May 27, 2021

By Fernando Marti and Peter Cohen

Last year was tough for everyone: from the pandemic to the murder of George Floyd, to the virulence of the national election, to budget shortfalls locally, we have had to adapt and to struggle for a better future. Amidst all the damage the pandemic has caused, the production and preservation of affordable housing also lagged over the past year. Budget shortfalls put construction projects on hold; and, despite dozens of willing sellers of large apartment buildings, acquisition funding has not been prioritized.

Thankfully, the budget outlook has improved drastically, and, thanks to forward-thinking policies by the Board of Supervisors and the Mayor, millions can be set aside for housing in the coming months following those prerogatives. The City Controller now projects a $153 million budget surplus. Funding for one of today’s most pressing issues, affordable housing, is back, with upwards of $68 million from that projected surplus — money that can be allocated and programmed quickly to build and to acquire hundreds of units of affordable housing.

May 1, 2021

“I think, for a lot of us, it will always be a workers’ day that’s different from Labor Day — which is really a holiday created by the government to honor workers but different from us demanding our own day for workers,” said marcher Fernando Marti.

March 5, 2021

By Fernando Martí and Peter Cohen

Healthcare infrastructure has long been a foundation for San Francisco’s economy. So it’s good to see UCSF’s modernization at the Parnassus campus. UCSF has rightly proposed constructing new homes along with its expansion to mitigate the increased housing needs for its workforce. As we’ve been saying for years, a functioning city needs to house its workers!

UCSF will increase the size of its Parnassus campus by 50%. With 4,000 expected new permanent jobs, between faculty, researchers and support staff, the expansion will have an impact on the city’s housing capacity and on the surrounding neighborhood. If the project doesn’t include enough homes, new higher-wage workers will compete with local residents for scarce housing and exacerbate displacement. And new lower-wage workers will be pushed to find housing outside the city, many forced into long mega-commutes.

February 27, 2021

The model might work best in more suburban communities with larger lot sizes and less expensive land, said Peter Cohen of the Council of Community Housing Organizations. He said cities getting rid of single-family zoning should focus on who these units will be serving and how they will help solve the region’s affordable-housing crisis.

“If the underlying premise of the movement around ending single-family zoning is that it’s going to make housing more affordable, my question is how? How is it going to make housing more affordable? What is the affordability strategy?”

February 22, 2021

Peter Cohen, co-director of the San Francisco Council of Community Housing Organizations, said the coalition of community-based housing providers supports increasing density in areas that "make sense," like near transit or close to commercial streets.

"Permitting denser housing, by itself, does not make it affordable or necessarily result in racial integration," he said. "We should be careful in rezoning single-family areas that this does not result in house-flipping, development speculation and other activities that contribute to the displacement of existing communities."

February 10, 2021

“It’s just a lack of sufficient capital to spread that peanut butter around to ensure that housing is being produced for folks across the entire income spectrum. Construction itself is not going to answer that. It’s more of—I would call the focus on construction technology as kind of working around the edges. What’s really the issue is the staggering disparity of income and debt distribution that’s just polarized everything—and housing production, housing access, is no different,” Cohen said.

Though technology itself likely won’t be able to provide low-cost homes to everyone because it doesn’t address the funding issue, Cohen did reflect that 3D printing could play a role in the housing market. Specifically, he offered that new technologies—whether that’s additive construction or, more simply, pre-fabricated construction—could be used for in-fill of geographically unique pieces of land via accessory dwelling units (ADUs).

December 25, 2020

“There’s a long list of these companies that for the most part came into existence, or super-scaled up after that crisis,” says Peter Cohen, co-director of the Council of Community Housing Organizations in San Francisco. “Those companies are still here. They’re heavily capitalized. They’re not housing providers first. They’re financial investment firms that happen to be in the business of making money off real estate . . . So it could even be worse.”

December 8, 2020

Addressing these two issues — opening opportunities in high-resource areas and combatting urban displacement — will be key to allowing current and future generations of Bay Area residents the opportunity to choose their community based on their needs, preferences and access to resources and not have their futures constrained by their race or economic background.

November 29, 2020

A comprehensive housing database is tantamount to understanding the nature of The City’s housing supply, and the displacement and speculation which continue to plague our city and put San Franciscans at risk. This new tool will empower The City and the public with an information infrastructure to enforce laws which curb displacement and improve affordability. This housing crisis has resulted in major displacement of renters, extreme income inequality and prices that make it increasingly untenable for low-income and working-class everyday people to remain here.

