A ten-hour-long Planning Commission meeting allowed Mayor Lurie’s “family zoning” plan to clear its first legislative hurdle on Thursday, but the SF Board of Supervisors seems primed to add a ton of amendments to the ambitious upzoning proposal.
Mayor Daniel Lurie’s so-called "family zoning” plan is an ambitious effort to add 36,000 new housing units in San Francisco, in order to comply with the state-mandated housing element order that we add 82,000 new housing units by the year 2031. And Lurie’s plan cleared its first hurdle Thursday with a 4-3 approval vote from the SF Planning Commission, as the Chronicle report.
The meeting was preceded with a raucous rally and counter-rally on the City Hall steps, and then the Planning Commission meeting started at 12 noon, and it did not get around to this vote until after 10 pm, because there were more than five hours of public comment.
Today, San Franciscans came out to support the Family Zoning Plan and a simple idea—that families and workers should be able to live in San Francisco. Not just visit on the weekends or commute from the greater Bay Area, but live, grow, and thrive here.
— Daniel Lurie 丹尼爾·羅偉 (@DanielLurie) September 11, 2025
That is why our plan is… pic.twitter.com/D9gewRHlbK
Mayor Lurie’s photo op image above does not tell the whole story about how his pre-meeting rally in support of the proposal rally went. As Mission Local observed, “Lurie was shouted down” to chants of “Shame! Shame!,” and “You are a liar! You are a liar!”
A few of Lurie’s allies on the Board of Supervisors also spoke, and the Chronicle reports that Supervisor Joel Engardio’s speech was somewhat humorously drowned out by chants of “Five more days!,” a reference to his upcoming recall election on Tuesday.
Regardless, that was all before the Planning Commission meeting, which was a calmer (and much longer) affair. And the commission considered the brass tacks of the “family zoning” proposal, which as the Chronicle explains, would allow for heights of six stories in the mostly single-family housing Sunset District, 16 stories along the Marina’s Lombard Street, and up to 24 stories on parts of Van Ness Avenue.
These “family zoning” high-rises do not sound like they would be geared towards families living in them? But during the meeting, Planning Department staff countered that there would be incentives for developers to add three-, four-, and five-unit apartments into these buildings.
And San Francisco has an incentive to upzone too. Should the state determine we are not in compliance with our housing elements plant, the city could lose up to $100 million annually in state funding, and also be subjected to the “builder’s remedy” free-for-all where developers could just build whatever they want without seeking SF city approval.
But a huge concern is that small businesses would be displaced by developers keen to tear their building down to put up something taller. Joe's Ice Cream in the Richmond District is currently facing that very problem. “Small business eviction is not a fear, it’s a reality,” Joe's Ice Cream owner Sean Kim said in a letter to the commission that was read aloud before Thursday’s vote, according to 48 Hills. “We cannot compete with the profits on condos.”
Planning Commissioner Kathrin Moore, one of the three commissioners who voted against the plan, worried about broader displacement of rent-controlled tenants for the same reason. “What we are looking at today is not a plan,” she said before the vote, per Mission Local. “It is a document primarily responding to a mandate for numbers without a vision.”
But Commissioner Lydia So, who voted in favor, saw the plan as the best available option. “We’re stuck in a decades-long cycle of housing scarcity. That scarcity creates uncertainty, fear and inequality,” she said. “Mayor Lurie’s family zoning plan offers a relatively reasonable, locally driven path forward.”
Despite Lurie’s plan getting passed by the Planning Commission Thursday, the Board of Supervisors is clearly going to carve into it with add-ons and amendments. Mayor Lurie has already indicated he would support Supervisor Myrna Melgar’s amendments to give small businesses displacement aid, as well as Supervisor Chyanne Chen’s forthcoming amendments for renter protections.
So there’s going to be a lot of cooks in the kitchen before this thing ever heads to the full SF Board of Supervisors for a full vote, a process that will likely last for months in committee meetings. As the Chronicle points out, the board does not have to pass this plan until January 31, 2026.
Image: @DanielLurie via Twitter
