First of its kind
Small-scale infill mixed-affordable
housing project in San Francisco
Project update
The original hearing for this Project was November 19, 2020. Letters of support (69) and callers into the hearing (16) far outnumbered the letters submitted and calls made in opposition. In the end the Project was “Continued” with direction from the Commission to “[w]ork with the Department to develop a scale and building typology here that does add density without maybe some of the negatives that this project brings.” We worked closely with Planning Department staff for nearly a year on a scaled down version of the Project, eventually winning the Department’s official endorsement supporting approval of our Project ahead of the next and final Hearing before the Commission on October 14, 2021.
About the homeowner: The person behind this project is me, Scott Pluta. I own the building at 4300 17th Street and live there. I am not a developer. Just a homeowner that cares deeply about matters related to social justice which I’ve learned since moving to San Francisco increasingly means access to affordable housing.
I am originally from Wisconsin, went to college in Chicago, and law school in Virginia. After law school I moved to Washington, D.C. where I worked in the Obama Administration and on both the 2008 and 2012 Obama campaigns as an election attorney focused fighting voter suppression of underrepresented groups. After the Administration I went to work for Elizabeth Warren at the CFPB where I spent five wonderful years designing policies on a range of progressive issues intended to protect consumers and marginalized communities. I moved to SF for a job at Google focused on content moderation policy; specifically to drive positive change in the areas of hate speech, child safety, misinformation, and other speech and abuse-related topics.
Why is this type of Affordable Housing project needed in SF?
The racist and exclusionary origins of San Francisco’s housing crisis are well known and well documented. Our City is increasingly segregated by race and income which leads directly to worse outcomes for our marginalized communities. Affordable housing is scarce and the little that exists is limited to a handful of under-resourced areas of the City. This project - and if this project is successful future ones like it - seeks to help counter these powerful forces by building small scale, infill, affordable housing in well-resourced areas of San Francisco with little to no existing affordable housing or diversity. Click below to learn more about the connection between San Francisco’s many layers of exclusion and how this type of affordable housing development can help.
How can this innovative affordable housing model be repeated?
The goal of this model is to insert small scale affordable housing into well resourced, low-density zoning districts in San Francisco. This model of building affordable housing acknowledges the hard reality that due to a host of challenges - exclusionary zoning, oppositional neighborhood associations, and cost - this modest scale of development may be the only way to achieve affordable housing throughout all parts of the City. Click below to find out how this model would work and the legislation that could be passed to make this kind of affordable housing development possible at scale.