State’s Housing Goals Would Require Massive Demolition and Evictions

If San Francisco is going to rely on private for-profit developers to build most of its new affordable housing through inclusionary mandates, the amount of new market-rate housing will have to more than triple what state currently requires.

San Francisco won’t meet the Regional Housing Needs Assessments for affordable housing under inclusionary policies unless developers build 166,000 new units, 120,000 of them market-rate, over the next eight years.

Either that, or the city would have to require that 57 percent of all for-profit units are affordable—or fail to meet the lower-end RHNA goals and greatly exceed the number of luxury units, with the profound gentrification and displacement that would ensue.

That’s an impossible number without radical changes in the city—and equally radical changes in the housing-finance markets. There’s also no way the city could add that much luxury housing without seriously devastating existing vulnerable neighborhoods.

The state’s housing goals would require massive demolition and evictions in SF