SF’s Dean Preston Faces Criticism Over Affordable Housing in Hayes Valley

Tommy Netzband and his Shih Tzu, Asha, sat in a circle with friends, sharing drinks and food packed in Tupperware on the grass at Patricia’s Green, an urban park in Hayes Valley, on Sept. 28.

They laughed as Asha and her best friend, Birdie, zoomed around them, barking at passing dogs and their owners, who carried picnic baskets and blankets.

“I know most people in the neighborhood. Asha knows everybody,” Netzband said.

“We all hang out at the park every day, like three times a day,” Zach Nelson added.

Netzband and Nelson, along with dozens of others, were in the park to watch Songs of Earth, a 2023 documentary set in Norway, on the big outdoor screen. It was the first of five Friday movie nights scheduled for the 9th annual Fall Film Festival at PROXY, an outdoor space at Octavia Boulevard and Hayes Street that features local businesses, Sunday concerts and free events like the film festival.

The space opened about 15 years ago as a placeholder for an affordable housing project.

Housing is a top concern for many San Francisco voters, and the candidates for mayor and the board of supervisors have rolled out plans to tackle the housing crisis. San Francisco, the slowest city in California to approve new housing, is under pressure to build 82,000 housing units by 2031.

In July, Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order directing state officials to dismantle tent encampments. On Thursday, San Francisco Mayor London Breed announced that the number of tents on the city’s streets is at the lowest point since before counting began in 2018.

In District 5, which includes the Tenderloin, Japantown, Western Addition, Haight Ashbury and Hayes Valley, incumbent Supervisor Dean Preston’s housing record has been criticized by pro-development groups and his challengers. PROXY, officially known as Parcel K, has been a part of Hayes Valley for as long as many residents like Netzband have lived in the neighborhood.

Preston has made developing Parcel K a priority since he took office in 2019, dividing residents who have fallen in love with the space.

“When you promise affordable housing on a site as part of land-use planning, you damn well better deliver it,” Preston said at a rally in support of Parcel K development last month.

After voters approved a proposition to replace the central freeway west of Market Street with Octavia Boulevard in 1999, the surrounding land was parceled off for different uses. The city planted about 400 feet of grass and trees and put in concrete tables to create Patricia’s Green, named for Patrica Walkup, one of the activists who inspired the roadway teardown. Parcel K was earmarked for low-income housing.

Preston and Board President Aaron Peskin said that an affordable housing proposal for the space would gain the approval of the supervisors. If a developer did get the rights to build, they wouldn’t have to pay for the land. Thanks to a nearby market-rate development deal, Preston said a builder would get $1 million for the project. Still, 21 years since being designated for housing, there isn’t one rendering of what the apartment complex might look like.

Preston blames Mayor London Breed, who was endorsed by SF YIMBY, the city’s pro-development movement, in July. Before anything can happen, Breed has to issue a request for qualifications to invite bids from developers, which Preston said the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development agreed to do last year but hasn’t.

“It was determined that we would not prioritize Parcel K for development in the immediate term and instead focus on advancing projects that are more competitive for State funding and located in priority equity neighborhoods,” a spokesperson for the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development said in an email.

The spokesperson said that PROXY saves the city roughly half a million dollars a year in holding costs and contributes to the neighborhood. The debate over what to do with Parcel K is just one of many policy tug-of-war between YIMBY groups and progressives in the fight to solve the housing crisis. Preston and Peskin have been quick to point out the hypocrisy of those who label them NIMBYs.

“You would think the YIMBYs would be here,” said Peskin, who is running to replace Breed, after last month’s rally at Patricia’s Green in support of Parcel K.

About 30 people attended the rally, including members of the advocacy group Hayes Valley for All and affordable housing advocates, to celebrate the delivery of a petition signed by 1,600 people asking Breed to issue the RFQ immediately.

In 2021, SF YIMBY volunteers published Dean Preston’s Housing Graveyard, a website chronicling more than 30,000 homes the group claims he’s opposed. GrowSF, a moderate advocacy group trying to oust Preston in November, put up a billboard near a shuttered Touchless Car Wash in the Haight that it said should be affordable homes. In June, a housing advocate filed a lawsuit over Preston’s depiction of his housing record on his reelection paperwork.

Preston’s main rival, Bilal Mahmood, who GrowSF and SF YIMBY endorse, has campaigned on meeting the 2031 requirement.

