One Year In, Sarah Dennis Phillip Tries to Harness “Evolving” Attitudes in San Francisco

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Shortly after the election of San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie, he nominated Sarah Dennis Phillips to succeed Rich Hills as planning director. Dennis Phillip was both a conventional choice and an offbeat. Offbeat, because she was coming from over a decade in the private sector, working for mega-developer Tishman Speyer. Conventional because she had previously spent a similar amount of time in San Francisco city government, in planning and community development.

Her appointment complemented Lurie's dedication to development and increasing the city's housing supply. A year later, Dennis Phillip has presided over the implementation of the city's "Family Zoning Plan" and is attempting to reform the department amid renewed public enthusiasm--or at least tolerance--for new housing. She spoken with CP&DR's Josh Stephens.

You've been on the job for about a year now. What are your overall impressions so far?

I think there are two overriding impressions.

One, how amazing and evolved the San Francisco planning staff is. I left planning in 2013, for other career opportunities. We've always had really qualified staff, but the way staff practice their jobs now, that staff has really risen to the moment.

They understand the challenges facing us. They understand how time impacts housing in our public realm projects, and they understand what the city wants. They're not just here regulating, they're looking at how they get to yes, to build, to get to the exciting outcomes that San Franciscans want.

As we understand the affordability crisis, they've really taken that to heart. They've seen that themselves, not just because their boss told them to and not just because they just got out of college. There are plenty of people who started the same year I started here in 2005 and are still here — over 20 years — and those same humans have evolved in a really strong way. I think it's emblematic in some ways of our city

And then the other one is, I forgot how brutal the politics are here. That's real, and it's a bit daunting.

What lessons do you draw from Tishman-Speyer and bring into your current job?

It was an incredible opportunity. I don't think everyone who works in the development sector has the opportunity to work with a firm that prioritizes design almost as much as planners do — that's endemic with Tishman Speyer and that's fabulous.

What I brought back here is an understanding of the myriad ways that a project can get impacted and go south. There is not just "oh, the rents aren't high enough" — there are a hundred different ways that a project can go sideways, some of which are in the city's control: capital priorities shifting, capital partners going south, different ways you structure a joint development agreement. So many pieces along the financing and the construction side of things have made me understand the vulnerability of development, which definitely shapes my attitudes here as we regulate it moving forward.

Tell us about the mayor's agenda. Which aspects are you most excited about, which are proving to be the most challenging? 

I came in last July, almost a year ago, with the number-one priority being we need to get the Family Zoning Plan over the finish line before we hit the deadlines mandated by the state housing element law. 

I'm proud of what the team built — they built it long before I got here, it had been in development for about two years before I arrived. What we brought over the finish line was largely baked by the time I arrived, but the politics of getting it approved, and the outreach needed so that the public really understood what we were doing, was a big part of those final six months.

The family zoning plan wasn't the priority — that is the vehicle. The priority is housing. We need more housing for all San Franciscans, and the family zoning plan is a big part of that. 

There are other initiatives happening that I'm really excited about, including an expanded housing trust fund that'll create $125 million annually out of the city's budget for permanently affordable housing, and adjusted inclusionary housing percentages that allow regular market rate housing to move forward at the same time that we're financing affordable housing through that trust fund.

Another priority is downtown revitalization — not recovery. I think we are past downtown recovery, but we still can make our downtown a lot better. Not just filling vacancies, but creating an amazing public realm, making it a place that people come to 24 hours a day for entertainment, for art.

The third priority, which came straight from the mayor, is improving our permitting process, improving our permitting technology, and creating permitting that is oriented towards customer service.

How much of that feels in your grasp versus technically challenging, or needing buy-in from staff, the supervisors, or the public?

Under this mayor, there's a big chunk of it that is within our grasp. One of the things we are working on now is unifying our planning department and our building department. The people who issue rules and the people who issue building permits and inspect projects are different departments — that is not great. There are a lot of bumps in the handoff along that process.

By putting us together — and we are midway through merging them — by early 2027 we hope we will be one unified department working towards housing and land use approvals together. The concept of a unified department has been talked about in San Francisco for a long time, but there hasn't been the leadership to pull it off, and the mayor has given myself and our director of the building department the authority to make that happen.

A second example is our new technology permitting system. We are on a very old, disparate set of tech tools for permitting. this mayor has made it an imperative that we get on one unified system together. We started that system in March this year, we have about 10 permits up and running on it, and over the next two to three years we will fully migrate to a system that all permitting agencies in the city will be using together.

You're obviously in the AI capital of the world. How has that affected the city itself in terms of rising rental rates and new influx of people? And how are you thinking about AI as a planning tool?

It's a super interesting question. In terms of a business sector, AI has been the force driving our recovery. We're in a very good place from where we were in 2022, 2023, in large part due to not just the growth of AI firms and the leasing that they've done, but through the energy and ancillary support that's brought to other industries around San Francisco.

At the same time, the fears that our entire country have around AI, particularly at a time of a tight and tightening job market, are even more acute here because it is so present at our front door. So there's some existential dread.

We've regained our population losses, which is great. We are now seeing energy around developing new housing. We hadn't seen a lot of housing proposals in the city post-COVID, but that is starting to change because capital is following AI's impact on San Francisco, and they're starting to invest in housing projects to support the growing population.

