[1] Due to lobbying from local residents, the agency primarily built its public housing buildings in low-income neighborhoods.
[1] By 2012, the San Francisco Housing Authority was considered a "troubled" agency by HUD, the federal agency that oversees local housing authorities, with a backlog of deferred maintenance on its properties.
[3] In 2013, Mayor Ed Lee pushed to reorganize the failing agency.
Among the measures adopted was to enter all of the 29 of the Authority's public housing buildings into the Rental Assistance Demonstration program, which would privatize the buildings by transferring their management to non-profit housing organizations[3][4] In 2018, the Authority came under scrutiny for discovering that it had a $29.5 million shortfall in its budget due to poor accounting practices.
Due to the agency's failures in accounting and administration, HUD sent a letter in March 2019 ordering the Authority to cede the administration of its programs either to the federal government or to the municipal government of San Francisco.