cities, and it's to build an affordable housing development system.

This one is in the sunset. How many affordable housing developments have been built in the sunset? Well, this was the very first one. And yeah, I think we got in on the ground floor of that whole process and kind of saw why it was the one and only. Since then, there have been a few others that have popped up. But yeah, this was quite literally ground zero. Wow.

For people who are outside of San Francisco or just like live in a different part of the city, maybe just like describe the sunset and what's the housing stock out there? Yeah. So the sunset is an idyllic neighborhood. It is kind of the suburban meets urban. You know, you can see downtown in the distance, but the birds are chirping and it's

It is two stories all the way to the ocean. Really, the west side, because of zoning restrictions, has been, yeah, two stories, you know, for the last hundred years. So it's a very, it's a beautiful neighborhood. I also live out in the west side. I live in the Richmond and there's a lot to love about it. But if you start to dig into the history of kind of how that all came to be, it's a little more complicated. Yeah.

So what is the history of things, or at least trying to get things built out there? Was it basically like people didn't try and build apartment buildings? Or was it that they couldn't even because of zoning build apartment buildings? Like what happened out there? Yeah, I mean, I'll pass it off to Annie to talk a little more about the history of San Francisco and zoning regulations and kind of how the east and west side have been split. I'll pass it to you for that. All right, put me on the spot.

So I'm actually a resident of the Sunset, so I can speak firsthand as well as professionally. So the Sunset District, for a very long time, that geographic quadrant of the city was actually sand dunes. It was pretty like, you know, undevelopable based on sort of the norms of the time. Are we talking 19th century? 19th century into early 20th century. And essentially most of the Sunset was built in the post-World War II boom.

Right. So with all of the the norms and ideals of that time, the time we were building a lot of car infrastructure, we were building nice suburbs. There were a lot of young families that could afford to get a mortgage or get a loan or buy this brand new home and this brand new federal housing program. Exactly. Exactly. FHA, GI Bill, that kind of stuff. Exactly. And there are interestingly, there are throughout the sunset, a handful of scattered homes.

non-conforming apartment buildings, right? You'll walk through the sunset and every like

eight blocks, 10 blocks, you'll see this like out of nowhere, eight story apartment building that looks old, but it's an eight story apartment building. And you kind of wonder like, how did this happen? The Sunset District actually didn't have a lot of rigid zoning restrictions through the mid 20th century. And so although most of the homes were built as tract homes, right, it's the same exact box for several blocks in one direction, you could build taller. And

And so especially for workers, there are apartment buildings there. And then in the 1970s, the city enacted this down zoning. So they actually reduced or established height limits in most of those neighborhoods. And only in the 1970s did the Sunset District get a strict shutdown.

short height limit. And so there's actually a lot of those older buildings. I live in one, a rent-controlled 10-story old building in the sunset. And it's really interesting to look out the window and sort of see those layers of history and deduce how that has happened over time. That's so interesting. So let's talk about the specific project. It is Kitty Corner from one of these apartment buildings, right, at 26th and Irving. That's quite tall. What was the project? Who was trying to put it in, Nate?

Yeah. So the group that was there was the Mid-Sunset Neighborhood Association, and they were kind of entrenched against it. And the developer was TNDC. Tenderloin. Neighborhood Development. Neighborhood Development Corporation. Yeah. Yes. And so, you know, it was a pretty...

kind of classic in San Francisco divide between a developer that, you know, wants to accommodate the neighbors and, you know, some of their demands on the project. And the neighbors kept on ratcheting up sort of what they wanted. And at some point they kind of couldn't come together. And so it ended up spilling into the courts and the TNDC invoked SB-

Thirty thirty five. Thirty five. Yes. Burned into my mind. Yes. Right. That that allowed them to streamline and kind of get the project through. And in the film, we capture a lot of the committee meetings. We sat through many, many, many committee meetings around this project. And so for the first time, the developer kind of had the tools to to move forward with the project. Yeah.

What would have happened to this project, which is now nearing completion? I can see the crane from my window. I've been tracking it. What would the normal process have been like and what was the sort of post-35 process?

I see Nate looking at me. Yeah, yeah.

And before SB 35, the city did not have to follow their own rules when it came to what they did and did not have to approve. And so, for example, you could have a property that the city says on paper, you're allowed to build eight stories, 40 apartments, you know, within this shape and size.

