Multifamily housing has always been an integral part of San Francisco’s urban fabric. A new state mandate would allow this housing type on the city’s west side. Photos by Darius Riley | HOUR VOYSES
Fifty-five years after California passed a body of law to supply housing for people at all income levels in every jurisdiction, San Francisco still struggles with housing affordability and exhibits patterns of racial segregation. The city has begun changing exclusionary, single-family zoning patterns to favor lower-cost, multifamily buildings. SPUR is spearheading policy and advocacy work to ensure the city adopts a transformational rezoning.
San Francisco has long viewed itself as a progressive and inclusive city — a home for people seeking refuge. The high cost of housing has changed that narrative in recent years, but today the city is poised to offer new generations that experience of acceptance by allowing more housing. The opportunity: make good on the intent of a 55-year-old state law, itself aligned with a federal law to repair segregation in housing.
In 1969 — one year after the Federal Fair Housing Act passed Congress — the California State Legislature adopted the Housing Element Law, which aims to ensure that every jurisdic- tion contributes to the state’s supply of housing for people at all income levels. Every eight years, all California cities are assigned a quota of new homes that they are expected to plan for and, eventually, build. The local quotas as-signed to cities, through a mechanism referred to as the Regional Housing Needs Allocation, are commonly called “RHNA numbers.”
For nearly 50 years, the Housing Element framework had little effect on housing supply and affordability: California failed to build enough housing for people at any income level, but especially people with lower incomes. Moreover, new development often maintained or strengthened old patterns of housing segregation along the lines of race and income. The housing quotas assigned to cities were subject to political negotiation and, therefore, were often divorced from local and regional housing shortages. The planning obligations that followed from the quotas were nonbinding and rarely resulted in a legitimate rezoning, and exclusionary jurisdictions still found ways to “trade” their housing responsibilities with poorer, more remote jurisdictions in their region to maintain social, economic, and racial exclusivity.
Despite its worthy goals, the Housing Element did not reverse mid-century patterns of segregation, and housing prices skyrocketed.
In 2017, the California State Legislature and then-Governor Jerry Brown committed to overhauling the law. Leaders were energized by the Obama Administration’s 2015 rulemaking updates to the 1968 Fair Housing Act, the threat of newly elected President Trump repealing that historic progress, and the success of the nascent, pro-housing YIMBY (yes in my backyard) movement. The result was dozens of successful Housing Element reforms, including many sponsored or supported by SPUR. They include:
Senate Bill (SB) 35 (Wiener, 2017) and SB 423 (Wiener, 2023), which require cities and counties that have not met their housing quota, as measured by construction permits issued, to streamline housing approvals with ministerial review and strict timelines for local planning approval. Ministerial review means these approvals cannot be denied by local elected bodies, are bound to objective and knowable planning standards, and are not subject to environmental review.
SB 828 (Wiener, 2018) rewrites the methodology that the state and regional governments must use to estimate future housing need, requiring them to consider preexisting shortage conditions, rates of overcrowding, housing cost burden for local residents, and vacancy rates. It prohibits a regional government from using prior underproduction of housing or no-growth population indicators as a justification for reducing a city’s RHNA share.
AB 686 (Santiago, 2018) requires that local governments adopt policies, including zoning plans, that distribute multifamily and lowercost rental housing in a pattern consistent with Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing — specifically, concentrating these housing types in well-resourced and historically exclusionary neighborhoods while encouraging anti-displacement policies to help historically excluded communities.
AB 72 (Santiago, 2017) grants California’s attorney general legal authority to directly sue local jurisdictions if they violate state housing law.
AB 1771 (Bloom, 2018) requires that RHNA allocations within a region be more equitable and distribute housing obligations in a pattern consistent with Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing and with increasing access to opportunity, particularly for low-income Californians.
Meeting San Francisco’s Housing Allocation
San Francisco, like all Bay Area jurisdictions, has a Housing Element cycle that spans from 2023 to 2031. In March 2022, San Francisco received a housing allocation of 82,069 units, representing 18.6% of the Bay Area’s total housing obligation (441,176 units).
The final income breakdown for San Francisco’s obligation is 20,867 homes for very-low-income households, 12,014 homes for low-income households, 13,717 homes for moderate-income households, and 35,471 homes for above-moderate-income households.
