It’s hard to build in San Francisco. The city’s approval processes encourage collective decision-making, giving broad veto powers to almost anyone who wants to oppose a change. These processes sometimes allow small, unrepresentative groups to stall or kill projects, protecting narrow interests at the expense of the community as a whole. In a city with a severe housing crisis and an obvious solution — build more housing! — it’s hard to understand why these barriers exist.

Although it’s well past due to reform or remove a lot of these processes, it’s also important to understand the history of why they were created in the first place. Without that understanding, we risk repeating the mistakes they were put in place to solve. And without acknowledging that history, we will struggle to build a solid pro-development coalition.

To understand San Francisco’s penchant for collective decision-making, we need to go back to 1955, the year President Dwight Eisenhower proposed the Interstate Highway System: a $101 billion program meant to connect every American city with more than 50,000 people through 40,000 miles of world-class roads. At the time, it was an almost utopian vision and the biggest public works project the country had ever seen. The idea was to stimulate commerce, foster military readiness, create jobs, reduce traffic congestion, and ultimately bring Americans together.

Initially, the plan was extremely popular. Americans had been growing increasingly concerned about traffic and road safety. Most roads between cities were only two lanes and sometimes too narrow to accommodate larger cars traveling in opposite directions. The highway system promised to redefine urban accessibility and propel cities into a new era of connectivity. The car was not just a mode of transport; it was a symbol of freedom, independence, and quintessentially American individualism. 

Federal bills funding the construction of the highways made it through the House and Senate easily with bipartisan support. The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 in particular offered states a tantalizing deal: 90% of the costs of construction paid by the federal government. (The funding would apply only to highway projects, not to any other transport projects such as trains, trams, or bus systems.) With such financial backing and the allure of job creation, it seemed almost unthinkable to say no to such an injection of federal investment.

A core appeal of the interstate highway plan was that you would be able to drive all the way across the country on wide, modern highways. Crucially, that included through cities, not just between cities. As planning on the highways began in earnest, people started to realize that the system’s design prioritized getting from one place to another over the places themselves. To build the urban segments of the highways, neighborhoods would have to be torn down. 

San Francisco’s 1951 Trafficways Plan proposed the construction of 11 freeways through the city. One of the San Francisco neighborhoods first and most heavily impacted was Hayes Valley. Its proximity to major thoroughfares like Market Street and Van Ness Avenue made it a logical place to put a highway — except for the fact that thousands of people inconveniently lived in the path of what would become the Central Freeway. Completed in 1959, the construction razed thousands of homes, displacing thousands of families and creating a physical barrier that split Hayes Valley down the middle.

“Hulking highways cut through neighborhoods, darkened and disrupted the pedestrian landscape, worsened air quality and torpedoed property values,” writes journalist Farrell Evans. “Communities lost churches, green space and whole swaths of homes. They also lost small businesses that provided jobs and kept money circulating locally — crucial middle-class footholds in areas already struggling from racist zoning policies, disinvestment, and white flight.”

No one wanted their neighborhood to be next, so residents began banding together to protest plans against highways slicing into their part of the city. Naturally, the people with the least political power were the ones who typically lost these battles. Initially, there were also plans to cut highways through wealthier, whiter neighborhoods such as Pacific Heights, the Sunset, and Glen Park, but those communities had the resources and political clout to hold back the most destructive plans. By contrast, Hayes Valley, a predominantly black community, didn’t have the same sway as those wealthier, whiter neighborhoods.

The destruction of houses to build highways was part of a larger trend of urban renewal that swept the country in the 1950s and 1960s, starting with the Housing Act of 1949, which authorized the demolition and reconstruction of urban neighborhoods that were considered slums — typically ones that were low income and non-white.

In San Francisco, its impact was felt most acutely just east of Hayes Valley in the Fillmore District, a vibrant African American community referred to as the Harlem of the West. The Fillmore was renowned for its jazz clubs and was an epicenter of Black-owned businesses, churches, nightclubs, restaurants, and bars. Between 1956 and 1973, urban renewal plans such as the Western Addition Redevelopment Project led to the displacement of an estimated 10,000-13,000 residents and the destruction of many historic homes and businesses.

The pattern repeated itself across the country. Over the next two decades, the construction of the highway system displaced an estimated 475,000 households and over a million people, disproportionately (and frequently intentionally) in Black and low-income communities. 

Local resistance was not unique to San Francisco. The 1960s and 1970s were the era of what came to be known as the highway revolts across the United States. This was when Jane Jacobs famously clashed with urban planner Robert Moses and his plans to cut through Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, Little Italy, and SoHo with the Lower Manhattan Expressway. Dozens of other groups popped up in cities across the country, such as the “Stop the Inner Belt” protests in Boston against projects that would have sliced through neighborhoods like Fenway, Brickbottom, and Cambridge.

However, the backlash in San Francisco was both early and particularly intense. Thanks to spirited opposition from residents, the planned federal highway expansion in the city was never completed. These protests were the first of many that would ripple across the country over the next two decades. 

