Housing is expensive. It’s expensive to buy. It’s expensive to build.
In fact, San Francisco’s mayor’s office estimates it costs $700,000 to build one unit of affordable housing, which can take about five years. So, it’s no big surprise that voters are being asked to decide on the largest affordable housing bond in the city’s history this November.
San Francisco voters face two big, but separate measures that could provide $600 million for affordable housing, and help build housing for teachers and other educators that work for San Francisco schools.
To help you prepare, here are the basics for those measures, Proposition A and Proposition E.
Proposition A is a $600 million bond that would pay for the acquisition, rehabilitation and production of approximately 2,800 affordable housing units over the next five years. The money would be committed in these ways:
This bond is nearly double the size of the 2015 low-and-middle income housing bond measure backed by then-Mayor Ed Lee. Voters green-lit that $310 million bond, which has created about 1,500 units, according to Malcom Yeung, campaign committee co-chair for this year’s Proposition A.
Before that, San Francisco hadn’t passed an affordable housing bond since 1996, when former mayor Willie Brown pushed for a $100 million measure. Out of that money, $15 million was earmarked for down payment assistance loans for first-time home buyers; the rest was for the renovation and construction of very-low-income housing.
"For years, the city never really considered affordable housing to be infrastructure and as a result never regularly programmed it into the capital planning cycle," Yeung said. “Hopefully by having a housing bond every five years or so, we are going to be regularly addressing the affordability needs, as opposed to waiting 20 years."
Proposition A has support from Mayor London Breed and the Board of Supervisors as well as some state politicians. Salesforce and the Facebook-affiliated Chan Zuckerberg Initiative have helped financed the bond campaign. There’s no major opposition.
Proposition A needs two-thirds to pass.
Proposition E, meanwhile, needs a simple majority to pass. And if you're having trouble keeping the two straight, remember that the "E" stands for educator housing.
A 'yes' vote on Proposition E would change the city’s planning code to allow housing projects, specifically for educators, to be built on publicly-owned land. It would also relax some zoning requirements and expedite the city’s approval process for those projects. Park land is not included, and lots must be 10,000 square feet or bigger to qualify.
Educators working for San Francisco Unified School District — including teachers, staff, teaching assistants and aides — as well as City College educators would be eligible for the new housing.
The onus ultimately falls on San Francisco Unified and City College to provide funding for the construction of new educator housing. If Proposition A passes, the city would chip in $20 million.
Susan Solomon, president of the United Educators of San Francisco, said teachers here face unprecedented affordability challenges that make it hard to stay in the city.
"For many of them, especially newer teachers, they are also paying off their student loans," she said. "So, what it means for them is that they are living with many roommates, or tiny apartments or commuting from very far away."
The profession has a national attrition rate of about 8 percent annually, according to 2017 study by the Learning Policy Institute.
San Francisco Unified has a 10 percent attrition rate, according to a school district memo from April that sought pitches from developers for potential housing projects.
The school district has identified a few lots that would be eligible for Proposition E development if it passes: One in the Inner Sunset, another in Laurel Heights and one in the Bayview neighborhood.
The district has already started working with the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development on a housing project planned for the Francis Scott Key Annex in the Outer Sunset. It is expected to have more than 100 new one-to-three bedroom apartments for teachers and classroom aides.
But the potential impacts could reach further because Proposition E would expedite and relax zoning rules for housing built on publicly-owned land if it is 100-percent affordable and meets the 10,000-square foot requirement.
That could be a big deal for building anywhere in the city, said Peter Cohen, co-director of the Council of Community Housing Organizations, which is a big supporter of both ballot measures. Of course, the city would have to first acquire the land.
"We say that Prop. A and E are complementary measures,” Cohen said. “They both address affordable housing developers' two biggest obstacles: the funding and the land.”
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