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This is the letter for week 146 of a weekly climate strike that went on for 4 years in front of San Francisco City Hall, beginning early March 2019. For more context, see this story. For an annotated table of contents of the topics for all the strike letters, see this story. Meanwhile…
STRIKE FOR THE PLANET
Listen to the wind blow / Watch the sun rise / Run in the shadows /
Damn your love / Damn your lies
This week’s topic: Don’t Sleep In The Subway, Darlin’
Hold tight / We’re in for nasty weather
San Francisco is going to flood, it’s already guaranteed.1 CO2 emissions put us on track for bad to worse-case climate change scenarios, which means flooding in SF will be worse than the SLR (sea level rise) predictions the city is working with. Large swathes of SF will be underwater and more will be prone to flooding. So what are SF’s plans for dealing with too much water?
I’m barred and bolted and I / Won’t let you in
SF, a peninsula and a few islands, is investing in ineffective and harmful hard (gray) flood infrastructure, with a dab of ecosystem restoration. Gray infrastructure projects increase carbon production, cause flanking and protected area erosion, and result in catastrophic impacts when they fail. Gray projects are expensive and provide little benefit for the cost. They take a long time to build and require a lot of non-local resources, resources we may be able to afford but may not be able to get delivered.
Chain, chain, chain / Chain of fools
Not only are current and planned protections not going to protect the city, but SF is actively making the situation much, much worse. Building in flood zones is a fool’s errand2, yet that’s where SF’s mega housing projects are happening.3
Yes, we need housing, but not underwater. So what do we do?
Such a strange vibration / People in motion4
What can we do about the housing and flooding crises? Turns out, a lot.
- Density — increase housing density not only in the lower income areas but in the rich areas of the city. Connect housing density to building elevation to get maximum longer-term bang for the buck.
- Little houses — legalize and make space for little houses everywhere, especially at higher elevations. How do we pay for this?
- Tax the hell out of big houses and big businesses — if they can afford to pay $8 million for a 5-bedroom house, they can to pay more taxes to help the city survive. And no more luring corporations with tax cuts. That’s a loser’s game and we’ve lost a lot by it (cf. Uber, Lyft, Twitter, Slack, Airbnb, Postmates, Zendesk, etc.)
- Make multi-use buildings multi-use buildings — If a business space is vacant, people can live there. Tax by vacancies, of houses, of units, of commercial spaces.
- Use the roads — Cars kill. Homelessness kills. Houses can be tiny. There’s space in roads.
- Build up hill — It seems obvious, but you all haven’t gotten the message yet.
- Require all buildings in flood zones to be strong enough to withstand water pressure and currents, and to have attachment options for moving about above the water level (see Seattle)
- And surround the city with green sponges and other green infrastructure projects. They’re cheaper than gray projects and work much better.5
Dear Editor
The SF housing crisis will be made much worse by current plans to build affordable housing units in flood zones. From Treasure Island to Ocean Beach, from Mission Rock to the Power Station, plans for mega projects are ignoring the realities of sea level rise. Meanwhile, places where housing should be built — uphill — are ceded to the wealthy to house the few. You can argue that this system worked in the past, but what worked in the past will cause homelessness and create climate migrants in the near future. We have plenty of space for housing, but only if we use spaces equitably and build for the future that’s washing towards us, not for a future that will never be. A city that intends to survive climate change won’t do it by making a bad housing situation worse through bad housing locations.
FOOTNOTES
1. from SF’s Office of Resiliency and Capital Planning. Sea Level Rise Guidance. https://onesanfrancisco.org/sea-level-rise-guidance/, and Strike letter week 140.
2. Jake Bittle. “US flood risk is about to explode — but not for the reasons you think”. Grist. 4 February 2022. https://grist.org/extreme-weather/flood-risk-growth-development/.
3. See Strike letter week 140: Massive Waste.
4. In order, the songs lyrics are from Fleetwood Mac “The Chain”, Petula Clark “Don’t Sleep In The Subway, Darling”, Talking Heads “Burning Down The House”, Kate Bush “Get Out Of My House”, Aretha Franklin “Chain of Fools”, and Scott McKenzie “San Francisco”.
5. Andrew Wu. “Green versus gray infrastructure: The economics of flood adaptation in Fiji”. Yale Environment Review. 1 September 2016. https://environment-review.yale.edu/green-versus-gray-infrastructure-economics-flood-adaptation-fiji-0.