The Petaluma fixer-upper bought by one of the wealthiest men in the Bay Area doesn’t really need fixing up, some of his new neighbors say.

Not if it means letting 80 dump trucks haul away 10,000 cubic feet of dirt for the next year or so to allow the home to double in size and to enable construction of a 4,200-square-foot underground garage and basement, two large walk-in closets and a dining room that can seat 25 guests.

The historic 115-year-old house on Sixth Street, just south of downtown, was bought four years ago by Peter Haas Jr., an heir to the Levi Strauss pants empire, and his wife, Ginnie. Nipping and tucking may run in the family genes, but the alterations to the property have got some of his neighbors feeling bluer than a pair of the family’s iconic trousers.

“We worked hard to come up with a plan to bring a historic house back to its glory,” Haas said. “We want to live in it for the rest of our lives. Petaluma is such a vibrant, thriving community.”

“This project proposes a complete transformation of the original structure to suit the extravagant desires of its new owners,” said Elsa Beatty of Preserve Petaluma, a group opposing the plan.

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Posters and flyers proclaiming “Stop the Big Dig” are popping up all over town, in advance of a Dec. 21 meeting of the City Council. There the plan — already approved by planners and the city’s historical preservation committee — faces a final vote.

A peek at the blueprints filed with the city shows the ambitious changes Haas has in mind for the elegant gray two-story Victorian designed more than a century ago by legendary Petaluma architect Brainerd Jones.

Gone will be four of the home’s six bedrooms. Scheduled for demolition are fireplaces, balustrades, roofs, staircases, a chimney and a dormer roof window.

In their place are to be a pair of 10-foot-by-10-foot closets (labeled “Pete’s closet” and “Ginnie’s closet”), a 25-seat dining room, an 11-seat breakfast room, an elevator, a wine cellar, a mudroom, a powder room, a barbecue porch with two grills and a turntable to enable four cars to maneuver into the new basement parking garage.

A proposed top-floor deck that will replace the dormer will offer “unimpeded views into at least six neighboring backyards,” complained Preserve Petaluma on its website.

Haas, 73, grandson of the late Levi Strauss president Walter A. Haas and himself a former president of the company, said he worked closely with his architects and with the city on his plans and cannot understand the controversy.

“Most people look at this and say they support it, or they say what’s the big deal,” he said. ”I understand that a neighbor wouldn’t be happy with construction going on next to his house for a period of time. But when it’s done, it will be consistent with the look and feel of the neighborhood. If you stood in the street, you wouldn’t see anything different.”

Bill Wolpert, the project’s architect, said he suspected that opposition to the renovations, which mystified him, was driven by fears that the house will be “some sort of corporate entertainment house — and it’s not.”

He has already altered his blueprints, he said, to accommodate critics who objected to the sunroom and to the proximity of the barbecue grills to the neighbors’ property.

The renovations, he said, would cost “over $1 million, which is not really a lot of money for a project with this much work.” And he said he knew of no rules against big dining rooms or big closets, if that’s what the client asks for.

In a statement, Preserve Petaluma maintained that the preservation committee and city planning department showed a “complete lack of support for historic and cultural preservation” in approving the Haas plans, which, it said, would “essentially gut and forever change the character of this home and surrounding environment.”

Preserve Petaluma founder Margie Turrel, who is also the Haases’ next-door neighbor, said she and others started the group in July after she and Peter Haas differed over his plan for the barbecue deck that directly adjoined her property.

“I believed smoke and odors would permeate from the cooking area,” she said. “I asked him politely if he would move it and he unpolitely said he would not.”

Turrel added that the plans for the barbecue deck called for it to be raised 5 feet off the ground. That meant, she said, that the feet of the Haases and their guests would be directly opposite the heads of the Turrels on the other side of the fence.

Turrel said she “welcomed the Haases as neighbors,” but believes the size and scope of the renovations are “out of scale with adjacent homes.”

Neighbors seemed divided about whether to let the pants magnate do his thing.

“Some of my customers are for it and some are against it,” said Don Gossage, whose barbershop is two blocks from the project site. “A lot of people don’t care. Some say this guy’s got more money than brains. Most of the time we talk sports around here, not old houses.”

Restaurateur Tara Williams, proprietor of the nearby Cafe Zazzle, said whatever Haas wants to do is OK with her. She said the architect’s drawings for the project don’t appear to alter the house’s looks.

“I feel a lot of the people who are against it are just freaked out by change,” she said. “I don’t live in that neighborhood so it doesn’t really matter to me. And digging to build the underground garage isn’t any deeper than digging to build a swimming pool.”

Steve Rubenstein is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: srubenstein@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SteveRubeSF

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California’s uphill battle against its housing crisis has increasingly called upon a small but powerful actor: the accessory dwelling unit, or ADU.

Often referred to as in-law units or granny flats, traditional ADUs are small dwellings that are located on the same lot as an existing home, and typically have their own kitchens and bathrooms. ADUs can also refer to converted garages, boiler rooms and other sections of apartment buildings turned into housing.

Proponents of ADUs tout them as relatively low-impact tools to both help address California’s housing shortage and to enable lower- and middle-income homeowners to increase wealth and income by renting out the units. State legislators passed numerous laws aimed at making ADUs easier to build in recent years, including one that legalized units on single-family lots in 2020.

San Francisco has enacted numerous pro-ADU laws of its own in recent years as well. In 2016, the city passed Ordinance No. 162-16, which legalized ADU construction across all neighborhoods. It was among the most significant of a handful of pro-ADU policies the city has enacted since 2014, starting with an ordinance that allowed property owners to build ADUs if they also retrofitted their buildings against earthquake damage.

