SF’s Mayor Breed Has Spent 4 Years On the Job. What’s Her Housing Record?
Breed’s early goals are only part of the story. Her legacy hinges on the battle, with help from state allies, to change how SF builds homes.
From day one of her administration in 2018, San Francisco’s London Breed fashioned herself as the housing mayor. “Yes, we need more affordable housing,” she said during her first inauguration. “Yes, we need more middle-income housing. And yes, we need market-rate housing.”
At that time, a single-family home in SF sold for an average of $1.6 million. Today, after a crushing pandemic and a nearly 7 percent population decline, such homes are selling for $1.9 million, and condominium prices are up nearly 7 percent over the same period. Rents are back to pre-pandemic levels. The city is still unaffordable.
But a push in the state capitol to rewrite California’s housing rules has brought a reckoning for San Francisco to get serious about the crisis. Is Breed the one, as Gov. Gavin Newsom loves to say, to meet the moment?
Assuming she runs for reelection next year (or in 2024, if voters approve an even-year realignment of SF elections), it’s high time to examine her record on housing, the city’s most critical issue.
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It’s not as simple as matching numbers to campaign proclamations. Building homes in San Francisco is as complicated as civic issues can get. The mayor has power — but the Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors have far more direct control to hinder or enable housing. Still, when SF does build more, the mayor’s office is quick to take credit, so it’s only fair to assess the effects of Breed’s influence overall.
Let’s start with the commitments she made earlier in her tenure, which began in full in June 2018. (She was also briefly interim mayor after Ed Lee died suddenly in late 2017.) Breed promised to press ahead with two pledges Lee made in 2014:
- Build 5,000 housing units every year, including both market-rate and below market-rate (“affordable”) housing.
- Add 10,000 units of affordable housing by 2020.
- As the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered group shelters and rattled the city’s homelessness plans, she added a new goal in mid-2020: Deliver within two years 1,500 new units of permanent supportive housing for previously homeless residents, with on-site services such as mental health care or job training.
If these commitments were the sole yardsticks, her track record would be hit and miss. SF has slightly underperformed on the first goal of 5,000 units a year, with 4,858 units completed in 2019, 4,402 units in 2020, and 4,649 units in 2021. (Those numbers look a little worse when demolitions are counted, dropping the net gain of homes by about 4 percent.)
The city fulfilled the second goal but needed an extra year to hit it. According to the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, SF built 10,573 affordable housing units from 2014 through the end of 2020, a year beyond Lee’s original goal.
Breed’s homelessness department has surpassed her permanent supportive housing goals.
Nevertheless, the numbers don’t get us far enough. Many, if not all, of those homes were already in the pipeline when Breed took office. On the flip side, more than half her tenure has spanned the pandemic. Macroeconomic factors beyond mayoral control, always at play in the housing sector, have been even more extreme.
What’s clear is that she continued to pursue Mayor Lee’s goals, and those goals have proven too modest to make a dent in the city’s affordability crisis.
One of Breed’s under-the-radar moves earns applause from a city politician who doesn’t always agree with the mayor on housing. Breed added affordable housing to the city’s capital borrowing plan, putting it on the same level as sewers, water, parks, and other regular needs, according to Sup. Myrna Melgar. “We’re now treating affordable housing as infrastructure. [She was] the first, and I give her great credit. Any mayor could have done it if they thought it was important,” Melgar says. “I think she’s moved the needle.”
The needle still has a long way to go. The city’s affordable housing funding gap, for example, is more like a chasm.
That’s why an analysis of Breed’s record must also address her broader efforts to shake up the ways housing happens (or doesn’t) in San Francisco. That may end up being the largest part of her housing legacy.
To that end, there are two upcoming dates to mark. The first is November 8, 2022, when housing will loom large on SF voters’ ballots. The second is a day of reckoning: January 31, 2023. That’s San Francisco’s deadline to show California regulators a viable plan to build 82,069 new homes, with at least 57 percent affordable, this decade.
Parking lot politics
To meet the state’s goal of some 82,000 new homes, SF needs projects with hundreds, if not thousands of units to move quickly to fruition. But our politics and bureaucracy aren’t built for speed.
Instead, the city’s process and reviews and appeals often delay or kill ambitious projects, and those that win approval often end up diminished along the way. If Breed wants to change that, she’ll need majority support from the Board of Supervisors. So far, their relationship has been strained, and often antagonistic.
Take the proposed project at 469 Stevenson Street, a 27-story, 495-unit tower that received Planning Department approval last year and met all standards in the planning code, but was appealed to the full Board of Supervisors, which rejected it for reasons that were questionable at best.
Opponents “picked the project to death,” says Laura Foote, executive director of YIMBY Action. Foote adds that the structure of city government “makes everything debatable” and allows supervisors to override the assessment of seasoned planners. (YIMBY Action’s legal arm is suing the city, saying the board’s rejection of the 469 Stevenson project violates a 40-year-old state housing law.)
