Gay SF Planning Director Has No Plans to Leave

In recent months the leaders of several San Francisco city departments and agencies have either departed or announced their intentions to do so. Among them were the gay men heading the city's airport and serving as the mayor's homeless czar.

John Rahaim, the gay man at the helm of the city's planning department for the last eight years, however, has no plans to leave anytime soon. In a recent interview with the Bay Area Reporter , Rahaim said he continues to enjoy his job, even as he and his staff come under withering criticism prompted by the city's affordable housing crisis.

"I am very honored to have been here eight years and I have no intention of moving on in the short run. I am more exhilarated and challenged than I have ever been in my career," said Rahaim, 60, who lives in the city's Mission district, which has become ground zero in the debates over luxury housing and gentrification. "I am really having fun. It is not an easy position. I am being both personally and intellectually challenged at a level I have never been and I am enjoying that."

Since he arrived in San Francisco from Seattle, where he had served as that city's planning director for four years, Rahaim has faced intensifying arguments over the direction of development in the city and various housing policies. Over the last year tensions have flared at planning commission meetings over how to rein in home-sharing sites, block market-rate housing in the Mission, and most recently, rezone various neighborhoods to allow for denser developments in exchange for more affordable housing.

Fears that the city's gay Castro district is losing its LGBT residents have also grown stronger since Rahaim was hired. At times he has been asked what the planning department can do to stop the gayborhood from becoming "too straight."

The answer, said Rahaim, is there isn't much the department can do, in terms of zoning policies, to prevent that from happening.

"To be honest it is hard for me to know, from a land use stance per se, what we should be or could be doing different," said Rahaim. "It would be interesting to know from the gay community's standpoint if there are things ... To be honest, perhaps to my own detriment, I haven't engaged the LGBT community at a political level as much."

He did point to the LGBT senior housing development now under construction at 55 Laguna Street as well as the streetscape revamp of Castro Street in 2014 as two projects he and his department were proud to work on. The sidewalk widening project, in particular, Rahaim feels turned out great.

As for the various in-fill developments on upper Market Street that have added housing over ground floor retail, Rahaim admitted some have turned out better than others. Two he likes are the Icon building at 16th, Market and Noe, and 2175 Market Street by Forest City

"I think it's a mixed bag. A couple really disappointed that I thought would be better," said Rahaim, declining to specify which projects he dislikes.

To critics of the buildings who would prefer seeing Victorian-like structures, Rahaim's response is that developers should be constructing modern architecture and not copies of housing from a bygone era.

"We should build buildings of our time. I do believe it is important we don't create false historicism," he said. "It is also true that these buildings need to be part of their context. They need to be complex and have shadow and light."

And Rahaim is dismissive of architects who complain the city's design guidelines hamper their creativity.

"My response is nonsense. We have some great buildings out there," he said. "The designs of what is being built today is far superior to what was being built 20, 30 years ago in the city. I think we need to take credit for that."

Developers Versus Residents

Another complaint often voiced during planning policy debates is that the planning department listens more to developers than residents. Rahaim, while accepting partial responsibility for the concern, said public anger over planning decisions comes with the job.

"Some of it, I think, we are responsible for and some of it is the system, which is true not only here but in many cities," he said. "We are the entity that they can point to to say you are causing change in our neighborhoods. Neighborhoods are changing, development is happening, and you are letting this happen."

In terms of the affordable housing density program, debate over which has boiled for months and will again go before the planning commission later this month, Rahaim acknowledged the department misjudged public sentiment about the program.

"In such processes, like the density program discussed last night, I think we could have done a better job upfront in engaging the neighborhoods on that," said Rahaim, who spoke with the B.A.R. Friday, January 29, a day after a heated, nearly six-hour planning commission hearing about the proposal. "We did not anticipate the amount of interest there is. That might have been naivete on our part, but that is just a fact."

He rejected, however, a suggestion that his department faces public mistrust surrounding the work that it does.

"The other factor, I have always been a little sensitive about, I think sometimes the word trust is used as a buzzword for disagreement. In other words it is not necessarily they don't trust us, it is they disagree with us," Rahaim said. "There is fundamental disagreement with what we do."

A main point of divergence is Rahaim's steadfast stance that the city can't address skyrocketing housing costs by blocking new development.

"It has been my philosophy, and the department's point of view, for a while that we need to accept some level of growth. Growth is coming to the city and this region, and we need to plan for it and allow in a certain level of growth," said Rahaim. "And there are a certain number of folks who fundamentally disagree with that. They don't want more development. They don't want more market-rate housing. They don't want more growth ever."

