View the San Francisco for Wednesday, February 19, 2025
Hopes among San Francisco housing boosters that 2025 could deliver a sudden home-building boom are already fading after the year opened with a series of economic curveballs, driving fears that construction costs could soon rise.
The first shock came only days after the new year began, when fast-moving wildfires erupted in Los Angeles County and went on to consume thousands of homes. The disaster hasFederal Reserve late last month to hold off on lowering interest rates Builders and housing-market experts agreed that it’s still too soon to say how far reaching these developments might ultimately prove to be. Still, any economic setback only adds to the cloud of uncertainty hanging over San Francisco’s home-building sector, which has struggled to regain its footing in the wake of the sharp downturn that followed the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. “Even if there’s just a 2% increase in construction costs, it’ll be a bit disastrous,” said Patrick McNerney,Despite efforts by The City to cut red tape surrounding home-building, new construction has slowed to a trickle in recent years, held back by challenging economic forces.in recent years, held back by challenging economic forces. Although some of that economic pressure seemed to be easing, this year’s barrage of disruptive market news now stands to reverse that trend. Trump on Feb. 11 levied across-the-board 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum, strengthening import taxes he initially imposed in 2018, during his first term in office. Since his second term began last month, Trump has also imposed 10% tariffs on all imports from China and also promised to impose reciprocal tariffs on scores of other countries that have set high import duties on American goods. In addition to steel and aluminum, San Francisco home builders say they are also monitoring a long list of other critical construction materials that could soon Making the economic outlook even less clear, it is still not certain which of the president’s tariffs will ultimately take hold. For example, Trump had initially promised to impose steep levies on goods from Mexico and Canada, the latter of which is the largest exporter of wood to the U.S.“Is anything actually ever finally settled?” asked Sean Randolph, a senior director for the Bay Area Council Economic Institute. “Because it feels like if everything is a transaction, it could be reopened at any moment.”San Francisco builders are also trying to guess what might be in store once Southern California homeowners begin to rebuild from January’s wildfires in large numbers. The Palisades and Eaton fires together burned more than 16,000 residential and commercial structures, according to estimates from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. Homebuilders have numerous recent examples of natural disasters to look back upon for guidance, including 2017’s Wine Country fires, which levelled entire neighborhoods in Sonoma and Napa counties. In the years that followed, home-construction projects in the North Bay pulled many skilled laborers away from San Francisco, builders said. “A lot of the tradespeople themselves live in the North Bay,” said John Grcina, who serves as board chair for Field Construction, a San Francisco-based firm that specializes in renovating commercial buildings. “A lot of them started doing residential construction. So there was a draw on the local labor pool in San Francisco.” Randolph said he expects that, once again, San Francisco’s homebuilding workforce will follow the jobs, this time to Southern California. In turn, the glut of LA-area projects could put an even sharper strain on The City’s labor pool of skilled construction workers, a pool that has already seen marked declines in recent years as “I think that’s just another factor that’s going to exacerbate the cost of building here in the region,” Randolph said. Others said they’re skeptical that the effects will be quite so pronounced given the limited overlap of the two labor pools. They point out that construction jobs in San Francisco, especially on larger projects, tend to rely on union labor, whereas unionized workers make up a smaller share of the workforce in Southern California. Even if the worst price-shock scenarios never materialize, experts warn that simply adding all this extra market guesswork could create substantial economic drag for the industry, discouraging investors from contributing to new projects. “This feels like we’ve got a multiplier effect on the uncertainty side of it,” said University of San Francisco professor Patrick Murphy, who directs the university’s Urban and Public Affairs program.Ebony Atlas, bottom, a health worker with the San Francisco Department of Public Health, works with clients Brajhon Dixon, Danette Reid and Shelley Eskridge at OMI Family Center. A San Francisco behavioral- and mental-health clinic implementing programming and services focused on Black residents is aiming to raise its profile and reduce racial disparities in care. Years after The City received millions in state funding to make inroads