In an interview with The Frisc, Sup. Rafael Mandelman, who voted to reject the Stevenson proposal, acknowledges that more housing might bring down its inflated costs. But he’s worried about people who may get pushed out before more supply drives down rents. Mandelman also says he would approve the project if a new environmental review addresses his concerns.
The Stevenson rejection is one example of how the current system, which evaluates projects on a case-by-base basis, forces even a strong mayor to spend political capital on every project. Breed chided the supervisors for the rejection, which was as effective as asking the summer fog to roll back. So she keeps fighting with them, or some of them, and has done what every SF politician does when City Hall breaks down: Make a date with the ballot box.
‘Delay, drama, politics’
The fight to speed up housing approvals has been years in the making. Breed has tried three times to ask voters to approve a major change to the city charter, and each time, as if in some biblical parable, the supervisors or the pandemic has smitten her down.
When state regulators warned San Francisco recently that its first stab at the 82,000-home blueprint, known as the Housing Element, needed a lot of work, part of their warning centered on the snail’s-pace approval process.
So Breed is taking her latest proposal, called Affordable Homes Now and coauthored by Sup. Ahsha Safaí, to the voters. (It is Proposition D on November’s ballot.) It would “remove the ability to obstruct projects like 469 Stevenson,” Safaí tells The Frisc. Prop D would exempt eligible housing from discretionary reviews (which is what torpedoed 469 Stevenson before the Board of Supervisors). To be eligible, projects must offer more than 25 units and a higher percentage of affordable than normally required.
Since Breed and allies are taking their case to voters, opponents are doing the same with an alternate version, the Affordable Housing Production Act (Proposition E), by supervisors Connie Chan and Aaron Peskin, among other progressives. Prop E would require a higher affordability bar while keeping more discretion over projects. Chan and Peskin say this proposal is “truly affordable,” but housing advocates say it’s not feasible for spurring production.
Asking SF voters to choose among competing ballot measures on affordable housing is ‘an extreme way of doing legislation.’ —Sup. Myrna Melgar
Asking voters to sort out housing laws is “expensive and dangerous,” says District 7’s Melgar, who chairs the committee that must approve all housing legislation before it reaches a full board vote.
“One of my colleagues has a piece of fairly complicated legislation to counter the mayor’s legislation, and the mayor put hers on the ballot because she felt we couldn’t get our act together,” observes Melgar. “It’s an extreme way of doing legislation.”
Breed says Prop D could push SF beyond her old promise of 5,000 new homes a year. “This will more than likely help us to exceed that goal,” she said in a brief interview with The Frisc. “We have 72,000 units in the pipeline that could be built, but you know, process, delay, drama, politics get in the way.”
We could add economic vicissitudes to that list. With all the things that could “get in the way,” citing a pipeline number is more political than practical. Without more context, notes YIMBY Action’s Foote, it’s “not meaningful. How long in the pipeline? What stage in the pipeline?”
(For the record, SF Planning’s pipeline showed 69,300 units as of December 2021, but applications to build new homes in 2022 have hit a new low.)
Because of administrative and bureaucratic barriers, along with regular construction hurdles, the average development takes more than three and a half years to complete. Larger projects can take decades.
While the Breed and Chan streamlining plans face off on November’s ballot, Breed can count on a few policy victories. Early in her tenure, she ordered city departments to clear the backlog of accessory dwelling unit (ADU) applications. Also called in-laws or granny flats, ADUs let owners add stand-alone units to their homes, often in a backyard or behind a garage. ADUs became legal to build in SF in 2014, when Breed was representing District 5 on the Board of Supervisors.
By clearing the permit backlog, Breed helped approve “more in-law units than in the previous three years combined,” her office said. Yet they remain a tiny fraction of the city’s housing needs. In 2021, only 248 new ADUs opened up.
Get in the zone
Even if Breed’s streamlining wins at the ballot this fall, SF’s current zoning regulations would still hamper the kind of growth envisioned by the mayor and her allies. Reform remains elusive, with — no surprise — the mayor and her allies in the state legislature at odds with city supervisors.
Until recently, well more than half of San Francisco was zoned to allow one or two homes per lot, giving swaths of the city a low-rise, quasi-suburban feel.
Thanks to a 2021 state law, SB 9, this single-family zoning is now verboten (but with exemptions, like the one this neighborhood was able to win). Theoretically, low-rise SF can now have up to four units per lot. In a recent legislative battle, SF supervisors mustered enough votes (seven) to pass their own “fourplex” bill that would have allowed, at best, a subset of what SB 9 allows.
Breed struck it down with a veto, and the supervisors did not have the votes to override. SB 9 remains the law of the land unless a veto-proof majority of supervisors (eight) comes up with a new local version. Five supervisors are up for reelection this November; two of them sided with Breed in the fourplex fight.
The board’s balance of housing power also matters for the mayor’s own legislation. She has proposed her own rezoning ordinance, Cars to Casas. The bill would make it easier to turn gas stations, parking lots, and other car-oriented places into apartments, but it has run into a brick wall in the Land Use Committee, the one that Melgar chairs.
