The Sunset’s first all-affordable housing project can move forward—for now

A controversial all-affordable housing project in San Francisco’s Sunset District has gotten the legal green-light to move forward, after a judge ruled against a neighborhood group’s request for a temporary injunction.

Last Tuesday, the Mid-Sunset Neighborhood Association filed a lawsuit to stop the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation from continuing its plans to build a seven-story all-affordable housing complex at the site of a police credit union along the Irving Street commercial corridor.

One day later, San Francisco Superior Court Judge Charles Haines denied its request for a temporary injunction, though he did move forward to the New Year the question of whether the developer had found an “equitable balance” between maximizing housing units and addressing neighborhood concerns, according to the court filing.

That hearing for a preliminary injunction on the project will take place on January 7, with all supporting documents and responses due into the court by the end of the year.

In the meantime, TNDC can move forward with its plans to build 90 units of all-affordable housing in a neighborhood that has seen fewer than 20 affordable housing units built in the last decade. It targeted the site in 2019 and, after two years of pushback from neighbors and a $14.3-million loan from the city’s affordable housing bond, it submitted its entitlement papers to the Planning Commission on December 3. The development should be fast-tracked due to a California law streamlining affordable housing approvals, one of many recent changes that the state has made in order to encourage housing production in the midst of an affordable housing crisis.

“This project needs to continue to go forward,” a spokesman for Mayor London Breed told the San Francisco Chronicle. “Delaying housing through appeals or lawsuits means denying people homes. Our housing shortage requires all cities, including San Francisco, to push harder to build more, including in areas that haven’t seen as much housing built.”

Supervisor Gordon Mar, who represents the neighborhood, would not comment to the paper on the suit. In the past he has expressed support for the five-story, 80-unit version endorsed by the neighborhood group who filed the suit.

Supervisor Matt Haney, who sat on the three-member committee that unanimously approved the city loan for the project and is running for a highly contested state assembly seat, tweeted that though he had hoped for a compromise to prevent the lawsuit, there was “nothing progressive” about giving into the neighborhood group’s demands.

“Some people will do anything & everything to stop affordable housing from being built,” he wrote.

But Mid-Sunset Neighborhood Group President Flo Kimmerling told the Chronicle that her group was not opposed to affordable housing, and that the lawsuit was a last resort after TNDC refused to consider its smaller version of the project.

“We had two choices: lay down and die or go to court,” said Kimmerling. “We picked the latter.”

She further added that despite early objections from the neighborhood about adding any affordable housing–with flyers circulating about stopping the “Slum in the Sunset”–her group does want affordable housing, just not in such a large envelope.

“We want to welcome new neighbors, but the building proposed is too big,” she said.

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