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San Francisco Chronicle​

Meet the S.F. group begging the city to build more housing in its ‘rich' neighborhood

At a time when San Francisco neighborhood groups from the Marina to the Sunset to Fisherman's Wharf are fighting the city's plan to allow taller and denser housing, a group of residents in one city enclave have a different message to city planners: Please, upzone us. The organization D9 Neighbors for Housing has been lobbying to have Bernal Heights included in the rezoning that is aimed at producing housing areas in the city that have seen little development in the past 40 years and are considered 'high-resourced' in terms of household income, transit, schools, parks and retail. The group believes that the neighborhood's 40-foot building height limits and tight density controls have contributed to soaring housing prices and created an exclusive environment where the artists and activists and working-class families who defined Bernal for generations are shut out. D9 Neighbors argues that Bernal Heights, a lively hillside village with narrow streets, neighborhood schools, a library, spectacular hilltop parks, a strong retail corridor and a median home price of $1.7 million is nothing if not well-resourced. The neighborhood was left out of the 2010 Eastern Neighborhoods plan that resulted in thousands of new homes in the adjacent Mission, as well as Dogpatch and Potrero Hill. 'This is a resource-rich hill,' said Brendan Powell, a longtime Bernal homeowner who raised his family in the neighborhood. 'We are a rich enclave and we need to do our part. There is a clash between a lot of our neighbors' image of themselves and the reality of the wealth they have.' For the most part, the city's state-mandated 'expanding housing choice' plan doesn't include eastern parts of the city that have seen the preponderance of building in the past 25 years. Neighborhoods left off the rezoning map include the Mission, SoMa, Civic Center, Ingleside, Dogpatch, Hayes Valley, Western Addition, Bayview-Hunters Point and Potrero Hill. These are all areas that have either been part of past rezonings or do not qualify as 'high-resourced' under the Planning Department's criteria. Planning Director Rich Hillis said that 'Bernal is somewhat unique' in that it has not been included in any of the neighborhood plans that have allowed for more densities. While property values have soared, the neighborhood is still part of a census tract that doesn't qualify as high-resourced. 'You could probably make an argument that it's similar to well-resourced neighborhoods, but the way the data come together by census tract it ended up not being in a well-resourced area,' Hillis said Hillis acknowledged that the D9 group is unusual. 'This is the only time I have seen a group organizing to become part of the upzoning,' he said. He emphasized that the plan is still in flux with changes to the map likely to occur between now and January, when state law requires that the rezoning be complete. It's possible that the Planning Commission could decide to add a portion of Bernal in the rezoning. The state is requiring that the city rezone for 36,000 units of new housing, over half of which must be affordable to low- and middle-income families. In a city where nearly all new housing has been built in a handful of neighborhoods, Bernal Heights has been particularly immune from development. Between 2016 and 2021 it added 60 housing units, which equates to just 0.02% of housing built in the city. This is compared to 12,005 units in SoMa and 3,073 in Mission. From 2008 to 2023, Bernal averaged six net new units per year and among the city's districts it ranked last or near last in building housing almost every year, according to the city's annual Housing Inventory Reports. But the neighborhood hasn't always been so immune to development, particularly affordable housing. In the 1940s and '50s three public housing developments were built on the neighborhood's edge: 118 units at Holly Court, 160 at Bernal Dwellings and 151 at Alameda Apartments. All three of those projects have been renovated in recent years. And in recent years Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center has been aggressively looking to add to its affordable housing portfolio. The group is building 35 units at 3300 Mission St., which will replace the 3300 Club bar and residential hotel that was destroyed in a 2016 fire. In a statement, the group said the project would be completed in fall of 2026. The group recently won approvals for 70 units of disability-forward senior housing at 3333 Mission St., in the parking lot of a shuttered Big Lots store. 'We are actively pursuing a financing pathway for this project,' the group said. Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center has not taken a position on the rezoning. Both the 3300 and 3000 Mission projects were opposed by neighbors — something which members of D9 Neighbors said is all too common. The 3300 Mission project went through several owners and years of political negotiations before the final project was approved. It was opposed by condo owners in the adjacent market-rate building, which was on the site of a hardware store that was also destroyed in the fire. Powell, who managed a vintage car restoration shop, said the 3300 project, which will open in late 2026, should have been denser and taller and completed long ago. 