a building with patter,sns
Patterns, at 14th and Church Streets. Photo by Tauseef Khan.

As San Francisco prepares to build some 82,000 homes in the next eight years — at least half of which must be affordable — experts have pointed out a major concern: How to pay for it. 

On Tuesday, Board President Aaron Peskin proposed putting a $300 million bond on the March 2024 ballot to fund the production and preservation of affordable housing. The bond was originally planned for the November 2024 election, but the supervisors, mayor and a capital planning committee agreed to move it up to March to compensate for a dearth of affordable-housing funds. The bond would not increase property taxes.

But the bond’s impact would be a miniscule portion of the need: The bulk of the bond — $240 million — would go towards funding just 1,500 units already in the housing pipeline. 

Another $30 million of the housing bond would go toward preserving aging sites like those identified in the Small Sites Program, accounting for more than 60 units, while the last $30 million would go toward adding 120 beds for supportive housing for domestic violence survivors. 

And, according to the state, San Francisco must do much more than provide more dollars.

To wit: Also on Wednesday, the governor released a report from the California Department of Housing and Community Development, lambasting San Francisco for its glacial pace of development: The city has no hope of meeting the state mandate of 82,000 homes by 2031, due to a “notoriously complex, cumbersome, and unpredictable housing approval process,” the report stated, confirming what everyone has known for decades.  

San Francisco must build 10,000 homes a year to meet its requirement — about 27 units a day. So far in 2023, the state said, the city has built a home a day.

“Among key findings, the report highlights policies and practices inconsistent with state housing law, delays caused by the City’s discretionary review processes, and negative impacts from local politics on housing outcomes — all of which have real costs and dire consequences for Californians in need of housing,” the state said.

Still, the bond would help fulfill fledgling local affordable housing dollars.

Historically, the majority of San Francisco’s affordable housing is funded by federal or state money. But, in the last couple of years, federal and state grants have been more competitive, meaning the city has been forced to rely on local funding like bonds or inclusionary housing. 

But even that has been jeopardized recently: The construction sector is so sclerotic that recent legislation passed by the Board of Supervisors and signed into law by Mayor London Breed has temporarily lowered the affordable housing requirements of market-rate buildings, threatening a major source of affordable home production. 

Peskin on Wednesday said that the bond would help fill some of the city’s dire need for local funding. It would be “part of our ongoing effort to provide what the state government is not providing, which is a source of funds to meet our 46,000 unit mandate.”

“Inclusionary fees have been the second-largest source of funding,” said Eric Shaw, director of the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, at the meeting, after bonds. “But since the pandemic, those fees are shrinking.”

All of the bond’s funds are expected to be spent by the fiscal year 2028-29, Shaw said.

Bond measures must receive at least two-thirds approval to pass, which is often a difficult threshold. During the June 2022 election, voters narrowly rejected a bond that would have funded transit. 

San Francisco voters have twice approved similarly sized housing bonds in recent years, however.  In 2015, voters greenlit a $310 million general obligation bond that has funded some 1,500 homes and, in 2019, voters passed a $600 million general obligation bond that funded some 3,100 homes. 

The Budget and Legislative Analyst’s office noted some $165 million of the 2019 bond has not been spent, however, and another $175 million has been authorized, but will be spent in 2024.

That raised questions among some supervisors.

“What’s the plan for those?” Supervisor Ashai Safaí asked Shaw. 

The $165 million will go to previously identified projects in the pipeline that need gap funding, Shaw said, and not new projects. 

More than a dozen attendees spoke in favor of the bond, including a majority of advocates for unhoused women or survivors of sexual violence. Representatives from other local housing organizations, including the Council of Community Housing Organizations and Mission Economic Development Agency, spoke in favor as well. 

Gen Fujioka of the Chinatown Community Development Center said the nonprofit developer has five projects currently in the pipeline, two of which “do not have the funding necessary to proceed without this bond,”  amounting to roughly 340 units of family and senior housing. 

The committee voted unanimously in favor of amending the legislation to add specific language regarding findings of labor, domestic violence and climate. The proposal next goes to the Board of Supervisors for a vote. 

“We still have a long way to go to put this on the ballot,” Peskin said, acknowledging the repeated calls of support. “But we’re off to an auspicious start.” 

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REPORTER. Annika Hom is our inequality reporter through our partnership with Report for America. Annika was born and raised in the Bay Area. She previously interned at SF Weekly and the Boston Globe where she focused on local news and immigration. She is a proud Chinese and Filipina American. She has a twin brother that (contrary to soap opera tropes) is not evil.

