With its majestic hills, mystic fog and magical afternoon light, San Francisco is one of the most photogenic and expensive cities in the world, with the median home price hitting $1.4 million in 2023.

It’s a city that Moira O’Neill, an urban planning and local government law scholar at the University of Virginia, knows well, even though she was born and raised on the other side of the bay, in Oakland. These two California cities have been in the media for years because of their rising housing costs and the debate around the relationship between housing supply, gentrification and displacement. But the cities are at the center of O’Neill’s research about what drives regional and neighborhood-level inequality.

These topics aren’t abstract for O’Neill. She grew up poor, in a city much less affluent than its neighbors in the region, and went to public schools that were de facto segregated. For that reason, understanding how law can remedy or perpetuate inequality has long been a personal mission for O’Neill — an effort that culminated last week in the heralded release of a California-funded investigative research report that prompted the state to require the city to overhaul a zoning and permitting process that has stymied housing construction.

As O’Neill told The New York Times after her report was released, San Francisco has progressive zoning laws on paper, but its actual practices — which her report uncovered — have resulted in a city that excludes middle- and lower-income workers.

“It’s a progressive city, but there’s this contradiction,” she said in the Times article. “It’s really, really important to highlight not just for California, but for the country, how it’s possible to use procedural rules to be exclusive and block the ability to house people.”

Over the years, pundits and politicians have thrown out various explanations for the astronomical home prices in San Francisco, from generally blaming liberal policies to more specific issues such as the booming tech economy, the cost of labor and building materials, and the expense of addressing environmental regulations.

That last claim was a tipping point for O’Neill, whose scholarship harnesses empirical and data-driven evidence to support state and local government efforts to address both climate change and inequality. Now holding a joint faculty appointment in UVA’s School of Architecture and School of Law, O’Neill still serves as an associate research scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, where she also previously taught at the College of Environmental Design and at the law school.

When she began working as a researcher at Berkeley in 2012, O’Neill took a close look at how other fields — like urban planning and public health — understood and evaluated law. That’s when she began designing a project to use more detailed data and interdisciplinary methods to tease out the details of how state and local law shape housing development patterns in very different cities.

In 2016, she started talking about her work to a colleague at Berkeley Law, Eric Biber, who taught environmental law. “I told him about my concerns and said, ‘Here’s why this matters to me,’” O’Neill said. “‘Because urban economists are saying that it’s environmental law in California that’s blocking housing, and from working in this space, I don’t think it’s that simple and I don’t think we have the right data to fix anything.’”

Biber agreed, but he didn’t need convincing to join her efforts. “He had his own reasons for wanting to launch this work,” O’Neill said.

Working with a law student, they launched an initial study in San Francisco. “So I had partners — we still had no money, but we had a team,” O’Neill laughed.

By 2017, a program officer at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation took notice of their work and provided O’Neill and Biber their first grant to fund expansion of the work into four neighboring cities in the region. O’Neill and her colleagues released their first working paper in February 2018, sharing initial findings from the dataset that would become known as CALES, short for Comprehensive Assessment of Land Use Entitlements Study.

Within months, the paper’s findings would show up in the analysis supporting legislative reform to close loopholes in existing state housing law. “Now we had a proof of concept on what precise, detailed data could do for legislative reform.”

Other funding then showed up, including money from the California Air Resources Board.

Over the next several years, O’Neill and her colleagues at Berkeley continued to collaborate on papers looking at the CALES data from different angles — but always with consistent methodology. In one instance, the CALES data showed that local governments were choosing to write their local law to trigger the state environmental law that other scholars said blocked housing construction. In another, the CALES data showed that state climate policy — often blamed for displacement — could not overcome the challenge of local exclusionary land use regulation.

Earlier this year O’Neill was able to use the data to explore the effects of recent state legislation that requires cities that aren’t meeting their housing production targets to approve “qualifying” affordable developments. Qualifying developments are those where a specified amount of the units are priced below market rate, where the proposed project will be built on parcels that are not environmentally sensitive and where they meet other special labor criteria.

“If they conform to all the city and state rules, you must say yes,” O’Neill said. “For those developments, you can no longer apply a discretionary local review process.”

