{"id":195633,"date":"2026-02-27T00:15:10","date_gmt":"2026-02-27T00:15:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/195633\/"},"modified":"2026-02-27T00:15:10","modified_gmt":"2026-02-27T00:15:10","slug":"sfs-affordable-housing-shortage-triggers-alarms-what-about-consequences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/195633\/","title":{"rendered":"SF\u2019s Affordable Housing Shortage Triggers Alarms. What About Consequences?\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

San Francisco needs to build affordable housing. This is true in a broad sense. Like much of the country, the city has a housing shortage, and the housing it has is, on average, very expensive<\/a>.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

But the need for affordable housing \u2013 that is, subsidized and reserved for people at certain income levels \u2013 is now a legal issue. In early 2023, SF lawmakers voted to make mandates for it binding. Last month, the city quietly triggered one of the enforcement mechanisms written into those laws.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Will any consequences come of it? San Francisco is not on track to meet its affordable housing goals, and that failure is poised to become the next contentious chapter in the city\u2019s housing fight. A City Hall committee is supposed to convene soon to hash out ideas to address the shortfall. Affordable advocates say they\u2019re working on their own plan.<\/p>\n

One neighborhood group even wants to revive plans to turn a Muni bus yard<\/a> into one of the city\u2019s biggest affordable complexes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Everyone will be working under adverse circumstances. Affordable housing is not affordable to build. Labor, materials, and land remain market-rate. Even in good economic times, it\u2019s also difficult to finance. These are not good times.\u00a0<\/p>\n

City and state budgets, a crucial funding source, are in deep deficit. SF faces a two-year shortfall of $936 million<\/a>, and it could get worse thanks to the federal \u201cbig beautiful bill.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\ud83e\uddf5 ALERT: We’re joining the Board of Supervisors’ Budget Committee at 10am for updates on SF’s deficit and what Daniel Lurie proposes to do about it. With the Trump GOP’s “big beautiful bill” cutting all kinds of federal funds, SF estimates its deficit could soon spike to $1b or more.<\/p>\n

\u2014 The Frisc (@thefrisc.bsky.social)<\/a> 2026-02-25T17:50:53.407Z<\/a><\/p>\n

There are some creative ideas floating about<\/a>, but unexpected pots of public money are unlikely to become available soon. And \u201csoon\u201d is a key word here, because SF is under the microscope for its dismal housing record.\u00a0<\/p>\n

State regulators could penalize San Francisco by withholding housing or transit funds, or more drastically wrest away local control and invoke the so-called Builders Remedy<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Affordable trigger warning<\/p>\n

Before this decade, California set targets for new local housing but didn\u2019t enforce them. If cities didn\u2019t hit their goals \u2014 and they rarely did \u2014 Sacramento couldn\u2019t do much.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That changed with the latest eight-year cycle, which began in 2023. SF\u2019s Housing Element, a 183-page blueprint for new housing plans, won unanimous board approval. Even skeptics like Sup. Aaron Peskin, who doubted it would produce 82,000 new homes, more than half of them affordable, voted yes because of the state\u2019s new regulatory muscle.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"AA map of San Francisco\u2019s affordable housing sites shows how most are concentrated on the city\u2019s east side. The larger the circle, the more units are in the building. (Courtesy Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development)<\/p>\n

To keep SF on track, the blueprint included time-sensitive triggers. One \u201ccircuit breaker\u201d will force a rewrite of the housing plan \u2014 in essence, deeper deregulation \u2014 if the city fails to issue building permits for at least 29,049 new units by January 2027. Critics of market-rate housing have called this trigger a \u201cdirty bomb\u201d that will let developers have their way.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But in January, the city\u2019s lack of production since 2023 brought it closer to an affordable housing circuit breaker. If a new City Hall committee drawn from the Planning Department and other agencies gives the city a failing grade on affordable housing production, it will activate new requirements.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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The Housing Element spells out three remedies: Increase local funding, ask the state for more funding, and \u201cincrease the land banking strategy\u201d \u2014 that is, buy more properties for future development.<\/p>\n

Rachael Tanner, in charge of long-term planning at the planning department, says it\u2019s too early to say what ideas the committee will consider.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Regulators at the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) will decide if the city\u2019s proposals are up to snuff. Spokesperson Alicia Murillo said that \u201cHCD continues to monitor San Francisco\u2019s progress\u201d and will \u201cwork to ensure the programs\u2019 objectives\u201d once the city decides what it\u2019s going to do.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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One critic of the city\u2019s housing plan and upzoning push is skeptical that the committee or state will hold SF to task. \u201cWe don\u2019t expect either Planning or HCD to take affordable housing goals seriously,\u201d says Joseph Smooke, spokesperson for the Race & Equity in All Planning Coalition (REP-SF). Smooke says REP-SF is drawing up its own recommendations to satisfy the Affordable Housing Breaker but isn\u2019t ready to make them public.<\/p>\n