Follow her on Twitter at @AnnikaHom.

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12 Comments

  1. No more bonds. No more taxes. The city needs to tighten up, audit its contractors, cut the dead wood, and report to the people. After that, talk to us about bonds.

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  2. The city has approved, not built, 1 unit per day – an abstraction of the goal but that’s all they can do. The zoning tax is at least $400,000 per unit and the city should cut that *drastically* to maximize production before asking for money – spending taxpayer funds on housing the city itself has made artificially expensive (i.e. slashing the number of units the money could buy by half or whatever the number is) is pathetically backwards.
    src: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28993/w28993.pdf

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    1. DK,

      You are exactly right.

      We should not be taxing housing creation.

      If the political class and their connected “non-profits” want the taxpayers to approve bond money for “affordable” housing, then it should make the necessary regulatory reforms and eliminate the taxes/exactions currently being impose on housing creation so the taxpayers can have even a modicum of confidence that the money will be well spent and not wasted on “process.”

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  3. This is silly. If the city would just drop the affordable housing requirements that no developer can reach, developers would build these units without requiring city money.

    Our political leaders have been considered developers the enemy for so long that apparently they can’t see that. But that’s exactly what’s going to happen if/when the state takes over. Other cities don’t need to spend this much public money to build housing — not when it’s going to become a valuable commodity immediately.

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  4. The city’s spending is profligate. Consider, for example, Ronen’s “tiny homes” project at 16th and Mission. Each temporary cabin is projected to cost more than $100,000 in construction costs alone. After that, add in meals, security, cleaning, management, health care, and wraparound services. The chronically mentally ill and addicted population she plans to house there will require lots of security and police. The city doesn’t bother to regulate its spending, even in a time of decreasing revenues. No bonds.

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  5. No bonds.
    Why does this article say it will not raise prop taxes? That’s exactly where the fees are place – on the property tax bill.
    NO NEW TAXES.
    15 Billion dollar budget and massive short fall. Agreed to other posters, a Cuty audit is needed and everything we don’t need can be chopped. I think you’d find several billion right there.
    Return that money to the San Franciscan taxpayers.

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  6. If there’s anything more absurd than YIMBY and the state of California claiming that market rate housing, which can only be produced at scale during the second half of the up phase of the business cycle, can lower housing prices (and punishing localities when capital refuses to be deployed until conditions are prime), it is that government funded affordable housing can scale to meet the challenge where we see a building dribble out very 5 years or so.

    The ethical problem here is that only those who stand to benefit economically, who are coincidentally also paid by the government to build that housing and to advocate are stepping up demanding this. Were the slate clean, residents who are not ethically conflicted would probably demand other forms of affordable housing production that might be more effective than the CCHO sludge.

    This dozen of public commentators shows that San Franciscans are not clamoring for CCHO’s snake oil. In any event, CCHO and the housing advocacy nonprofits are not even treading water in a rip tide. They are being rapidly washed out to sea. Once gerrymandering is fully felt, they’ll probably be cut off, the CCHO cartel will fail, and they’ll begin attacking each other for scraps of funding.

    Compensated advocacy by government funded nonprofits on policy questions that they’d stand to benefit from economically needs to be made illegal.

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  7. The article states: “The bond would not increase property taxes.”

    That is misleading. This bond replaces another bond that is expiring. However property taxes will still be higher if the bond measure passes than if it does not pass.

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    1. Sir or madam — 

      I’m not going to touch the merits of the bond, but the line “won’t raise taxes” when a new bond is replacing an expiring bond is as old as God’s parents. It’s not misleading to say that your taxes won’t be raised when … they won’t be raised.

      Best,

      JE

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      1. Interesting trick. Shouldn’t the tax on the first bond go to zero when it expires? If so, they raised the tax from 0 to the old value. But instead, you continue to pay a debt after it expires.

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  8. Aaron Peskin pursuits the interests of Telegraph Hill Dwellers. Most prominently, they want to keep the state out from their neighborhood, so he’ll do everything to try to move the needle towards building as many new housing units as can. That goal would be maximized with studios and 1BRs. Taking the Potrero yard development as a barometer, we can assume that’s what would be built in large numbers, piling on the existing glut of 1BRs and studios sitting empty across town already, following the exodus of tens of thousands of residents over the course of the last few years. Add-on “win”: Vacancy tax.
    Who’s losing here is existing housing stock in desperate need of rehabilitation as well as families and families-to-be looking for workforce housing.

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