State gives SF early nod on required plan to build 82K homes

State housing regulators have given a preliminary nod to San Francisco’s plan to build 82,000 homes in the next eight years – before the city issued a green light.

The California Department of Housing and Community Development said the latest draft of the city’s housing element plan “meets the statutory requirements” of state housing law, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The Board of Supervisors is slated to vote on the plan Tuesday.

“This finding was based on, among other reasons, programs and actions to affirmatively further fair housing and reduce governmental constraints to facilitating housing production,” Paul McDougall, a program manager for the housing department, said in a letter to the city’s planning department.

The potential punishments for not having a certified housing element by the Jan. 31 deadline are severe. They include losing out on state funding for affordable housing and transportation, plus triggering a “builder’s remedy” granting automatic approval for projects with affordable housing.

Building 82,000 homes is ambitious, considering the city has averaged 2,550 units a year over the past two decades. The big challenge is that 46,000 of the new homes must be affordable to low- and moderate-income households.

Approving the plan is the start of what will likely be a controversial, three-year process of rezoning neighborhoods for apartment buildings.

“There is a lot of work to do to actually implement this plan and make it real. We’ve got to reduce barriers, change laws, undergo rezoning, all of it,” Jeff Cretan, spokesman for Mayor London Breed, told the newspaper.

“The mayor has already directed staff to develop immediate and long-term policies so we can actually change how we approve and build housing in this city.”

San Francisco’s state-mandated housing plan commits to an October 2026 deadline to rezone the city for at least 36,282 homes.

It must approve new regulations to permit multifamily buildings — at least 20 units per acre — without the “discretionary review” used to stall or kill housing developments in San Francisco.

“The city should pursue the most aggressive rezoning strategy to ensure that adequate sites will be available throughout the planning period,” the housing department letter says.

The rezoning will be a major shift in where the city builds homes.

For the past two decades, 85 percent of residential development has been in the eastern and central parts of town, with clusters of medium- and high-rise buildings in South of Market, the South Financial District, Mission Bay and Hayes Valley Dogpatch.

The rezoning will focus along transit lines in historic residential areas, including California Street, Lombard Street, Geary Boulevard, Judah Street, Noriega Street, Ocean Avenue, Taraval Street and 19th Avenue.

At a hearing this week during the Board of Supervisors Land Use and Transportation Committee, residents praised the plan but said it is unrealistic. They said the city has not been proactive in spending available money to buy and land-bank potential sites.

Fred Sherburn-Zimmer, executive director of the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco, called the housing element process “state blackmail.”

“The state is frankly passing the buck,” Sherburn-Zimmer said. “They are telling us we have to build housing without giving us the money that we need to build it.”

Supervisor Dean Preston blasted the Mayor’s Office of Housing for failing to buy affordable housing sites with money raised through Prop I, a 2020 ballot measure he sponsored that increased transfer taxes. He blamed “political games and retribution.”

Eric Shaw, who heads up the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, said the agency is focused on getting the pipeline funded and built as fast as possible.

— Dana Bartholomew