What's Going On In My District, Man?

Supervisor David Chiu’s proposal to limit the ability of property owners in the Chinatown, North Beach and Telegraph Hill neighborhoods to install garages cleared its first hurdle Tuesday during the Board of Supervisors meeting, where it passed on the first reading.

Presently, most property owners in the area are entitled to one parking spot per residential unit. Applying for a permit to install a garage is therefore pretty simple. Chiu’s legislation would make owners get a conditional use permit before building a garage on their property. In other words: Bye-bye, simple process; hello, headache.(Pdf of legislative analyst's report: Download Garage Ord - Legislative Analysis.)

It gets better, though. This is not just any old conditional use process. Under the new law, if there has been a “no fault” eviction at the property within the past 10 years, you don’t get a permit.(Pdf of Planning Dept Summary: Download Planning Dept Summary.)  Chiu likes to cite a “study” done by the Chinatown Community Development Center showing that, since 2007, there have been 101 evictions of rent-controlled units where the owner installed a garage and converted the property into a tenancy-in-common. Of those 101, 68 are alleged to be in the Chinatown, North Beach and Telegraph Hill neighborhoods. This is supposed to justify the special conditional use process. (Pdf of study here: Download CCDC data.)

However, Planning Department folks don’t think there have been nearly that many garage permits given out in the past five years in those districts. Where does the 68 figure come from? Despite questioning, no one at the center is talking.

Luckily, supervisors don’t require verifiable data to justify passing a law in our fair city.

Comments

[sfsoma]

It's called social engineering, Melissa. This is one good reason Chiu should not be appointed interim mayor if Gavvy, the Mayor in name only, wins his lt. gov campaign. I am sure there are more but I leave it to others to come up with them.

[Il Postino]

Chalk another one up for the SF Tenant Mafia!

[transbay]

The claim is that this study justifying the legislation is based entirely on public records from DBI and the Rent Board. So if someone were really curious, it should just be a matter of verifying whether CCDC has reported correct numbers or not, based on those records. If the numbers have been reported correctly, but Planning still disagrees with them, then there is a different issue altogether. I'm also not clear on which exact statistic Planning has taken issue with. You mention evictions over the "past five years" (presumably referring to the 166 Ellis Act statistic since 2004), but then the statistic you provide in the post only refers to the past three years. Or does Planning disagree with both statistics?

Also worth nothing is that the legislation also codifies a number of policies that make eminent sense, particularly in District 3 -- including more rational limitations on residential parking, as well as the preservation of on-street space for public parking, rather than carving it off for private benefit. The eviction issue is the public impetus for the legislation, but there are other factors included in the reworked CU. And even if a proposed garage addition has no taint of eviction, the CU could still be denied on another ground.