New housing laws may threaten some of SF's most iconic buildings

Old city directories, fire insurance maps first published in 1915, newspaper clippings spanning decades of San Francisco history — this collection of yellowing, brittle documents spread out atop a stately wooden table tells the century-spanning story of the brick-walled building that has housed the Old Ship Saloon, a venerable local landmark in The City’s Financial District.

These days, the Old Ship is a neighborhood restaurant and bar nestled at the corner of Battery Street and Pacific Avenue, but it traces its roots all the way back to the Gold Rush era, when one of The City’s earliest residents began serving drinks out of the hollowed-out side of a beached wooden ship — one of many vessels to come aground along the shoreline of the rough and tumble neighborhood that would come to be known as the Barbary Coast.

“Here’s the actual original permit for the building when it was created after the 1906 Earthquake and Fire,” preservationist Woody LaBounty said, shuffling through the papers. “Yeah, building permits were a lot simpler — like, four pages!”

This rare cache of historic documents is housed inside a jam-packed library that makes up much of the third floor of the Haas-Lilienthal House, a towering Victorian that serves as a fitting headquarters for the preservation-advocacy group SF Heritage.

For LaBounty, the group’s president and CEO, the stunning hodgepodge represents more than a collection of historical curiosities. Those musty tomes and creaky cabinets hold key evidence that one day soon could mean the difference between demolition and preservation for hundreds of San Francisco buildings that are considered to be historic but have not yet been formally added to The City’s registry of official landmarks.

Such applications take a lot of documentation. “So it’s all going into proving the case,” he said.

Many preservationists worry that historic structures that still lack the protection of landmark status have been imperiled by a recent wave of housing legislation that streamlines the process for building permits and, in so doing, removes several layers of review that otherwise could have offered opportunities to block demolitions.

“And so you can lose the Old Ship Saloon,” said LaBounty. “Like, wait — I don’t think we want to lose the Old Ship Saloon.”

Preservationists both inside and outside of city government argue that since construction permitting has now been streamlined, The City’s heretofore sluggish landmarking process must be sped up as well.

If The City leaves this long standing backlog of historical work unaddressed, warned Rich Sucre of the San Francisco Planning Department, “we might be [demolishing] the next Ferry Building, or the next Harvey Milk camera shop at some point, unexpectedly,” referring to two iconic buildings that have already made their way onto the official landmark list.

But this budding plan to ramp up historic reviews — still in its early stages — comes at a moment of heightened scrutiny for preservation efforts, which have come to be seen by some as a disingenuous tactic to thwart new housing developments.

Advocates for housing growth in San Francisco still harbor bitter feelings from a 2022 preservation fight in The City’s St. Francis Wood neighborhood . Ultimately, neighborhood organizers were successful in their bid to win historic status for the tony enclave, made up of expansive properties topped by striking homes, all laid out along an unusual “residential park” design.

Critics of the effort, though, saw only an attempt to skirt Senate Bill 9, the California housing law that abolished single-family zoning. With St. Francis Wood’s historic status now in place, the neighborhood is exempt from SB 9 provisions that would have allowed for the construction of denser lots.

Similar housing fights have popped up elsewhere in California as well, including in San Mateo and Pasadena .

Amid concerns that communities had hit upon a winning playbook to circumvent California’s housing laws, pro-housing advocates responded this year by introducing statewide legislation that would require cities to make a full accounting of how local preservation designations will affect state-mandated housing goals , and to file periodic reports with the state.

“So it’s basically making sure that cities are aware that the state is watching and that the state knows that historic preservation is being abused to block housing,” said Matthew Lewis, who directs communications for California YIMBY, the advocacy group behind the measure.

LaBounty strongly opposes the bill — which is now working its way through the state Assembly — arguing the threat to housing posed by preservation has been overblown. He also believes the measure unfairly stigmatizes legitimate efforts to preserve buildings treasured by local residents. His own group first emerged in the 1970s in response to the threatened demolition of a number of Victorian houses in the Western Addition .

