recommending that you continue to prescribe zoning. it can't possibly have been clear but that does summarize the recommendations regarding the loss of the units and i am certainly available for questions. the second part of the proposed ordinance deals with non-conforming units and it is much more clear and easy to present. legal non-conforming units that is units that are were constructed with permits but do not conform to the density under the proposed ordinance would be allowed to be in larged and when the history is unclear, the presumption would be that the unit was legally constructed secondly planning code section 181 that outlines the provisions and reconstruction of non-conforming uses would be amended to allow the alterations needed to bring a building into conformity and to secure the bike parking and it would allow non-conforming units that exceed the density to be enlarged altered or reconstructed provided that the alterations would not increase the non-conformity and permitted height for the required rear yards and set backs and it is this last piece that the department has concerns about that we would like to address. >> the draft ordinance is adropted would result to changes in the way that the alterations are controlled and considered. non-conforming units are legal units that do not conform to current existing density controls and generally they are units in older buildings constructed to prior zoning district and typical example will be a three unit building that was legally constructed in a zoning distributing rh2 that permits two unit or a larger building in the rh 2 district. building that contain a greater number of units which disi go nature the units of conforming and non-conforming and only conforming may be expanded and altered and it is it is building owner that can determine and choose which units to designate. which means that most often it is the smallest for least desirable units that are made for the non-conforming units. the age of the structure with the prohition to expand means that these legal non-conforming units are among this staff and often subject to rent control. and while these units are affordable and they are not by definition so-called illegal and secondary units as they were legally constructed with permits. based on information from the department information and analysis group, of the approximately 360,000 dwelling units in the city 52,000 units exceeds the permitted zoning of the parcel on which they are located, close to 14 percent of the existing units in the city. as noted these are generally affordable, and sort of naturally affordable and not necessarily officially considered affordable housing. >> so the amendments to control for non-conforming units included in the draft ordinance would provide increased flexibility which could on one hand improve the expansion of the family sized units. alternatively, the amendments could result in the expansions that would increase the cost of the units including rental units such that they are no longer affordable, at this point the department cannot fully predict the implications of the change, so we encourage the decision makers to consider these impacts to the natural affording housing. the department recommends to state that the buildings that are not conforming may be expanded and enlarged or altered however we also recommend that when a non-conforming unit is expanded traditional use authorization be required if the number of on site bedrooms is increased also acknowledge that this is not a perfect solution but it was our best attempt at providing over site and in the hopes to preserve affordable. and add the requirements for the oversight in the expansion and may result in the decreased affordbility. and the amendments and an important amendment to 317 would be to remove the ability to allow dwelling mergers administratively, to come before this body and that is consistent with that recommendation in closing. the department is supportive and hope for the review and the public understanding of the controls while the public is >> public comment. >> ilean, and i just want to briefly commend supervisor avalos's office and staff to work on this and this is a problem as you can tell from the presentation this is various pieces of the code that are developed and that are no longer consistent and just don't work together well and i think that the effort is come mendable in terms of consul taiting with respect to demolition and merger and i specifically want to urge you to support staff's recommendation with respect to the criteria for the merger of the dwelling units and it fulfills what supervisor avalos's office is trying to do in implementing the general plan and i think that it simplifies it for home owners and neighbors alike so that they understand what the commission is going to be looking at and weighing and i particularly like the criteria about the bedrooms. i think that it is pushes and puts the emphasis rather on the creation of family-sized units which we know are lacking and weighs that against the loss of potentially affordable smaller units. >> thank you for your consideration and i urge you with regards to the consolidation, i would urge you to adopt the staff recommendation and i have no comments on the non-conforming use. thank you. >> sue, hester, i don't know in if it was the staff's intention to bore you to death with long items that were really dense. but they have had the effect on me. and i'm a pretty sophisticated person. i think because i have been at the long hearings that have wound up with the code language on demolition and merger, and this has been a contracted issue for commissioners way beyond or before you guys were commissioners. i think that you should consider taking up supervisor avalos's kind offer. and let this not sit but percolate and give a little bit of thought to this. this is hugely important legislation and i applaud supervisor avalos for going into these weeds. and i acknowledge that. but, i don't think this is number 9, no this is number 1 0, when you have had number 6, 7, 8, and 9 already and you go to eleven and i pity the poor people who are here for 12. this calendar is out of control. and i just... i can't... i really want to understand this and the staff report came out last friday, but, i think unless you really, really know (inaudible) you should not as of today ask questions. it has serious implications