San Francisco housing shortage facts for kids
The San Francisco Bay Area has faced a big problem since the 1990s: there aren't enough affordable homes. This means it's very expensive to live there. By 2015, San Francisco had the highest rents of any big city in the United States. Nearby cities like San Jose and Oakland also had some of the highest rents. Between 2012 and 2017, the average house price in most parts of the Bay Area almost doubled. The former mayor of San Francisco, Ed Lee, called this problem a "housing crisis." It was his main focus to try and fix it. This local housing problem is part of a bigger issue across California.
One main reason for the housing shortage in San Francisco is strict zoning rules. Zoning rules decide what kind of buildings can be built in different areas. Historically, some of these rules were made to stop new homes from being built in richer neighborhoods. They also made it harder for people of color to move into certain areas. After a law in 1968 made it illegal to openly discriminate, neighborhoods started using zoning rules that mostly allowed only single-family homes. These rules made it hard to build homes that people with lower incomes could afford.
Why Homes Are Hard to Find
Since the 1960s, San Francisco and the Bay Area have had very strict zoning rules. For example, in most parts of San Francisco, buildings cannot be taller than 40 feet. Laws also make it easier for neighbors to stop new building projects.
Because of these rules, from 2007 to 2014, the Bay Area only approved half the number of new homes needed for its growing population. At the same time, the high tech industry in San Francisco and Silicon Valley grew very fast. This created hundreds of thousands of new jobs. Many people moved to the area for these jobs. This high demand for homes, combined with not enough new homes being built, caused rents to skyrocket and house prices to become extremely high. For instance, between 2012 and 2016, the San Francisco area added 373,000 new jobs. But only 58,000 new homes were approved.
Empty homes are also a problem. In 2019, a group called Curbed estimated that San Francisco had almost five empty homes for every person who was homeless.
How the Housing Shortage Affects People
San Francisco has strict rent control laws. These laws limit how much landlords can raise rent. However, a California state law called the Ellis Act allows landlords to evict tenants if they decide to stop renting out their property completely. By 2013, hundreds of people had been forced to leave their homes because of this law.
The city's economy grew a lot due to more tourism and new tech companies. But not enough new homes were built. This caused rents to go up by more than 50 percent by the 1990s. Many wealthy tech workers moved to San Francisco for jobs. Before the late 1960s, San Francisco had affordable housing, which meant many different kinds of people could live there. But the economic changes affected who could afford to live in the city.
This led to constant gentrification in many neighborhoods. Gentrification is when a neighborhood changes as wealthier people move in, often causing original residents to be forced out. By 1995, people living in areas like the Tenderloin and the Mission District, which had many immigrant and lower-income families, faced eviction. Their homes were sometimes turned into more expensive housing. For example, in 2000, people in the Mission District made up 5 percent of the city's population. But they experienced 14 percent of all evictions in the city that year.
High housing costs have also made it harder for people to move to California, especially to San Francisco and other coastal areas. A 2015 report from the California Legislative Analyst's Office explained this. It said that if California had built more homes each year from 1980 to 2010, about 7 million more people would be living in the state today. In San Francisco, the population could have been more than twice as large.
New York Times writer Farhad Manjoo said in 2019 that strict zoning rules can act like walls, keeping people out. He suggested that some wealthy people who call themselves "progressive" use zoning rules to keep housing scarce and expensive. This, he argued, has a similar effect to what some politicians want to do with border walls – it limits who can live in an area.
What Is Being Done About It
Housing has become a very important topic in Bay Area elections. In November 2015, San Francisco voters said no to two ballot propositions (ideas put to a public vote). Supporters of both ideas said they would help with the housing crisis. One idea, Proposition F, would have limited Airbnb rentals in the city. The other, Proposition I, would have stopped all new housing construction in the Mission District for 18 months, unless the homes were affordable for everyone.
To help with evictions, San Francisco City Supervisor David Campos tried to pass two new city laws. These laws would have made landlords pay tens of thousands of dollars to tenants evicted under the Ellis Act. However, both laws were rejected. One was found to be against the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, and the other went against California state law.
Mayor Ed Lee responded to the shortage by calling for 30,000 new homes to be built by 2020. He also suggested a $310 million city bond to pay for affordable housing. Voters approved the goal of 30,000 new homes in 2014 (Proposition K). The affordable housing bond was also passed in 2015 (Proposition A).
In 2015, then City Supervisor Scott Wiener criticized those who opposed new development. He wrote an article called "Yes, Supply & Demand Apply to Housing, Even in San Francisco." He argued that the city needed to greatly increase the number of all types of homes, both affordable and market-rate.
In 2021, the Board of Supervisors discussed a plan to allow slightly more homes to be built in some areas. This plan would allow "fourplexes" (buildings with four apartments) on corner lots and near train stations. As of 2017, almost 75% of all residential land in the city only allowed single-family homes or duplexes (two apartments). David Garcia, an expert from UC Berkeley, said that allowing fourplexes everywhere would be fairer. He also said that the housing shortage is so big that limiting new housing to only specific areas would not be enough to solve the problem.