In San Francisco, resistance to the highways was visible as early as 1955, “when public outrage mounted over construction of the massive double-decked Embarcadero Freeway [that] cut off the city from the bayfront,” explains urban historian Raymond A. Mohl. 

Housing destruction was one concern for these early activists, but they were just as likely to be motivated by historical preservation, aesthetics, or — especially — the environment. San Francisco was ground zero of the then-budding environmental movement, which celebrated a small-is-beautiful ethos. Environmentalism would become mainstream over the ensuing decades but at the time was a David to the highway system’s Goliath. Environmentalists were horrified by the highway authorities’ myopic preoccupation with highway capacity and traffic flow, without thinking about homes, business, nature, aesthetics, or anything else that people care about. The highway revolts brought together established San Franciscans who wanted to protect the natural beauty of their city with 1960s radicals opposed to heavy-handed, top-down government intervention.

The highways had powerful supporters at all official levels of power — city, state, and federal — but the coalition that rose up against the highways proved to be even more powerful. Its power lay not just in its sheer numbers but also in its heterogeneity.

The coalition included everyone from WWII veterans to hippy environmentalists; Catholic priests; millionaire politicians; the executive editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, Scott Newhall; and Black community leaders like politician Willie Brown (who would later become mayor). Residents of the hardest-hit neighborhoods formed anti-highways organizations such as the Property Owners’ Association of San Francisco. Meanwhile, stopping construction of the highways became a core issue for the reform wing of the Democratic Party, led by the progressive U.S. Congressman Phillip Burton. And although organized labor had initially supported highway construction (likely because it would have created lots of jobs), the unions ultimately joined the coalition to oppose the highways as well.

San Francisco’s political structure also played a significant role in the success of the anti-highway movement. The city’s legislative body is the Board of Supervisors. Each supervisor represents one of the 11 districts in the city. Supervisors’ loyalties lie with the individual neighborhoods they represent, and they frequently push for policies that differ from the policies the city's leaders at-large want.

The supervisors had a powerful tool at their disposal to oppose the highways, one unique to California: under state law, local authorities had to approve the closure of any streets. This essentially gave veto power to the Board of Supervisors, since highway construction requires many road closures.

In 1959, 30,000 residents signed a petition to the Board of Supervisors to halt highway construction. Resistance to the new highways was strongest in the Sunset and Glen Park neighborhoods. Unlike in Hayes Valley, these communities proved to have the resources and political clout to hold back the most destructive plans for their neighborhoods.

In response to the outcry, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to oppose six of the nine planned freeway routes through the city, much to the shock of the Department of Highways and the state government. In 1964, protests against a freeway through the Panhandle and Golden Gate Park led to its cancellation, too, and in 1966 the Board of Supervisors rejected a proposed extension of the Embarcadero Freeway to the Golden Gate Bridge. 

After that, highway construction lost all momentum. Constructed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Interstate 280 was the last major highway to escape the revolts. It still doesn’t connect to I-80. In the following decades, highway construction not only stopped but even reversed, with the demolition of the Embarcadero Freeway, the Terminal Separator structure, the Central Freeway, and a segment of Interstate 280.

San Franciscans were proud of their attempts at opposing the highways. They made a choice to enshrine the same activist philosophy into the policies the city would use to guide development into the future. 

One of the many obstacles to prevent development is called Discretionary Review, which allows anybody to raise complaints and potentially deny a project, even if the proposed project meets all requirements laid out in the city’s zoning codes. (By contrast, in most places, if you want to build a building that already meets all codes, your plans will automatically be approved. This is what’s called “by-right development.”)

As a result, approvals for even minor home renovations can take years to make it through the system and cost tens of thousands of dollars before construction even begins. Approvals for larger projects are even more complex, slowing down the construction of new housing in a city with a severe housing shortage.

Discretionary Review creates uncertainty, delays, and heavy costs that make many projects infeasible. Instead of straightforward rules that make clear what you can and cannot do with your property, owners have to go through a nondeterministic process that might cost tens of thousands of dollars, take years of their life, and result in nothing. 

For example, a Bernal Heights homeowner named Hiten Madhani has spent six years and $70,000 trying to get a simple remodel through the San Francisco approvals process and still doesn’t have approvals. “If you’re really, really rich, you’ll make it through the gauntlet,” he said. If not, “you’re shit out of luck.”

