San Francisco voters back $600 million for affordable housing

Though mail-in ballots remain to be counted in full, most San Francisco voters said yes to Proposition A, a new housing bond, approving the measure by a margin of more than two to one.

This will set SF on track for what City Hall hopes will be a seven-figure affordable housing fund in the near future.

According to the San Francisco Department of Elections, Prop. A netted 69.46 percent of the vote (or 78,072 ballots), well over the two-thirds margin that the bond plan needed to pass.

If affirmed, Prop. A allows the city pursue $600 million in loans for the purposes of building and fostering “extremely-low, low, and middle-income” housing, with $150 million going toward rehabbing public housing and another $150 million earmarked for senior housing.

Mayor London Breed originally proposed the bond earlier this year; the Board of Supervisors backed it unanimously, even swelling the deal by several hundred million dollars.

The emphasis on low-income housing makes the measure particularly attractive to City Hall, which continues to lag when it comes to what it needs to build.

Between 2015 and 2017, San Francisco permitted only 19 percent of very-low-income housing, 21 percent of low-income housing, and 13 percent of moderate-priced housing it wants to build by 2023, according to the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG),

By comparison, during the same period the city issued enough permits for market-rate housing to satisfy 80 percent of the ABAG guidelines, with six years to spare.

The big numbers in the bond seem particularly juicy when coupled with the projected $400 million that the city hopes to raise after recently increasing office construction fees, yielding a potential $1 billion affordable housing war chest that Supervisor Hillary Ronen predicted “will make a dent in this crisis.”

Although the housing bond took an early lead on Tuesday, for much of the night it seemed to be falling just short of the two-thirds margin in preliminary vote counts. But by early Wednesday morning, it had pulled ahead. (Note that these early returns may still not yet be final; however, with a win margin of nearly three percent, there’s little room for error to undo the bond’s predicted passage.)

Voters also passed Proposition E, which will allow the city to build new housing for teachers on city-owned property regardless of zoning. Prop. E had over 74 percent of the vote by Wednesday morning.