In our office, our staff are relatively nimble in figuring out ways AI can supplement their jobs. They've done some creative things in identifying and cataloging our historic resources, for example.

As a city, we're a little creaky — like all bureaucracies. Executing AI in your work comes with union concerns, because people want to make sure it's supplementing their jobs, not replacing them. And we have privacy concerns, because we are stewards of public data and need to be careful about how we use it.

The city is working on an emerging tech pool where we have prequalified technology partners, including AI partners, that we can develop smaller tools with — but it's a pilot and we haven't really started yet, so we'll see how that turns out.

Let's get bigger and talk about the state. How do you feel about dealing with state laws? 

I probably can't parse out exactly which ones I like versus which ones are challenging because with so many in California, I sometimes still have to remind myself — wait, is that 2011 or 423, which one is it?

By and large, I'm glad they exist and they are generally helpful. But they are most helpful when they push us towards an outcome while allowing us our own way of getting there.

SB 79 describes what I was hoping for exactly — it said, “you are either going to have these types of heights and densities near your transit station, or you can show us your own way of getting there and we can tell you if we agree.” Our Family Zoning Plan basically qualified as our alternative plan under SB 79.

It was one more tool we could use to explain to residents why it was important that we adopt the plan: “If we don't do it our own way, the state will do it for us.” 

There was some tension with some planning commissioners when you were appointed. How has that played out?

That's been fine. I mentioned the politics here are kind of nasty — a knife fight in a phone booth, as our city attorney used to say.

Our planning commissioners are lovely humans. Rich Hillis is my predecessor and he had a 4-3 vote on his appointment, and I joke that I was unanimous because those three recused themselves. We spoke pretty immediately after that outcome, particularly Catherine Moore, who's somebody I've worked with in a professional capacity for a long time and have a lot of respect for, and I think the respect goes both ways.

Their challenge there was the process and not the person, and I'm comfortable with that. Process is, interestingly enough, one of the things we're trying to work through here in San Francisco — our planners are in favor of less process if it's the right outcome. And we've worked together swimmingly over the last nine months.

San Francisco has had its share of contrverisal projects recently: the tower in the Outer Sunset; the Nordstrom's parking lot; and now the Safeway redevelopment in the Marina. What do those controversies mean to you? Are they a big deal or are they describing headlines but just part of the day-to-day for your office?

Different meanings for each of them.

The Nordstrom parking lot, dare I say, was a catalyst for much of the state laws that you asked me about. While it didn't turn state legislation on its head alone, the disapproval of that project and the grounds the appeal was upheld on, and just the utter shock that we could be that worried about growth on such a likely and positive development site, really helped catalyze a lot of the change at the state level that has been, as I've noted, generally helpful.

The Outer Sunset tower has died. But even the noise around that one did bring to the fore a whole lot of housing supporters who were quiet before. It was just so loud that folks were like, wait, do I really care if there's a tower there? I know that's a crazy tower, but maybe I want more housing.

Marina Safeway is challenging for us because we worked with the community in the Marina and the broader San Francisco community on the family zoning plan for what we felt was the right kind of density for that site. This project was filed just after that plan was adopted but before it became effective.

We had been coming off a multi-year process, working with communities, telling them that yes, we need more housing, but we'll work with you on the shape and form of that housing. And then a project came in that was dramatically different. So that's a hard one.

How do you characterize attitudes towards housing and development in the city today — what is the vibe?

I think we are smack in the middle of an evolution. San Francisco has been for a very long time — certainly when I moved here in 2000 — a town with a lot of conflicted feelings about growth, even as it was an economic powerhouse through the first tech boom. “Manhattan” has always been a dirty word here in San Francisco.

That's a long-standing attitude that is evolving. I don't think we're through the evolution — I think we're smack in the middle of it. The surveys around the family zoning plan showed that a strong majority, somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of residents, support that plan. And it was hard-fought — even though many people supported it, it was an incredibly tough approval process. So you can see that tension between high support but still those no-growth attitudes fighting against each other.

The number of people who identify as pro-housing is incredibly large and well recognized. And attitudes towards growth are somewhat affected by what we saw post-COVID in our downtown — people realized they didn't want an empty downtown, and that if growth and more intensity is what it takes to get it back to activity, they can be in support of that.

Where do you draw intellectual inspiration from — books, histories, people, mentors?

I'm an economics geek. he overlay of the economy with the city is fascinating, not just because money has driven cities — through transfer of capital and growth — but because the other part of economics is humans and how humans want to see those things move. I'm a big fan of Edward Glaeser's books. I read The Economist weekly because it helps me understand what's going on throughout the world.

I've had the benefit of some amazing mentors. Dean Macris, the planning director when I came here, who let me walk in as a very green planner and walk up to the podium and launch some exciting initiatives right from the get-go. John Rahaim, an incredibly thoughtful, design-focused planning director who I still consult with regularly. And Carl Shannon, who was my boss at Tishman Speyer, who showed me how you can be a capitalist with heart — Carl cared about affordability and design probably more than making money.

And I would also say, given the brutality of land use politics, my inspiration for getting through challenging and thorny topics is running with my dog and playing my violin. I'm terrible at the violin — I only started a year ago — but there's nothing like being terrible at something when you've got a really hard job to get your head out of it.

This interview has been edited and condensed.