Although Discretionary Review was first introduced in 1954, it was in the period directly following the highway revolts that it began to be used in its modern form. As legal scholar Christopher Elmendorf writes, the fact that planning permits can be rejected for any reason under the sun is “a kind of lawyer’s lore. The drafters of the city charter did not choose it, and the voters who adopted the charter did not ratify it. Rather, it was invented by the city’s lawyers decades later — during the heyday of antigrowth activism in the late 1970s.” ¹

The ascendant ideology in California at the time was that “more process, more public participation, and more administrative discretion to deny development is always the better way”. Law professor Nicholas Bagley calls it “The Procedure Fetish.” Part of this was transforming zoning from a set of clear rules (such as by-right development) into “a platform for public discussion, negotiation, and ‘dealing’ on a project-by-project basis.” ²  

California continued with even more radical policies to increase the amount of process involved in planning these sorts of projects. “The California Supreme Court in 1976 authorized local governments to change development regulations retroactively,” explains Elmendorf. “Soon afterwards it invented a constitutional public-hearing right for any landowner whose quality of life could be affected by a development project.”

One of the most impactful policies passed in California during this period was the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) of 1970, signed into law by Governor Ronald Reagan. Like San Francisco’s highway revolt, CEQA was a product of the state’s particularly strong environmental movement. The state law requires state and local agencies to assess and disclose the environmental impacts of proposed projects and to consider feasible alternatives. Its original purpose — to protect the environment — was well-intentioned, but the law was written in a way that created endless surface area for people to attack a project on almost any grounds, holding up even very reasonable development projects. 

Although California took this procedure fetish farther than almost any other state, it was not alone. Even the federal government reoriented toward a more procedural approach. A turning point was in 1970, when President Richard Nixon signed into law the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which requires federal agencies to assess and consider the environmental impacts of proposed projects, policies, and actions.

The Nixon administration also responded to the highway revolts directly with legislation aimed squarely at addressing the problems they raised. Legislation in the mid-1970s, such as the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1973, finally permitted states to cancel planned interstate projects and also allowed for transit funds earmarked for highways to be used for mass transit alternatives.

San Francisco’s labyrinthine permitting process is the unforeseen consequence of well-intentioned activism. When power was more consolidated, city planners bulldozed entire neighborhoods. It’s understandable that San Franciscans decided there should be more processes and more veto points.

But Discretionary Review, CEQA, NEPA, and other procedural protections have been used far more frequently than originally intended. Discretionary Review, once reserved for “exceptional and extraordinary circumstances,” now applies to almost every permit as a result of ever-expanding interpretations of its vague language.

Legal tools originally created to give residents a say before their neighborhood got demolished for a highway have become weapons for nosy neighbors to block you from building a deck in your backyard, simply because the construction noise will bother them for a few days. Like the Bootleggers and Baptists, many of these people evoke the language of the highway revolts to try to halt anything they don’t like, even though the magnitude of the harm to them is not remotely comparable to the scale of destruction from the urban highways.

Just as the centralized decision-making of the interstate highway era disproportionately harmed the most vulnerable populations, it is those same groups that bear the brunt of the problems caused by San Francisco’s vetocracy. Policies like Discretionary Review have frozen the city in amber, and the housing supply has not kept up with demand. This has caused prices to skyrocket, pushing out the poorest, least-enfranchised residents of the city.

As the housing crisis in San Francisco and California worsens, there’s a growing consensus that our shift toward local control in the past few decades has created a vetocracy, preventing the city from evolving and adjusting to residents’ needs over time. Many believe that it’s time to recentralize a bit more of the decision-making so that narrow local interests don’t hold back what’s good for the city overall.

The logic is that of the tragedy of the commons: If every neighborhood or town in a region says, “We don’t want this development in OUR backyard,” development stalls. By placing planning in the hands of a higher level of government, it allows California to make decisions that are good for the state overall and to solve critical problems that won’t otherwise be solved — even though it may have downsides for some entrenched interests. 

Numerous legislative proposals aim to shift planning powers to the state level. For example, California’s SB 423 will eliminate Discretionary Review statewide for many multifamily housing projects, taking away some of cities’ ability to make local decisions about what’s built.

It’s clear that the other attempts to ease the housing crisis aren’t working. But we have to remember that there are very real dangers to centralizing power, too. Top-down rules and plans are blunt instruments, so we should be careful. When decisions are made from the top, they can sometimes be too general, not considering the unique needs of individual communities.

Centralized power can result in decisions that don't account for local intricacies or nuances. A one-size-fits-all strategy might work in theory, but in practice, it can lead to unanticipated challenges or unintended consequences. As cities lose their autonomy, there might also be a loss in the innovation and tailored solutions that local governance can provide. Moreover, centralizing power might foster feelings of disenfranchisement in local communities, leading to resistance or even outright rebellion against state decisions.

Recentralizing some decision-making power may be the right thing to do given that nothing else seems to be working, but we must always keep the risks in mind, rather than assuming that centralization is a panacea.

If we’re going to succeed in changing policies like Discretionary Review, CEQA, and NEPA, which have held us back for so long, we need to understand where they came from. This is not just a feel-good idea but also a pragmatic one; changing these policies requires building a coalition, and there are plenty of reasons for San Franciscans to be scared of making changes that reduce local control. 

After all, the last time central planners made decisions without the residents’ input, their homes were demolished. They need to know that we are keeping history in sharp focus and that we are working to strike a balance between the two extremes, rather than simply repeating history.