Housing dominates SF congressional race

Housing isn’t the only marquee issue for San Franciscans, but it does lead a litany of challenges that includes an office vacancy rate above 30 percent despite gains from the still blossoming artificial intelligence industry, slow construction permitting and the general vibe of an increasingly pugnacious Trump administration.

All of that, and more, arose on Wednesday, as the three major candidates vying to replace Rep. Nancy Pelosi as San Francisco’s voice in Washington D.C. gathered before a packed auditorium and tried to convince voters of their vision for the city.

Still, when asked for the most pressing issue, state Sen. Scott Wiener, the race’s most high-profile candidate, immediately pointed to housing. Indeed, over the course of the evening, Wiener, San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan, and Saikat Chakrabarti, who formerly worked as chief of staff for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, laid out their competing proposals to address the city’s housing shortage

Little wonder in San Francisco, a city mandated to permit 82,000 new housing units by 2031.

Could the feds help?

“The federal government used to play a huge role in housing in this country,” said Wiener, who, since arriving at the legislature in 2017, has authored some of the most ambitious housing bills in California’s history. “We need massive investment in affordable housing, in social housing, mixed-income social housing in this country.”

Wiener called for providing incentives for cities to more rapidly permit construction so as to keep federal grants and loans from getting bogged down in bureaucracy. He also said he would prioritize modernizing the construction industry, and stabilizing the local skilled workforce.

Chakrabarti said the city’s efforts to rezone neighborhoods and speed up permitting, while good on paper, has failed to actually produce housing. He talked about bringing back the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a New Deal agency from the 1930s that provided low-interest loans to developers and stockpiled steel and lumber to insulate the effect of inflation on critical construction materials. Chakrabarti also said he wanted to repeal the Faircloth Amendment, part of the 1998 federal bill that restricts new social housing construction.

Chan, a progressive who many see as a foil to Wiener’s build-build-build and upzone ethos, agreed that the city needs to build more housing but argued it was already happening. She said the city needed land and money in order to deliver “true, real housing,” and not just luxury condos for the wealthy.

“One of the best ways to actually solve homelessness is to make sure that people can actually stay housed, and that means to preserve the existing housing that we have today, including rent controlled units,” Chan said. “It’s the most affordable and most valuable housing that we have in our city, and we must preserve them.”

A day after the candidate’s forum, the San Francisco Chronicle reported what many in the city had been expecting: Mayor Daniel Lurie’s so-called Family Zoning Plan, passed late last year by the city’s board of supervisors, would face a legal challenge. The plan, which upzoned parts of the city that haven’t added additional housing stock in decades, was set to go into effect Monday, but may be paused due to the litigation. The lawsuit, filed by San Francisco Neighborhoods United and Small Business Forward, attempts to compel the city to further study the plan’s impact on city infrastructure, historic resources, and at-risk communities before it goes into effect.

While Lurie’s housing solution faces a snag, one of the city’s most embattled development sites may finally get unlocked. The Oceanwide Center, a two-tower proposal that broke ground in 2021 and was supposed to produce the city’s second tallest skyscraper behind the Salesforce Tower, has sat abandoned for years. Now, the project’s China-based lender, Haitong International Equity Investment Management, has taken control of the property and expects to put it to auction on January 15. The San Francisco Business Times is reporting that the San Francisco Recovery Fund — a new venture from long-time local developer Dan Kingsley and his business partner, Jay Yang — is poised to purchase the property for $100 million. The fund put down a nonrefundable deposit on the property in December.

Yang declined The Real Deal’s request for comment, saying only that his fund was in the process of closing on the purchase.