by KELLY WALDRON MARCH 1, 2024, 12:04 PM (MissionLocal.org)
A group of some two dozen affordable housing experts and housing advocates presented findings from their report on affordable housing to the Planning Commission on Thursday, with a single overriding message: San Francisco needs more outside money to reach its housing goals. Under the state-mandated Housing Element passed last year, the city needs to build 46,000 homes by 2031 for extremely-low to moderate income households.
The typical cost for a single affordable housing unit is over $900,000 — and for the most part, it’s not the city that foots the bill, according to Daniel Adams, the director of the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development.
“San Francisco can’t do this alone,” he said. Adams presented the report by the Affordable Housing Leadership Council, a group that has been convening meetings since May 2023, and includes the executive directors of affordable housing nonprofits that are in partnership with the city.
Between 2018 and 2023, two-thirds of the funds needed to build affordable units came from outside San Francisco — about $2.6 billion from state and federal funds and $1.2 billion from local funds.
Affordable housing in San Francsico relies on outside funds
“It’s darn expensive to build affordable housing in San Francisco,” said Adams.
While finding more outside funding is a challenge, so is securing local money. On March 5, voters will decide on Proposition A, a $300 million housing bond that would infuse much-needed cash into affordable housing developments. There is concern, though, that the measure may not reach the two-thirds of the vote required for it to pass.
Commissioner Sue Diamond called the measure’s prospects “distressing.”
“If the bond doesn’t pass, we’ll have to scramble,” said Adams. But it could be argued that the city is already scrambling to build more affordable housing.
“We have all these projects sitting around the city … that are essentially waiting for a combination of state, federal and local funding to be available,” said James Pappas, who works for the Planning Department and worked on the council’s report. Hundreds of units, he said, are permitted but awaiting funding.
For each affordable housing unit, a patchwork of agencies chip in
Charlie Sciammas, who works at the Council of Community Housing Organizations, said the report lacked “a sense of urgency and a clear set of benchmarks.” Sciammas noted that to reach the housing target, the city would have to increase its housing production fivefold. “Now is one of those moments where we need to be reaching much further than we are,” he said
As well as the need for funding, the report —which is not binding— made two other main recommendations: The city should expand its capacity and coordination locally to produce affordable housing, and it should innovate with diverse partnerships in the philanthropic and private sectors to do so. Affordable housing in the city is already constructed by nonprofit partners, whose executive directors largely staffed the working group that created the report.
“We’re ready to roll up our sleeves and get to work,” said Adams.
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KELLY WALDRON
Kelly is Irish and French and grew up in Dublin and Luxembourg. She studied Geography at McGill University and worked at a remote sensing company in Montreal, making maps and analyzing methane data, before turning to journalism. She recently graduated from the Data Journalism program at Columbia Journalism School.More by Kelly Waldron
