The Numbers Don't Lie: San Francisco Built 2,300 Units Last Year When It Needed 10,000

San Francisco permitted 2,312 new housing units in 2025, according to figures released last week by the Planning Department — less than a quarter of the 10,000 annual units the state's Regional Housing Needs Allocation requires the city to produce by 2031. With that deadline now five years out and the city running at roughly 23 percent of the pace it needs, the Board of Supervisors is scheduled to convene an emergency housing session on July 14 to hash out what went wrong and who is accountable for fixing it.

The timing matters because San Francisco has exhausted most of the political goodwill it had with Sacramento. Governor Gavin Newsom's office sent a formal notice of non-compliance to City Hall in May, the first such action under AB 2011, the 2022 law that strips local zoning authority from cities that miss production benchmarks. The state can now fast-track developer applications in San Francisco without the usual thicket of environmental and design reviews — a power Sacramento has so far been reluctant to use but is no longer ruling out.

What the Data Actually Shows

The headline permit figure conceals a more troubling breakdown. Of those 2,312 units, only 387 were classified as affordable — defined as rent-restricted housing for households earning below 80 percent of the Area Median Income, which the Department of Housing and Urban Development set at $136,900 for a family of four in San Francisco County for 2025. The rest were market-rate, concentrated almost entirely in the Eastern Neighborhoods plan area along Illinois Street and Third Street in Dogpatch and the Central Waterfront. Neighborhoods like the Sunset, the Richmond, and the Excelsior, which together account for roughly 35 percent of the city's land area, contributed fewer than 90 permitted units combined.

Average asking rents tell their own story. A one-bedroom apartment in the Mission District now lists for approximately $3,450 per month, according to Zillow's June 2026 median for the 94110 zip code. In Hayes Valley, that number climbs to $3,720. The city's own Office of Economic Analysis estimated in a March 2026 report that a San Francisco household needs a gross annual income of at least $138,000 to afford a median market-rate apartment without spending more than 30 percent of income on housing — a threshold fewer than 40 percent of city residents meet.

The Human Services Agency counted 7,754 people experiencing homelessness during the January 2026 Point-in-Time count, down slightly from 8,182 in 2024 but still higher than the 6,858 recorded before the pandemic in 2019. Mayor Daniel Lurie, who took office in January after defeating London Breed, campaigned on a platform of streamlining Planning Commission approvals and eliminating what his team called "redundant discretionary review" for projects under 50 units. His administration has since proposed cutting the average approval timeline from 38 months to 14 months — a target that housing advocates at the San Francisco Housing Action Coalition call ambitious but mathematically necessary.

What Comes Next at City Hall

The July 14 hearing will center on three proposed amendments to the Planning Code. The first would eliminate conditional use authorization for most projects in the Tenderloin and SoMa that include 20 percent affordable units on site. The second would expand the city's by-right approval zone — currently limited to parcels along Van Ness Avenue and Market Street under the 2023 Better Streets Plan — to include commercially zoned corridors in the Outer Sunset and Portola neighborhoods. The third would require the Planning Commission to render a decision within 90 days of a completed application, with automatic approval triggered if the deadline lapses.

Real estate analysts at Beacon Economics noted in a June 30 memo that even if all three measures pass and the city doubles its permitting pace immediately, San Francisco would still fall roughly 18,000 units short of its 2031 RHNA target. The July 14 session starts at 10 a.m. at City Hall's Board Chambers, Room 250. Public comment is open, and housing advocates from Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation and Greenbelt Alliance have both confirmed they will testify.