Local opposition efforts stall affordable housing development in San Francisco as residents and local policymakers stall plans to designate North Beach a historic district.
Taken directly from the California Democrats’ issue on sustainable communities, they “believe all Californians have a right to affordable housing in reasonable proximity to where they work, study, and hold community ties.”
Still, despite general support in Democratic states for affordable housing in theory, building such housing remains a difficult process due to the permitting process, preservationist regulations, and Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) ideas.
These affordable housing problems are found in San Francisco, a heavily Democratic city, where over 60% of registered voters are for the Democratic Party.
Infographic by Kiana Chen
“One of the big problems that we generally have in a lot of places, and a lot of blue states in particular, is that we have a really onerous permitting process for building more than one unit of housing. If I wanted to build a single family house, that’s pretty easy. I don’t have to go through a crazy permitting process,” said Katherine Levine Einstein, an associate professor of political science and director of undergraduate studies at Boston University.
According to Einstein, in most places, developers need “special permission from a local governing body” in order to build an apartment building or a condominium project.
“Every public meeting I go to to present my plans, members of the public have an opportunity to voice their views on a project,” Einstein said.
This lends itself to more restrictive outcomes regarding affordable housing, especially NIMBY ideas and preservationist sentiment.
“Preservationist sentiment in progressive cities tends to express itself through appeals to ‘community character,’ ‘neighborhood fabric,’ or ‘historic integrity.’ These arguments are not inherently exclusionary, but in practice, they often serve to block new housing, especially affordable or multi-unit housing,” said Martin Vinæs Larsen, an associate professor at the Department of Political Science at Aarhus University.
The State Historical Resources Commission decides on designating areas as historical districts in California. Earlier in 2025, there were moves in San Francisco for North Beach to apply for a designation as a historic district, which drew mixed feelings.
“I doubt that there would be significant pushback to designating North Beach as an historic district. I think what you might see is some meaningful discussion about where the lines will be drawn in the designation, because, frankly, there are chunks of North Beach that really probably should be designated as a historic district, because, in fact, it’s a historic district,” said Erik Migdail, an English teacher at Carlmont and a resident of San Francisco.
Einstein says that historic districts are absolutely a problem when trying to build more affordable housing, since they add a layer of permitting.
“And so I’m sympathetic to why people might want to create regulations that preserve some of that, but I think the problem with those types of regulations is they preserve these communities in amber, and they say that they can never change,” Einstein said.
Mayor Daniel Lurie has postponed the consideration to August, which means the discussion regarding the status of North Beach will continue.
“I would suspect that there are interested parties who are haggling over the contours of that district for self-interest,” Migdail said.
In general, NIMBY ideas, despite plans for affordable housing developments, stalls this already drawn-out process.
“When we think about sort of how local government is structured, our zoning and land use regulations have meant that anytime you want to build more than one unit of housing, you have these public meetings. And so that’s sort of one government structure that’s really favoring this sort of NIMBY voice,” Einstein said.
Larsen corroborates the idea of local influences towards housing.
“The disconnect between support for affordable housing and local opposition is one of the most enduring puzzles. One key factor is that housing politics are deeply local,” Larsen said.
Another reason for these objections is the balance of costs and benefits.
“One of the really challenging issues to deal with development is it has what we sort of think of as concentrated costs and diffuse benefits,” Einstein said.
Construction projects and the associated disturbance contribute to the concentrated costs, and they feel big and important for people living nearby, according to Einstein.
“In contrast, each new housing development has these incredibly diffuse benefits,” Einstein said.
People may support affordable housing in the abstract but resist it when it’s proposed on their street or in their neighborhood, often due to concerns about traffic, parking, school quality, or changes in social composition, according to Larsen.
Another challenge is the location of these affordable housing units. Migdail says that distance to amenities and accessible services is important in determining the best location.
“North Beach actually, I think, is a good place for building affordable housing,” Migdail said. “But functionally, we’re at a crossroads where it has made it impossible to get anything done.”
Just like how historic district designations are managed by the state, shifting housing politics to a higher level of government suggests effective results.
“One promising approach is shifting decision-making to higher levels of government,” Larsen said. “State-level reforms that limit the veto power of localities have had some traction.”
Stein agrees that “doing it at the local government level is a nice start, but we’re never going to solve this problem just by having local governments voluntarily pass these policies.”
Some suggest that reducing the extensive process that traditionally protects the housing market is a viable solution to the problem.
“There is a real rethinking in left-wing circles about what the trade-offs are. And in order to solve this problem, it may be that some of those checks may have to go by the wayside and create conditions whereby unscrupulous people can exploit the system, but those are just trade-offs we need to make,” Migdail said.
