CCHO's Endorsements
November 3, 2026 election
Yes on B. Yes on C. Yes on I. Yes on J. Yes on Prop 1. No on Prop 43.
10,670 homes. Approved. Not built.
San Francisco has approved 10,670 affordable homes across 212 projects that are not being built.
They aren't stuck at the Planning Commission. No variance, no shadow study, no neighbor with a lawyer. They cleared all of that. They're designed, sited, entitled, and sponsored.
They are waiting on money.
That's the fact underneath every endorsement on this page.
San Francisco must plan for 46,598 homes affordable to low- and moderate-income households by 2031. That is not a zoning number. It's a subsidy number. No streamlining bill and no density bonus produces a home a home health aide, a hotel housekeeper, or a senior on a fixed income can afford. The market has never built those homes. That's not a criticism of developers — it's arithmetic.
Affordability takes three things: making it possible to build, paying for what the market won't build, and financing it at a cost that pencils. This city has spent years arguing about the first. This ballot is about the other two.
These measures aren't competing answers. They're partial answers to a question bigger than any one of them:
Yes on Prop B
Builds the public financing tool to lend to affordable housing at lower cost
Yes on Prop C
Locks a permanent funding floor into the City Charter
Yes on Prop I
Dedicates revenue voters already approved to what they were promised
Yes on Prop J
Closes a loophole that lets the biggest buildings transfer tax-free
Yes on Prop 1
Brings $11.25 billion in state dollars to shovel-ready local projects
No on Prop 43
Would take away the voters' power to do any of this again
Anyone telling San Franciscans they have to choose is asking them to accept less than the city needs and calling it prudence.
YES on Proposition B
Municipal Financial Corporation — The Public Bank
Creates the governance structure for a San Francisco public bank: a publicly owned institution that can lend to affordable housing, small business, and green infrastructure at rates Wall Street won't offer.
Affordable housing dies on financing costs, not just subsidy. Every project carries construction and permanent debt. Lower-cost capital means more homes per public dollar — the same subsidy stretched further.
The city banks with Wall Street today. Billions in public deposits sit with institutions that lend our money back to us at market rates, or don't lend here at all.
Public oversight, professional management. The bank would be run by bankers, with appointment power held by the City Attorney, Controller, Treasurer, Mayor, and Board of Supervisors.
No lending to fossil fuel companies or weapons manufacturers. Written into the structure.
Yes, capital comes later — that's how you build a bank. Prop B is the authorization step. You cannot fund an institution that doesn't legally exist. Opponents calling this "no money" are describing the correct order of operations.
The window is closing. California's authorization for municipal public banks sunsets in 2028. Build the framework now or lose the option.
San Francisco would be the first U.S. city with a public bank. The idea polls at roughly two-thirds support here. It's time.
YES on Proposition C
Housing Trust Fund Charter Amendment
Raises San Francisco's annual affordable housing commitment from roughly $52 million to more than $125 million — and locks it in the Charter through 2058.
Up to $3 billion over three decades. The largest housing commitment this city has made in a generation.
In the Charter, not the budget. It survives budget cycles, downturns, and whoever is in office.
A promise that depends on goodwill isn't a commitment — it's a courtesy. Prop C turns a courtesy into an obligation.
CCHO helped build it. We worked with Supervisor Melgar from the start, and we're proud of it.
It's a floor. It was designed as a floor. That's exactly why the rest of this ballot matters.
YES on Proposition I
AFFORDABLE Housing Guarantee Act
Dedicates roughly $120 million a year — from property sales of $10 million and up — to building, acquiring, and preserving affordable housing and keeping people in their homes.
Not a new tax on anyone. Not on your house. Not on your building. This tax already exists. Prop I decides where the money goes.
Voters already made this call. In 2020 San Franciscans passed this tax on skyscrapers and mega-mansions, over heavy real estate opposition, for affordable housing and rent relief. The dedication was never made binding — so the money went to the general fund.
It works when it's used as promised. It funded a rent relief program that kept thousands of San Franciscans housed through the pandemic, and housing packages worth more than $100 million at a stretch. But it took a fight every single budget cycle.
It cuts the transfer tax on new apartment buildings. Prop I reduces the tax on the first sale of new multifamily housing — the only measure on this ballot that funds affordable homes and lowers the cost of building them.
Audited every year. Administered by the Mayor's Office of Housing through the same competitive process as every other affordable housing dollar, with a mandatory annual Controller audit. Not one dollar goes to any organization by name.
No trade-off with city services. Prop J, on this same ballot, raises about the same amount by closing the foreclosure loophole. Voters can have both.
Prop I does one thing: it keeps the promise.
YES on Proposition J
Closing the Foreclosure Transfer Tax Loophole
Closes the exemption that lets large apartment and commercial buildings change hands through foreclosure without paying the transfer tax at all.
Everyone else pays it. Some of the largest buildings in San Francisco don't. That should end.
Roughly $120 million a year to the general fund — police, firefighters, libraries, public health.
Authored by Supervisor Mahmood and supported by the Mayor. Broad agreement that this loophole shouldn't exist.
We'd support it either way. Our position on Prop J doesn't depend on what happens to Prop I. But together they answer the objection: J protects city services, I protects the housing commitment.
YES on State Proposition 1
Veterans and Affordable Housing Bond Act of 2026
An $11.25 billion state bond for affordable housing construction, preservation, homeownership, and veterans' housing.
It refills programs that ran dry. State affordable housing funds are oversubscribed and exhausted. Prop 1 replenishes them.
Local dollars go further when they're leveraged. Nearly every affordable project here is a stack of local, state, and federal sources. A gap in one layer stalls the whole building.
This is the layer our pipeline is missing. 212 approved projects with sites and entitlements need capital San Francisco cannot raise alone.
Not a new tax. A bond, placed on the ballot by the Legislature.
NO on State Proposition 43
The measure that takes away your vote
Prop 43 would require a two-thirds supermajority for local special taxes proposed by voters through the initiative process, starting January 1, 2027.
This is the most dangerous measure on the ballot for affordable housing, and almost nobody is talking about it.
It ends majority rule on local funding. A measure supported by 65% of San Franciscans would fail. One-third of voters could block what two-thirds want.
It targets the citizen initiative specifically. Not the tool downtown uses. The tool tenants, seniors, and neighborhood coalitions use when City Hall won't act.
Prop I is exactly what it would block. A grassroots coalition gathered 21,000 signatures to put affordable housing funding before the voters. Under Prop 43, that path is effectively closed.
It's a Howard Jarvis measure. It reached the ballot through a deal in which the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association pulled an even broader anti-tax initiative. The same movement that has spent fifty years starving local government of the ability to house, teach, and care for people.
Housing, transit, parks, libraries, emergency response. Every locally funded public good depends on the threshold Prop 43 would raise.
Vote YES on funding housing. Then vote no on the measure that would make funding housing nearly impossible to do again.
Show us the other plan
Every argument against dedicated housing funding lands in the same place: not this revenue, not this mechanism, not this year. The reasons are always procedural. They're always delivered by people who sincerely agree this is the defining crisis of our time.
So show us the plan. Not a projection. Not a feasibility study. A funding path with numbers in it that produces 46,598 affordable homes by 2031 — an obligation this city accepted in writing.
We'll back it. We've been asking for one for years.
Until then, those 10,670 homes stay where they are: approved, sited, drawn, unbuilt. They aren't units on a spreadsheet. They're apartments with addresses, in neighborhoods, that people are on waiting lists for right now. Some have been waiting since before the last Housing Element.
We fund firefighters and libraries because we decided together they aren't optional.
Housing working people isn't optional either.