The point of removing a locale’s discretion for otherwise compliant projects is to prevent well-organized — and well-heeled — neighbors from blocking affordable or mixed-income development by raising a ruckus at zoning and planning hearings, she said.

The work that led to last week’s eventful release began last fall, when California’s Department of Housing and Community Development launched an investigation into San Francisco’s land use policy and practices. The agency provided O’Neill a grant to expand CALES in San Francisco and analyze the data to identify barriers to housing approval and affordable housing construction. O’Neill was also tasked with checking to see whether San Francisco’s processes were consistent with California’s housing law, which requires cities to zone and plan to provide their fair share of affordable housing to the region. That law keeps home rule intact, but it asks cities to equitably spread both the burdens and the benefits of housing construction.

“The state’s newest changes to this area of housing law do more to task cities with revising local laws that have essentially walled off neighborhoods from multifamily housing, in order to relieve the burden on the neighborhoods that have carried the load for so long,” O’Neill said. “This is one of the ways cities create opportunities for social and economic mobility — by making sure that poor people aren’t concentrated in one part of the city.”

The report released last week showed how San Francisco has maneuvered around California’s housing law — which applies to its local zoning and planning law — through its local law, including a provision in its business and tax code. That provision requires discretionary review of all permits of any type.

“There is no proposal to do anything that is not subject to discretionary review,” O’Neill said. “If you want to do anything, even build a deck — there’s always the element of notification, and neighbors and ‘interested parties’ can just request a hearing on it.”

O’Neill calls it “process to an extreme.”

O’Neill and a team of researchers — which included Tim Dodson, a third-year UVA Law student — also looked at every detail of how San Francisco’s process unfolds in practice. Some of what she found came through the CALES data set. Other insights came in through interviews because informal conditions for approval were rarely referenced in hearing transcripts and documents.

“What developers, planners and housing advocates in the city shared is that the process allowed the city to impose conditions for approval that are not codified, that are not enumerated in writing, that are not predictable and that come up in between hearings,” O’Neill said. “That’s what people are reporting and it’s very hard to track whether the city is imposing conditions that are not allowed under state laws, because it’s happening outside of the formal public notice-and-hearing context.”

The research resulted in a 94-page academic report with statistical analyses, mapping and comparative charts. The biggest takeaway, O’Neill said, is that the housing approval process in San Francisco makes it hard to create any kind of new multifamily housing, affordable or otherwise.

“In other words, San Francisco is exclusionary — despite having inclusionary laws on paper, such as an inclusionary housing program, tenant protections, and a lot of land zoned for dense residential use compared to other cities,” she said.

This arduous process has meant it takes developers two years, on average, to get the initial green light for developments that already comply with all of San Francisco’s local law, or “code compliant” development. San Francisco then self-reports to the state that it takes another 605 days, on average, to get building permits for specific items like plumbing and electrical hookups. The unpredictable timeframes have driven some developers out of the market and deterred others from entering, she said.

The state is now mandating 18 specific actions the city must take, including eliminating the right of any individual to object to projects that comply with city rules and speeding up building permits once a project is approved. The state’s report also provides another 10 recommended actions.

According to the state report, if the city doesn’t make the required changes within the specified timeframes, California could withhold state funding and revoke local control over development in San Francisco.

While the San Francisco project had personal relevance for O’Neill, she said she hopes to be part of building a more equitable and sustainable future for Charlottesville, Albemarle and the South generally — a place where her husband, Malo Hutson, the dean of UVA’s School of Architecture, has family ties.

“I believe in research that helps local and state governments implement policy to tackle climate change and inequality — that’s everything I do in my research,” she said. “I love teaching land use law and state and local government law, because of how relevant it is to our daily lives. It may not be the area of law you think about first when you come to law school, but the fact is, your day-to-day experience is deeply impacted by state and local laws that affect your choice of schools, how you get to work and your ability to pay for your housing.”

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In the coming months, Mayor London Breed and other city officials are expected to announce the opening of Maceo May, a six-story, 105-unit affordable housing development specifically designed for formerly homeless veterans and families on Treasure Island.

The project is one of many currently underway on the man-made island, which has essentially become a 400-acre construction zone. However, when it comes time for city officials to cut the ribbon on Maceo May, one notable group won’t be in attendance: the San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council. 

