PROXY / PARCEL K POLICY for sf d5

The people of Hayes Valley deserve a town square.
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You may have read about the fight to build affordable housing on Proxy, a site that has become Hayes Valley’s town square.

The question here is not, “Should we build affordable housing?” – of course we should.  The question is, “Are we so pressed for space that we need to build on our parks and town squares?”  The answer is NO.

We need affordable housing. 

But would we build on Alamo Square? 

Would we say, “Osaka Way is plenty for the people of Japantown!” and rally to put affordable housing on the Peace Plaza? 

Would we sacrifice part of the Panhandle to add 50 affordable homes? 

No, we would not.  And we should not build on Hayes Valley’s town square either.  It's the beating heart of the community. If we build on our community spaces, they’re gone forever.

Hayes Valley is strongly in favor of affordable housing, and has welcomed hundreds of new homes and new neighbors in the last 15 years.  They have built 11 new housing projects. Six of those projects were 100% affordable, adding 539 affordable homes to the area.  And Hayes Valley is excited to add more… but not on Proxy, their town square.

Proxy used to be an empty parking lot in the heart of the neighborhood business district.  Now it hosts eight small businesses.  Neighbors run into each other, friends meet up for a cup of coffee, and people work out in the open air.

Proxy is a plaza large enough to hold community events.  It hosts film nights and carnivals, and hundreds of people come.  We are in a loneliness epidemic, and it’s events like these – and places like Proxy – that build the human connections all of us need.

Don’t the residents of Hayes Valley – including the people who live in those 539 units of affordable housing – deserve that town square and the connections it builds?

We have set up a false choice between building affordable housing and having community gathering spaces.  We can have BOTH.  The people who live in Hayes Valley's affordable housing deserve BOTH.

There are many places we could build housing that would not cost Hayes Valley its town square. I've highlighted some opportunities (in blue) in the map at right.
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Let's join forces and build affordable housing in these spaces... and then encourage our new neighbors to join us for an ice cream or coffee in our town square. As we learned during Covid, no matter how nice your apartment is, it’s the human connections that matter.

Let's go get more carnivals.  More movie nights.  More street markets.  More neighbors running into each other on Sunday mornings.

Because that’s what the people of Hayes Valley – and every neighborhood – deserve.

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Find other sites for affordable housing in the neighborhood
Here are some places we could build affordable housing around Hayes Valley that the entire community could get behind:
* The parking lot at 630 McAllister could host nearly 200 units of affordable housing.
* 95 Gough St could hold 100 units.
* The former Commerce High School at 170 Fell could be turned into homes that bring revenue to the school district.
* There are four empty parcels on Octavia Street.
* Plans are in the works to build well over 2000 new units at Freedom West.

And there are many more opportunities to build housing in District 5, from the DMV site to the carwash site to 650 Divis.
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Secure a long-term lease for Proxy -- or rezone it entirely to preserve it as the town square
...so the neighborhood can invest in making it beautiful. It's currently on a year-to-year lease, which makes it hard to find support to improve the site.