St. Francis Wood earns historic designation, sparks backlash

On June 30, this unique San Francisco neighborhood was added to the National Register of Historic Places, representing the culmination of a yearslong campaign by neighborhood residents.

But the decision has been met with dismay by housing activists, who say the historic designation will deter future housing development and preserve a landscape designed to foster racial segregation.

“If you are preserving structures with the requirement that they remain single-family homes forever, when the origin of that single-family home was so Black people and Japanese people and Chinese people could not live there, is that really what you want to preserve?” says Annie Fryman, a housing policy expert who works for the backyard cottage developer Abodu and previously worked as a legislative aide to Senator Scott Wiener in Sacramento. “Historic preservation is known as frequently being used as a convenient and accepted tool of exclusion.”

The St. Francis Homes Association contends the historic designation is all about architectural history, not stopping development or keeping people out. “We've eliminated the harmful aspects of our governing documents, we've added inclusiveness statements and we have a diverse community,” said Michael Fox, president of the neighborhood association. “We don't have gates, and we're an inclusive community that's open to the public.”

But in practice there’s no question the historic designation will make it considerably more difficult to build new housing in St. Francis Wood, directly contradicting local and state goals of concentrating new housing construction in wealthy single-family home neighborhoods. Navigating that contradiction will be an increasingly important frontier in housing law and politics.

St. Francis Wood is one of the most fully realized and best documented “residence parks” in the nation, Richard Brandi writes in the book Garden Neighborhoods of San Francisco. A pattern of suburban development inspired by the City Beautiful movement that peaked in popularity during the teens and '20s, residence parks were conceived of as an idyllic retreat for the upper-middle classes that retained easy access to downtown jobs via streetcar.

Standalone houses, curvilinear streets, extensive landscaping and decorative monuments were meant to create the impression of living in a park. In fact, St. Francis Wood’s street layout was designed by the Olmsted Brothers, sons of famed Central Park designer Frederick Law Olmsted. The roster of architects who built homes in the neighborhood is a who’s who of early 20th century Bay Area greats: Julia Morgan, Willis Polk, Bernard Maybeck, William Wurster.

But there was a dark side to this domestic bliss. Virtually all residence parks, St. Francis Wood included, employed racial covenants to ensure that people of color could not move in. (In San Francisco, racial covenants targeted Black and Asian people, but unlike elsewhere in the country, they did not forbid Jews and Latinos.) They also pioneered early zoning restrictions that banned apartment buildings and commercial development — saloons and laundries were common bogeymen — that were thought to attract minorities, the poor and the poorly behaved.

Since the Supreme Court struck down racial covenants in 1948, St. Francis Wood has become more diverse in certain respects. As of 2016, the neighborhood was 45% white, 45% Asian, 5% Hispanic and 0% Black. The median household income was $188,000 per year.

According to Fryman and other YIMBY activists, allowing new development in St. Francis Wood would increase the neighborhood’s racial and economic diversity. That’s the de-facto stance of the Planning Department as well. As part of the state-mandated planning process known as the Housing Element, the Planning Department has committed to shifting new housing construction to single-family neighborhoods in the western and northern parts of San Francisco to reduce segregation and concentrated poverty. Preliminary zoning maps associated with the Housing Element show parts of St. Francis Wood being rezoned to allow apartment buildings up to 50 or 60 feet tall.

While the historic designation won’t prevent The City from upzoning the neighborhood, it will make it much more difficult for anything to actually get built. Several state laws that allow increased density and speedier approvals for housing projects have carveouts for historic resources, including SB 9, SB 10 and SB 35. San Francisco’s recently approved fourplex ordinance, which overrides SB 9, also includes an exemption for historic resources.

St. Francis Wood’s historic designation will also require all projects in the neighborhood, from remodels to new construction, to go through an extended process under the California Environmental Quality Act. The paperwork costs about $10,000 and will add an additional 3-4 months to project approvals, says Steve Vettel, a land use attorney with Farella Braun and Martel. New projects will need to be “compatible” with the historic character of the neighborhood, which could make it difficult to build anything that doesn’t at least resemble a two story single-family home with generous front, back and side yards.

All of those hoops will add up to less housing getting built. And it could prove a tempting avenue for other neighborhoods hoping for that result. Already, wealthy communities from Palo Alto to Pasadena have tried to skirt SB 9, the statewide duplex law, by creating historic districts.

“I don't have a problem with historic districts,” said Wiener, noting he fought for the creation of the Duboce Park historic district as a city supervisor. “The problem is the exemptions in state housing law for historic districts.”

Wiener is “very concerned” St. Francis Wood’s historic designation could set a precedent for other neighborhoods in other cities to get around state law. “We’ll see wealthier neighborhoods having the resources to be able to exempt themselves from state housing law, while lower-income and working-class neighborhoods won't,” Wiener said. “That's fundamentally unfair, and in my view, is a violation of fair housing principles.” Wiener added that he’s hoping to revisit these exemptions in the legislature.

Fryman thinks there could have been a middle ground where the streets, parks and monuments of St. Francis Wood could have earned a historic designation but not the houses, which she describes as a “jumbling and sort of incoherent mix of 25 disparate revival styles.” The neighborhood is, after all, one of more than two dozen residence residence parks in San Francisco. Virtually all of them are likely to be upzoned for apartment buildings as part of the Housing Element.

“If we historically preserve every neighborhood in San Francisco, we will be taking an enormous step backward, both in terms of equity and racial outcomes, and our housing crisis,” Fryman said. “At the end of the day, every single neighborhood history is interesting to certain people. Every neighborhood is precious to the people who have lived there for a long time.”