And then when someone proposes a building that's eight stories and 40 apartments, the city could say, well, we didn't really mean it. We actually meant four stories and it has to look this way. And really, we only want six apartments. But if a neighbor doesn't want six apartments, they can veto it into oblivion and essentially make it zero apartments. And so if you're someone trying to build, it's actually exceptionally challenging to be able to predict what happens.

Am I allowed to do and what can I have any kind of guarantee the city will let me do? And this was actually something that is the normal standard mode of process in San Francisco for generations. And so when you were trying to if you ever wanted to build affordable housing on the west side,

You had to do a really, really serious risk assessment ahead of time, because if there was someone in the vicinity who didn't want affordable housing, they could block affordable housing. If the board of supervisors was feeling political pressure against that affordable housing, they could block the affordable housing. And so if you were someone who wanted to build, you're like, is this actually worth it?

Like, is it actually worth trying? - Yeah, 'cause what were the venues for that veto? They were essentially the Board of Supervisors or some other set of things. - Yeah. - The Planning Commission, Board of Appeals and-- - There's so many. So I would say the most commonly used one was a process that sort of exists within the planning department called discretionary review.

And that means that any person in San Francisco could file this paperwork. If you're a neighborhood association, you get to do it for free. And it says, hey, we don't like this. We don't necessarily have to have a good reason. Sometimes people did, some didn't. And that would essentially put everything on hold for

hold up the permit, block the permit until it could get scheduled at a planning commission hearing, which sometimes was six months out. And then depending on how the planning commission ruled, you could also appeal that up to the board of appeals or these different bodies. The board of supervisors also had a hand. So discretionary review was the most common one, but there was also, you know, I can get into all the jargon, but like conditional use permits, which get reviewed at the planning commission, there's CEQA, which is actually a body of state law that

Because San Francisco allows or allowed for all of those projects to be sort of subjective judgment of a public official, all of a sudden, the second you have subjective judgment, the state environmental law kicks in. And so you also had that opportunity.

world or body of law to sort of block things. I think discretionary review, though, was most commonly used because it was cheap. You didn't need a lawyer. The decks were stacked in your favor and you didn't have to live like in a certain vicinity. I could have filed a discretionary review to block an ex-boyfriend I was angry at six miles away across town if I wanted to. And that's how the process is designed. And we spoke a lot to the developer

the lead developer on the project who wouldn't be on camera in an interview for legal reasons but you know he had lines in his

on his face everyone for a different project that he had tried to get started in the sunset. And I think the thing that they spoke to again and again was just the uncertainty. It wasn't that it was the length of the timeline or the hurdles. It was that you didn't know at any phase what was going to happen. And so that just made each individual project untenable. I mean, you also spent a lot of time with the neighborhood group too. I mean, what were they saying their issues with the building were?

Yeah, so that was one thing that was really important to us. In what has become the kind of nimby-yimby fight, it often has felt to me like the groups are...

yelling at each other from thousands of miles away and are not really looking for common ground. And as a result, the issue is becoming more polarized. So we really wanted to dive into that group and understand them just as we...

understood the unhoused family looking for permanent supportive housing and kind of give them a chance to make their case and sort of walk a mile in their shoes as well. So, yeah, it was a really interesting process. We spent in total two years with that group and

You know, when I tell you I've been to community meetings, when I tell you I've been to living room meetings, I've seen them all. And, you know, I think one thing we found is that there was a real diversity of people.

issues within that group. It wasn't a single, it wasn't just the toxins. It wasn't just the parking. It wasn't any one thing. But when they got put together, it kind of becomes like this knot that is impossible to untangle. We're talking about the documentary Fault Lines with Nate Hodling, the executive producer and director, and Annie Freiman from Spur. We'll be back with more right after the break.

Support for Forum comes from the University of San Francisco School of Management. Celebrating 100 years of partnership with the Bay Area business community, the USF School of Management connects students to the city's vibrant culture, hands-on internships, and a wealth of career opportunities. Where AI and sustainability are integrated into every facet of business education.

and where students bring innovation, ethics, and entrepreneurial leadership to a planet in need. The University of San Francisco School of Management. Change the world from here. Support for KQED Podcasts comes from Earthjustice. As a national legal nonprofit, Earthjustice has more than 200 full-time lawyers who fight for a healthy environment.

