Building the Affordable Housing San Francisco Needs
By Karoleen Feng, Gina Dacus, Anni Chung and Maurilio Leon | Council of Community Housing Organizations
March 7, 2023
San Francisco Examiner
The certification of San Francisco’s Housing Element by the California Department of Housing and Community Development is a big milestone, and it provides The City a powerful impetus to address the housing affordability crisis. With a mandate to build 46,000 affordable housing units out of 82,000 units total, San Francisco must rise to the occasion.
As a coalition of nonprofit organizations that have built housing for extremely low- to moderate-income San Franciscans, the Council of Community Housing Organizations seeks the inclusion of equity and affordability strategies in Mayor London Breed’s Housing for All Plan. This gives San Francisco a fighting chance to achieve the affordable housing goal in the 2023-2031 Housing Element cycle.
Let’s put this in context: During the last cycle, San Francisco achieved 150% of its market rate housing goals, while building much less than 50% of the affordable housing targeted at low- and moderate income levels. To successfully meet the Housing Element’s affordable housing goal and to truly build housing for all, The City will need to collaborate in new ways with community leaders to identify strategies and scale up its investments. For tens of thousands of residents in communities across San Francisco who are experiencing housing insecurity, The City must not fail. We worked alongside The City during the pandemic to keep households as housing secure as possible, and we know we can succeed together.
San Francisco’s community-based housers have partnered with The City for decades and have deep knowledge and rich experience in developing affordable housing and providing housing services for low-income communities. Unlike any other city in the state, San Francisco is unique in having cultivated community housers that ensure strong voices from the ground up in responding to community needs and serving as long-term anchors to San Francisco’s neighborhoods. We saw this most significantly in the transition of the San Francisco Housing Authority’s distressed buildings ownership into the Rental Assistance Demonstration projects of over 3,500 units in 29 buildings, amounting to at least $2 billion in assets. Notably, RAD also dramatically transformed the capacity of several BIPOC-led organizations into the affordable housing owners and developers they are today.
As an immediate action step to its Housing Element, San Francisco will convene a working group on developing an Affordable Housing Implementation and Funding Strategy. In this last year of finalizing the Housing Element, S.F.’s Planning Department incorporated the experience and voices of the Council of Community Housing Organizations and other coalitions to add racially equitable provisions that support the production of affordable housing. That includes strategies for acquisition and land banking, and a commitment to provide or obtain additional funding sources if The City falls short of its affordable housing goals mid-cycle in 2027.
We are heartened that our advocacy has led to these commitments. We hope that these priorities are reflected in The City’s budget and planning priorities to provide the housing desperately needed by San Francisco’s low- and moderate-income residents. The Housing Element calls for developing in well-resourced neighborhoods on the westside and in the northern neighborhoods. Given that state mandates for affordable and overall housing production are nearly three times that of the previous cycle, The City must not neglect the less-resourced eastern and southern neighborhoods – Priority Equity Geographies where working-class and BIPOC residents are vulnerable to displacement.
Financing is the critical piece to realizing these affordable housing development goals. The City has been able to develop innovative funding strategies for affordable housing including increasing the property transfer tax (2016 and 2020), taxing vacant residential properties (2022), adjusting Inclusionary Housing, establishing Jobs-Housing Linkage Fees, passing two housing bonds passed since 2015, and increasing funding for permanent supportive housing to address homelessness. San Francisco’s voters — who understand that economic opportunity for all depends on greater access to affordable housing – have been key to The City’s innovative strategies.
During these challenging economic times, San Franciscans deserve collaborative leadership at City Hall where continued innovation and practical financing solutions will be necessary to make the most of our public dollars and City resources. Our local tools include creating Infrastructure financing districts, now moving forward at the Potrero Power Station site where one-third of the proposed 2,600 housing units will be affordable.
San Francisco must also consider strengthening, rebuilding public institutions, and creating new entities to work toward a common goal of ending inequity, discrimination and housing insecurity. San Francisco launched the San Francisco Housing Accelerator Fund based on the affordable housing community’s recommendations in 2017 to directly add private dollars as rapid acquisition and bridge financing for local developers of affordable housing. The SFHAF is an example of what The City could do to further grow local dollars in public investments. Already, The City is considering the creation of a municipal finance corporation as a step toward a public bank. This bank would direct lending and priority investments to advance racial equity and to serve critical community needs such as housing affordability, local enterprise and climate resilience.
The City has and must continue to advocate for state funding that could activate local innovations like land banking, and the development of regional sources of financing that could yield billions of dollars to address housing insecurity in the Bay Area. San Francisco’s housing organizations bring a base to shaping regional and state legislation. For instance, San Francisco’s nationally lauded acquisition and preservation program that is known as the Small Sites Program for buying buildings off the speculative real estate market is being modeled statewide as the Community Anti-Displacement and Preservation Program. If SB225 is adopted, the state program could bring more dollars for preserving buildings off the private market. Separately, Bay Area housing planners are assessing the placement of a multi-billion regional housing bond that could usher in at least $1.2 billion to house San Francisco working families.
Again, collaborative and transparent leadership at all levels of government will be necessary to scale up the resources to make these innovations possible. CCHO member organizations look forward to continued partnership with The City. We want to ensure that Housing for All means housing for the working-class, BIPOC, and vulnerable communities that built San Francisco into a great city and deserve a fair economy that works for all.