Housing debate has dominated Campos and Haney’s Assembly race. New reports uncover their track records

But she and her husband managed to rent a small one-bedroom apartment at 1188 Valencia St. in February 2021 for $3,900 a month plus $400 for utilities and a storage unit. Like many San Franciscans, they’re now hooked. Unlike many San Franciscans, they plan to stick around when they have kids.

“We’ve really fallen in love with our home here and the community here and the work we do here,” said Ganguly, 36.

Ganguly’s new life, though, wouldn’t be possible if then-Supervisor David Campos had gotten his way back in 2015 — because her home probably wouldn’t exist.

The building with about 50 residences, including six below-market-rate units, is home to a diverse mix of people, many of them families living in larger units with children. But the development would have been significantly delayed, if it had been built at all, if Campos’ proposed 18-month halt on construction of market-rate housing in the Mission — with an option to extend it to 30 months — had passed muster at the board or ballot box. Even Campos himself now acknowledges the moratorium was not a good idea.

That’s a central point made in a new report examining Campos’ housing record — and another looking at the record of his state Assembly opponent, Supervisor Matt Haney — by a UC Berkeley associate professor of political science and avowed YIMBY who wants to see more housing built all over the city. And who, for the record, is voting for Haney.

David Broockman, working in his spare time, has taken on the mind-numbing task of plumbing planning documents, watching government meetings and filing public records requests to analyze the housing records of San Francisco’s leaders, one by one. (You may recall his first report on Supervisor Dean Preston, whom he called “the worst offender” when it comes to halting housing on a board with several candidates for the title.)

Broockman plans more deep dives into the housing track records of the supervisors up for re-election in November.

As the Assembly race nears its April 19 finish line, housing — or San Francisco’s lack thereof — has become a primary focus. It’s obvious that the city and state, both grappling with a major housing shortage and affordability crisis, need more places for people of all income levels to live. It’s also obvious that the Board of Supervisors hasn’t done nearly enough to approve that housing, and that the city makes it far too hard and expensive to build the units that do manage to get approved.

Clearly, our housing crisis isn’t the fault of any one elected official, but emanates from an overall desire by too many residents and their leaders to freeze certain San Francisco neighborhoods in amber, pretend the basic laws of supply and demand don’t exist, and continue to see their own home values skyrocket.

Still, it’s crucial to look at individual leaders’ track records and hold them to account.

As Broockman explained, “For any individual project, there are often excuses that sound reasonable, but it’s only by zooming out that you get a sense of the overall pattern.”

Campos served as the supervisor of District Nine, which includes the Mission, the Portola and Bernal Heights, from late 2008 to early 2017. Broockman calculates that Campos got a paltry average of 157 residences built in the Mission per year, including just 32 subsidized units. That was fewer than one a week despite his repeatedly talking about the need for buildings with 100% affordable housing.

To be sure, Brookman is not a neutral political observer here, and Campos dismissed his report as “poorly done, biased and narrow in scope.” He argued that it left out his focus on keeping people in their homes, taking actions like banning no-fault evictions of teachers and families during the school year, and regulating Airbnb to prevent homes from becoming short-term vacation rentals.

But to really tackle our housing crisis, officials need to focus both on tenant protections and building more housing at all levels. Broockman argues that second part is where Campos fell down on the job.

The report concluded that between rejecting specific projects and rebuffing legislative proposals, Campos effectively opposed the creation of units capable of housing 6,058 people during his time in office, including subsidized homes for an estimated 3,930 lower-income people.

In 2016, for example, Campos wrote a letter to the Planning Commission opposing the development of 2675 Folsom St., an abandoned warehouse, saying it would damage the vibrancy of the Mission’s Latino Cultural District centered on 24th Street. Broockman calculates that the proposed project would have housed 227 people, including 45 low-income residents, but after various plans fell through, it remains an abandoned warehouse.

Much of the tally of homes effectively opposed by Campos stemmed from his proposed moratorium on new market-rate construction, which would have killed or delayed several developments that now exist, including 1188 Valencia, that either include affordable housing on site or came with fees to pay for it elsewhere.

In an interview, Campos said his position on the moratorium has changed, and he wouldn’t propose such an idea if he were supervisor now.

He said he’s glad 1188 Valencia got built and that more people like Ganguly have homes. He pointed out that Haney, then a school board member, also supported the moratorium, and he accused Haney of morphing into a YIMBY as soon as he decided to run for Assembly because he needed developer money to fund his campaign.

Broockman found that Haney saw 2,255 housing units approved in his district per year during his time on the board. (“That’s one every four hours!” the report reads.) That included 372 subsidized units per year. (“That’s more than one per day!”)

Haney’s District Six, which includes the Tenderloin, Civic Center and South of Market, has long been one of the few areas of the city in which the supervisors approve new housing in big numbers, a fact that’s been true for decades — and for which Haney doesn’t deserve full credit.

“Voters are looking for someone who wants to build more housing, who wants to challenge bureaucracy, who wants to actually fight for progress, not just fight to stop everything,” Haney told me.

Haney said he would “absolutely not” support a moratorium if it were proposed now and said tweeting support as a school board member is not the same as coming up with the idea as a supervisor.

It’s clear both men’s positions on housing have evolved at least somewhat — just as it’s clear there’s no love lost between them. Haney dismissed Campos as having “a terrible record” on housing, including affordable housing. Campos ripped Haney as being “a show-horse, not a workhorse” whose shift to the YIMBY camp is politically convenient.

Regardless, it’s good that the city’s leaders are realizing — if very slowly — that building more housing, including market-rate homes, is essential.

Ganguly certainly thinks so. She admitted to being a little frustrated by all the construction around her residence in Brooklyn, but said she realized that enabled more people to find a home they loved. Like she has.

“I want the Mission to be an affordable place to live,” she said. “I just don’t think building less is going to get us there.”

She founded a startup that creates virtual experiences for children to learn math and science through real-world problems. One experience revolves around how to construct apartment buildings that pencil out financially. Students learn that building more apartments makes rents cheaper.

“It’s really interesting to see kids go, ‘Oh my gosh, I had no idea!’” she said.

Sounds like she should take her lesson to City Hall.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight appears Sundays and Wednesdays. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @hknightsf