For years, the organization representing more than two dozen labor unions in San Francisco has been butting heads with Breed and other elected officials on how the city intends to meet its housing goals—and who should be doing that work. In the case of Maceo May, the Building Trades were essentially boxed out.

Members of the Carpenters Local Union 22 listen to Mayor London Breed speak at the Affordable Homes Now Rally in the Tenderloin on June 16, 2022. | Eloïse Kelsey for The Standard

The project instead relied on a unionized group of carpenters working out of Factory_OS, a modular construction plant on Mare Island in Vallejo. What the prefabricated homes may lack in flash, they make up for in efficiency. Supporters of the assembly-line style of production—which includes almost every aspect of a build-out, from the plumbing and electrical to the flooring—say it can radically reduce the cost and duration of construction.

San Francisco has an ambitious state mandate to build 82,000 units of housing by 2031, and Breed and pro-housing advocates see modular construction as an important avenue in reaching that lofty goal. But a war being waged on two fronts—one between the Building Trades and a coalition of carpenters, and the other between the Building Trades and City Hall—is threatening to derail that progress, with disputes on multiple issues boiling over into strongly worded letters and multimillion-dollar fights at the ballot box.

To understand why that matters and what comes next, it might help to recall an act of God that occurred a year and a half ago.

Monsoon on Treasure Island

In October 2021, a “bomb cyclone” more powerful than any storm seen in the previous quarter-century drenched the Bay Area. An atmospheric river traversed across the Pacific Northwest, causing hundreds of millions of dollars of damage across the Left Coast. 

Maceo May wasn’t spared. The storm’s heavy downpour and high-speed winds ravaged the development for one key reason: Maceo May didn’t come with a roof. 

The prefab project—built by members of the Northern California Carpenters Union at Factory_OS—was delivered topless to Treasure Island, with plans to complete roofing at a later stage in construction. Despite “round-the-clock staffing” to protect the project, city officials said the damage was substantial. 

“The project’s location on Treasure Island, in the middle of the Bay and subject to particularly high winds, led to extraordinary damages at this location,” Anne Stanley, a spokesperson for the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, said in an email. “Given that modular units are installed before the building’s finish materials or roof are built/installed, units are delivered covered in protective wrappings, but at least some of those wrappings had already been removed for installation.”

The Maceo May modular housing development is seen on Treasure Island on April 18, 2023. | Paul Kuroda for The Standard

The storm harmed nearly every aspect of Maceo May’s build-out, and the estimated cost to repair and complete the project ballooned by nearly $35 million, raising the total price tag to $110 million and delaying completion by more than six months. 

The devastation was shocking, said Malcolm Yeung, the executive director of the Chinatown Community Development Center, which partnered with the nonprofit Swords to Plowshares to build Maceo May.

“Did I have a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach when I heard the news? Yeah,” Yeung said. “Did my eyes pop out of my head? Yeah. I had to find them and put them back in my skull.”

San Francisco issued new loans to keep the project moving forward, but the extent of the damage and increase in costs have gone unreported until now. City officials expect all of Maceo May’s units to be leased by June.

Who’s Got Skill?

According to leaders of the local Building Trades, the mistakes made at Maceo May are just one example of a larger trend in which local construction jobs are being shipped out of San Francisco to less-skilled workers, resulting in mistakes and additional costs that aren’t accounted for in bids. 

John Dryden, a carpenter and framer, works on corridor walls at the Factory_OS facility in Vallejo on July 26, 2019. | Yalonda M. James/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

Larry Mazzola, president of the Building Trades, has sent multiple letters to the mayor and supervisors calling out Factory_OS, accusing the city of using “smoke and mirrors” to avoid hiring properly skilled and trained San Franciscans and paying prevailing wages.

In a letter from March 2021, Mazzola listed 14 bullet points worth of issues about a modular project at 833 Bryant St. in the South of Market area, noting numerous code violations. While the work of Building Trades’ members is inspected throughout the process of construction, Mazzola said, modular projects are delivered nearly complete, making it impossible to inspect issues like electrical wiring without opening up the walls.

