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San Francisco has turned into something akin to a nightmare. Its homeless population has risen to nearly 10,000 residents, its rents have climbed to nearly $1,900 per month, and parts of its downtown are now littered with used needles, trash, and human poop.
As more tech workers flock to the city for jobs at Google, Facebook, and Uber, longtime creative professionals like artists and musicians have found it increasingly difficult to live there.
The next decade will be a defining period in the city's history, Alicia John-Baptiste, the president of SPUR - a research organization that develops solutions to major problems in the Bay Area - told Business Insider. Those ten years could determine whether San Francisco is able to accommodate its low-income residents or if it transforms into a city that only the wealthy few can afford.
Here are some ways to improve the city before it's too late.
San Francisco has laws that restrict where affordable housing can be built. Those need to go.
Research from the nonprofit organization Next 10 indicates that San Francisco needs to build 200,000 units of housing each year to keep up with its population growth. But there's a reason why the city has only allowed 113,000 units to be built since 2017.
San Francisco is governed by zoning regulations that determine how certain areas of land can be used. These laws originated as a way to segregate white, wealthy communities from poor residents of color.
Many of San Francisco's zoning regulations favor single-family units, which means that developments can accommodate fewer people. Single-family zones also tend to be more expensive, creating large pockets of wealth throughout the city.
To make San Francisco more affordable, the city will need to alter its zoning laws to allow more affordable and multifamily units to be built in residential neighborhoods.
The city should limit the construction of luxury apartments and short-term rentals.
Investors frequently buy units in San Francisco and flip them into short-term rentals on services like HomeAway and Airbnb. At the same time, the world's wealthy billionaires are scooping up luxury apartments throughout the city, creating a demand for high-end real estate.
By cracking down of the construction of luxury apartments, and limiting the amount of short-term rentals that are allowed in the city, San Francisco could free up more space for affordable housing.
"The region overall has really struggled to grow gracefully over the past 20 years or so," John-Baptiste said. "We now have the question of how we grow within the existing fabric of the city."
The state can protect vulnerable tenants so they aren't easily evicted.
San Francisco's average rent climbed 18% in the last five years, making it more difficult for low-income residents to afford their monthly rental payments. Residents who fail to pay their rent run the risk of eviction, which can make it harder for them to secure a rental property in the future. In some cases, it can even drive residents into homelessness.
Last year, 15% of San Franciscans reported to the city that they had been threatened with evictions in the previous five years. Nearly half of these residents came from households earning less than 50% of the city's median income.
John-Baptiste said protecting these residents should go "hand in hand" with increasing the city's housing supply.
To save residents from eviction or displacement, Marsha Cohen, a law professor at the University of California, Hastings, has suggested a state-wide program that subsidizes rents for low-income families in California.
The entire Bay Area could help with lowering transit costs.
San Francisco's main transit system, BART, has gotten steadily more expensive since 2013, when its board of directors approved a series of fare hikes that expire in 2020. Another set of fare hikes is scheduled to go into effect in 2022.
Bringing these costs down will be critical to making the city more affordable for residents. But John-Baptiste said that San Francisco shouldn't bear this burden alone.
"When we ask cities to solve problems on their own, we're sometimes trying to solve things at the wrong scale," John-Baptiste said. All nine counties in Bay Area, she said, should consider coordinating their investments in a regional transit network.
Tax large corporations and businesses can pay for the services that people need — like street cleaning.
On a recent visit to San Francisco, President Donald Trump said the city was in "total violation" of environmental regulations because of its homelessness crisis, which has left some blocks littered with feces and discarded needles.
"The allegations that Trump was levying were false," John-Baptiste said. "But I understand the concern that residents have relative to street cleanliness."
One way to start paying for services that people need, she said, is to rethink Proposition 13 — a constitutional amendment that decreased property taxes in California. Democratic lawmakers have suggested revising the proposition to boost taxes for large corporations and businesses. The tax revenue could then be used to find city services like transit, street cleaning, or low-income housing.
Build affordable homes in places that are safe from wildfires.
San Francisco's housing crunch has forced residents to relocate to more affordable suburbs and rural areas outside the city center. In some cases, these areas are located in the wildland-urban interface — a place where housing development is either close to or located within wildfire territory.
Between 1990 and 2010, about half of the housing units built in California were constructed in this potentially dangerous zone.
"While forest fires have always happened, [people] have impinged into areas that are prone to fire," Marko Bourne, a former Federal Emergency Management Agency official, told Business Insider. "Now we're being impacted by those fires directly."
John-Baptiste said there's a strong need for affordable housing in places that are safe from climate-related hazards.
Don't incentivize construction in areas that are vulnerable to sea-level rise.
As low-income residents relocate to wildfire territory outside the urban core, San Francisco's high-income residents have gravitated toward luxury waterfront developments.
For the last several years, developers have been building an $8 billion neighborhood at the city's Hunters Point Shipyard, located directly along the San Francisco Bay. Condos there were priced up to $1.5 million as of last year. Developers are also planning a $1.5 billion project to build 8,000 residential units on Treasure Island, an artificial land mass that sits squarely in the bay.
Both of these new developments are vulnerable to sea-level rise. A March 2018 study from the American Association for the Advancement of Science predicts that up to 166 square miles of the Bay Area could be underwater by 2100.
John-Baptiste said the city could instate zoning regulations that prohibit developers from building in areas that are at high risk of flooding. Another option would be to incentivize building away from the coast. Whatever the city decides, she added, it will have to act quickly.
"It is time for us to become far more ambitious in what we believe we can achieve," John-Baptiste said. "We're going to have to figure out ways to do the big fixes much faster than we've been able to in the past."