and i say that with all respect for avalos, thank you. >> any additional public comment on this item? >> thank you, president fung. and i would like to second the comments her. and i have been legalizing small structures for more than 20 years in san francisco when commissioner sugaya was on the board of appeals he saw me there very regularly with that kind of application. i think that there are a lot of implications that need to be considered by the community and i suggest that you get more input on this before it moves forward. i appreciate the efforts of mr. avalos's office in taking this up and i think that there is a lot of history behind these issues that could be really brought to the benefit to make it a better piece of legislation if it needs to. any additional public comment? >> public comment is closed. commissioner? i am very supportive of the part of the legislation dealing with demolition and mergers? and i think that it it is more critical that this commission has stated many times of looking at affordable housing and as for the section 181, the legal non-conforming units, i would suggest that we split the files, and split the file as supervisor avalos has suggested. i have some concerns, i think that to be able to make alterations to units that may need ada was cited as a possibility and they need some other kind of operations but i think that it could somehow incentivize the owners to evict the tenants there are over 50,000 units and that seems substantial to me and i like the way that the letter today, the direction of the letter, so supervisor avalos considered not changing the envelope of the building. and then also only allowing alterations and extensions for units that do not have any no fault eviction and i think that it takes more time and hopefully staff can do more analysis. >> commissioner antonini? >> i don't like this legislation at all and particularly the first part of it. the sex part my have some valid benefits and let me explain my opposition to the part d of trying to lump together conversions, mergers and demolitions, there are three different things and they are usually brought forward by three different kinds of project sponsors and conversions often take place when institutions or others are trying to change a housing use to a non-housing use and these are calls that have to be made on each individual project and the issues involved here are entirely different from the ones that have come up on the demolitions and mergers and mergers are always almost a family trying to enlarge their situation by properties they own to meet their family's changing needs. and sometimes this applies to demolitions but those are often a little different too to enlarge to a bigger family or more, and a single residence ha is over 50 percent of the cost of renovation is more than 50 percent of its value. and that is one of the criteria is allowed to be demolished and replaced by sometimes more than one unit and sometimes the same number of units but in all of these cases particularly in the two final cases what you are doing is improving the housing stock? san francisco. and most jurisdictions encourage people to have housing stock. >> we have it backwards and take make it as bad as we can and kho p it up and make it smaller and charge people $30,000 for they want to alter the property for their own needs, a few other things bother me to the fact that lumping together three things that are not even anywhere similar. and in fact, i would want a administrative approval and mergers that meet all of the qualifications and i would like to see more qualifications. and such as what was the house originally, often times single family homes were choped up in the second world war without permit and made into three dysfunctional units that only students or people that are there transiently will live in and they want to make them back into the family sized home that they once were. if it meets all of this criteria, the mullen example was a terrible one that was a place and you know, so dysfunctional that you could not enter one of the units without trespassing on everyone else's property that is one of the reasons why it was approved as a merger and the dr is actually been withdrawn. so i have a question for miss hayward on the other part of this legislation which deals with conditional use. are you telling me that we still have drs for mergers and demolitions and conversions but in certain districts it will have to be a conditional use, is that what you said? >> part of the existing code, there are the market octavia area where the lots are up to two units requires conditional use authorization and most of the city up to two units requires mandatory discretionary review. all parts of the city, and the ownership beyond the city to prove the property owner should not be able to merge for his or her own uses and they should have to get more votes to prove that this is a valid thing rather than getting four votes to allow them to do it. when you bring this up to people outside of san francisco they think that you are talking jiggeris she both pds how cities can have laws like this. it is worse that we are charging $3500 to change the structure of their own house. so i don't like this legislation. >> in considering this legislation we did think about the fact that there are different controls for the market area and we did not want to recommend changing of the controls continuing on with my feelings, we are moving into the direction that there are places where it is a good thing and usually by new construction it is built the right way but we have an over abundance of units that are too small and not safe and fire hazards and we should be incentizing them to make them big and her merging units and making them more family friendly and something else in here that is inconsistent and it says that we don't, we are not interested? the density and if you add more bedrooms and make it more affordable, now i don't think that those things necessarily are consistent because when you merge your unit you usually add more bedrooms to it and that is one of the reasons that you merge it and it may become less affordable as one unit, then the two units were individually, so those things are not consistent and i think that we have to look at what is the best housing for san francisco what makes the city a safer place to live in and stop worrying about the issues and trying