But despite these policies, only 622 ADUs have been built in the city since 2014, representing less than 0.2% of the city’s total housing supply. And those units are disproportionately located in wealthier neighborhoods, a Chronicle analysis has found.

The Chronicle obtained data from the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection on all permitted ADUs completed since 2014, when the city first began enacting ADU-friendly legislation. We then looked at the number of ADUs completed by neighborhood, as a share of each neighborhood’s total housing units.

The majority of ADUs, we found, are being built in neighborhoods in the northern and central portions of the city. The Haight-Ashbury neighborhood has the highest rate of ADU construction relative to its available housing stock; Since 2014, the neighborhood has seen 50 ADUs successfully completed, a rate of 55 per 10,000 existing housing units. Seven neighborhoods, including Sea Cliff and Japantown, have seen zero ADUs, according to the permitting data.

Overall, we found more ADUs built in wealthier neighborhoods — those with higher incomes — than in less wealthy ones.

Our findings dovetail with previous research by a University of Michigan researcher that showed few permits to construct new ADUs have been filed in lower-income communities in San Francisco, and even fewer of those permits have become actual ADUs.

David Garcia, policy director for the Terner Center for Housing Innovation, said that ADUs are being disproportionately constructed in wealthier neighborhoods across the state, not just in San Francisco. “These neighborhoods are (traditionally) housing-exclusive, so I actually think that’s positive,” he said.

However, he said, it is a problem that so few ADUs have been constructed in San Francisco’s lower-income neighborhoods — which he attributes to lower- and middle-income homeowners lacking the cash or equity to pay the often-steep construction and design costs .

“I think we’re used to talking about ADUs being used as tools to build wealth, and if that’s not happening I think that’s a failure of the policy,” Garcia said. He added that the Terner Center and other policy experts are trying to identify possible solutions to the ADU wealth gap, like loans and other financial incentives. Politicians are working on this too: One recent bill introduced by Assembly Member Phil Ting of San Francisco would create a state fund that lower- or middle-income families could draw on to build ADUs.

Other housing experts, though, question whether it’s sensitive for the city and state to spend so much time and energy on ADU legislation at all. Among them is Daniel Parolek, CEO of Opticos Design, a Berkeley architecture firm.

Parolek is also credited with coming up with the “missing middle” concept, or the idea that moderate-density housing options — like duplexes and fourplexes — are key to addressing housing shortages in urban regions like the Bay Area.

“It’s good that we’re adding housing in this way. But a city like San Francisco needs a lot more tools to enable a volume of housing that has an impact,” Parolek told The Chronicle.

He added that in his experience, many California cities are “prioritizing ADUs at the expense of other needed housing efforts,” in part because they’re less politically controversial than other development options, like rezoning neighborhoods or approving large apartment buildings.

And even though San Francisco has passed many recent laws aimed at making ADU construction easier, many builders still see the process as cumbersome, according to Mark Hogan, principal architect at OpenScope Studio. OpenScope helped shape San Francisco’s ADU program and has built numerous ADU projects in the city.

Hogan said this is because the city has its own set of laws around ADUs that are less streamlined than the state’s. For instance, when California legalized ADUs statewide in 2020, it also required local governments to respond to ADU permit applications within 60 days.

But because of a loophole in the law that applies to cities with ADU programs prior to July 2018, including San Francisco, the city doesn’t have to abide by this time limit for ADU permit applications for apartment buildings — the kinds that tend to be most feasible for San Francisco, given that the city’s lot sizes are often too small for the in-law unit type of ADUs. Hogan said this loophole has stalled many ADU projects in larger buildings, frustrating developers.

In 2019, Hogan said, things were looking up for ADU builders when Mayor London Breed issued a directive ordering the Department of Building Inspection to respond to permit applications within four months. But then the pandemic arrived, coinciding with internal department-wide disruptions such as high staff turnover and corruption investigations involving higher-level staff.

“Because of the disruption of staff leaving and the pandemic, that whole four-month timeline has completely gone out the window,” he said.

Susie Neilson is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: susie.neilson@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @susieneilson

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And those people were usually colored people, and their households were 35% more likely to be lacking tap water than white, non-Hispanic households, the study says. The breed was not specified further in the study.

“When compared to the entire US population, we find that uninstalled households are more likely to be colored by people, have lower incomes, live in mobile homes, rent their homes, and pay a higher percentage of their gross income for housing costs.” “said the study.

Of the 50 largest metropolitan areas, San Francisco had the highest proportion of people without access to indoor plumbing, followed by Portland, Oregon, Milwaukee, San Antonio, and Austin. Based on the total, New York has the most people without indoor installations at 65,000, followed by Los Angeles with 44,200 people and San Francisco with 27,400 people.

The results, the researchers say, reveal a “theory of unsafe water access as a relational condition caused in part by racial gaps in prosperity and uneven neighborhoods”.

Urban water management and security are more of a supply problem. However, the results of the study show otherwise.

“Our results develop an alternative conceptual paradigm – the housing-water connection – that theorizes gaps in urban water access as a product of structural inequality, neither random nor accidental, but of a social and systemic nature,” researchers write.

Going forward, researchers say policies are “urgently needed” to reduce poverty poverty.

Access to water is especially important in the Covid-19 era, as many guidelines recommend keeping hands clean. The researchers also drew this connection.

“In a global health pandemic like COVID-19, the difference between safe and unsafe water access – starting with those 65,000 uninstalled New Yorkers – is a matter of life and death,” the researchers wrote.

With more than 200,000 people dead from the virus, researchers concluded the study with a dire reminder: Without universal access to water, efforts to limit the spread of infectious diseases like Covid-19 will undermine global health and will undermine certain populations over others benefit “. “

And in an even more sobering memory, researchers predicted that poverty poverty in US cities could get worse if the cost of living continued to rise.

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