SF supervisors blast state housing mandate and lack of funding

San Francisco supervisors, facing a looming deadline for a state-mandated plan to build tens of thousands of homes across the city, appear to have thrown in the towel.

The city’s Board of Supervisors bashed Gov. Gavin Newsom and state housing officials for what they said were unrealistic requirements to build housing, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

During a public hearing on the required plan to find room for 82,000 new homes – more than half of them affordable – the supervisors lambasted the state for being short on the billions of dollars needed to pay for them.

“They are setting us up for guaranteed failure,” Board President Shamann Walton said, after calling the state housing mandate “problematic” and “unrealistic.” “Where is the money?”

“To the state of California: You can come and threaten and mandate but ‘Hey Mr. Newsom, put your money where your mouth is, too,’” Supervisor Aaron Peskin added.

San Francisco’s so-called “housing element” plan must detail the construction of 82,000 units between next year and 2031, of which 46,000 must be affordable to low- and moderate-income residents.

Also, the element must plan for “fair housing,” or significant new residential development in “well-resourced” neighborhoods.

With the hourglass turned over on a Jan. 31 deadline for a final plan, failure to comply could mean the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for affordable housing and transportation.

It could also open the door to a state “builder’s remedy” legal provision that allows developers to construct housing with few constraints.

The San Francisco housing element comes after state housing officials launched an unprecedented probe into the city’s housing approval process, the slowest and most difficult in California.

With state housing officials monitoring San Francisco’s every move, the city risks losing local control of its housing approval and permitting process if it doesn’t come up with a plan the state is willing to certify.

While the city has a pipeline of thousands of approved units on its east side, its city’s housing element is largely focused on 34,000 units of “added capacity” in “high-resource” commercial corridors on the west side, much of it in the Sunset and Richmond districts.

Supervisor Myrna Melgar agreed with the plan’s focus on the west side, but said the city lacks the nonprofit builders to create enough affordable units to meet the mandate – even if there was money to do it, according to the Chronicle.

“What are we going to do to build that capacity in our nonprofit sector?” she asked.

Supervisor Rafael Mandelman called out the state for having plenty of say on San Francisco’s housing element — “but no direction on how to generate $1.5 billion a year for additional revenue to fund affordable housing.”

Supervisor Dean Preston said “it doesn’t seem like anyone is serious about reaching those goals.”

The city has more than 65,000 approved units, many on hold due to economics. Some of those developments made sense before the pandemic but no longer work because of inflation and declining rents, according to the Chronicle.

Supervisor Catherine Stefani called the housing element “an exercise in futility if we don’t figure out how to remove the barriers to building” — including hefty fees and red tape that can delay projects for years.

“You could propose to rezone my district, but if you do so without removing those barriers, no housing is going to get built,” she said.

— Dana Bartholomew

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