If the two affordable housing measures on the November ballot don’t pass, San Francisco will run out of money for affordable projects in two years, leaving thousands of units unable to break ground.
That’s because more than $1 billion in bond money approved in the past ten years has largely been spent, building almost 5,000 units and funding another 2,000 that are going to come on line soon.
But, as Quintin Mecke, the director of the Council of Community Housing Organizations, points out in an alarming substack post, the next housing bond isn’t scheduled until 2034—and it’s a scant $200 million.
Here’s what the city’s capital plan calls for
- Earthquake Safety and Emergency Response, June 2026.
- Parks and Open Space, March 2028.
- Waterfront and Climate Safety, November 2028.
- Public Health, 2030.
- Transportation, 2032.
Affordable housing, 2034.
The city plays this game because nobody wants to try to pass a bond, which requires 67 percent, if it will lead to an increase in property taxes. So the city issues no new bonds until it has paid off old ones.
I get it: Two thirds is a high threshold, and conservative homeowners and big landlords won’t vote for higher taxes, and since landlords can pass half the cost onto tenants ( a rule the city could change), renters are skeptical, too. All the bond act media says: “Won’t raise taxes.”
But the mayor has declared a rental crisis, and while he has offered some reasonable ideas, none of them involve new revenue for affordable housing. As Mecke notes:
Rents up by a quarter in a year. Evictions at a decade high. More than 12,000 affordable homes are in the pipeline waiting for funding. A $25.1 billion gap between what the city has and what it needs to meet its affordable housing obligations. And the next scheduled bond for affordable housing is eight years away, and smaller than what the city is spending on affordable housing this year alone.
A rent emergency with no money to build the way out of it is a cliff. Almost nobody is talking about it.
More:
The market builds housing for people who can pay market rents. It always has, and it always will, because that is what a market does. No developer can rent a new San Francisco apartment to a home health aide or a senior on Social Security at a price they can pay and still stay in business. Affordability at those incomes has to be paid for, permanently, with public money.
We have already run the experiment. In the last Housing Element cycle, San Francisco permitted roughly twice its target for market-rate housing while falling short on homes for low-income households. The cranes came. Rents kept climbing anyway. Now a new wave of AI wealth is pushing them up faster than anywhere else in the country ….
Without new local revenue, bond money for the affordable pipeline could run out by fiscal year 2028–29. MOHCD projected its annual capacity dropping from roughly $330 million supporting 20 projects this fiscal year to about $130 million supporting seven projects in 2027–28.
Read that as a construction schedule. Twenty buildings a year becomes seven. Then fewer.
Meanwhile, in the name of making luxury housing “pencil out,” the city has dramatically cuts affordable housing fees on market-rate developers.
Here’s what we get:
A nonprofit developer holds a site the city helped acquire. The community meetings are done. The design is done. The state tax credit application needs a local funding commitment to be competitive, and the commitment doesn’t come. The application waits a round, then another. Carrying costs pile up. Construction prices climb. The project that penciled in 2027 no longer pencils in 2030.
And because affordable housing takes years to finance and build, the damage arrives on a delay. A funding gap in 2029 means empty ribbon-cuttings in 2032 and 2033. The seniors, families, and formerly homeless San Franciscans who would have moved into those buildings will simply wait longer, or leave.
That’s why, Mecke says, the November election matters so much: Two measures before the voters could bring in more money every year than the entire 2034 bond.
Prop. C, which almost everyone supports, increases the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, now capped at $50 million, to about $125 million a year. Prop. I, which the Yimbys who say they love housing are opposing, takes $125 million in taxes on high-end property sales and guarantees that it goes for non-market housing.
Lurie opposes Prop. I, because he wants that money for the General Fund, which he can spend on cops and other priorities. But that Prop. I money would not exist if the voters who approved it didn’t believe it was for affordable housing.
To make things worse, the right-wing anti-tax folks have put a measure on the state ballot that might pass, and anti-tax measures often do in statewide elections. Prop. 43 would overturn a Supreme Court decision that allows voters to put taxes on the ballot by initiative, and pass them with 51 percent, not two-thirds.
This, Mecke notes, may be the last chance for the city to pass taxes for affordable housing:
We know how to build affordable housing in San Francisco. We proved it over the last ten years. The only question on this ballot is whether we keep paying for it.