They wield the power of the law to protect people's health, preserve magnificent places and wildlife, and advance clean energy to combat climate change. Earthjustice fights in court because the Earth needs a good lawyer. Learn more about how you can get involved and become a supporter at earthjustice.org.

Welcome back to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. We're talking about the documentary Fault Lines. You can watch it on Apple TV. It really covers the Bay Area's affordable housing crisis. We're joined by director and executive producer Nate Hodling, also co-founder of Portal A, which is a production company here in town. Also joined by Annie Freiman, director of special projects at Spur.

We also want to hear from you. Do you feel like you have a voice in decisions that affect your neighborhood? Maybe you've been a part of one of these disputed projects on some side of it. How did that go for you? Give us a call. The number is 866-733-6786. That's

866-733-6786. You can email your comments and questions to forum at kqed.org. You can find us on social media, Blue Sky, Instagram, et cetera. We're KQED Forum. And of course, there is the Discord as well.

I want to talk a little bit about the sort of pressure that the board of supervisors can sometimes find themselves under. In this film, during the period in which it's taking place, it was Supervisor Gordon Marr. And you see him in multiple different community meetings kind of struggling with work.

how he's going to approach this neighborhood group. Tell us a little bit more about that, knowing now that he lost his reelection bid to Joel and Guardio, who's now also fighting off a recall bid. So what did you see about the kind of position that our sort of political leaders find themselves in when they're got a project like this in their district?

Yeah. One of the reasons I embarked on making this film is that just noticing that sometimes in these deep blue cities, which, which I love as, as holders of these progressive ideals, sometimes the ideals that we have and the outcomes that we want can be at odds with one another. And I think politicians often find themselves, um, in the Bay area in the middle of that, um,

You know, it's no longer cool to be NIMBY for sure. And everyone, a lot of people say they want affordable housing, including on the west side of the city. But when the rubber hits the road, it's not, you know...

that espouse a big urbanist vision like Ingardio, who, like you said, is in the middle of a recall election, sometimes pay the price for it. So Gordon Maher, in my mind, tried to split the baby a little bit and appeal to both sides. You'll see him kind of wriggling on some of the Zoom meetings during the pandemic. Like literally physically, in fact. It looked like he was about to throw up off screen. And...

I have some empathy for him because he is trying to please not even just two sides of his constituency, but often the same group that feels two different ways, if that makes sense. So, yeah, it's a very complex. I'm fascinated by their the slogan of the neighborhood group was opposed as proposed.

Because taken at face value, I think it's quite interesting. It makes sense to me that neighborhood groups would want to have a say in these things. On the other hand, it is really difficult, I think, to have a group committee of interested neighbors weigh in on the design of a project that is like...

They may or may not agree even on what should happen to it. From your perspective, Annie, and like what you've seen, how often are these neighborhood groups and developers able to find a middle ground where they do change the proposal and then say, okay,

It's changed over time. I would say that in the past, before a lot of these state law reforms, what we would see is that developers who build affordable housing would only really propose it on sites that were already pretty like

Right.

I remember talking to an affordable housing developer in California who does a lot of projects in San Francisco who said, "We budget eight years for approval because the only path to get through is to negotiate with the community and neighborhood. And even in the easiest areas, we need to be planning for up to eight years of negotiations, of appeals, of redesigns. We're paying for all those architects fees. We're paying for all of the cost of just this dragging on.

And we risk losing our financing for the affordable housing if it takes that long. And so one of the other reasons it was so challenging to build affordable housing in San Francisco is that the pots of money, particularly at the state level, they're also looking for bang for their buck. And it's actually not a very good bang for your buck. Right.

funding affordable housing in San Francisco because of that really long process. So like yes they would come to an agreement but the agreement would drag out the timing many times it would kill the project in the process which is something we don't necessarily always see and it would negotiate often down the heightened number of units which negotiates much higher up the price.

You know, one of the things that I found so interesting, you know, doing shows about this over the last few years is the sense that there's a generational gap and it shows up in this really specific way, which is around the word developers. Like, I feel like at a somewhere in this sort of age spectrum above that spectrum, above that that line, everybody just despises developers. And below that, most people are like neutral to fine developers.

And it's really interesting. Do you think that's a... It feels like there's some history there that just as someone who's 43, I don't totally understand that.

