Will the Creation of a Historic District in San Francisco Hold Back New Housing?

At a “Historical Housing Tour” on April 9, Jane Natoli walked attendees through the proposed historic district and pointed out the empty or damaged structures. She started at a burned-out apartment building on Union Street and Columbus Avenue. From there she took her audience to see a dilapidated storefront—an auto shop in a parking garage with busted windows—and a sausage factory that’s also a nationally recognized landmark.

“It’s a cool building,” said Natoli, the organizing director for the San Francisco chapter of national pro-housing organization YIMBY Action. “It was once the largest sausage factory on the West Coast, right? But it hasn’t been that for a long time, and what it is right now is an empty building with a parking lot next to it.”

The tour had an audience of about thirty, mostly housing advocates or historic preservationists. One was Katherine Petrin, the author of a proposal to turn North Beach into a historic neighborhood. Over the last 45 minutes of the tour, along a vibrant stretch of Grant Avenue between Filbert and Union Street, that group fell into debate about how historic preservation fits into San Francisco’s rich cultural history and the city’s urgent need for new and affordable housing. “In a city like San Francisco, especially, we have a lot of conflicting views about how we honor our past while making a path forward,” Natoli said.

Natoli supports some levels of historic preservation. “There’s going to be some people who are just like, you should be able to basically tear anything down,” she said, “And I don’t personally agree with that.” On the other hand, Natoli also doesn’t want to overuse historic preservation, freezing neighborhoods in place. She says there’s no right or wrong answer, and on her tour, she asked attendees to consider what a middle ground would look like: “What are we willing to live with, and what are those trade offs going to be?”

Housing activists in San Francisco are butting heads with a local historic preservation organization called the Northeast San Francisco Conservancy over a proposal that would turn a dozen blocks of the city’s North Beach neighborhood into a nationally registered historic district, potentially adding barriers to redevelopment for more than 600 properties.

In the early 2000s, the Northeast San Francisco Conservancy hired architectural historian Michael Corbett to analyze the neighborhood’s architectural and historical significance. The San Francisco Planning Commission adopted their findings in 2022, with additional contributions from Petrin and architectural historian Shayne Watson. “It was a huge effort,” Corbett said. “It took many years to do it…In the little preservation world it was a big, big project.” The Conservancy built on that work to write the North Beach Historic District nomination, which it says would preserve a critical and vibrant stretch of San Francisco’s cultural heritage.

North Beach was home to communities of Italian and Chinese immigrants throughout the 20th century, and was rapidly rebuilt after an earthquake and fire in 1916. The area’s thriving nightlife gave roots to some of San Francisco’s early LGBTQ communities, and in the 1950s the neighborhood hosted influential beatnik writers like Jack Kerouac and the legendary City Light bookstore run by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The North Beach Historic District nomination draws connections between that history and the architecture that characterizes the neighborhood’s older buildings, with ornamental styles that pay homage to the Italian Renaissance and virtually identical construction methods from the post-fire reconstruction period. Corbett argues that North Beach deserves to be protected and nationally recognized and that said the historic designation, if accepted, won’t stop people from making changes to the nominated buildings. “It represents the history of an important part of San Francisco in a way that nothing else does, and represents a piece of American history for the same reasons,” Corbett said.

But San Francisco’s housing advocates say the proposal could gridlock the redevelopment of old and worn-down structures. In order to maintain historic architecture, buildings listed on the National Register typically face additional, stricter rules, and redevelopment can be pricier. A 2023 report by the California Department of Housing and Community Development found that San Francisco had more roadblocks to building housing than anywhere else in the state. The city’s approval process for building permits was slow, with an objection process that allowed individuals to easily block or delay development.

San Francisco’s housing production has fallen every year since 2020, and most of the city’s housing is unaffordable to families earning the median income. Many essential workers, such as teachers and firefighters, are forced to live outside the city and endure long commutes, while other low income workers live out of their cars or on the street. The city’s housing crisis is one piece of a much wider problem, as the majority of California renters are burdened by the cost of rent, while nationally, US housing affordability has plummeted since 2021.

Activists and politicians are increasingly attributing that crisis to dense regulations and zoning laws. YIMBY activists across the country have taken up grassroots campaigns and lobbying efforts to push cities to cut restrictions. In 2021, California Senate Bill 9 allowed duplexes and split lots on single-family zoned lots. In 2023, Governor Gavin Newsom signed 56 bills targeted at improving California’s housing crisis. This year, proposals in the state legislature seek to speed up and cheapen the development process by legalizing multi-family housing near transit stops or exempting certain multi-family projects from review under the California Environmental Quality Act.