to second guess who is going to live here and a predisposition for groups and penalize the *t other groups, i am a no on this for sure and i would like to hear about adding bedrooms in the non-conforming uses but another problem is that we have neighborhood areas that were zoned a certain way because they wanted it to be single family and a lot of illegal units and we have these units that you pointed out are exceptions and may be apartment buildings on the corner or something like that and they are legal and non-conforming generally speaking people live in areas because of the density because they want to be there because of the density that the neighborhood has and they don't want to see it crowded up with a lot of units in the neighborhood that was normally one or two housing units per lot. and so, i think that we have to keep that and i would want to see those as staying as criteria for mergers and demolitions. >> and in principal, i am in strong support of what is intened here and it might just require a little bit more time or be split into two parts as suggested by one of my fellow commissioners. and i believe that the organizizing of the discretion of the housing on the merger into such the 317 is a logical way that it basically just mirrors the department and it has been working on it for years. and but the area where i would like to get additional and more strong delineated is in the subject of mergers and we had a case last week where i asked on the additional guidance, and i believe that owners and potential home owners will come to the city and buy two storage units. occupy the house with the additional unit for years and actually from 2007 to 2013, when they were coming forward to want to merger and in addition to that, i think that we should look at minimum and maximum unit sizes in order to be repaired of what it will entail, we will not have more land and we have a fair amount of land. we are squeezing in the units in order to create the housing type on the other hand we do not have control to say that the two unit building which has added to the sized units would be merged in order for somebody to make a mansion, and we are trying to balance it. and so i would like more work on this and in addition to the safety issue of non-conforming legal non-conforming and it is complicated because if indeed the supervisor avalos mentions in the letter, it would not be more bedrooms it is like choosing it before the square footage will remain the same and redefine what is for them and then after a couple of standards for. >> they cannot put all of the bedrooms in the rear of the building and the living rooms and no exterior light and say that you have a... (inaudible) that is non-conforming legal verses co-compliant. and so i leave that for further investigation. and i am very supportive of it and i think that it needs to be further worked on and fine tuned. >> commissioner borden? >> i share that with my colleagues. and in the per version and i actually will feel comfortable and i think that is more clear for the secondary portion, around the expansion of legal non-conforming units and the unintended consequences may be complicated for us to make a decision on this given the amount of units that are impacted there. i do applaud the effort to consolidate it to one place and that is a challenge that we often have and that causes a whole series of the unintended consequences there. and i do think that this is quite a bit and they could often do have or looking at mergers and challenges because it is not always consistent across the cases and having further questions by which we can adequately evaluate, i think, helps quite a bit. and so, i understand that there is not an issue and generally we don't, we have never going to have enough space to build, you know, large single family homes and the families might want to build in and that might be true and we can't really tear up the existing housing stock to meet those needs either. there has to be a balance. and i think that this does a good job in trying to look at that. i don't know that we know for a certainty what the families do or don't want to live in. i think that it is 30,000 units that are held off of the market and that is the report that we have seen and we have seen and so if we could, and i don't know if people are doing it because they are hoping to do mergers, if there is clarity around when the people can do these things that will help to take the prertion off of this unit. >> commissioner antonini? >> i think that you know the units being held off of the market has knowing to do the mergers and a lot to do with existing laws that make it really hard to get rid of tenants if things are not working out and owners don't want to have to deal with it if they can afford not to. passing legislation like this is only going to make it worse, more restrictions and viewer people will want to put their roots down in san francisco and limited on how many space they can have. and they want to ration your living space, and so, and we need it, but we need it with. and the new appliances and in the role and. and the comfortable unit. i would like to continue. >> and i want to make you aware of the fact that we have a deadline to review this legislation, if you do not act on this demolition, and you will lose the opportunity to weigh in on that, he is willing to split the non-conforming portion. >> when does he need a decision? >> nengt week will be the next opportunity. >> could we continue it to next week. >> you can continue it to july 25th, however, commissioners fung and hillis are and he would to be out. i would make a motion to continue it to next week. is there a second? >> commissioner sugaya? >> i think that i am going to make a motion to go ahead and support supervisor avalos's legislation pertaining to the first half, whatever the proper sections are and to continue the 181, i think, is that right? to another date. >> second. >> and that said, i didn't... >> do you want a staff recommendation? >> yes. >> so we can pick an appropriate date. do we have a deadline on the second? >> it is up to the supervisors. it might be splitting hairs and i will leave it up to you to consider, 181 deals with alterations to the non-conforming units and 180, basically just makes and the presumption of the non-conforming units and if you look at page 12, and

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