Debate reignites over San Francisco’s first public bank

June 21, 2021

It’s “potentially game-changing” in the realm of affordable housing, said Fernando Marti, co-director of the Council of Community Housing Organizations, a nonprofit affordable housing collective. San Francisco has been stuck in a system of building affordable housing tax credits and private capital with a diminished role from the federal government in public housing, he said.

“Ideally, this is something that allows us to create new models of affordable housing,” Marti said. “The public bank is a part of that discussion of something we can innovate that can get us beyond what we’ve been doing for the last 30 years. It’s going to be huge — creating a bank is not a little thing.”