How San Francisco Spent a Decade Talking About Housing and Built Almost Nothing

San Francisco issued permits for roughly 1,500 new housing units in 2024, less than a third of the 4,500 units the state's Regional Housing Needs Allocation required the city to plan for annually under its 2023–2031 cycle. That gap — stubborn, documented, politically embarrassing — is the arithmetic expression of how the city arrived at a median asking rent of $3,200 a month for a one-bedroom apartment and a median home sale price that crested $1.3 million last year.

The numbers matter now because the window to fix them is closing. State housing law, including the builder's remedy provisions that kicked in after San Francisco missed its Housing Element certification deadline in January 2023, has shifted legal leverage toward developers in ways the city's Planning Department is still absorbing. Meanwhile, the Board of Supervisors is scheduled to take up a revised Density Bonus ordinance this fall, and Mayor Daniel Lurie's administration has staked early political capital on promising 82,000 units by 2031 — a figure most independent analysts consider a fantasy without dramatic changes in both policy and financing.

A Decade of Ballot Measures That Cancelled Each Other Out

The story of the last ten years is largely a story of voters being asked to solve, at the ballot box, problems that required sustained administrative will. Proposition C in 2018 raised roughly $300 million annually for homelessness services by taxing large businesses — a genuine funding achievement. But the same political energy that passed Prop C never coalesced around actually permitting shelter beds or supportive housing fast enough to absorb that money. By 2022, the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing reported spending more than $60,000 per bed per year to maintain existing stock while the waitlist for the City Access Point system stretched past 10,000 households.

Upzoning fights paralyzed the Mission District for years. The Mission Moratorium, a 2016 ballot measure, temporarily froze market-rate development in a 24-block area bounded roughly by 16th and César Chávez streets. Its backers argued it would protect Latino cultural institutions and low-income renters. Its critics argued it simply pushed development pressure onto adjacent Noe Valley and Potrero Hill while adding nothing to total supply. Both were right. The Mission's share of new affordable units built between 2016 and 2023 fell below 8 percent of citywide production, according to Planning Department records.

On the eastern waterfront, the Pier 70 project — a 28-acre mixed-use development in Dogpatch that received Planning Commission approval in 2018 — spent four additional years navigating appeals, environmental reviews, and financing gaps before breaking ground on its first residential phase in 2022. It will eventually deliver roughly 2,150 units, about 30 percent of them below market rate. That kind of timeline, multiplied across dozens of projects, explains the production numbers.

The RHNA Math and What State Pressure Has Actually Changed

California's Housing Accountability Act and SB 9, which passed in 2021 and theoretically allowed duplexes on any single-family lot statewide, were supposed to force San Francisco's hand. They haven't, entirely. The Sunset District and West Portal remain overwhelmingly single-family in practice. Applications under SB 9 in San Francisco numbered fewer than 200 through 2024, a fraction of projections, partly because lot sizes and construction costs make the economics work only in a narrow band of circumstances.

The Department of Building Inspection's permit backlog — which hit a high of 1,800 residential applications in 2022 before falling to around 1,100 last year after a staffing push — added months and sometimes years to projects that had already cleared planning review. A two-bedroom unit in the Tenderloin that a nonprofit developer broke ground on in early 2021 received its certificate of occupancy in October 2024. Three and a half years, for 42 units.

What comes next depends on whether Lurie's administration can hold together the coalition of state housing officials, institutional lenders, and neighborhood groups long enough to pass the updated Density Bonus rules and actually deploy the $250 million in affordable housing bond funds voters approved under Proposition A in November 2024. If those bonds remain unspent by mid-2027, state clawback provisions become a real risk. The political calendar is tight, the financing environment is uncertain, and ten years of evidence suggests San Francisco finds new ways to complicate problems it claims to be solving.