COALITION OF AFFORDABLE HOUSING ORGANIZATIONS DECRIES  CA DHCD’s REVIEW OF SF DRAFT HOUSING ELEMENT

Press Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: September 15, 2022

CONTACT: Charlie Sciammas, Council of Community Housing Organizations  charlie@sfic-409.org, 415-615-2632


COALITION OF AFFORDABLE HOUSING ORGANIZATIONS DECRIES 

CA DHCD’s REVIEW OF SF DRAFT HOUSING ELEMENT


Community Housing Organizations Call Upon The CA DHCD To Provide 

Relevant Guidance For SF’s Affordable Housing Production Goals


On August 8th, the Department of Housing and Community (DHCD) wrote San Francisco  Planning Director Rich Hillis highlighting the changes that the DHCD deems necessary to bring San Francisco’s Housing Element into compliance with various state mandates.  This letter affirmed DHCD’s mandate to boost San Francisco’s overall housing production to 82,069 units, 57% of which or 46,598 units would have to below-market-rate including 20,867 units for very low income residents, 12,014 units for low-income residents, and 13,717 units for moderate-income residents.  


DHCD’s letter is long on housing targets and short on the solutions to achieve them. The DHCD is requiring the Planning Department to identify sites of available land for residential housing of various typologies; provide strategies, metrics, and timelines for implementation of the housing element; and share an analysis and list of “governmental constraints” that would hinder the city from meeting its regional housing need.  Lacking in DHCD’s compliance letter is any mention of resources to enable San Francisco to achieve the aforementioned below-market rate regional housing goals. “Government policies and resources should be our best backstop to combat the housing affordability crisis,” said Charlie Sciammas, Policy Director of the Council of Community Housing Organizations. “But it's like the Department of Housing and Community Development demanding the city to construct all the housing necessary to bring San Francisco into compliance without sharing any of the resources to fulfill our affordable housing targets.”


On Tuesday, CCHO issued a response to the DHCD calling on the State to share the resources that would ensure that San Francisco can achieve its goals.  In summary, CCHO shared the following conclusions:


  • The State’s actions do not align with the state’s goals.  The state’s guidance puts SF on a collision course with upzoning San Francisco to create housing that is approximately 20% affordable and 80% market rate, meanwhile actual housing production goals set by the state & region conclude that 57% of new housing should be affordable to very low, low, and moderate income households.  Our State should be providing the guidance, resources, and accountability to enable cities to meet their affordable housing goals first.  


  • Deregulation of our housing market is an inequitable strategy for creating affordability.  San Francisco’s affordable housing standards have raised the bar, and we need to do more, not less, to uphold our affordable housing standards.  The State is over-emphasizing the removal of government constraints without recognizing San Francisco’s policies and resources that serve as an essential line of defense to safeguard affordability and prevent displacement.  Without critical policies and processes to regulate the housing market for affordability, San Francisco would not have been able to slow the tide of displacement and would have fallen even further short of our affordable housing goals.  A narrow focus on entitlement procedures is inadequate because simply lifting all government processes without providing resources to achieve below market rate housing targets lacks any empirical measure to achieve success. 



  • A narrow focus on “supply side” strategies does not consider underlying shifts in our housing market.  San Francisco is in a transformed housing market where for-profit developers are no longer in the business of building to create long term homes for working families or adequately housing our local workforce. Instead, investors are motivated by increasing land values and year-on-year returns on investment.  Our public policies should not center the role of for-profit developers and investors in solving our affordability crisis, we need public investments, public policies, and public and community-controlled housing to fill the gap.  The State should be paying more attention towards helping cities achieve the 3 Ps, protecting tenants, preserving at-risk existing housing, and producing affordable housing for generations to come.


  • Equity measures must be embedded in housing policies to protect working San Franciscans and low-income communities of color from widespread displacement and gentrification. To ensure more equitable results, market rate development can be focused in highest resource areas while leaving out cultural districts, sensitive communities, and other low income BIPOC census tracts, such as those defined in the Displacement Risk Map of the UC Berkeley Urban Displacement Project.  Similarly, future investments in affordable development and preservation strategies must not leave behind frontline working class communities that have historically faced displacement pressures.  The current draft of San Francisco’s Housing Element mentions the word “equity” more than 121 times, yet when one adds up all the policies that encourage demolition, streamlining, and cut costs for developers without prescribing equity measures or price controls, the cumulative effect is accelerating housing development that increases displacement pressures on BIPOC communities. We encourage the DHCD to make every effort to identify the policies and resources that will enable San Francisco to build housing to sustain working class, BIPOC communities to have sustainable futures in San Francisco instead of creating a system that would further imbalance housing development against such a future. 


To achieve its RHNA development targets, San Francisco will need to build at least 6,000 new affordable units each year, dedicating about 45-60 new sites to affordable housing, and spending an average of $2 billion annually on housing production and preservation.  In order for San Francisco to emerge from our affordability crisis, decision makers need to move beyond tinkering with entitlement procedures and calls to boost housing production goals and move towards funding, financing, and policy solutions that will enable San Francisco to meet these goals that the state has set for us. “What we actually need from the State is an understanding that San Francisco needs a solid affordable standard backed by resources from all levels of government”, said John Avalos, Executive Director of CCHO. “We need the State and local government to understand that merely streamlining market rate development will never deliver us out of our affordability crisis.” 


The Council of Community Housing Organizations has played a leading role in innovating affordable housing strategies and advancing groundbreaking policies to expand affordability, prevent displacement, and stabilize local communities.  Together, our 21 member organizations have been responsible for over 30,000 new or preserved affordable homes, winning nearly $6.5 billion in dedicated funds for affordable housing, creating thousands of jobs, and helping to foster healthy and equitable communities. 

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Council of Community Housing Organizations