Queer housing rights activist Tommi Avicolli Mecca told the B.A.R. that when the community feels it is not being heard by the planning department, then the only recourse it has is to show up in force at planning commission meetings to voice concerns. He pointed to how Mission district residents have had to rally at City Hall several times over the last year as one example.

"For years, the Mission fought to have more input on important issues affecting tenants and working-class families, such as what gets constructed in the neighborhood and how that impacts rents, gentrification and displacement of tenants and families and small businesses," Avicolli Mecca, the director of counseling programs at the Housing Rights Committee of SF, wrote in an email. "One thousand people from the Mission went to City Hall last May to demand 100 percent affordable housing for the Mission and then 800 returned to City Hall in June to demand a moratorium on market-rate housing. That caught the attention of City Hall. And it has resulted in some small concessions to the neighborhood. It's not enough, but it's more than the neighborhood was getting."

He added that the planning department has been reaching out more to residents but could do a better job of gathering community input as it develops policies such as the affordable housing density proposal.

"I think the relationship of neighborhoods and communities to planning and its staff is a work in progress. They're listening to us more. They're understanding that the community needs to be involved in issues, but they don't always involve us until after they formulate plans, such with the density bonus program," wrote Avicolli Mecca. "By the time we heard about it, planning had already formulated the plan, and we had no choice but to make an issue of our concerns at the planning commission."

In response to public opposition to the plan, Avicolli Mecca said planning staff offered to meet with housing activists to hear their concerns. Something, he argued, it should have done early on.

"I feel that planning should be meeting with the community before finalizing its plans. They should understand that we know what benefits our communities," he wrote. "Planning should be a community process, the community should be involved from the ground up."

High marks

Gay District 8 Supervisor Scott Wiener, who at times has disagreed with the planning department on zoning decisions in his district, gave Rahaim and his staff high marks.

"He is a very smart and diligent planning director," said Wiener. "I think John and his department are very focused on our housing needs and do a lot of proactive work around it."

At the same time, Wiener said the planning department does not bear sole responsibility for ensuring current San Francisco residents are not priced out of the city.

"It is not just the planning department's job to deal with it. It is also up to the mayor, the Board of Supervisors, and the mayor's office of housing," said Wiener. "We all have a joint responsibility. The planning department can't solve the housing crisis on its own."

Gay Planning Commissioner Dennis Richards, who was elected last month as the oversight body's vice president, expressed great admiration for Rahaim and the job he is doing. Prior to being appointed to the commission in 2014, Richards often met with planning staff to discuss various zoning and housing issues as the former president of the Duboce Triangle Neighborhood Association.

"I have intense respect for him and a great working relationship with him. I really look forward to working with him this year," said Richards. "He gets it, he knows the issues ... he is the right guy for the right time."

And Richards added, "The nice thing is he admits when maybe they have a misfire."

In terms of the rapid rise in housing costs, Richards said the issue blindsided not just the planning department.

"I think he will admit, as the rest of us will, the whole acceleration in the real estate market came so fast and furiously, it caught many of us, myself included, a little bit off guard," he said. "We have 1,000 more people per month moving into the city than we have places for them to live. You start adding up displacement, lack of affordability, and the lack of creating of new units, it really has been a perfect storm."

Rahaim said, "nobody anticipated the pace of change in recent years" that resulted from both millennials being drawn to the city by the tech sector and baby boomers wanting to leave the suburbs for urban living.

"That has created huge consternation in places like the Mission," he noted.

Addressing the city's housing needs will not be solved overnight, cautioned Rahaim, and requires a multi-faceted approach not just at the city level but region-wide.

"Absolutely it is the most important issue of our time and likely will be for quite some time," he said. "The bonus program is one tool in the toolbox and a tool we are trying to grow. We have a number of tools to grow affordable housing but we don't have enough."

Communities around the Bay Area need to be building more housing, added Rahaim.

"Some smaller communities on the Peninsula have not stepped up and built their fair share of housing. I have been very vocal lately on this," he said. "It needs to be dealt with regionally. The mayor has also been very vocal about this and has formed a partnership with his counterparts in Oakland and San Jose to address it. I think more and more people are understanding that."

Among his proudest achievements since taking on the job, Rahaim said, has been "substantially" increasing the professionalism and integrity of the department's staff and shepherding to adoption various neighborhood-based rezoning, such as the Market and Octavia Neighborhood Plan.

A major priority for Rahaim is fulfilling the promise, forever immortalized in song, that "San Francisco, open your golden gate / You let no stranger wait outside your door."

"One reason why the gay community is so important here, we always felt welcome here," said Rahaim. "What I worry about with the cost of housing is we are losing the ability to welcome anyone. I do believe that is extremely important."