San Francisco housing shortage

[citation needed] Since the 1960s, San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area have enacted strict zoning regulations.

[9] Among other restrictions, San Francisco does not allow buildings over 40 feet tall in most of the city, and has passed laws making it easier for neighbors to block developments.

[14] Mayor Breed proposed in July 2024 rezoning for more housing in areas that currently require a high percentage of office space.

[18] Non-profit organizations, unions, and other advocacy groups may leverage the permitting process to negotiate concessions from developers, which can lead to additional delays in construction and increased project costs.

[19] For example, the redevelopment of a laundromat in San Francisco into residential housing was delayed for several years due to California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) requirements and shadow study requests after the developer opted not to enter negotiations with local non-profit organizations.

[20] Rapid economic growth of the high tech industry in San Francisco and nearby Silicon Valley created hundreds of thousands of new jobs.

[29][30] Many affluent tech workers migrated to San Francisco in pursuit of job opportunities and the lack of housing in the South Bay.

[30] Until the end of the 1960s, San Francisco had affordable housing, which allowed people from many different backgrounds to settle down, but the economic shift impacted the city's demographics.

[18][44][45] San Francisco's metropolitan area added 373,000 net new jobs in the last five years—but issued permits for only 58,000 units of new housing.

The lack of new construction has exacerbated housing costs in the Bay Area, making the San Francisco metro among the cruelest markets in the U.S. Over the same period, Houston added 346,000 jobs and permitted 260,000 new dwellings, five times as many units per new job as San Francisco.

This graphic shows the year that cities around the San Francisco Bay Area are projected to reach their 2040 housing targets as defined in Plan Bay Area 2040 (housing units needed to provide sufficient housing for the projected population growth) - in 2018, San Francisco was projected to be 23 years late to meet its 2040 target. MTC director Steve Heminger said in 2018: "Every single county is over-performing its job forecast, some by massive amounts, and every single county is under-performing its housing forecast, almost all by a wide margin." [ 1 ]