A cyclist rides by the Sentinel Building in 2023. The building was completed in 1907 and designated a San Francisco landmark in 1970.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, San Franciscans live in a city that desperately needs new housing but is extraordinarily good at preventing it from being built. Recent aggressive actions at the state and local levels to streamline development have been a welcome and necessary shift.

Yet there’s a new initiative out of City Hall that feels oddly out of step.

On May 28, Mayor Daniel Lurie and Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman announced a package “to strengthen historic preservation and celebrate the unique legacy of San Francisco’s neighborhoods.” Their effort would mandate a long-overdue citywide survey of historic resources and would streamline the landmark designation process. 

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The legislation would also add roughly 2,500 new landmark designations by 2030 — effectively doubling the number, which, according to Richard Sucré, the city’s deputy director of planning, stands at around 2,191 today. “It would be good,” he told me, “if the very best of the old stuff doesn’t get ministerially demolished.”

As San Francisco grows, Lurie said at the May news conference, “we are going to protect what makes the city special.”

Lurie is right that we need buildings that remind us where we’ve been and who we were. And our city has a lot of them, from the iconic and once-reviled Transamerica Pyramid to the obscure, skinny Gothic revival Heineman Building on Bush Street. These places tell stories worth preserving.

But why double the number of landmarks? That’s not only arbitrary, but it also undermines the entire point of preservation: finding and saving truly worthy buildings.

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There’s also a potential state law violation here — Senate Bill 33 prohibits local jurisdictions from enacting new ordinances that would have the effect of reducing new housing within their borders or delaying it via........

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