What do you think? - I would say that historically, if we go back to, for example, the Sunset District, a lot of those homes that were built post-war were built by frankly really small local builders. You could call them developers, but often they were general contractors, they ran a small firm with their brother, they lived in the neighborhood, and so they were not distant in this way where there was the same power politics that we think of today.

And over time, my analysis of this is that as we have made it harder and harder and harder to build,

The profession of building has had to get more and more and more and more professionalized and cutthroat. And so now if you want to be a builder in San Francisco, you need to have five different lawyers, three permit consultants, a huge redundant stack of equity and finance that's very distant from our community. And you are not necessarily someone who relates in a lot of cases to that neighborhood. It's very different if you're like, hey, my neighbor...

Fred or Susan is a contractor and they're building homes in our neighborhoods. That's how we used to do it in San Francisco and that is no longer the case. It's interesting. I had been thinking that maybe it was from that era in which we were building huge suburban tract developments and that people associated developers with the bulldozing basically of what people had seen as wild lands or open space and that it was kind of from that era of things.

and or that we do see that developers are major contributors to local political campaigns too, right? I mean, they are major funders of local politicians. And so they're, you know, my question has always been, and Nate, maybe you can talk about this in terms of, you know, Supervisor Maher or Joel Engardio, these different people, is the developers do contribute a lot of money politically, but they also seem to lose a lot of the time in the actual practice of trying to build buildings, you know? Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. I think it comes down to local control and just the way that our laws are written. And I think the deck has been stacked towards community groups. And like so many progressive values that have just kind of warped over time, I feel like it was the ideals and the principles behind that were just in a lot of ways. But yeah, now it's become very skewed. Yeah.

We sometimes say that, you know, if you want to get developers out of politics, you need to take the politics out of development. You know, we have a system that we have built through policy, through laws, through things have been reinforced over time that says in order to get something built, you got to play politics about it. And I think that is something that really turns people off when developers play the game that was handed to them. And I...

I think it's, you know, as someone who works on policy and sort of reimagining a better system in a better way, that's something that I always hold close is how can we take the politics out of development so that it's a lot more like when you need to get your license renewed at the DMV. You show up with your check, your ID, your forms, you stand in line. And on the other side, you know that it's predictable development.

that the rules are going to be applied the same to you, no matter who's on the other side of the desk. Whereas if you had to like be buddies with the person at the DMV to get your license renewed, you'd probably start playing very different games at the DMV. Um, Nate, I want you to talk about sort of the storyline in the, in the film that it's really about like the homeless families, people who, um, oftentimes working who can't afford, um,

a place in the city. You know, one listener writes, many, if not most people living on the streets need supportive housing, not just affordable housing. They're not equipped to function as expected in our society. Talk with someone who gets into permanent supportive housing. Tell us a little bit about his story and what he found trying to find housing in the city.

Yeah, Carlos Rojas grew up in the Mission. Literally like four blocks from here, I think, based on New York. Exactly, yes, Florida Street. And he is... We spent two years... This was the most difficult subject in the film to get right, and so we worked with a lot of amazing community groups to bring individuals that were interested in being profiled, and so we ended up with...

Carlos and his adorable son Andres. So funny. Star, star. Complete star. Yeah, he had a rider and yeah, he's on his way. And yeah, for me, Carlos's story is about someone who loves San Francisco even when it doesn't always love him back.

Uh, and a very, I think quintessential story. A lot of times the homeless story is talked about as people moving here or people trying to kind of leech services off the city. And Carlos is, is the opposite of that. Um, he's someone who was desperate to not be with, uh, in the services. And in fact, um, one of the heartbreaking moments of the film is when the fact that he was, um,

Working. Working and kind of like on the border of welfare and working that he didn't qualify for an opportunity he would have otherwise. So, yeah, we saw him navigate the...

morass of services and opportunities and struggle with that. But to me, it was less about how those services were offered and more just the math of the available housing units in the city and people that love the city to their bone and are not going to leave no matter what and where they end up. Yeah. Let's bring in a first caller here. Let's bring in Buck in San Francisco. Welcome, Buck.

