I rabidly support every new apartment development. Trinity Towers (across the street from the main branch of the SF Library) should be a model for how these things work:
* Remove rent controlled tenants. They will be displaced for 6->12 months.
* Tear down old building.
* Build Phase 1 of new, far denser building, as quickly as possible.
* Move rent-controlled tenants back into their new units at the same rate they had when they were displaced. Those units are covered by rent control forever. The rest of the building is at "market rate".
* Build the rest of the building at your leisure.
The only thing I might add to the plan is city-sponsored housing to put the displaced residents.
I didn't know that was how Trinity Towers was done, but that's been my suggestion for a while now: bulldoze the Mission and start over if you like, but every damned one of those people had better come back in on the same or better terms than what they had when they left -- and they'd better be housed in the meantime, too.
Too often, the debate about development ignores those people, or makes great promises but fails to deliver.
He probably caused the start of rent control in SF with his "promise" to increase rents in his buildings by something like 100% per year, every single year. [0] AIUI, he never sells buildings; he buys or builds them to rent apartments to people. And now, there's the Trinity Towers deal! He's rich as fuck from the landlording business, but -from what I know of him- he deserves every penny.
> Too often, the debate about development ignores those people, or makes great promises but fails to deliver.
The city's schizophrenic attitudes with regards to housing development confuse me. Something stinks in this city, and it's not just the Combined Sewer System. ;)
[0] IIRC, the story goes that he publicly made this proclamation shortly after the passage of Prop 13.
What do you do with the previous tenants for those 6-12 months? By your last statement I assume it's just "figure your own shit out for the next year", which... well, that's really bad. Just the cost of moving (twice) could break some lower-income folks' backs. I wouldn't be surprised if few of those people return after phase 1 is complete.
I don't know what happened in this particular case, but given how long it took to hash out the details, I would expect that alternative housing was found for the displaced tenants.
I really should ask around; this detail seems to be something that the various newspapers aren't covering.
I agree that having to figure out alternative housing for yourself would be very, very bad for a few classes of tenants. I mention a mitigation in the last sentence of the comment to which you replied. :)
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