San Francisco Trails Toronto, Vienna on Housing Solutions

San Francisco permitted roughly 2,100 new housing units in 2025, a figure that puts it well behind Toronto's 28,000 and Vienna's ongoing delivery of subsidized apartments that has kept that city's median rent at roughly one-third of what a Mission District renter pays today. The gap isn't a quirk of geography or economics. It's a policy choice, and city planners and housing advocates say 2026 may be the last window to close it before state intervention forces the issue.

The comparison matters because Mayor Daniel Lurie, who took office in January after defeating London Breed, ran explicitly on a housing production emergency platform. His administration inherited a backlog of more than 30,000 approved but unbuilt units citywide, a figure the Controller's Office confirmed in a March 2026 report. With California's Housing Accountability Act already threatening to strip San Francisco of land-use authority if the city misses its state-mandated Regional Housing Needs Allocation target of 82,069 units by 2031, the clock is no longer abstract.

What Toronto and Vienna Are Actually Doing

Toronto's secret isn't money alone. The city overhauled its development approvals process in 2023, cutting the median permitting timeline from 26 months to under 11 months for mid-rise residential projects. Vienna's Wiener Wohnen program, which manages roughly 220,000 municipally owned apartments, charges income-linked rents that average €7 per square meter — compared to San Francisco's median asking rent of $3,400 per month for a one-bedroom as of June 2026, according to Zillow data. Both cities made the political choice to treat housing as infrastructure, not as a revenue stream for existing property owners.

San Francisco's Department of Building Inspection still takes an average of 18 months to fully process a standard residential permit, according to figures the agency released in April. The HomeSF program, which offers density bonuses to developers who include below-market-rate units, has produced fewer than 400 affordable units since its 2018 launch. The Mayor's Office of Housing and Community Development has a pipeline of projects along the Balboa Park BART station corridor and on Schlage Lock site in Visitacion Valley, but both remain years from delivering occupied units.

Closer to Home, Small Wins and Structural Problems

There are genuine efforts underway. The Planning Department approved a streamlined review process for accessory dwelling units that has added about 1,200 ADUs annually across neighborhoods like the Sunset and Excelsior — real numbers, if not remotely sufficient. Tenderloin Housing Clinic and Chinatown Community Development Center continue to preserve existing affordable stock through acquisition programs, preventing displacement rather than adding new supply. That's valuable. It also illustrates the trap: San Francisco has become expert at preservation and intervention while other cities build.

State Senator Scott Wiener's SB 79, signed into law in May 2026, forces upzoning within a half-mile of BART stations including the Civic Center and 16th Street Mission stops. Developers and housing lawyers say the first projects relying on that law won't break ground until late 2027 at the earliest, given existing entitlement queues. Toronto eliminated a comparable bottleneck in 18 months. San Francisco has been debating equivalent reforms since 2019.

For renters searching now, the practical reality is brutal. The average San Francisco household earning the area median income of $136,000 for a family of four can afford a mortgage on roughly 9 percent of homes currently listed for sale in the city, per a June analysis from the San Francisco Association of Realtors. That number was 14 percent two years ago. Housing advocates at SPUR and the Council of Community Housing Organizations are pushing the Lurie administration to adopt a specific permitting timeline guarantee — a hard deadline, not a goal — modeled on what Toronto implemented. Without that structural change, the distance between San Francisco and the cities doing this better doesn't shrink. It compounds.