“We are not going to meet those housing goals if we follow the pattern that [Preston] does, which is pick fights in the community against single parcels and not be developing simultaneously and trying to get things done in as many spaces as possible,” said Mahmood, who has secured endorsements from Breed and San Francisco’s Democratic Party.

Besides Preston, he is the only other candidate in the race who signed Hayes Valley for All’s petition — reluctantly, according to organizers. He said District 5’s supervisor should be focused on building on other sites, like the car wash at 400 Divisadero St.

“Dean wants to continue to make this a specific personal campaign issue because he’s failed to build housing,” he told KQED. “He’s also failed to build housing in other empty lots and other parcels and we need to be building housing in as many places as possible.

Some of the units Preston is accused of opposing by SF YIMBY are projects requiring developers to increase the percentage of affordable units to gain his vote, including at 400 Divisadero St. and another potential development at 650 Divisadero St.

Preston said that in 2022, there was a developer in contract to acquire the graffitied, fenced-off car wash lot for a fully affordable project. He blames Breed for failing to acquire the land. Now, a market-rate project with 200 units is proposed for the site. Only 23 are expected to be affordable.

“We’ve been supporting housing at all levels, but when we say that, we mean that includes housing the market won’t build, which is housing that low-income and working-class people can live in,” Preston, who Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi endorsed in July, said.

But he’s also opposed projects before because of the way they could impact neighborhood character. Before he was supervisor, Preston was a leader of Affordable Divis, which advocated for affordable development on the street that would “contribute to the architectural character of the neighborhood.”

“This is the hub of this neighborhood,” Netzband said of PROXY, adding that the neighborhood wouldn’t utilize Patricia’s Green the same way if a tall apartment building was built on Parcel K.

He’s lived in San Francisco for 30 years and said Hayes Valley’s sense of community has kept him in the neighborhood for half of that time. Netzband said he’d vote for Preston but feels that his push to develop Parcel K is out of touch with the community.

“Over the past 15 years, [Hayes Valley] has grown tremendously,” Netzband told KQED. “New housing has brought thousands of people into this neighborhood, and this park is way too small for a neighborhood that’s as dense as this.

“I’m all for public housing, but this needs to stay the hub of the community because this community will suffer if we don’t keep it.”

Preston told KQED that Parcel K development would include ground-floor retail, like most of the buildings in the Hayes Street commercial corridor. It could accommodate about 100 units and be around eight stories, compared to surrounding three- and four-story buildings.

Jen Laska, the former president of the Hayes Valley Neighborhood Association, said a tall building would swallow Patricia’s Green.

“I think that would affect the draw to Hayes Valley, generally,” Laska, who was GrowSF’s head of operations in 2022 after leaving the neighborhood association, said. During her tenure, GrowSF coalesced with SF YIMBY to sponsor Proposition D, a 2022 ballot measure to streamline the city approvals needed to build housing. The organization said proposals are often denied by an “anti-housing Board of Supervisors.”

“I think it would greatly change the character of Hayes Valley if that went away,” Laska said.

Mahmood’s idea for Parcel K is to build the affordable housing units on top of a two- to three-story, open-air atrium, which could continue to host the small businesses and community events PROXY does now.

“The purpose of a supervisor is to find consensus and compromise within your community to build the housing that we need there but also preserve the open space,” he said. “The proposal we came up with that we’ve been talking about since the beginning of this campaign is mixed-use development.”

Mahmood’s mixed-use space would require building higher and designing a more complicated structure, which “would be way more expensive to do in a seismically sound way,” Daniel Chatman, an associate professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of City and Regional Planning, said.

“The engineering costs would be extremely high. The materials and the construction costs will be extremely high,” Chatman, who recommends focusing on other sites fit for larger projects that are easier financially and would have a greater impact on the city’s housing shortage, continued. “If you look at what’s happening in space right now, the revenue generation aspect of it is pretty minimal.

“It would never justify building an additional two stories supported by pillars. That would be an additional million dollars or so.”

Preston said he’s more focused on affordable housing than large-scale projects, declaring his policy is pro-housing.

“I understand there are some critics who want me to focus more on the market-rate side of things,” he told KQED. “But I’ve been an affordable housing champion for decades. And it’s disinformation to paint me like I’m getting in the way of housing.”