into providing such treatment to African American San Franciscans, OMI Family Center health worker Ebony Atlas says “ knows we’re here” at 1701 Ocean Ave. “We have an extremely big area, and nobody really knows we’re in this area,” Atlas said of the clinic’s coverage footprint, which covers an area from the Outer Mission to Bayview-Hunters Point. Including Atlas, there are two other African American staff members at the clinic as part of the program who only serve Black clients struggling with their mental-health and substance-use issues, and those who are looking for connections to housing or employment. The clinic is one of four in The City’s Department of Public Health system that has implemented programming from San Francisco’s Culturally Congruent and Innovative Practices for Black/African American Communities project. San Francisco’s initiative aims to enable Black practitioners to use their shared cultural background to better connect with patients and clients who might have had negative past experiences with health-care institutions or have been reluctant to begin treatment, and reduce stigmas around care.granted $5.4 million to San Francisco for the program in 2021. A year later, Atlas said she was the first employee hired at OMI under the initiative. The program’s growth at the clinic has been slow, she said, with OMI hiring its third full-time employee under the initiative in November. “It’s just the little things that our clients go through that we can connect on, on a personal level, and we bring it into our professional levels,” Atlas said. “A lot of non-Blacks will not understand that plight.” “Racism is real and racism still thrives,” she said. “A lot of people dismiss it, because that’s not what they go through.”Americans, according to a Suicide Prevention Resource Center analysis of federal data, but African Americans are less likely to say they’ve received mental-health treatment. The Kaiser Family Foundation’s 2023 Survey on Racism, Discrimination and Health found that 50% of white adults reporting fair or poor mental health said they received such services within the last three years, compared with “For African Americans, therapy is something that we — just for my era, I can’t speak for the other ones — that was a no-go,” said Shelley Eskridge, an OMI client who said that she was brought up not to share the family business and to keep secrets. “But all of those secrets are why I’m in therapy now.”Danette Reid, left, and Shelley Eskridge take part in a painting event at the OMI Family Center at 1701 Ocean Ave. in San Francisco. Temeka Burnett, a behavioral health clinician and therapist at OMI hired in 2023, said right now she sees around 30 clients, all of whom are African American and all of whom share traumas and other issues related to their upbringing and background. “African Americans have families and children that have been targeted for many, many, many years,” Burnett said. “I work with clients a lot on going back and finding where the trouble started, and most of it is trauma.” One such example, she said, is that schizophrenia is often misdiagnosed in African Americans who instead learned to disassociate from a young age from the abuse or violence around them. Burnett and her colleagues said some clients have experienced childhood trauma related to interactions with Child Protective Services, while the Black women they’ve seen have previously felt misunderstood or dismissed during medical appointments. “I sat with a young lady who told me that every African American person has come in contact with CPS. ‘It’s a thing, they’re coming after our children,’” she said. “That’s her reality. Everybody she knows is African American. This is what she saw.” In order to remove such stigmas, the grant also funds culturally conscious programming, which Atlas said often takes the shape of music or art workshops at OMI. On a recent Friday afternoon, clients gathered to sip juice, eat snacks and paint portraits of famous Black inventors in honor of Black History Month.Burnett and Atlas both said they wish that there were more Black professionals working in mental-health care to provide the understanding their clients need. Eskridge said the Black professional she saw when she came to OMI two years ago was her first. She said that at the age of 60, she was grateful to finally have found such a safe space. “We’re not really good at opening up,” Eskridge said of members of the African American community. “So to have a program that you can actually relate to ... I don’t feel uncomfortable. It’s great.”