San Francisco Supervisor Myrna Melgar has put the wheels in motion to establish a new city department, according to plans shared with Mission Local.
The forthcoming legislation would establish the Department of Housing Development and Preservation — the name is not set in stone — which would support affordable and market-rate housing production and preservation of existing housing units.
“I think housing is our most challenging issue as a city,” said Melgar, who represents District 7, which covers the Inner Sunset, West Portal, Ingleside and other neighborhoods on the city’s west side. However, she added, “we don’t have a structure to address it.”
“What I would like to see is one agency where the planning, financing and policy around housing is coordinated and happens. That doesn’t mean they have to run all the programs — but it should be centralized and coordinated,” she added.
Presently, the closest thing the city has to a housing department is the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, a wing within the mayor’s office.
The proposed Department of Housing Development and Preservation would promote the mayor’s housing office to a bonafide department, similar to New York City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, Melgar’s office shared.
Melgar said she has been working in tandem with the mayor’s office on the law.
She is also planning to introduce future legislation that would create a program to develop, finance and support housing co-ops, and she is exploring ways to mandate cooperation between the Department of Public Works and the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency to speed up the rollout of bike lanes outlined in the city’s “Bike and Rolling Plan.”
Melgar plans to announce her legislative priorities, including the bike lane plan, at the Board of Supervisors meeting on Tuesday, though the co-op and new department legislation are still being drafted by the city attorney’s office.
The legislation creating a new department seeks to consolidate different housing functions.
Right now, the mayor’s housing office is not a full-fledged department and has a narrow scope, said Melgar. The office is focused on affordable housing and generally oversees the city’s affordable housing portfolio, rather than shaping the city’s housing policy as a whole.
The city’s current housing programs are scattered across other offices, including the Housing Authority, the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing and the Office of Community Investment and Infrastructure. Melgar said it’s still to be determined how the new department would interact with those offices.
While the legislation would move the current housing office out from under the mayor’s office, the future head head of the new housing department would be appointed by the mayor.
“My goal is not to take power away from the mayor,” she added.
New co-op legislation
Co-op housing is relatively rare in San Francisco, but Melgar hopes to see more of it built soon.
“It’s a really great model that we could be looking at to build new construction, and we haven’t done that in forever,” said Melgar.
Limited equity housing co-operatives, or co-ops, are an ownership model through which residents can own a share of a corporation that owns their building rather than buying the property itself. Generally, co-ops are a more affordable pathway to homeownership, and some residents who might not qualify for a mortgage on their own may be able to through a co-op.
There are some 1,600 co-op units in San Francisco, most of which were built between the 1960s and 1980s and located in the Fillmore, Bayview and Diamond Heights neighborhoods, according to a 2022 city report.
According to the city report, the federal government, through the Department of Housing and Urban Development, financed many of the co-ops in San Francisco. But after tax cuts in the 1980s co-op development subsidies dried up.
“We’ve left them all on their own,” Melgar said. “Many of the co-ops are doing great. A couple of them are not doing so great.”
Proposition I, a November ballot measure backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, would among other things put tens of millions of dollars annually into social housing, including co-ops.
Some of the problems that persist in co-ops are financial, but others are related to shareholders not having the support or capacity to run a board and take charge of all the administrative work that entails, Melgar said. She hopes that grants coming from the co-op program would help provide training.
Finally, Melgar’s bike-lane plan seeks to address a lack of coordination between different city departments. Right now, Public Works does not coordinate with the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency when repaving city streets, which Melgar sees as a missed opportunity to move forward with bike lane installations that are already planned for.
For Melgar, the new department and co-op programs are just part of the housing puzzle. “To solve our housing crisis,” she said, “we need more of everything.”
