Every morning on their way to school, students at Marshall Elementary School in San Francisco’s Mission District are forced to sidestep clouds of meth and fentanyl smoke, as well as human faeces. The Inner Mission is a neighbourhood plagued by street addiction, homelessness, and untreated mental illness. Emily Glasner, a Marshall mom, told me about the time someone jumped out from an alley screaming at her, “I’m going to kill you”, while she was walking to school with her 10-year-old son. Now, her son has nightmares about being attacked by people on the street.
Despite these abominable conditions — or perhaps because of them — a nine-storey apartment building called “La Maravilla” has been approved for construction next door to the school. It will contain 135 units to house formerly homeless people. Neighbours, school staff and parents of Marshall students fear it will make conditions around the school even worse. Yet in response to their concerns, supporters of La Maravilla have called them “Nimbys” (“Not In My Back Yard”) and accused them of bigotry.
In a meeting before the San Francisco Board of Supervisors last July, Sam Moss, the executive director of the Mission Housing Development Corporation, the non-profit affordable housing development firm leading the project, lit into critics of La Maravilla. A group of neighbours opposed to the new construction, which is slated to begin in December, had appealed its approval, and that appeal was before the board to consider.
“This appeal isn’t about protecting the neighbourhood,” Moss said, his voice tense with anger and brimming with contempt. “It’s about protecting privilege. It’s about using bureaucracy to block equity. It sends a clear message to low-income and housing insecure folks in San Francisco: you don’t belong here.”
His acerbic language reflected the rhetorical tenor of the Yimby (“Yes In My Back Yard”) movement. It’s a moniker proudly claimed by the pro-housing activists who oppose Nimbys — the pejorative used for neighbours who criticise and hold up new housing construction projects. Moss’ wife, Laura Foote, who also testified on behalf of La Maravilla that day, is one of the founders of the Yimby movement. (Moss declined to speak to me for this story and Foote did not respond to an interview request.)
Nimbys, in the minds of Yimbys, are affluent homeowners so pampered by their comfortable neighbourhoods that they become feverish reactionaries in the face of any proposed change to the status quo. The caricature of a Nimby is encapsulated in a video from a 2017 Berkeley City Council meeting in which a neighbour held a zucchini aloft and declared that it could never have grown in the shade that would be cast over her vegetable garden by a couple of two-storey buildings slated for construction next door. Yimbys often claim that concerns invoked by opponents of new development projects over traffic, parking, shadows and neighbourhood character are not merely frivolous; they’re smokescreens for the real objective of keeping poor people out of the area. “I am ashamed at this classist and hostile behaviour from some of my neighbours,” said one supporter of La Maravilla at the Board of Supervisors meeting.
But the stereotype is an odd fit for those who oppose Moss’ project, especially those affiliated with Marshall. The school’s students are overwhelmingly low-income. Many of them are the children of immigrants. The complaints of their parents and educators are not about zucchini gardens; they’re about surrounding a school with an open-air drug market. Neighbours have seen open prostitution in the area during school hours. One school employee told me about a man masturbating on the sidewalk in front of the playground in view of the kids. A teacher had seen shirtless young men walking out of a nearby station carrying machetes. “It’s unsafe at a hygiene level,” the Marshall employee, who asked not to be named, told me. “People are defecating on the street daily.”
“Every morning on their way to school, students are forced to sidestep clouds of meth and fentanyl smoke, as well as human faeces.”
Yet their grievances have been described as those of Nimbys even by Jackie Fielder, the supervisor who represents the neighbourhood, on her Instagram page. (Fielder did not respond to a request for comment.) “It’s a trope that plays well in San Francisco,” said Ali Gilmore, who lives across the street from the school.
Neighbours and parents fear that the new project will bring even more chaos and disorder to the vicinity. Plans for La Maravilla include three buildings. All of them will be affordable housing, but only one of them — the nine-storey structure that will break ground in December — has been funded. That building will be permanent supportive housing. “Supportive housing” means housing with services for formerly homeless people who are mentally ill or drug-addicted.
San Francisco incentivises the development of this type of housing. Thanks to a ballot measure passed in 2018 that raised taxes on huge companies in San Francisco to fund homeless services, there are hundreds of millions of dollars in city funding available for the construction of permanent supportive housing. And thanks to recent Yimby-supported legislation, residential development projects that include supportive housing are streamlined for approval in California, especially when they’re near transit corridors, as La Maravilla is. Instead of going through the tedious process of gaining the approval of public officials, developers whose projects meet a list of prerequisites can dispense with public hearings and costly environmental reviews and cut the permitting process down to months instead of years. The rules are meant to prevent Nimbys from blocking the construction of housing desperately needed to address the state’s affordability crisis. It was this streamlined process that allowed the Mission Housing Development Corporation and its partner on the project, the Mission Economic Development Agency, to push La Maravilla through.