Another affordable housing advocate has an idea for the committee that he calls a \u201clow-cost step,\u201d acknowledging the city\u2019s budget pain. Council of Community Housing Organizations director Quintin Mecke wants affordable developers to convene and pitch plans to combat \u201crising construction costs, financing gaps, stalled projects,\u201d and other major development obstacles.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"How\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n

Several community groups, most in and around the Mission, have a more specific idea<\/a>. They want the city to bring back its once-audacious goals for the Potrero Yard project. The site\u2019s owner, SFMTA, slashed plans from several hundred affordable homes atop a rebuilt bus maintenance yard down to only 100 homes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In a letter to SF Planning, Sup. Chyanne Chen has asked for a \u201cconsistent affordable housing funding source\u201d but made no specific suggestions. Chen was one of four supervisors to vote against the sweeping plan to upzone western and northern neighborhoods, which for decades didn\u2019t allow midsize apartment buildings \u2014 the scale often needed to make affordable construction viable.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u2018We have forever\u2019<\/p>\n

When the Housing Element passed in January 2023, the relief of getting the plan\u00a0 through the contentious Board of Supervisors superseded worry over future deadlines. \u201cAt the time it seemed like, \u2018Oh, 2026, we have forever,\u2019\u201d says Habitat For Humanity SF CEO Maureen Sedonaen.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For the 2024-25 fiscal year<\/a>, the Mayor\u2019s Office of Housing and Community Development budgeted more than $310 million toward affordable housing grants and loans, and subsidies for permanent supportive housing.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

According to a recent report from the city\u2019s capital planners<\/a>, that\u2019s a sliver of what MOHCD needs to spend to fully fund SF\u2019s goals: $2.2 billion in 2026 and $27 billion over the next decade.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We\u2019re very unoptimistic. <\/p>\n

YIMBY Law director Davey Kim<\/p>\n

The City Hall group \u2014 officially the Interagency Housing Element Implementation Committee \u2014 will recommend a new funding figure, but the Board of Supervisors and mayor must appropriate the funds through legislation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re very unoptimistic,\u201d says YIMBY Law director Davey Kim. \u201cWith this budget crisis, the appetite to apply funds to get housing at all income levels is not necessarily going to be there.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"WorkersAffordable housing construction at San Francisco\u2019s Balboa Upper Yard site, seen in 2022. It opened with 131 units in 2023, partially funded with federal tax credits. (Courtesy Mission Housing Development Corp.)<\/p>\n

Perhaps complicating the budget math, Mayor Lurie and Sup. Bilal Mahmood want to roll back a 2020 tax hike<\/a> on property sales of at least $10 million. They hope to spur new construction by freeing up developer capital. <\/p>\n

Critics say the transfer tax, one of the highest in the U.S., is supposed to help fund affordable housing, although City Hall can also put the money into the general fund. That allocation was an annual source of tension between London Breed and then-Sup. Dean Preston<\/a>, the tax hike\u2019s author.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Lurie and allies say they\u2019ll look for other ways to make up the affordable housing funds.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If supervisors and the mayor say there\u2019s no extra money to devote to affordable housing, it remains to be seen if HCD plays hardball. But there\u2019s more local pressure that will come to bear. Opposing sides of the city\u2019s housing wars have sued over the new upzoning plan. The plan\u2019s opponents say it violates state environmental law, and YIMBYs say it doesn\u2019t upzone enough to meet state housing mandates baked into the eight-year cycle that got everything started.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Upcoming elections, especially on the June ballot, will be a housing bellwether. Supervisors Alan Wong and Stephen Sherrill, both density-friendly mayoral allies, face challenges from density-skeptic rivals. Sherrill\u2019s main opponent, Lori Brooke, cofounded one of the groups that filed the environmental suit<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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San Francisco State political scientist Jason McDaniel points out that in those two races specifically, housing mandates could put incumbents in a tight spot. They\u2019ll be \u201cblamed [by their opponents] for any projects that do get built, while at the same time blamed by the more YIMBY side of things\u201d for not building even more.<\/p>\n

Affordable housing advocates sometimes ask the city for the implausible, but now the city\u2019s own promises face a financial reckoning. The bill is coming due at the worst possible juncture. As San Franciscans of nearly every stripe struggle to meet housing costs, city government has to do the same.<\/p>\n

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