Rezoning shows chasm between young, older San Franciscans

As The City endeavors to scale back restrictions and allow for denser housing development, it will have to reconcile a yawning gap between its younger residents and its older ones in what they want and need.

The divide was made clear in a recent and extensive public outreach effort led by the Planning Department, which has already heard no shortage of opinions — including from Mayor London Breed — about how it should tackle zoning reform and pave the way for thousands of new units of housing.

The City must loosen land-use restrictions to meet the demands of its Housing Element, a state-mandated plan that requires The City to accommodate about 80,000 new homes by 2031.

That goal is set in stone, but how The City achieves it is not.

The results of the Planning Department’s outreach indicate that young adults and seniors not only have very different current living situations but also have different opinions about The City’s approach to growth.

The City’s younger residents are far more ambivalent about the type of housing in their neighborhood and have fewer concerns about the potential effects of denser housing development such as six-story buildings where development is currently limited to four. They just want more of it.

However, older residents, who are more likely to own homes, are substantially more likely to express fears about issues such as the effects that taller buildings would have on their quality of life.

For example, one online survey of 542 residents found that those under 39 years old rated their concern over “altered skylines and views” about 1.5 out of 5. By contrast, average residents older than 60 rated the same concern at just more than 3.5 out of 5, more than twice as highly as the younger cohort.

Similar differences persisted across concerns such as neighborhood character and access to parking.

“As is apparent to anyone experiencing the [California] housing [and] rental market, we have a severe housing shortage in this state — and the shortage is falling acutely on young adults,” James Hawkins, associate director of the Berkeley Institute for Young Americans at UC Berkeley, wrote in an email to The Examiner.

The Planning Department, which released a draft rezoning proposal in February, solicited feedback from thousands of residents, and the generational gap was persistent. Those who work in city planning said the fact that younger and older people feel differently about housing is no surprise.

“I think generational divides are universal, but what’s exacerbating this divide in attitudes about housing is the fact that younger generations are facing a much more challenging housing market than previous generations,” Lisa Chen, a principal planner in the Planning Department, told The Examiner.

In its focus groups with 18 to 24-year-olds, Chen said she noted that participants were frustrated and pessimistic about their ability to stay in San Francisco.

The chasm between young and old San Franciscans likely won’t directly impact how San Francisco is rezoned, Chen said, but the survey’s findings do generally validate the need for rezoning.

Not everyone agrees that rezoning will solve The City’s housing woes. A coalition of neighborhood and nonprofit housing organizations known as the Race and Equity in all Planning Coalition believes that the private market simply isn’t capable of producing the housing that San Franciscans need.

“You have to prioritize investment in affordable housing,” said Joseph Smooke, a spokesperson for the coalition.

The City can zone to allow taller buildings tomorrow and have staff members hand out building permits on the street corner, Smooke said, but conditions in the private market aren’t fueling new housing development.

“We can’t really rely on the market to solve our affordability problem, and that’s what you see consistently throughout that report,” Smooke said.

There is something of a paradox at play, however. According to a state analysis, seniors tend to have lower incomes overall but are also more likely to be homeowners. More than 53% of seniors own their homes, compared with just 33% of other households.

“Homeownership, especially the single-family home, doesn’t have to be the default for everyone, but there is an enormous amount of cultural value wrapped up in homeownership — aka the American Dream — and homeownership is historically an important engine for individual [and] family wealth accumulation,” Hawkins said.

The opinions of older residents might be based on the type of housing they assume younger people want or need. Anecdotally, Chen said she’s heard from older residents that rezoning could push families out of San Francisco, based on the assumption that families need single-family homes.

But younger people don’t necessarily share that belief.

“The younger people we’ve spoken with tend to talk more broadly about making the city more family-friendly by investing in services like schools and recreation centers, and by making sure that we build more affordable housing and housing types that can accommodate families — for example, by making sure new buildings have open space and requiring units with two, three, or more bedrooms,” Chen said.

Where there might be a key point of agreement is that, due to a lack of affordable alternatives, people feel stuck in their current homes.

For an older person, that could mean staying in a single-family home they no longer need years after their children have moved elsewhere. For a younger person, it may be the fear that they won’t be able to find an affordable place in The City with the space to accommodate their evolving needs or buy a home.

On the whole, census data indicates homeownership rates have remained steady over time. But when looking at different age groups, homeownership rates have declined for younger adults while they’ve risen for older adults, essentially offsetting each other.

One reason why a growing percentage of older adults own their homes could be that they have nowhere else to move.

“We should strive for a housing market that provides a number of options for individuals or families of various sizes, at various stages of their life, with various budgets,” Hawkins said. “We are moving in that direction, but we are working off decades of restrictions.”