Hi, great show. I hope this isn't too arcane. The voice that's never in these conversations about new affordable housing development are the people that actually need to live there. You tend to have primarily homeowners perceive their self-interest as stopping it. You have these, God bless them, nonprofit affordable housing developers that are trying to build it

and this is where the term I hope isn't too arcane, residential preference. What if everybody that lived within a mile of the housing that was being built, if they qualified by income, wouldn't be one of 10,000 people in a lottery. They'd be one of 200 people in a lottery. You'd have to adjust it for ethnicity. You couldn't have an all-white neighborhood have a residential preference just for white people. But I feel like it would shift things

the balance of power in these conversations and give the people that need the housing the most a direct say in whether it gets built and how many units get built. And if it's affordable, they'd have a self-interest in seeing as many affordable units built as possible. So if you two consider residential preference as a way out of this morass. Buck, this is such an incredible question.

About 10 years ago, the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco was asking themselves this exact question. And then Supervisor London Breed, so before she became mayor, she actually enacted the first, we call it neighborhood preference here in San Francisco. But Supervisor London Breed actually did pursue this neighborhood preference approach or policy.

There were some things they had to figure out with the federal government around fair housing, which is exactly the thing that you pointed out as a potential just complication in certain neighborhoods. But San Francisco actually does after getting that approved and sort of checked off by the bodies that be. We do have a neighborhood preference program for those units in San Francisco. And so I can't remember exactly what percentage it is, but a small or a reasonable percentage of.

of the affordable homes in one of these new developments is actually prioritized for people who are applying from the neighborhood. And the thing that I would say that unfortunately has not necessarily shifted the politics on that is that politics is about power. And

Mm-hmm.

But we haven't seen it make as much progress on shifting the politics of this because the folks that are chiming in are still the same people that have been chiming in for a while. Joshua in San Francisco. Welcome, Joshua. Hey there. Thanks for taking my call. So I really, really do enjoy this conversation, but I'm hoping and I wish that we could talk about it.

The fact that there's, according to the Chronicle, in 2003, there was 52,000 vacant units in San Francisco. So instead of talking about a lack of housing stock, it should be a conversation about a lack of affordability and the way that private equity plays into how apartment buildings are being gobbled up and that people can't afford to live in them. And I'll take my comment off the air. Sure. Thanks, Joshua. Have you looked into your research that's kind of the vacancy question? Yeah. And the thing that's tricky about vacancy is that the data is...

Yeah.

The one thing that I will say is particularly in the rental market in San Francisco, despite us knowing certain cases of property owners holding units vacant, San Francisco actually still has a lower vacancy rate. So the number of homes that are vacant of the overall housing stock, a lower vacancy rate than a healthy housing market.

And so even though we sometimes, you know, quote these giant numbers, it's actually still only a small percentage of the existing housing stock. And when you think about that practically, you're like, OK, if you're a renter, say that you're in your apartment for two years.

And then you move to a different apartment. When you move, you give your landlord notice. And then that unit is going to be vacant for a month or two because they're going to repaint. They might replace the refrigerator. They need to find a new tenant. They need to do a showing. And so of 24 months of tenancy. Hmm.

There might be two months of vacancy, and that's not really an example of abuse necessarily. That's the reasonable turnover. And so you do want some amount of vacancy rate so that when someone is in a transitional moment where they're looking for a home, there are vacant units available.

And so one thing that we do know is that by looking at the vacancy data in San Francisco and rental housing, despite us knowing that there are some property owners that are holding units vacant longer term for whatever reason, we do have a pretty low rate. And most indications show that it's the normal, healthy, if not tight turnover of units just from people moving into different stages of their life and different housing opportunities. Yeah.

I do want to talk about Airbnbs at some point, which some of the listeners want to talk about. But we're talking about the documentary Fault Lines and the Bay Area's affordable housing crisis. We're joined by Annie Freiman, director of special projects at Spur, and Nate Hodling, who's executive producer and direct co-director of Fault Lines.

Documentary, it's available on Apple TV. Of course, we're taking your calls as well. How much new housing do you think San Francisco should build? You can give us a call. The number is 866-733-6786. That's 866-733-6786. You can email your comments, your questions.

about the film or affordable housing to forum at kqed.org. You can find us on social media, Blue Sky, Instagram, et cetera, we're kqedforum. And there's the Discord as well. We'll be back with more right after the break. I'm Alexis Madrigal.

Support for Forum comes from the University of San Francisco School of Management. Celebrating 100 years of partnership with the Bay Area business community, the USF School of Management connects students to the city's vibrant culture, hands-on internships, and a wealth of career opportunities. Where AI and sustainability are integrated into every facet of business education.

and where students bring innovation, ethics, and entrepreneurial leadership to a planet in need.

