Legalize Affordable Housing Everywhere
Every election, every candidate campaigns on Affordable Housing, and after every election, housing prices continue to rise, and the amount of non-profit affordable housing remains small.
So what am I going to do that is going to be different?
I will introduce legislation to legalize deeply affordable housing everywhere in San Francisco.
Most San Franciscans don’t realize that it is illegal to build affordable housing in 78.6% of San Francisco. Affordable housing developers have to be able to build at least 50 units at a time. This means they have to be able to build at least medium sized apartment buildings, but apartment buildings are illegal in most of San Francisco. In most residentially zoned areas, current city zoning law prohibits buildings with 5 or more apartments.
For too long, politicians have presented San Franciscans with a false choice, borne of a false scarcity. We are led to believe that market rate housing has to compete with affordable housing because we don’t have enough room for both kinds of housing. In fact, we have plenty of room. San Francisco has the potential to have ten times as much land available for affordable housing as we do now.
No one law change is going to fix our housing problem overnight. In addition, there are other barriers to building housing besides the legal ones imposed by the city’s zoning code. Neither of these facts are reasons that we should allow the current laws to stand. San Francisco cannot afford to allow opportunities to build affordable housing go unfulfilled.
When I am elected, I will introduce legislation to legalize multi-family housing that is affordable to people making 55% AMI or below in every part of San Francisco that is already zoned for residential use.