“The carpenters go around telling everybody that it’s too expensive to build housing with union labor, and it’s completely false,” Mazzola told The Standard, citing his shop’s work on the Jazzie Collins Apartments.

Jay Bradshaw, executive secretary-treasurer of the Nor Cal Carpenters Union, disputed that characterization, noting that the Carpenters Union has the most workers in residential construction, including affordable housing.

“For Mazzola to make such a false and baseless statement should be an embarrassment to him,” Bradshaw said. “We have never made such a statement. He knows his statement is false and should be ashamed of himself.”

John Dougherty, the business manager and financial secretary for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local Union No. 6, also has taken issue with Factory_OS, which employs about 400 carpenters under the umbrella of the Nor Cal Carpenters Union.

“They’re taking electrical and performing it in-house, off-site for 21 bucks an hour,” Dougherty said. “It’s taking work opportunities for San Franciscans out of San Francisco.” 

Four recent modular housing projects in San Francisco include: Maceo May; 833 Bryant St.; 410 China Basin St. in Mission Bay; and 1064 Mission St., a permanent supportive housing project also in SoMa.

A modular housing project gets installed in the Bayview neighborhood of San Francisco on Sept. 28, 2015. | Liz Hafalia/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

The dispute between the SF Building Trades and carpenters came to a head in February, when the carpenters refused to sign a unity pledge with other laborers, leading to the union’s suspension. In turn, carpenters unions across Northern California pulled out of every other building trades council. They later joined the Bay Area Council, a business association that partners with YIMBYs and counts the region’s biggest companies among its members.

The same month that storms hammered Maceo May, the local chapter for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers took a shot at modular housing with a video showing kitchen lights turning on when a worker tried to test the stove.

Supervisor Connie Chan has entered the fray on behalf of the Building Trades, and she suggested in a phone interview that modular projects and other exceptions to local provisions are a slippery slope.

“We are minimizing these long-standing values that we have, and I think that’s problematic,” Chan said.

However, the mayor and pro-development advocates cite two major issues in giving the Building Trades the work it desires: First, the costs of projects skyrocket when accounting for San Francisco unions’ prevailing wages; and second, there aren’t enough unionized laborers to meet San Francisco’s housing goals, let alone the entire state’s goal 2.5 million new units of housing.

“Just to be clear, everyone agrees—[building] trades, carpenters and myself—we’d like to see more unionization of the residential construction workforce. We all share that goal,” state Sen. Scott Wiener told The Standard. “But the sad reality is that right now only about 9% of residential construction workers are unionized. So, when you leave out non-unionized construction workers, you’re leaving out more than 90% of these construction workers, many of whom are capable and skilled, they’re just not in a union or a union apprenticeship program.”

The Factory Fight

Fights between unions and City Hall officials are far from unique. But as the city scrambles to meet a daunting state mandate, those fights could threaten efforts to speed up housing construction.

The exterior of a studio apartment is built at the Factory_OS facility in Vallejo on July 26, 2019. | Yalonda M. James/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

Proposition D, Breed’s signature proposal to streamline housing approvals, fell short last November, in part, because the Building Trades tossed hundreds of thousands of dollars into a competing measure, Prop. E. Meanwhile, a political action committee for the Nor Cal Carpenters Union threw $69,000 into the mayor’s housing measure. Both ballot measures failed.

“We wanted Prop. E to pass. We wouldn’t have put it on [the ballot] just to block Prop. D,” Mazzola said. “But the fact that it did block was an added bonus.”

The rift between the Building Trades and carpenters seems unlikely to be resolved anytime soon. The Nor Cal Carpenters Union has aligned with Wiener and Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland)—both champions of all forms of housing construction—in a calculated move that could bring them more work. 

Members of the Nor Cal Carpenters Union lead a chant with San Francisco Mayor London Breed, center, and Jay Bradshaw, right, the union’s executive secretary-treasurer, on the steps of City Hall on April 14, 2023.

At a rally last week at City Hall, members of the carpenters union decried wage theft and tax fraud in between boastful chants about being carpenters. In an interview, Bradshaw, head of the Nor Cal Carpenters Union, dismissed the grievances of the local Building Trades on modular construction.

“It’s a total red-herring issue,” he said. “They had zero interest nor capability to expand into industrial production of housing.” 