As he works with the Planning Department to shore up landmark protections, he also hopes to push back against the climate of suspicion he says preservationists now face.

“If this narrative and this wave continues, and more laws keep getting passed, it’s open season on everything,” he said.

One challenge facing LaBounty: drawing together all the research and documentation needed to make a convincing case that a building is not just old, but historically significant, is specialized, labor-intensive work.

That’s one of the main reasons San Francisco has not carried out such an effort on a broad scale sooner, despite the fact that prior surveys conducted over the decades have identified roughly 1,100 buildings that potentially meet the standards for historic status.

The other major challenge is the review process itself, which city officials say takes five months at a bare minimum, requiring sign offs from the Historic Preservation Commission, the Board of Supervisors and the mayor.

Over the course of a typical year, between five and 10 San Francisco buildings join the ranks of The City’s official landmarks, according to the Planning Department. To get that number up, conservationists have floated the idea of passing groups of buildings through the review process en masse, though Planning Department officials say they are still conferring with other city leaders. The agency is also considering policy changes to cut down on the review time and formulate more objective application requirements.

Currently, San Francisco has granted landmark status to 13 historic districts — including Alamo Square, Dogpatch and Telegraph Hill — and just more than 300 properties, all together accounting for less than 1% of The City’s total housing stock, according to planning officials.

As The City works to whittle that 1,100 figure down to a more manageable number, officials say they are focusing their efforts on commercial buildings because residential structures already enjoy relatively robust protections.

They are also conducting outreach to a number of ethnic and racial communities — including African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, Chinese Americans and Russian Americans — to make sure San Francisco’s landmarks reflect the full panoply of The City’s famously diverse history. Critics of historic preservation say such efforts have often overlooked less affluent, higher density neighborhoods .

Time is of the essence in this work: For now, new construction projects are emerging at only a trickle in San Francisco, held back by stubbornly high industry costs and interest rates. But when the housing industry picks back up, developers will benefit from SB 423, a recently expanded streamlining measure, which now requires the Planning Department to grant permits for most projects on an expedited timeline, so long as they meet The City’s planning code.

That streamlined process bypasses review measures that might have otherwise revealed the presence of a historic resource, which could have then triggered further layers of review.

In most cases, gaining landmark status would be enough to block an attempt to demolish a structure, or at least significantly slow it down. It also adds additional hurdles for other modifications that might detract from a building’s historic character.

But due to California housing laws passed in recent years, that landmark status must now be in place before a project application has been submitted.

Hence, the sense of urgency: “We’re all on borrowed time,” said LaBounty. Once housing construction revives, he wonders, “are we going to be ready for the onslaught?”

So far, San Francisco’s broad pro-development coalition seems to be giving this conservation push the benefit of the doubt.

“Even people who want to see more housing built, we’re not going to be like, bulldoze the city,” said Jane Natoli, San Francisco organizing director for the national YIMBY Action group.

“It’s a tool,” she said, referring to landmark protections. “And any tool can be used for good or ill.”

Nevertheless, some still fear that even well-intentioned historic preservation could inflict unintended harms — for instance, creating added barriers that could discourage property owners from converting their empty office buildings into new housing .

“Clearly, The City does have an interest in preserving historic architecture,” Lewis said.

Still, he said, “The City’s got a much more pressing issue that its tax rolls are collapsing, and it’s struggling across the city with commercial properties that are sitting vacant, that are not going to be full anytime soon.”

Sucre, though, pushed back on the notion that conservation and development must inevitably conflict.

“Just because you have a historic property doesn’t mean you can’t build housing,” he said. As one example of a San Francisco property that has been radically reimagined, he pointed to the transformation of Ghirardelli Square from a chocolate factory into a destination shopping spot that also includes a number of apartments.

“It just means that you have to be more creative with it,” he said. “And creativity is actually a good thing.”