The University of San Francisco School of Management. Change the world from here. Support for KQED podcasts comes from Earthjustice. As a national legal nonprofit, Earthjustice has more than 200 full-time lawyers who fight for a healthy environment. They wield the power of the law to protect people's health, preserve magnificent places and wildlife, and advance clean energy to combat climate change. Earthjustice fights in court because the Earth needs a good lawyer.

Learn more about how you can get involved and become a supporter at earthjustice.org.

Welcome back to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. We're talking about the new film Fault Lines and Affordable Housing, joined by the executive producer and co-director of Fault Lines, Nate Hodling, as well as Annie Freiman, who's director of special projects at Spur. The last sort of thread of the film that I wanted to get to is this kind of battle over measures D and E.

which were sort of competing measures that each kind of purported to address affordable housing crisis. Like, how did you try? There's an amazing debate scene in the film in which the two leading advocates for those two measures go back and forth. Why did you want to include this particular fight in it?

Well, just from a dramatic perspective, a storytelling perspective, it provided a nice ticking clock for the film. And we were in election season, and it was just kind of interesting that this just dropped on the ballot and was really interesting to follow. For me, you know, kind of speaking to the Gordon, going back to the Gordon Marr piece and how we have...

And this to me was the perfect example.

the perfect story to kind of capture that. There were a lot of good intentions on both sides. You know, the Prop D story we followed was a guy named Todd David, who's a longtime activist in San Francisco. And the Prop E was supported by a lot of the unions and trades and

And so, you know, both sides on their face said they wanted to build affordable housing. But as so often happens in local politics, it gets bogged down. And there are some nefarious actors who, you know, maybe apply pressure and kind of push it in that direction. And yeah, in the end, prop doesn't.

D, most outside observers would say that Prop E sunk Prop D and kind of confused the voting public. Let's bring in Erica in San Francisco. Welcome, Erica. Hey, Erica, are you there?

Yes. Oh, go ahead. Yes, I'm here. Can you hear me? Yes, go ahead. So, yeah. Well, I think that I saw the movie at Glide Memorial, and I thought it was the housing story light, as though it could be almost like a promo corporate movie for, you know, for the housing industry, really. Yeah.

Sorry, Nate, but you left out the movie, you know, the real story. It's not the little people that are even the NIMBYs who are opposed to the NIMBYs. We have a large affordable housing activist, many organizations in San Francisco, fighting for affordable housing and wanting to put affordable housing first where the need is.

that it isn't Annie from Spur who is a Yimby supporter. They work in conjunction with each other. And this movie, at the end of it,

at the moment is being used as promo for the YIMBYs cross-country in all large metropolitan areas at the moment. YIMBYs are featuring it as recruitment into their organizations of trickle-down housing economic viewpoints. The more you build...

high-priced market rate, which is too high for your normal... But wasn't this an affordable housing building in the Sunset?

That's correct. This is also not the first one, but yes, it was. It was a great one. A large group of Sunset residents, including myself, supported it. And we went to every one of those meetings and we were out there supporting it against the NIMBYs and the YIMBYs who showed up in very small numbers. They don't really care about affordable housing.

They care about real estate development, and they are shows for it, and there's no question about that. And so somehow with all the research, Nate, that you did, you left out the affordable housing advocates that exist right in the same neighborhood. And around the corner from where I live, a beautiful place called the Shirley Chisholm

Community was built with 100% affordable housing for school employees. It didn't have one voice of opposition from the neighborhood. It was done beautifully in conjunction with the people that lived here, including me. And none of this was recorded. Let's give Nate a chance to address your concerns here, Erica. Thanks so much for the call and thanks for bringing your perspective in.