On the issue of being suspended by the SF Building Trades, Bradshaw added, “They have a right to fight us on it. Good for them.”

Political Winds Blow

In a show of support for the carpenters, Breed and Wiener both attended last week’s event at City Hall. Wiener is carrying two bills with the support of the carpenters: SB 4 and SB 423. The goal of both bills is to streamline and fast-track housing approvals.

The Nor Cal Carpenters Union is proud to support Senate Bills 423 and 4. These bills will streamline the construction of affordable housing in California. Both require Prevailing Wages, Family Medical Healthcare, Apprenticeship, and will have the strongest https://t.co/AWQOEgwluL… pic.twitter.com/fzAiRVaFj4

— Nor Cal Carpenters Union (@NorCalCarpU) March 28, 2023

City officials have stressed that modular housing is just one of many strategies in meeting its Housing Element, which calls for the 82,000 new units.

“Modular construction is one tool we can use, but it is just one tool of many,” said Jeff Cretan, a spokesperson for Breed. “There are numerous other improvements we need to make and we are always open to pursuing different innovative strategies to get more housing built faster.”

But a new front in the war over construction work in San Francisco has emerged in recent weeks. The Building Trades are now accusing the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development (MOHCD) of abandoning the citywide Project Labor Agreement, and cutting them out of jobs related to a 2019 housing bond measure that will lead to hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts.

The Mayor’s Office contends that affordable housing projects that receive funding from the city are not subject to the existing project labor agreement, which prompted the Building Trades to recruit the help of Supervisors Chan and Ahsha Safaí, the latter of whom is considering a run for mayor.

“The previous director of MOHCD sent a letter to the Trades clearly spelling out the city’s position on how the 2019 affordable housing bond would be spent and committed to skilled and trained workforce,” Safaí told The Standard. “That is pretty clear. As far as modular construction goes, we need leadership to bring a modular construction factory to San Francisco that includes all crafts.”

The new fight has affordable housing developers spooked, city officials said. The prospect of contracting with Building Trades laborers on all aspects of a project could raise the cost of construction, although Mazzola and others dispute this argument. If an impasse persists, the Building Trades might oppose a housing bond expected to go to voters in 2024.

Workers build a modular affordable housing project at 833 Bryant St. in San Francisco on June 30, 2020. | By Liz Hafalia/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

“I don’t know,” Mazzola said. “Opposing a housing bond is tough, but I would like to think that we can work this out, so that there are no problems in the future.”

For some local housing advocates, however, this simmering beef between the Building Trades, City Hall and the carpenters is long overdue and necessary.

“I think the only path is to have this fight and for the carpenters to win,” said Laura Foote, executive director of YIMBY Action. “We’re never going to meet our housing goals under the requirements of the Trades. This fight needs to happen to bring us into the promised land.”

Josh Koehn can be reached at [email protected]

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Incredible footage shows the inside of Old Faithful Geyser in 1991

Yellowstone National Park covers some 3,500-square-miles of the US and is home to some of the world’s most iconic hydrothermal geysers and fumaroles. These include the iridescent colors of the Grand Prismatic Spring, the bubbling mud cauldrons that are the Artists Paint Pots and—of course—Old Faithful, the magnificent cone geyser that erupts a spray of water and steam roughly every 44–125 minutes. As millions of tourists marvel each year over the park’s many hydrothermal spectacles, so do earth scientists as they attempt to plumb the underground systems that formed and maintain them.

In their study, geophysicist Professor W. Steven Holbrook of Virginia Tech and his colleagues conducted special, airborne scientific surveys of Yellowstone using a special instrument called “SkyTEM”, which consists of a large loop of wire suspended from a helicopter.

The system — which emits repeated electromagnetic signals into the ground and measures the response of electrically conductive bodies — allowed them to identify areas underground with unusual electrical and magnetic properties.

Prof Holbrook said: “The combination of high electrical conductivity and low magnetization is like a fingerprint of hydrothermal activity that shows up very clearly in the data. The method is essentially a hydrothermal pathway detector.”

By making repeated passes over the path, the team were able to probe the subsurface along some 2,500 miles of so-called helicopter lines, from which they could create stunning maps of the subsurface “plumbing” under Yellowstone that supplies geysers such as Old Faithful.