November 20, 2020

“Gentrification of the city because of all this concentration of wealth and the income inequality has basically shoved the whole middle income workforce out to fend for itself, and so it just adds that much more demand on the affordable housing side, which we're already struggling to keep up with because we have a shortage of land and money,” said Peter Cohen, co-director of the Council of Community Housing Organizations, a San Francisco nonprofit coalition of community-based housing developers and tenant advocates.

“That’s why a lot of housing activists are just as much fighting against displacement and gentrification as they are fighting for more affordable housing,” Cohen added.

November 4, 2020

Peter Cohen, co-director of the Council of Community Housing, a coalition of affordable housing advocates, said he was “elated that S.F. voters continue to show up strong” when it comes to new revenue measures. Cohen strongly supported the real estate transfer tax increase.

Voters “just know in their gut that there are big winners in this town,” he said. “And they are fine with expecting those big winners to put out their paychecks.”

November 3, 2020

Peter Cohen, co-director of the Council of Community Housing Organizations, said of Prop. I that "we are fortunate to have a new revenue source for affordable housing and housing preservation right at the time we need it most in the recovery from Covid-19 economic impacts."

"With the Housing Stability Fund legislation and the Rent Relief Fund legislation that were both adopted unanimously by the Board of Supervisors last week, this new Prop. I revenue can be put to immediate use," said Cohen. "It's a good outcome for affordable housing and housing justice."

October 21, 2020

With forty years of experience as the voice of affordable housing in San Francisco, the 23 member organizations of the Council of Community Housing Organizations – working in neighborhoods from the Tenderloin to Chinatown, South of Market, Fillmore, the Richmond, and the Sunset, to the Bayview, Excelsior, Mission, and Castro – know that the singular critical element for more housing in our city is increased public investment. Private real estate money comes and goes with the vicissitudes of the global markets, booms and busts, and pandemics, but it is public investments that keep us building and responding to San Franciscans’ real needs over the long haul. Prop I is the real deal: increased funding for increased affordable housing. It’s a “Yes” vote!

October 10, 2020

“The fundamental flaw of SB 35 was and still is that it makes by right market-rate housing equally apply in at-risk urban communities as it is in suburban communities or in communities where there’s no displacement risk,” said Peter Cohen, CCHO co-director. “Given how critical our coalition’s housing organizations are in working on the ground to provide affordable housing and housing security, and in countering the displacement pressures on communities of color, we expect a close and constructive working relationship with San Francisco’s state senator. The housing urgencies of these times demand it.”

September 25, 2020

“There’s opportunity to invest in a time of a down market,” said Peter Cohen, co-director for the Council of Community Housing Organizations. “It’s a good time to increase public investment because land is more available. You can buy sites and sometimes buy entitlements. There may be less expensive land or less competition for contractors.”

While the market is experiencing volatility, Cohen said, the affordable housing sector in San Francisco has benefited from steady public investment over the last four decades. The $600 million Proposition A approved by voters last year, for example, is the largest affordable housing bond in city history.

“San Franciscans historically have been very good about public investment in affordable housing,” he said. “That’s our primary flotation device to get through these volatile swings in the private investment cycle. San Francisco has about 30,000 units of permanent affordable housing. If we hardwired ourselves to private real estate, we would not be able to afford to have that many.”

But affordable housing could lose out on units required as part of would-be high-end developments.

September 3, 2020

“Our members who are developers are working closely with our housing agency about how to reconfigure the reserves we’re required to have while supporting our tenants,” Fernando Martí, co-director of the San Francisco-based Council of Community Housing Organizations, said in an interview. “The way we approach it is we have to figure out how to keep buildings going and keep tenants in place.”

August 31, 2020

“The necessity of having to pay 25% of your income works for some people but for other people, it’s impossible” says Fernando Martí, co-director of the Council of Community Housing Organizations. Watch the entire segment here.

August 28, 2020

New Op-ed: Thank you to these San Francisco elected leaders for raising up Housing for Educators! While the pandemic rages on, educators are still in dire need of housing and community-based organizations must prioritize providing this affordable housing.

August 23, 2020

The change [to SB 1085] came in the wake of unanimous opposition to that provision of the bill by the Board of Supervisors, the Council of Community Housing Organizations, and affordable housing advocates citywide.

July 23, 2020

Big tech loan funds for housing are a good first step, but what's really needed is deep equity investment and a commitment to ongoing revenue sources. “One common approach for large tech companies has been investing in low-cost loans to affordable-housing developers. While that financing is helpful, there is more need for down-payment grants for these projects to cover upfront costs, said Fernando Martí, co-director of the Council of Community Housing Organizations, a coalition of affordable-housing developers and advocates in San Francisco.”