Yeah, I appreciate the feedback and the criticism. You know, we took this film all around the country, screened it in 30 different cities and got a lot of feedback on both sides. I think a lot of people thought it was very representative of what they were going through in Missoula, Montana or New York City or Miami. And a lot of people pushed back and said this wasn't the story that they saw as an activist or as a resident or as an outsider.

to me, that means that there are thousands of films you could make on the housing crisis and thousands of entry points. And I...

as a filmmaker, Yoav and I, my, my co-director of Yoav Atias, uh, we, we did our best to bring in different viewpoints through things like prop E and this affordable housing development and, and different voices. Um, so yeah, I, I would say I totally register what you're saying. We've, we've, we've gotten other criticisms from, from different angles on the film, but, uh, to me it's, it's,

when we start to shut down conversation by saying, oh, you're a Yimby, don't trust a word they're saying, or you're a NIMBY resident, you are the sole blocker of housing. That's when the whole thing breaks down. To me, that's the dialogue we've been having for the last 20-something years, as long as I've been part of this. So I made this film to invite debate, and I hope to

I hope that it spurs this kind of debate among people in the city. I appreciate the call, Erica. Thanks, Nate. Andy, I want to take this kind of YIMBY critique to you. Obviously, you've been... My read is you're part of that, of the movement to start building things and to create legislation around that. I think the most common critique, which is one that I actually...

take seriously is that they're building more things. The idea is that there'll be like filtering, right? That if even if you build like luxury places, which is not the story that's told in this film, but like, let's just take Erica's critique. You build luxury apartments that takes a set of people who would otherwise be moving into other housing. They move in there, which might open up, uh,

Other housing, cheaper housing down the ladder. People in the field call it filtering. People who are opposing this often call it trickle down housing. What's your what's your take on this?

So I'd say a few things. One is I think that is part, though not all, of the YIMBY hypothesis or approach. We do know that when there is a new building that pops up, people will move into it who can afford to live there. And often in new housing, those are people of higher incomes if it's a market rate building.

If that building did not exist, that person might live in an overcrowded housing situation, merging together three, four higher incomes, bidding up against people who may otherwise have previously been able to afford living in that neighborhood and competitively cannot keep up with three, four high income earning adults looking for the same apartment. And so I do think that there is a question of if we're adding high wage jobs, I do think that there is a case for building housing

even if it's at a higher price, we're also adding a lot of low wage jobs. And so having a lot of affordable housing, not just for those future folks, but people who are already here and living in not very dignified housing situations is an obligation we also have. And so one thing that I have seen and really worked firsthand on throughout this last, say, 10 years of housing reforms is

is actually I've been really heartened by the fact that the biggest beneficiaries of many of these policies and the loudest support we often hear is from the nonprofit affordable housing developers. It's actually not the market rate folks. Because if you have nimbyism against market rate housing, you're going to have quadruple nimbyism against low income housing. If you're going to have delays for market rate housing, if you're going to have financing issues for market rate housing, you're going to have quadruple financing issues.

for low-income housing. And so because those barriers are always already so much higher for affordable housing, we sometimes forget that even in a place like San Francisco, we do have that pushback against low-income residents joining a neighborhood or becoming more visible in a neighborhood. And so

You know, 2550 Irving, for example, which thank you so much, Erica, for supporting that as an adjacent neighbor. 2550 Irving was not going to be able to get built unless a YIMBY policy SB 35 was in place, which was able to get that housing approved.

We've seen housing approvals, particularly for low income housing, go down from eight years to 90 days. That saves money. That saves units. That does not empower the opposition who are working against folks like Erica. And so I do really want to bring back that, you know, Yimbyism and a lot of this pro-housing movement is about supporting housing at all.

at all income levels and for all phases of life because we have people of all income levels and all phases of life who are having housing challenges in San Francisco and many other cities. - I think the question for me has been, there's clearly been good politics to kind of laminate together affordable housing and middle market housing and so-called luxury housing and these other things.

I think the question is when we're looking at – I just read this book by Brian Goldstone called There's No Place for Us, which is about the working homeless in Atlanta. But of course there's a very, very similar situation here in the city. It's like for people who have an income that's, say, $15,000 a year or $20,000 a year, of which there are a lot of people even in the Bay Area.

This kind of housing that we're talking about doesn't really work, right? So it almost feels like there's kind of two solutions to this. You're going to need something that's much more like permanent supportive housing like we see in the film or public housing, social housing, one of these other things, right? Absolutely, yeah. I mean, I think that...

one of the, I would argue, false choices we have is that it has to be one or the other. We can do both at the same time. And also, you know, a lot of the housing reforms and initiatives that we've also seen, especially in San Francisco the last couple of years, is how do we actually make it so that

you can build permanent supportive housing in every neighborhood in the city. That was a focus of many state reforms. We're trying to do that locally here. We don't even have the zoning in place right now to allow that in 70, 80 percent of neighborhoods in San Francisco.

