On February 7, Mayor London Breed launched a Housing for All Plan to fundamentally change how we approve and build housing.
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This executive directive will help San Francisco take action on its commitment to build more than 82,000 new homes in the next eight years, mostly near transit and in the less-dense areas of the city. It shows the Mayor is serious about implementing the city’s recently adopted long-term housing plan, called a Housing Element.
This is good news for families, the working class, and a surprising community: climate and environmental advocates. That’s because San Francisco is an inherently low-emissions city with plenty of compact, walkable neighborhoods. The more housing we build here, the more families can join in our low carbon, sprawl-free lifestyle!

Let’s Thank Mayor Breed for Taking Action on San Francisco’s Housing Element!

Twice each year, the states housing, climate, and transportation agencies hold a joint meeting - the perfect venue for some urban environmentalism! (That's HCD, ARB, and CalSTA, for those of you who enjoy getting into the weeds.)

At this November's meeting, a key item on the agenda was review of a progress report on implementation of the state's Climate Adaptation Plan for Transportation Infrastructure (CAPTI), recently released by CalSTA. We called in to make public comment, and also submitted written comments to CalSTA. Here's an excerpt of what we said:

​As state agencies' own studies and reports acknowledge, we cannot meet our greenhouse gas and vehicle miles traveled reduction goals, not to mention address our housing affordability crisis, without building more infill housing. Infill housing is thus an essential issue that requires policies and programs with teeth across multiple agencies, and not just aspirational goals or process requirements

The CAPTI report suggests that work on infill housing (S7.1) is "complete." However, as with many other elements of the report, the implementation to date is insufficient and would better be described as "in progress." To more effectively incentivize jurisdictions to be pro-housing, additional implementation could include:

1. Programs pointing to the pro-housing designation and similar process indicators could also consider whether a jurisdiction currently has a compliant Housing Element and is currently on track to meet its regional housing needs allocation (RHNA), on a prorated basis.
2. Pro-housing designation could be a mandatory criterion for projects serving high-resourced locations with a jobs-housing imbalance, rather than optional.

No other commenters mentioned infill housing, an indication of how far we still have to go as a movement in bringing infill housing to the forefront of the climate action narrative. We invite you to join us in this activism, and hope our state agencies start listening!

Last month our executive director, Joanna Gubman, had the pleasure of being interviewed by our friends at Modern Power about our work here at Urban Environmentalists (and her previous work in clean energy and transportation at the California Public Utilities Commission).

This morning, the SF Chronicle published an opinion piece by Urban Environmentalists Lead Zack Subin and UCLA Professor Michael Manville. In their article, they call on Governor Newsom to sign AB 2097, a parking reform bill that would prohibit local governments from mandating excessive parking near transit:

Urban Environmentalists has supported AB 2097 throughout this legislative session, sending support letters to the Legislature, calling representatives, and more. We're excited and proud of how far this bill has come, and call on the Governor to sign AB 2097 now!

At Urban Environmentalists, our bread and butter is grassroots advocacy. But it's important to advance thought leadership in our field, too! We're honored that our peer-reviewed paper on Energy Efficiency, Land Use, and Equity was accepted into the conference proceedings of the ACEEE Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Buildings, a leading national conference that takes place biennially.
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The paper was written by our executive director, Joanna Gubman, and lead volunteer Vanessa Boehm. Joanna presented at the conference this past Friday, where we were able to meet and learn from a number of potential new coalition partners. We look forward to jointly exploring how energy efficiency programs and policies can actively pursue land use justice, not just technological solutions, to better help both people and planet.

Urban Environmentalists has had three Meet & Greets with candidates for State Assembly district 17, corresponding to Eastern SF. We have hosted Bilal Mahmood, David Campos, and Thea Selby, and the final event with be with Matt Haney on Dec 13. We have cohosted with Streets for People and SF YIMBY. You can catch the event videos at Streets for People's YouTube page.

SF-based Urban Environmentalists will be participating in SF YIMBY's endorsement process: stay tuned for their endorsements by early Jan 2022.