'That fire was tragic, but how do we make the most of that situation, how do we turn that into something that helps San Francisco, that helps Bernal, helps Mission Street?' he said. 'I'd say taking 10 years to start building is not helping San Francisco — it certainly didn't help the people who were burned out in the fire.' But it's unclear if upzoning that stretch of Mission Street would have led to more units at either 3000 or 3333 Mission, according to Planning Department Chief of Staff Dan Sider. While both properties are zoned for 40 feet, state density bonuses allowed for another three floors of units and also for 'density decontrol,' meaning that the developer wasn't limited in how many units it could squeeze into the buildings. If the zoning had been 65 or 85 feet, the two projects could be taller, but that would have forced a steel-frame or concrete building type that is expensive and difficult to finance. The neighborhood's unique geography — steep hills, wild open spaces and some streets so narrow that two cars can't pass each other — offers limited opportunities. Bernal's vibrant main commercial corridor, Cortland Street, is narrow with few vacancies. There is the single-story Good Life grocery store that some have mentioned as a possible development project, with housing above the retailer. But that would force the temporary closure or relocation of the wildly popular grocer, which is not something likely to be embraced by the community or the business. Most of the large opportunity sites in Bernal are on the flats along Mission Street and eastern end of Cortland, near Bayshore Boulevard, where small-scale retail and housing gives way to larger commercial parcels like the Bare Bottle brewery and tasting room at 1525 Cortland. Powell said he could see a redevelopment project there that includes a new brewery with housing above. He said neighbors need to think inventively if they want to create a place where their kids can raise their families and older empty-nesters can downsize into smaller units. His generation of Bernal transplants — he has been in Bernal or nearby since the late 1990s — 'have a notion of Bernal when they arrived.' 'I don't think they recognize that the people who do the same work that they do, or the work they did in their 20s or 30s or 40s or whenever they were able to get on the ladder, couldn't get on that ladder today,' he said 'Part of being a sanctuary is giving people a place to be. If we don't have housing we can't be a sanctuary. We can't live up to the values we espouse.' But, some longtime Bernal renters see the potential upzoning as a threat. Stephen Torres, who works at two San Francisco legacy businesses — Flower Craft garden center on Bayshore Boulevard and Twin Peaks Tavern in the Castro — characterized the pro-upzoning group as the 'homeowners up on the hill' who are happy to advocate for more density in the flats along Mission Street which will not impact them very much. 'A lot of us resent the top down attitude,' he said. 'It's people who had enough money to buy a home on the hill saying, 'Oh, Bernal is such a well-resourced neighborhood,' and then the parts of the neighborhood they are identifying for density are down at the bottom of the hill.' Torres said the vital community of restaurant and entertainment establishments along Mission Street south of Cesar Chavez — like Royal Cuckoo, Pizzahacker and Club Malibu — could be lost to redevelopment if the strip is upzoned. 'It's going to trigger a speculative real estate rush,' he said. Still, the push to add housing in Bernal has struck a chord. A year after being revived the D9 Neighbors, which was originally started by the late Michael Nolan, has 369 members, according to the group. Its members turned out in droves to support both plans for 3000 and 3300 Mission, as well as the rezoning. D9 Neighbors organizer Ruth Ferguson is typical of the members who have been testifying at public meetings. She said she was lucky to be able to buy a home in Bernal but fears that her friends and her sister — who lives on her block and 'makes a great salary as a nurse at the VA' — will eventually be priced out. The hope that her parents, small business owners in Washington state, might be able to retire to San Francisco to be closer to their daughters is far-fetched. 'My parents who have had a small business and worked their asses off my whole life, there is no chance they could buy a place here and live near me and my sister,' she said Ferguson said the arguments against upzoning are 'rooted in progressive values and justice,' convictions she said she shares. But she said the refusal to open Bernal up to new development 'sequesters' high density in other less wealthy neighborhoods and creates 'affordable housing segregation.' 'People like to say that Bernal Heights has a rich history of working-class people and artists and it does, and that's amazing,' she said. 'But at a certain point the rhetoric is hypocritical. We should be thinking of building for the people who are here and won't be able to stay, the people who have been forced out and the people who will be here in the future.'