You can make a difference to the hurt being caused by climate chaos and the great extinction event in your town or your city! How? Reuse, repurpose, and recycle this information. You can push your local politicians to act. It will make a difference!
This is the letter for week 206 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
Strong wind destroy our home1
This week: HOUSING
What are SF’s housing issues?
SF’s housing stock is:
- wildly unaffordable,
- segregated (see red-lining),
- often dangerous (radiation, Pb, not earthquake-ready),
- incapable of dealing with heat (no need for air-conditioning when SF had a stable climate), and
- completely inadequate in number of units at any income range except Tech Millionaire or above. The average cost of a house in the Sunset — a Sunset Starter, at 1000 sq ft — is 1.43 million, for example.
Additionally, SF has one of the worst urban heat islands in the US2, is hostile to families, is unaffordable for most workers (even to rent), and is utterly incapable of dealing with the influx of climate migrants and refugees that are coming or are already here (ex. Paradise and Central America).
BOTTOM LINE:
SF has nowhere near the number and type of housing stock needed. Much of the existing housing stock has issues that severely impact residential health and safety.
So what is SF doing about housing?
A lot of nothing.
- There’s a ton of above market rate housing available, and being built, but the few units that are somewhat affordable are mostly going up in areas that will be underwater (ex. Treasure Island).
- Rampant gentrification has made neighborhoods that were once cohesive and somewhat supportive communities (an unintended result of red-lining) into White, tech-bro playgrounds, resulting in forced displacement of mostly BIPOC San Franciscans.
- SF’s radioactive waste problem has been talked about, but nothing substantive has been accomplished, and health impacts of radiation exposure continue for residents living in the waste. SF still has lead paint and pipes seemingly everywhere. And SF’s on-going earthquake retrofitting work deliberately doesn’t address non-ductile concrete structures.
- Much of SF’s housing stock has no air-conditioning. While new housing stock does have HVAC, SF’s rate of building new housing or refurbishing old housing is very, very, very slow.
BOTTOM LINE:
SF is doing little to fix the situation and much of what’s being done is making and will make the situation worse.
Are there housing solutions for SF?
Yes. But they don’t look anything like business as usual, or even business as Sen. Weiner or the YIMBYs envision it. SF needs to:
- build dense, smaller footprint, multi-unit, storm-resistant structures uphill,
- stop all building along the coasts, especially on the bay side and on Treasure Island,
- declare these coastal areas sacrifice zones and fill these zones with densely planted spongy ecosystems,
- put necessary infrastructure uphill, and phase out and clean up all low-lying infrastructure,
- use all the spaces available, including roads, for housing and neighborhood building (food, clothing and goods, entertainment, etc.),
- uniformly plan all building so that SF presents the most aerodynamic profile from all directions (include all buildings and trees in constructing this profile),
- plant a lot more trees (native) in SF, and
- require all buildings, new and old, be green, sustainable, and non-carbon-producing.
BOTTOM LINE:
SF has a lot to do in order to avoid spectacular and unrecoverable housing disasters.
Why must SF act immediately?
For a quick update, let’s revisit some of the science.
Climate-changed air patterns are pushing more wind storms towards coasts, and these storms are climate-changed to be bigger, more intense, and deadlier. These increasingly bad storms, combined with sea level rise, are increasing flood risks and wind damage costs to the point where actuarial firms put a $520 billion price tag on what they describe as a U.S. housing bubble.
This bubble is the result of homes being overvalued because they were built in coastal locations. Meanwhile, new studies (April 2023) show the rate of sea level rise is, yet again, much higher and much faster than forecast. The insurance industry, which does pay attention to science eventually, is abandoning states where they can’t make a profit due to climate change, and reinsurers are following. In the Bay Area, a recent study put the costs of preparing/adapting for sea level rise alone at $110 billion. Even the New York Times recognizes that “Climate Change Is Speeding Toward Catastrophe.” And it’s important to remember that as soon as a study or model is published, it is out of date; the most recent information is still too conservative for what’s in place and what’s to come.
If the NY Times can see the writing on the wall, SF can focus, too, and then act!
FOOTNOTES
1. Ladysmith Black Mambazo. “Homeless”. Graceland. 1986.
2. Kerrin Jeromin. “These cities have the most stifling heat islands in the United States”. The Washington Post. 15 July 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/07/15/heat-island-rankings-climate-central/.