“They’ll sit with me and feel more comfortable telling a story,” she said. “They go sit in front of someone who is not African American, and they’re being judged by their behaviors, who don’t really understand the impact of what has happened when they were growing up.” Mayor Daniel Lurie held both his election victory speech and his inauguration celebration in Chinatown. San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie has a new head of Asian American outreach less than a month into his administration. Crystal Liang, a former news reporter and San Francisco communications official, will serve as Lurie’s Asian American and Pacific Islander community and press liaison, Lurie’s office confirmed Tuesday. LiangLiang’s predecessor, Kit Lam, stepped down from the position in late January, Lam and Lurie’s office confirmed to The Examiner this week. “Kit is a tireless organizer and champion for his community, and we are grateful for his work to set up Mayor Lurie’s administration for success,” Lurie spokesperson Han Zou said in a statement to The Examiner. “Crystal has a wealth of experience across critical city departments and in San Francisco’s API community, and we are thrilled to have such a talented professional on our team enuring that the API community, like all communities in the city, has its voice heard in City Hall.”Kit Lam , AAPI Political Director and Han Zou Campaign Manager, Daniel Lurie for Mayor, at their Mission District office in San Francisco on Friday, May 24, 2024. before that, helping rally support for Lurie among The City’s dense Asian American population while leading the campaign’s outreach to those communities. Many of the circumstances around Lam’s departure — first reported by the San Francisco Standard and the World Journal — remain unclear. In a statement, he told The Examiner he left for “personal reasons, but remains deeply committed to supporting Mayor Lurie and his vision for a safer, more affordable San Francisco.” Both Lurie’s office and Lam said that Lam departed on his own volition. A spokesperson for Lurie’s office said Lam left on good terms, and Lam and the mayor remain close. Liang has worked for The City the past five years, first as a translator for the Department of Emergency Management. She most recently worked as a public-relations officer for the Department of Public Works. Prior to entering the public sector, Liang was a San Francisco-based news reporter for Skylink TV, a Chinese news station. Like Lurie, Lam is a relative newcomer to San Francisco politics. He appeared on most San Francisco politicos’ radars in 2021, when he was a vocal supporter of the eventually successful recall of. He then became an aide to District 4 Supervisor Joel Engardio. District 4 includes the Sunset, which is home to one of The City’s largest Asian American populations. Last year, Lurie tasked Zou — his campaign manager at the time — and Lam with leading his campaign’s aggressive push to court San Francisco’s Asian American voters. Lurie received the majority of first-place votes in several prominent Asian American precincts in The City, support thatThroughout the campaign and in his first six weeks at City Hall, Lurie has repeatedly mentioned his commitment to advocating for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. The demographic makes up roughly 37% of San Francisco’s total population, according to U.S. Census data. Lurie has repeatedly said that heLunar New Year celebration under the San Francisco City Hall Rotunda with Mayor Daniel Lurie, the Board of Supervisors and other city officials on Wednesday, Feb. 5, 2025. Several representatives from deeply rooted Chinese American political organizations — some of whom asked to remain anonymous to preserve longstanding political relationships — largely said they were not concerned with the early staffing change in Lurie’s office. They admitted it was unusual, but said they thought Lam’s appointment in the first place seemed out of character for him. Chinese American Democratic Club organizer Brian Quan, whose group is one of the oldest Chinese American political clubs in The City, said Lam’s decision says more about him than it does about anything within Lurie’s administration. Quan said he has always perceived Lam as a “free spirit” who is “always looking for where he feels like he can do best, rather than what other people might want to utilize him for.” “Some people are good at campaigning; some people are good at the governance side,” Quan said. “I think Kit is one of those that might always be a little better at community-building.” Lurie created the position of AAPI community and press liaison, though officials in previous executive offices, including Breed’s, have served in similar capacities. While the role is relatively ambiguous, the person is generally responsible for organizing mayoral events within and for San Francisco’s Asian American enclaves, providing translation for the mayor, and serving as a voice for the community in the Mayor’s Office. “I think the fact that the position exists is what’s a reflection of where Lurie’s priorities are and where he would like to see how his administration can partner with the Asian community more,” said Quan, whose organization endorsed Lurie as its second choice for mayor behind former interim Mayor Mark Farrell.A demonstrator holds a poster during a rally to protest President Donald Trump’s policies on Presidents Day, Monday, Feb. 17, 2025, in Los Angeles.Click and hold your mouse button on the page to select the area you wish to save or print. You can click and drag the clipping box to move it or click and drag in the bottom right corner to resize it. 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