Emergency funding for Small Sites Program approved amid pushback from Breed
November 30, 2021
By Laura Waxmann, San Francisco Business Times
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted 8-3 on Tuesday to allocate $64 million to an acquisition and rehabilitation loan program for small multifamily rental buildings that affordable housing providers say has been unable to respond to loan requests due to a funding shortage.
The funding, announced earlier this month by Supervisor Dean Preston, comes from revenue generated by Proposition I — a measure approved last November that increased the transfer tax for high-end real estate transactions and is projected to raise $128 million this fiscal year.
While a majority of the board supported the allocation in the spirit of preventing the immediate displacement of vulnerable San Francisco renters, not all city leaders — including Mayor London Breed — were on board with the cash infusion, arguing that it would not solve the program's existing problems.
An hour before the board vote, Breed announced reforms to the Small Sites Program over the coming months, including modernizing rules to ensure that it can be applied in neighborhoods that have largely been left out due to income limits.
Once the reforms are implemented, the city will make "program-specific investments" in the upcoming budget process, which begins in two weeks, the Mayor's Office said Tuesday.
Despite the program's issues, affordable housing advocates deemed Tuesday's vote a victory.
"This action by our city legislators was not simply about an installment of $64 million to invest in affordable housing, but about listening to the voters who passed the Prop. I ballot measure overwhelmingly in November 2020 with the intention of funding a wide range of social housing programs — from preservation of small apartment buildings facing Ellis Act evictions to large residential hotels deteriorating in the hands of private owners, from land trusts to homeownership cooperatives,” said the Council of Community Housing Organizations — a coalition of affordable housing providers— in a statement on Tuesday.
