SF Builds Half the Homes It Needs — and Rents Have Climbed 34% Since 2020. Other Cities Are Doing Better.

San Francisco permitted roughly 2,100 new housing units in 2025, less than half the 4,400-unit annual target the state assigned under its Regional Housing Needs Allocation framework. The gap has compounded for five straight years. Median rents in the city now sit at approximately $3,480 per month for a one-bedroom — up 34 percent from the $2,600 median recorded in early 2020, according to tracking data from the San Francisco Rent Board and CoStar Group.

The numbers land at a particularly sharp moment. Mayor Daniel Lurie took office in January pledging to treat housing production as an emergency, and the Board of Supervisors faces a July 15 deadline to vote on a streamlining ordinance that would cut environmental review timelines for projects over 50 units in designated growth corridors. State Housing Accountability Act enforcement letters sent to the city by the California Department of Housing and Community Development last March put San Francisco on notice that continued underperformance could trigger builder's remedy provisions, stripping the city of discretionary project approval authority.

What the Mission and SoMa Numbers Tell You

Walk the 16th Street BART Plaza corridor in the Mission and the math is visible. Three approved mixed-income projects — totaling roughly 680 units — have sat in various stages of pre-construction financing for more than 18 months. One site on South Van Ness near Cesar Chavez broke ground in April 2026 after years of litigation. The Mayor's Office of Housing and Community Development has committed $42 million in city subsidy to affordable components across those projects, but private financing gaps, driven by interest rates that remain above 6.5 percent for construction loans, have stalled the market-rate portions.

In SoMa, the Central SoMa Plan rezoning adopted back in 2018 was supposed to unlock thousands of units near 4th and Brannan. The city's own planning data shows fewer than 900 units delivered against a projected 4,000 by 2026. Fees, litigation and the post-pandemic office collapse gutting ground-floor commercial viability have each played a role. The San Francisco Planning Department logged 340 active appeals of housing approvals in fiscal year 2025 — a figure city planners describe as among the highest per-capita appeal rates of any major American city.

London, Singapore and Tokyo Built Their Way Out — Differently

The comparison with peer global cities is not flattering for San Francisco. London's Greater London Authority delivered 37,000 net new homes in 2024-25, still short of its 52,000-unit annual target but representing a permit rate nearly double what the city achieves per capita. London has used its Affordable Homes Programme, backed by £11.5 billion in central government funding, to de-risk affordable delivery even as private markets wobble. Rents in Inner London rose 22 percent over the same 2020-2026 period — painful, but measurably less severe than San Francisco's trajectory.

Singapore's Housing Development Board, which builds and owns roughly 80 percent of the city-state's residential stock, completed 23,000 public flats in 2025 alone, keeping median housing cost-to-income ratios below 4.5 percent of monthly salary for most residents. The model is not directly transferable to an American city, but housing economists at UC Berkeley's Terner Center for Housing Innovation have pointed to Singapore's land banking strategy — the government acquires sites decades in advance — as the structural reason the city avoids the crisis cycles San Francisco keeps repeating.

Tokyo, by contrast, achieved affordability not through public ownership but through liberal zoning. The Japanese capital allows mid-rise residential construction across virtually all residential land, and its metropolitan area added roughly 145,000 units in 2025. Rents in central Tokyo have risen less than 8 percent since 2020.

San Francisco's Board of Supervisors will vote on the streamlining ordinance July 15. If it passes, planning staff estimate the city could see 600 to 900 additional units enter the pipeline within 18 months, concentrated in the Eastern Neighborhoods and along Geary Boulevard. That is not nothing. It is also not Tokyo. For renters on the wrong side of a 34 percent increase, the difference is acute.