My brother — who later became a judge — and I grew up in a three-bedroom Edwardian in the Richmond District, purchased with a V.A. loan our father earned through his World War II Coast Guard service. That layout was not a luxury; it was a necessity. One bedroom belonged to my oldest sister and our youngest aunt. My brother and I shared the second, which felt smaller each year as he outgrew the crib. My grandmother — a third-generation Californian — lived in the garden apartment behind the garage. The air in her space was clean enough for her to live there comfortably because my father used the garage to store overflow inventory from his auto-parts shop serving Nihonmachi and “The Moe.” When another aunt would visit us from her home in Hawaii, a surplus G.I. cot in the garage served as a guest bedroom, walled off by boxes of mufflers, carburetors, shock absorbers, sparkplugs, and ignition parts.
Until my sister and aunt left for their dorms at Cal, seven people lived under that roof — a configuration entirely ordinary among Chinese and many other Asian families on the west side.
This history matters because San Francisco is again debating what kinds of families our policies are meant to support. Mayor Daniel Lurie’s proposed upzoning plan defines “family” so narrowly that it excludes the lived reality of tens of thousands of San Franciscans whose households have never resembled the tidy, postwar nuclear model.
The plan aims to increase housing supply by relaxing zoning restrictions, but its framing of “family housing” reinforces the very exclusion that zoning reform is supposed to dismantle. It imagines families as couples with children or as small household units that fit upper-middle-class cultural norms — not the multigenerational homes that have anchored west-side neighborhoods for decades, from Chinese and Japanese American households to Filipino, Korean, South Asian, and Russian immigrant families.
The proposal would create zoning capacity for more than 36,000 homes across northern and western San Francisco, helping the city meet its state-mandated Housing Element obligation to plan for roughly 82,000 units by 2031. But “capacity” is not construction. The city controller estimates actual production under the plan by 2045 at between 8,500 and 14,646 units — barely 40 percent of what the upzoning theoretically allows.
More important, the plan’s emphasis on producing two-bedroom units ignores the prevalence and needs of multigenerational households on the west side. These families often require larger or more flexible layouts that allow grandparents, adult siblings, extended relatives, and college-aged children to live and contribute together. They are not outliers — they are why so many west side single-family houses support more residents than their suburban-style architecture suggests.
Yet the Lurie framework treats these arrangements as deviations, encouraging development patterns that don’t align with the neighborhoods’ actual demographic fabric. This risks producing new housing that is ill-suited for the very residents who have sustained the west side for generations.
Technically, the plan employs height increases along major corridors — in some cases up to 85 feet — and form-based zoning elsewhere. These tools can facilitate growth, but they may also trigger displacement if redevelopment pressures lead to the demolition of existing, multibedroom rent-controlled homes that currently house multigenerational families. The administration has signaled some tenant protections and small-business supports, but the details are thin, and community advocates question whether they will hold up against real-world development incentives.
The state’s deadline is absolute: San Francisco must adopt compliant rezoning by Jan. 31, 2026, or face the “builder’s remedy,” which would sharply curtail local control. But meeting that deadline should not require a plan built around a single, culturally narrow notion of family.
By centering an ethnocentric family ideal, the plan risks reimposing a model that never matched San Francisco’s actual demographics. The west side did not become the anchor of Asian American life by accident; it became one because multigenerational households pooled incomes and labor to make homeownership possible when a traditional nuclear family could not. That was true in the 1950s and 60s, and it remains true today.
Real family zoning — zoning that actually serves families — must recognize the multigenerational structures that define so many west side homes. That means safeguarding rent-controlled units, preserving large or flexible floor plans, protecting the small businesses that serve cultural communities, and directly engaging the Asian and Chinese American residents whose lived realities are absent from the plan’s narrow framing.
San Francisco cannot afford a housing policy that misunderstands its own residents. Upzoning can support a more livable city, but only if it reflects the real shape of our households — culturally, economically, and architecturally. A plan that erases multigenerational families will repeat the exclusionary logic that decades of planning reforms have struggled to overcome.
My family’s crowded Edwardian was not unusual. It was part of a west side tradition that continues to this day. A zoning plan that claims to center families must recognize all families, not just those that fit a postwar or privileged ideal. Otherwise, we risk remaking San Francisco in ways that displace the very communities that have sustained it for generations.
Doug Chan is a business lawyer whose civic involvement includes service on the police and civil service commissions.
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