SF Built 40% Fewer Homes Than Needed — Here's How That Stacks Up Against Cities Worldwide

San Francisco permitted roughly 2,400 new housing units in 2025, according to figures released this week by the California Department of Housing and Community Development — about 40 percent short of the 4,000-plus annual pace the state's Regional Housing Needs Allocation requires the city to hit through 2031. The gap is not new. It is, however, getting harder to ignore.

The timing matters because the state is watching closely. Under housing accountability laws reinforced by AB 2011 and the Builder's Remedy provisions of the Housing Element statute, cities that consistently miss their RHNA targets risk losing local zoning control entirely — meaning developers could theoretically override neighborhood objections and build by right in places like the Inner Sunset or the Castro. San Francisco filed an updated Housing Element with the state in January 2023, promising 82,069 new units by 2031. At the current production rate, it will deliver fewer than half that number.

What SF Is — and Isn't — Doing

The city's main legislative response has been Mayor Daniel Lurie's Housing Production Emergency declaration, issued in March 2026, which directed the Planning Department to fast-track permit reviews for projects of 20 units or more. The Office of Housing and Community Development has also expanded its Small Sites Program, which acquires existing rental buildings in neighborhoods like the Mission District and Excelsior to prevent displacement, though that program adds no net new units. On Market Street near Civic Center, two stalled mixed-income towers cleared environmental review in May after years of litigation, a milestone that advocates called encouraging but insufficient. The San Francisco Housing Action Coalition has publicly pushed for a dedicated zoning reform to allow six-story residential construction along every commercial corridor in the city, but the Board of Supervisors has not voted on the measure.

Contrast that with Tokyo, where a national zoning framework allows mid-rise residential construction across most of the metropolitan area by default, and the city added approximately 130,000 units in 2024 alone. Tokyo's median rent for a one-bedroom apartment sits near $1,100 per month — compared to San Francisco's median of roughly $3,200, per Zillow data from June 2026. Singapore's Housing Development Board delivered 23,000 new public flats in fiscal year 2025, meeting demand targets for the fourth consecutive year. Even Paris, which faces its own density constraints, approved a 2024-to-2030 urban plan committing to 7,000 new social housing units annually within the périphérique.

Why the Gap Keeps Widening

San Francisco's production failures are structural, not accidental. The city layers discretionary review on top of environmental review on top of neighborhood notification requirements, a process that can add 18 to 36 months to a project timeline and kill marginal deals. A 100-unit affordable project in the Bayview neighborhood that broke ground in April 2026 took four years from entitlement to construction start. Financing costs during that window, driven by interest rates that stayed elevated through much of 2025, wiped out the pro forma on at least three comparable projects in SoMa, according to records filed with the Mayor's Office of Housing.

London offers a cautionary parallel. After years of under-delivery, the Greater London Authority adopted a consolidated approval process in 2022 that gave the mayor direct override authority for projects above 150 units. London still misses its targets — it needed 66,000 units per year and built closer to 35,000 in 2024 — but the trajectory is upward. San Francisco's is not.

What happens next here depends heavily on two deadlines: the state's 2026 annual compliance review, due in December, and the Board of Supervisors' fall legislative calendar. Housing advocates are pushing for a ballot measure in November 2026 that would eliminate discretionary review for projects that comply with existing zoning, a reform that has broad support from the San Francisco Planning Department's own staff reports but fierce opposition in some western neighborhoods. If the measure fails and production numbers stay flat, the state attorney general's office has signaled it will begin formal enforcement proceedings — which could ultimately remove the city's ability to say no at the local level. That is a political outcome nobody in Room 200 at City Hall wants, which may finally be the pressure point that moves something.