Progress so far
Thus far, the city has adopted its Housing Element and passed related legislation. The San Francisco Housing Element is rooted in the state’s mandate to affirmatively further fair housing as a means to build new supply. It does so by removing constraints and costs to new construction, significantly up-zoning San Francisco’s wealthy and exclusionary neighborhoods, outlining strategies to secure financing for affordable housing construction and acquisition, and enacting community stabilization policies designed for historically lower-income and high-renter populations who disproportionately experience housing insecurity. At the end of 2023, the Board of Supervisors passed the first suite of significant Housing Element policies in an ordinance removing building constraints. It eliminates neighborhood notification and conditional use requirements for multifamily buildings, loosens outdated planning restrictions on ground floor uses, and allows homeless shelters, senior housing, and group housing in any residential zoning district. Next Step: Rezone neighborhoods rich in resources San Francisco already has zoning capacity to build more than 45,000 housing units, so the focus now is on how and where to add some 36,000 units to get to the city’s obligation of 82,069 new homes. The city’s next major milestone will be rezoning its high-resource western and northern neighborhoods for dense, mid-rise multifamily buildings to accommodate 36,282 new apartments that can feasibly be built by 2031. The state deadline to pass this rezoning plan is January 2026. If, by 2027, the city cannot prove that a significant number of permits are being processed under this new zoning plan, it will be required to adopt a more expansive rezoning in these same neighborhoods. The early draft of the city’s proposed rezoning plan, Expanding Housing Choice, was made accessible to the public in late 2023 through an interactive mapping tool created by the Planning Department.
Next Step: Rezone neighborhoods rich in resources
San Francisco already has zoning capacity to build more than 45,000 housing units, so the focus now is on how and where to add some 36,000 units to get to the city’s obligation of 82,069 new homes. The city’s next major milestone will be rezoning its high-resource western and northern neighborhoods for dense, mid-rise multifamily buildings to accommodate 36,282 new apartments that can feasibly be built by 2031. The state deadline to pass this rezoning plan is January 2026. If, by 2027, the city cannot prove that a significant number of permits are being processed under this new zoning plan, it will be required to adopt a more expansive rezoning in these same neighborhoods. The early draft of the city’s proposed rezoning plan, Expanding Housing Choice, was made accessible to the public in late 2023 through an interactive mapping tool created by the Planning Department.
SPUR’s Role: Spearheading Housing Element Policy and Advocacy
SPUR’s housing element policy and advocacy work is currently focused on ensuring that San Francisco’s rezoning plan accurately reflects the city’s housing development obligation, that this obligation is mostly met in resource-rich neighborhoods, and that new state-mandated building-height bonuses designed to promote affordable housing units can be used as intended once those neighborhoods are rezoned.
PRIORITY 1
Pass a courageous (and compliant) zoning map.
SPUR’s top near-term priority is ensuring that San Francisco uses a state-compliant, quantitative methodology to prove that its rezoning plan meets or exceeds the requirement for 36,282 new homes and does not undermine any state housing law that SPUR has sponsored or supported. According to an independent quantitative model, the early 2024 version of Expanding Housing Choice accommodates space for fewer than 8,000 new apartments, which is less than 25% of the additional zoned capacity that the state requires by January 2026. SPUR has been leading policy advocacy in this space with a coalition of housing and smart-growth partners, including the Housing Action Coalition, SF YIMBY, the Northern California Carpenters, United Way Bay Area, Greenbelt Alliance, Sierra Club, AIA San Francisco, and Bay Area Council. The work involves technical policy research, public engagement, and grassroots organizing with coalition partners as well as collaborating with the Planning Department, Mayor Breed, the Board of Supervisors, and HCD.
PRIORITY 2
Maximize lower-cost housing development in San Francisco’s resource-rich neighborhoods.
San Francisco has many historically wealthy, exclusionary, and low-density communities, mostly concentrated in its western and northern neighborhoods. To meet its fair housing obligations and commitments, San Francisco must locate most of the new apartments called for in its rezoning plan in these areas. Adopting zoning that encourages new, lower-cost multifamily housing, and especially encouraging pricerestricted affordable housing, allows people of all incomes and ages to rent and buy in communities where many San Franciscans have long been priced out and excluded. SPUR’s work to see that housing development is maximized in San Francisco’s resource-rich neighborhoods includes close collaboration with HCD’s fair housing and legal divisions, community engagement in San Francisco, and ongoing local legislative advocacy and communications.
PRIORITY 3
Work with state housing laws, not against them.
In 2023, SPUR sponsored Assembly Bill (AB) 1287, which grants additional height bonuses to projects that include more onsite affordable housing. In 2024, our focus is on ensuring that developers can use these bonuses as the state intended and that development proposals in San Francisco’s western and northern neighborhoods can benefit from the state law. Ultimately, any zoning policy adopted to meet the state housing mandate may not undermine other state affordable and fair housing laws, including AB 1287.
San Francisco is blessed with opportunities to increase the number of places to live near high-quality jobs and world-class transit without fueling residential displacement. We can ensure existing residents maintain a steady place in their communities while welcoming the next generation of young people and immigrants wanting to call San Francisco home. Doing so brings other benefits: attracting new customers to small businesses, increasing public transit ridership, growing the workforce, and strengthening social and civic institutions. These benefits could propel San Francisco into an era of true equity, sustainability, and prosperity. ✹