And so I think that, you know, I would understand someone who makes $15,000 a year, maybe they're living in a car on someone's couch in an RV with a family member that might not be a great situation, looking at a really expensive building going up and being like, oh, my God, these are crazy priorities. Why aren't they focused on housing for me?

I understand that. And I also don't think that one needs to be mutually exclusive of another. I don't think we need a system that chooses one over another. And I also think that the highest priority for making real progress on the housing issue for that person is that we have a criminally underfunded social safety net. We criminally underfund affordable housing and what is needed in order to support the

people at a certain life stage and at a certain income level that are not able to participate in the market. And I don't think that there's really...

a mainstream YIMBY hypothesis that thinks that the market is going to solve for everyone. There are people who can participate in the housing market, and that's not going to be everyone. And we really, really need to focus and fund and concentrate our political energy into increasing funding for affordable housing and also making it so that the regulatory environment is not counterproductive or taking away from that.

One listener sort of responding to my questions about developers says, speakers have been biased in favor of developers. When I was involved with a community group in SoCal in the 1970s, proposals would have dramatically increased density by destroying a primarily black area and not building, making alternative housing available to them seems somewhat like San Francisco's history. That's part of why older folks are distrustful of developers. I don't know.

I could see that. Let's bring in Christopher in San Jose. Welcome.

Yes. I appreciate the show. This is the piece that I want us to focus on. I know it's short on time. The clear definition of what affordable is, the piece that we're just dancing around it, the affordability that the person just used the term low income. See, this is what scares off this concept because we have to deal with the facts of where America is and

And unfortunately, this country has people living outside. Let's just deal with the affordable part. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Christopher. And I think this is really true. I mean, there's, you know, I mean, we are looking at a situation in San Francisco where

basically if you're I mean you can make far above minimum wage and not be able to afford a market rate apartment. Nate what would you say it was like you worked on this film for years what's your kind of takeaway of what if you could just like say okay one two three here are three things we need to do or that could could help up and down the income scale. One make it easier to build housing and to

To me, even though ironically this was a film about San Francisco in a local locality, I came away thinking that we are not really equipped. The incentive structures are not in place to have the policy on a city level, whether it's D or E or any of those type of measures to...

to legislate this. It needs to be on a state level to have meaningful change. And I do think that's what's starting to happen in California. To start to break down the divide as we kind of got into the perfect debate around it, around affordable housing and market rate housing and not

polarized this issue the way every issue in American politics gets polarized, where you just find smaller and smaller fractions of the conversation to debate against. And then third is just not to lose track of the human side of this issue, right?

Even with the focus on abundance with Ezra Klein's book and everything in certain progressive circles starting to talk about this more and more, which is great. Often it feels like it's just one long white paper and it just gets very abstract and we lose the heart of the issue, which is people suffering and suffering.

And, you know, the death of the American dream in a lot of ways. So just keeping Carlos and Andres, keeping their story at the center of this debate, even as we have very high level, wonky policy conversations about it.

Speaking of which, you want to talk about rezoning? How much time you got? Yeah, yeah. Maybe another show. Because I want to get in a couple last little comments here. Pam writes, you know, as a 64-year-old, I will say that, yes, my view of developers is what Alexa said. People who bulldoze open space to build sprawl.

My impression of low-income housing developers is different, but that doesn't change my view that big businesses with lots of money often have nefarious goals. In these areas of housing affordability, I rarely find anybody talking about how much of our housing rental stock has been bought up by large companies, which of course is another issue here as well as across the whole country.

We have been talking about the documentary Fault Lines. You can see it on Apple TV. It is about the Bay Area's affordable housing crisis. We've been joined this morning by Nate Hodling, executive producer and co-director of Fault Lines, also co-founder of Portal A Production Company. Thanks so much for joining us, Nate.

Thank you so much. And to everyone listening, please watch Fault Lines on Apple. As hard as it is to build housing in California and in San Francisco, it's just as hard to make a documentary. So please watch it and hope you enjoy it. Annie Freiman has also joined us, director of special projects at Spur. Thank you so much, Annie. Thank you.

And thanks to all of our listeners with your calls, with your critiques, with your comments. I always appreciate those as well. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for another hour of Forum Ahead with guest host Scott Schaefer.

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