Tools for Ensuring Equitable Investments - the California Context

1. Plan-based Land Value Recapture
The Eastern Neighborhoods
Plan in San Francisco

2. San Francisco
A culture of planning exactions/linkages (based on a
very strong market):
• Commercial Linkage Fee ($20 Office, $18
Entertainment, $15 Hotel, $18 Retail, etc.)
• Transit Impact Fee (non residential, $10)
• Child Care Fees ($1)
• Open Space Fees
• Arts fees (1 percent of construction costs)
• Inclusionary requirements (15 to 20 percent;
$380,000 in-lieu-fee)

4. Appendix: Public Benefits Incentive Zoning (excerpt)
“The purpose of Public Benefits Incentive Zoning is to ensure that any increased
development potential resulting from a rezoning of the Mission District helps to
develop a diverse, balanced, and healthy neighborhood. Where the rezoning
allows an increase in density or buildable square footage, it not only confers
greater development potential, but also creates greater land value for property
owners and sales or rental value for developers. Increased private value is thereby
conferred by a public act, but without gaining advantages for the local community.
This program creates a mechanism to capture a portion of this increased land
value in the form of Public Benefits that will mitigate the impact of the additional
development rather than allow it to become windfall profit to the landowner.
Public Benefits may take the form of affordable family and senior housing units
above the required inclusionary zoning, community serving spaces, publicly
accessible open space, and light industrial space where appropriate. For the
purpose of this program, “rezoning” includes increases in height, bulk, buildable
square footage, or density, or major changes in allowed uses.”
How can we explain such sophistication?

5. Origins: Rapid Gentrification/Displacement in
the SOMA area
• Dot-com boom of the late 1990s
• Super-gentrification in traditional working class
neighborhoods
• Wholesale displacement of families and businesses,
• Aided by city policies that exempted “live-work” spaces
in warehouses and industrial structures from
processing and fee requirements
Existing infrastructure of
community-based organizations to build on

7. Ten year campaign: Whose city?
• Struggle for residents and workers to remain
in their neighborhood
• Establishment of the Mission Anti-
Displacement Coalition (MAC)
• We don’t want to react to a city’s prepared
plan
• Strategy: From trying to stop what the
neighborhood did not want to “What we
want” and “How do we get it”

8. The People’s Plan for Jobs, Housing,
and Community
• Now what? (The People’s Plan meets the
Official Plan—Collaboration between the City
and MAC):
The 2008 Eastern Neighborhood Plan
Appropriate political juncture (Willie Brown-District Elections)
Planning Department staff in charge sympathetic

9. San Francisco Eastern Neighborhoods Plan

10. Eastern Neighborhoods
The EN Plan ties increased allowable intensities of development to higher
fees Three tiers:
• Tier 1: Increase in height of eight feet or less
• Tier 2: Increase in height of nine to 28 feet
• Tier 3: Increase in height of 29 feet or more
Fee levels
Tier Residential Non-residential
• 1 $8/gsf $6/gsf
• 2 $12/gsf $10/gsf
• 3 $16/gsf $14/gsf
In formerly industrial zones the use change to different types of mixed use
requires higher IH requirements

11. Land use changes (value creation) generate
community benefits (value capture), through the
planning system (in addition to existing exactions)
• This approach is now applied throughout San Francisco
when Area Plans or Specific Plans are updated
• It reflects a more interventionist city to guarantee
more equitable outcomes and offset the social and
environmental costs of development

12. Does it work always and everywhere?
No, it needs places and times with a
healthy market
• But how do cities, land owners and developers
know what level of value capture is feasible?
• “Community benefits cannot be calculated or
negotiated without using development economics
and real estate analysis, and the question is not
whether but how” (Cameron Gray, former Director
of Vancouver Housing Center)

13. • Mathur, Shishir. Under contract. Property
Value Capture to Fund Public Transportation in
the USA. Surrey, U.K: Ashgate.