Moss has described his opponents’ appeal against La Maravilla as “a greatest hits of Nimbyism” and “chock full of bigotry and segregation”. For people in wealthy Pacific Heights or on the low-slung west side of San Francisco who for decades have stubbornly resisted affordable housing construction and upzoning — changing construction codes to allow for denser development — that’s a charge that might stick. Those were the kinds of homeowners the Yimby movement was built to confront, not moderate-income and working-class families whose neighbourhoods are already inundated by blight. “I follow what’s happening in the Sunset,” Naomi Fox, who heads the Marshall Parent Teacher Association, said of the west side neighbourhood. “I see Mayor Lurie begging them to allow an upzoning plan. We would have no problem with that.”
The Inner Mission is, in fact, already upzoned, and no one I spoke to in the neighbourhood had a problem with affordable housing being constructed next to Marshall. Marc Solomon, another neighbour, told me they’d be fine with a building for homeless families, who tend to be higher-functioning than homeless individuals. The issue he and other neighbours have is with what La Maravilla is offering: permanent supportive housing for formerly incarcerated and chronically homeless single adults, which in San Francisco means drug addicts.
The part of the Mission that surrounds Marshall is already clogged with services for this population. About a block and a half south of the school is a free medical clinic for the indigent. A couple of blocks west lies a charity that distributes socks, blankets and hygiene kits to the homeless, and provides them with foot care and back massages. About a block southwest is another affordable housing complex called La Fénix, also built by the Mission Housing Development Corporation, with a quarter of the units set aside for the homeless. The site that La Maravilla will be built upon was, until recently, a homeless shelter.
Neighbours believe that the dense concentration of housing and services for the homeless, mentally ill and drug-addicted has turned the Inner Mission into a containment zone for highly unstable and sometimes dangerous people. On the first day of the school year, around pick-up time, there was a shooting at La Fénix. A Marshall employee told me the police never informed the school’s staff, who may have decided to go into lockdown. Another time, someone being pursued by a gunman ran onto school grounds while kids were being dropped off. “The people that live in this neighbourhood are dealing with the most difficult conditions in the entire city, alongside the Tenderloin and SoMa,” said Aaron Wojack, who lives across the street from Marshall. “The burden on this neighbourhood is already tremendous.”
Yet at meetings with the community, numerous people who attended them told me, the non-profit developers treated neighbours as if they were bigots. “Whenever there was any talk of the community not wanting this, we were told, ‘you don’t care about unhoused people,’” a neighbour with a son at Marshall told me. “It was their cause, their cause, their cause. Everyone who opposes it is bad and doesn’t care about poor people.”
“They were just telling us the bare minimum to say we met with community,” said Todd Eng, who lives a few blocks away and whose daughter graduated from Marshall. “It’s, we’re going to proceed forward with this, we don’t care what the community thinks.”
Development in the Inner Mission fits a pattern in San Francisco, in which just three neighbourhoods shoulder the brunt of the city’s addiction crisis. Even more than the Mission, the Tenderloin District and parts of SoMa are crammed with single-room occupancy hotels for the homeless, as well as food pantries, free medical clinics, drug courts and distribution sites for free, city-funded drug paraphernalia. Sidewalks are often clogged with drug users and dealers. As in the Mission, the poor immigrant families who live in the walk-up apartment buildings of the Tenderloin routinely have to dodge faeces and meth smoke on the street. A child of one family, who immigrated from Yemen, was attacked.
To many residents, it seems by design. Earlier this year, a group of Tenderloin residents and businesses sued the city for turning their neighbourhood into a drug containment zone. Among the plaintiffs is an immigrant mother who says drug users have threatened her with knives and hammers. Like the parents and teachers and neighbours of Marshall, these San Franciscans don’t want an open-air drug market in their proverbial back yard, which is already overflowing with the city’s worst problems. Does this make them Nimbys, too?
There’s no question there’s a housing crisis in San Francisco and throughout the entire state of California. Nobody questions the need for more housing construction of every sort, including permanent supportive housing. But the burden is not evenly spread. A few neighbourhoods are expected to absorb the fallout of concentrating hundreds of drug-addicted and mentally ill people in buildings next to their kids’ schools, while the rest of the city enjoys clean sidewalks and safe playgrounds. It’s not a coincidence that these neighbourhoods are also where the most powerless families reside.
The fight over the fate of the neighbourhood around the proposed La Maravilla development belies the simplistic picture of Yimbys versus Nimbys painted in the national media. Sometimes there are real issues at stake in projects such as these, and the compromises made to address them are messy and divisive. The Nimby caricature papers over these complexities, dismissing anyone who objects to any new housing construction as selfish and entitled, whether their worries are about blocked views or about the risk of their kids being shot. This is what passes for “equity” in San Francisco.
