For decades San Francisco and the rest of the Region have been suffering from an increasing imbalance between incoming new jobs and housing. Municipal, regional and State governments have been either unable or unwilling to do anything about the problem.
Fed up, the people of San Francisco have now taken a stand. On March 3, 2020 they passed San Francisco Prop E. According to Ida Mojadad’s in depth article (SF Examiner 2/29/20), Prop E will require large developers to curtail office development unless an appropriate amount of affordable housing development is built in San Francisco in accordance with state-mandated affordable housing objectives. Thanks to a ballot measure passed in the 1980’s San Francisco already limits the amount of office space that can be approved every year. Prop. E will reduce the amount of currently acceptable new office space by a percentage equal to the percentage by which the city fails to fulfill its affordable housing obligations. In addition Prop E will cap large new office projects in the South of Market neighborhood until at least 15,000 new affordable housing units are provided in that area.
Why one might ask, should a transit-advocacy group like BATWG care about Prop E?
Because as well as addressing San Francisco jobs/housing imbalance, Prop E directly confronts the Region’s most intractable transportation problem, which is how to end the development community’s long established practice of piling jobs into high cost housing areas, thereby forcing incoming employees, or those displaced by incoming employees, to relocate to distant, long-commute locations. Under this broken system developers are provided with financial incentives to both cater to the desires of large incoming employers and create additional sprawl. A better balance between housing and jobs would benefit everyone except those who put get-rich-quick real estate profits ahead of all other considerations.
Actions taken to deal with the Bay Area’s growing transportation and land use problems have been failing for decades. (The Faster Bay Area group has set out to do better, but the returns on that effort are still out). As things stand the prognosis is for more of the same wasteful misdirection scarce transportation funding to ill-conceived programs and projects, all in the name of “progress”. This situation did not arise by accident. It came about in large part of because political power has been and still is vested in a regional public body whose policy-makers seem to neither know much nor care much about reversing the Bay Area’s deteriorating transportation condition. This leaves them vulnerable to being unduly influenced by parochial, development and other outside interests with other objectives. Until this long-standing organizational defect is corrected, the Bay Area will continue to be afflicted by defective rail and bus operations, increased traffic backups and worsening housing agonies. 
But remain alert. Pieces of SB50 are almost certain to start quietly reappearing in other State bills.
