San Francisco has released its latest Capital Plan for the next decade, and it includes a lot of spending—a whole lot of spending—that will probably never happen.
Among other things, the plan notes that the need for affordable housing is $29 billion. The plans, however, calls for $2.7 billion worth of funding for affordable housing—and that’s a stretch, since the revenue sources that are actually available are far lower. The city just passed a $300 million housing bond; the next one, for $200 million, won’t happen until 2034.
The plan kind of dances around this radical shortfall between need and reality:
Project feasibility depends on the availability of City and nonCity funds, the cost and availability of development sites, and the cost of construction. Without eligible funds in hand, a project cannot proceed. Affordable housing developers must compete on the open market for sites, or sites may come to the City through land dedication. Construction costs have increased dramatically in recent years, and a project’s mix of uses and funds must be able to support those costs.
The whole plan is full of fantasy: Overall, the plan calls for $52 billion in capital spending. Overall, the city’s annual General Fund budget is about $6 billion a year, and is running at least an $800 million deficit.
Overall, the city proposes to issue $1.7 billion in bonds over the next ten years.
Nowhere in the Capital Plan is there any indication of where that massive amount of missing money will come from.
This is where the city actually plans to borrow money:
A broad coalition of environmental groups says the plan does little to address climate change:
As you know, several members of SF Climate Emergency Coalition appeared before this committee on
January 27, 2025 to give in-person public comment on the lack of movement towards addressing
greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction in the Draft FY 2026-35 Capital Plan. We find it disheartening, if
not irresponsible, of this committee not yet to address the life-threatening specter of climate change in
the proposed Bond Schedule.
And we remind you that this is not the first time we have publicly pointed out the lack of City bond
resources devoted to decreasing our fossil fuel usage. In December 2022, we spoke up in support of
the CLEE report which suggested financial vehicles that the City could use to begin funding GHG
reductions. At that time the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to recommend that Capital
Planning include a climate bond in the Bond Schedule. Throughout the spring and into the summer
of 2023, before the Budget and Appropriations and Board of Supervisors votes on the bond schedule,
we continued to insist that funding the reduction of climate-altering carbon fuels must be a priority.
Now we are here once again raising the alarm that it is foolhardy to ignore the urgent warnings and the
current destruction being wrought by climate change.
In fact, it does little to address transportation, streets, public health, or a whole lot of other things.
Deep in the 298-page plan is this:
The deficit for affordable housing is $26 billion. There is no revenue or bond source for that money. It’s just a large random number that has no relation whatsoever to reality.
And yet, it passed out of the Budget and Finance Committee without a dissenting vote, and will go before the Board of Supes Tuesday/15.
There is still absolutely no way that city can meet the state mandates for affordable housing. And yet, the supes and the mayor and the state Legislature continue making policy as if any of this were real. Amazing.
(John Elberling, the director of TODCO, has an interesting suggestion for funding affordable housing: The city could earmark some of the “tax increment”—that is, the additional property taxes that would come from increased development in the upzoned West Side—for affordable housing. That, of course, would mean less new money for, say, the Police Department, or Muni. But if all this massive new development is going to happen, some of that new money could pay to mitigate one of the most dramatic impacts, which is the displacement of lower-income people. Until this city gets serious about capturing the wealth of growth, and taxing the wealth of the top ten percent, this capital plan just an exercise in futility.)