“We have had this discussion so many times,” committee member Sup. Dean Preston said in one February meeting. More discussions have transpired since then, with no progress. Breed wrote last week that she hopes Cars to Casas gets a vote this fall.
This is why we fight
In opposing Cars to Casas, Preston said the bill should follow programs like Home-SF, which allows developers to add more density if they add more affordable units. In general, developers currently must dedicate 20 percent to 33 percent of units as affordable, depending on the project size. It’s basically what Chan and Peskin are looking to do with their own streamlining measure, Prop E, that aims to kill the mayor-backed Prop D in November.
Chan, Peskin, and Preston are right in this respect: The city exceeded the state’s market-rate housing goals from 2015 to 2022, while underproducing affordable housing. (After decades of underbuilding, however, even this level of market-rate housing hasn’t translated into greater affordability.) The city needs more housing, at all levels, and in theory the progressives’ demands could mitigate part of the problem.
The elephant in the room is money. Affordable housing costs just as much to build as market-rate; without incentives, most developers would prefer to build what makes their projects “pencil” — that is, pay off. SF’s current system collects fees from market-rate construction to subsidize affordable construction. The more market-rate gets built, the more money is available for affordable. But affordable projects still require a patchwork of local, state, and federal funding that’s increasingly difficult to get.
That brings us back to the mayor and the supervisors, and to the heart of the city’s housing fight. Breed believes more housing of all kinds is the answer: more supply to ease demand and to keep homes that middle- and low-income folks could otherwise afford from filtering up to affluent buyers.
Preston and other supervisors are suspicious of and even hostile to market-rate housing, saying supply and demand don’t apply. Preston in particular wants to wean the city from market-rate as a way to pay for affordable; he successfully pushed for 2020’s Prop I, a property sales tax to pay for affordable housing.
It’s a drop in the bucket, and even so, it became another point of contention between progressives and the mayor.
When housing means survival
The mayor and her rivals have divergent housing philosophies, but they can agree on this: Housing is the first thing people need to get off the street.
Breed and the supervisors all endorse “Housing First” for people experiencing homeless (7,754 in SF, by the latest count, which is likely conservative), who need stability above all else, even before mental health treatment, job training, or other services. The strategy has had encouraging results for cities like Houston. But to succeed here, the city needs more homes.
In July 2020, Breed announced goals that included 1,500 new permanent supportive housing (PSH) units with services such as counseling and health care on site. Since then, according to the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, the city as of September 8 has opened the doors of 1,900 new units, often in former hotels, with another 1,000 or so under contract but not ready for occupancy.
Those new units include a built-from-scratch project, 833 Bryant, which was more cost-effective and moved three times faster than similar projects. Beyond serving formerly homeless people, many new developments also offer housing for some of the poorest families in the city.
When this year’s homeless count arrived with a surprising drop, the mayor made sure to take credit for it, pointing to the new housing her administration has created.
That progress comes with problems. As The Frisc reported earlier this year, the city has awarded no-bid contracts to firms running sites and shelters, as well as larger single-room-occupancy hotels, but with inadequate checks and balances. Troubling incidents and terrible conditions for some residents have prompted SF supervisors to revive oversight efforts.
The mayor has opposed efforts to provide stronger oversight of her homelessness department, but this fall, voters will finally consider a measure to create an oversight commission (Prop C). The mayor has not officially weighed in. If she opposes or fails to support this one, it could put an asterisk on her record.
Democracy in action
For many years, the state’s Housing Element process was a formality with little oversight and modest targets, leading to today’s affordability crisis. On August 9, however, the state put San Francisco on blast. The city’s draft blueprint to build 82,069 homes by 2031 fell well short of what regulators were looking for.
The state has raised the stakes thanks to a 2018 law by state Senator Scott Wiener, formerly SF’s District 8 supervisor, that put teeth into the process. (The state attorney general has sharpened those teeth with a “housing strike force” to enforce housing laws.)
San Francisco has until January 31 to craft a housing element that satisfies the state’s watchdogs. If the blueprint falls short, the city risks losing essential state and federal funding. That’s a real consequence, but it may be too amorphous for some SF politicians and residents to respond to right now.
Unless, that is, the November elections say otherwise.
With competing measures on affordable housing and several supervisor races on the docket, voters could tilt policies and attitudes in Breed’s direction. If that happens, there will be momentum undergirded by local advocates and state lawmakers for far more than the numbers the mayor pledged early in her tenure.
It may be premature to call it a mandate to change an unequal and unaffordable San Francisco, but this could put to rest the rigid notion that more housing is detrimental to our values and civic well-being. That certainly would be a moment that London Breed, or future mayors, could meet.
Adam Echelman wrote about housing and development for The Frisc and now covers equity and underserved communities for the Modesto Bee.
The Frisc editor in chief Alex Lash contributed to this report.
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