New CEQA bill would harm low-income communities in San Francisco

OPINION – Thousands of people, including families, youth and seniors, live and work in downtown San Francisco, yet Senator Wiener’s new bill, Senate Bill 1227, proposes to eradicate all protections under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) for the area. Senator Wiener labels downtown a “concrete jungle,” but CEQA’s public health and environmental safeguards are essential to residents of the South of Market, Tenderloin, Chinatown, and other low-income neighborhoods in the City.

The purpose of CEQA is to protect Californians’ public health and safety, The law doesn’t stop projects; it improves them by ensuring developers reduce their adverse impacts on communities and the environment. CEQA also gives residents a voice in local land use decisions.

San Francisco is facing challenges these days, and it’s understandable that elected leaders are looking for a policy panacea that will turn the ship around. But pulling the wrong policy levers is a distraction and won’t get us any closer to a safe, healthy and vibrant downtown San Francisco. Rather, SB 1227 would point the City in the wrong direction.

If Senator Wiener’s bill becomes law, CEQA would no longer require downtown developers to reduce projects’ air, water, traffic, and noise pollution, or avoid soil contamination, in the City’s most disadvantaged areas. Developers would no longer be accountable for their projects’ greenhouse gas emissions or their effect on pedestrian safety and shadow impacts to urban parks and playgrounds. The bill also does not require the City to meaningfully consider whether new projects downtown will exacerbate gentrification or result in displacement. Yet, all of these problems are more acute than ever.

At a hearing of the Senate Committee on Environmental Quality last week, Senator Wiener stated he would accept some amendments to SB 1227 to address climate change and other issues, but the details of those amendments remain to be seen; we remain deeply concerned about the bill.

The latest analysis by the Senate’s Committee on Environmental Quality finds that SB 1227 would likely result in projects causing significant harm to the City’s downtown. The analysis exposes the bill’s major shortcomings as it attempts to exempt an entire geographic area from critical environmental protections. As the analysis explains, “At the same time that a geographic exemption could invite… projects that impact the environment or community, it could also put an unfair burden for environmental mitigation on nearby development.”

Nor is there any basis for the Senator’s contention that weakening CEQA will ease downtown San Francisco’s economic problems. In San Francisco, over 58,000 housing units have cleared the environmental review process under CEQA, but they remain unbuilt.

The pandemic and other factors caused San Francisco’s downtown problems – not CEQA.  According to the Senate’s analysis, the shift to remote work suppressed tax revenue and had a major impact on the City’s downtown’s economy. Tellingly, other major California cities such as San Jose and Los Angeles – also subject to CEQA regulations – have recovered from the pandemic more quickly than San Francisco.

The bill would give tax breaks to private interests but does nothing to encourage affordable housing, ignoring the needs of vulnerable communities. If Senator Wiener would like to see more housing built in San Francisco, he should lead the charge to securing funding for more affordable housing, since this is what San Francisco needs. Focusing instead on gutting public health protections in vulnerable neighborhoods is both disingenuous and ineffective.

Notably, this proposal would include the Filipino Cultural Heritage District, recognized for its high concentration of cultural resources. These districts promote community access to the arts, advance socioeconomic and ethnic diversity, and tackle issues of displacement. The state should be working in partnership with Cultural Districts and their communities, not rescinding their CEQA protections.

California legislators should reject SB 1227. This radical proposal would not revive downtown but would undermine our City’s low income communities and communities of color.  Yet, all of San Francisco’s more affluent, white areas would retain CEQA’s protection. Before CEQA, some of the worst projects in San Francisco history, like the Embarcadero Freeway, destroyed whole neighborhoods. Are we really going to return to those dark times? The answer should be no. In San Francisco, of all places, we must ensure that every community receives equal protection under the state’s premier environmental law.

Angelica Cabande is Executive Director of the South of Market Community Action Network (SOMCAN), which works on a range of issues to nurture the lives of youth, families, individuals and workers in San Francisco.