Prof Holbrook added: “One of the unique aspects of this dataset is its extensive coverage of this huge system.

“We were not able just to look deep beneath the hydrothermal features, but also to see how adjacent features might be connected in the subsurface across great distances. That’s never been possible before.”

Old Faithful (pictured) is Yellowstone National Park’s most iconic geyser (Image: Getty Images)

Pictured: a survey line. Blue areas are conductive pathways while red are resistive lava flows (Image: Virginia Tech)

The researcher found that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the nature of Yellowstone’s hot springs are profoundly influenced by the geology of the vast national park.

Hot hydrothermal fluids — comprising both water and dissolved gases and minerals — were found to ascend vertically from depths of more than 0.6 miles into the park’s major hydrothermal fields, traveling along faults and fractures within the rock.

As they complete this journey, the fluids mix with the shallower groundwaters that flow both beneath and within the park’s lava flow deposits.

According to the team, the findings help to fill a longstanding gap in our understanding of the deep hydrothermal system that fuels Yellowstone’s iconic geysers and fumaroles.

READ MORE: Yellowstone volcano warning: ‘Huge rocks’ could ‘crush’ public

Pictured: the iridescent colors of the Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park (Image: Getty Images)

Previous studies have examined the park’s surface hydrothermal features — such as, for example, the eruptive intervals of the geysers, the chemistry and temperature of the mud pots and springs and the unique bacteria that thrive in these extreme environments.

Others, meanwhile, have used seismic data to learn about the earthquakes and deeper heat sources far beneath Yellowstone — but little had been known about the exact nature of the connection between these deep fluid sources and the surface features.

As Prof Holbrook put it: “Our knowledge of Yellowstone has long had a subsurface gap.

“It’s like a ‘mystery sandwich’ — we know a lot about the surface features from direct observation and a fair amount about the magmatic and tectonic system several kilometers down from geophysical work, but we don’t really know what’s in the middle.

“This project has enabled us to fill in those gaps for the first time.”

One such mystery the study has addressed concerns whether or not different hydrothermal areas of the park — exhibiting different chemistries and temperatures — might be supplied by different deep fluid sources.

The team found that the deep structure beneath areas like the Norris Geyser Basin and the Lower Geyser Basin is remarkably similar, suggesting that the observed surface differences are actually the result of variable degrees for mixing with shallow groundwater.

Pictured: the Artists Paint Pots, Yellowstone National Park (Image: Getty Images)

Paper author and geophysicist Dr Carol Finn of the US Geological Survey said: “While the airborne data were still being collected, we saw the first images over Old Faithful and knew instantly that our experiment had worked

“We could, for the first time, image the fluid pathways that had long been speculated.

“Our work has sparked considerable interest across a range of disciplines, including biologists looking to link areas of groundwater and gas mixing to regions of extreme microbiological diversity, geologists wanting to estimate volumes of lava flows, and hydrologists interested in modeling flow paths of groundwater and thermal fluid.

“With the paper as a guide and the release of the data and models, we will enable research in these diverse scientific communities.”

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Pictured: study author and geophysicist Professor W. Steven Holbrook of Virginia Tech (Image: Virginia Tech)

The researchers’ study may be complete — but Yellowstone still holds plenty of mysteries.

In future studies, for example, Prof Holbrook said that they would like to look for further evidence for distance connections between isolated underground hydrothermal areas.

The SkyTEM data, he explained, has already revealed evidence for subsurface linkages between hydrothermal systems in Yellowstone that are up to six miles apart.

Prof Holbrook added: “That might have implications for the co-evolution of thermophilic bacteria and Archaea.”

“The notion that airborne geophysical data could illuminate something about the life of microscopic organisms living around hot springs is a fascinating idea.”

The team have also released their geophysical scans, allowing other researchers to conduct their own analyzes delving into the remarkable dataset.

Such, Prof Holbrook said, is “so big that we’ve only scratched the surface with this first paper. I look forward to continuing to work on this data and to seeing what others come up with, too.

“It’s going to be a data set that keeps on giving.”

The full findings of the study were published in the journal Nature.

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