San Francisco Community Land Trust Preserves Affordable Units to Meet State Housing Goals

As San Francisco works to add tens of thousands of housing units by 2031, efforts to preserve existing affordable housing can now be included in the count and housing nonprofits are taking note.

A new state law, AB 670, allows cities like San Francisco to include preserved and converted affordable housing units to meet up to 25% of their overall goal of adding 46,000 affordable units in the next six years. This week, the San Francisco Community Land Trust, a nonprofit housing organization that works to acquire properties to rehabilitate, remove them from the speculative market, and provide residents with long-term affordable housing, announced its first multi-unit building purchase since the state law was signed in October. Several residents have called the complex home for decades and are relieved they won’t have to leave anytime soon.

“This means that we can stay, and it just makes it seem more stable and less stressful,” said Alana Herron, who has lived in a two-bedroom apartment at 3235 16th Street for nearly 30 years with her husband. She is a teacher and raised her two daughters there, and said having rent control for many years helped her stay rooted in the community.

But when the property recently went up for sale, Herron and many of the building’s other long-term residents — several of which are musicians, artists, and even a co-writer and producer of the recent Compton’s Cafeteria Riot play — worried they might lose the affordable rent that’s kept them stable for many years if the building were to be sold off to a market-rate developer.

“When the building went up for sale, I didn’t know what would happen,” she said. “Now, my kids know we’ll still have somewhere affordable, nobody’s gonna have to bail out mom and dad.”

Instead, the property was sold to the San Francisco Community Land Trust.

“Our residents are at the heart of everything we do, and this acquisition is about making sure they can stay rooted in the neighborhoods they’ve shaped for decades,” said Kyle Smeallie, SFCLT policy and communications director. “Preserving affordable housing is about keeping what makes San Francisco special: the people, the culture, and the communities that give this city its soul.”

San Francisco is currently on the hook to make way for 82,062 additional housing units for different income levels by 2031. To get there, the city has been focused on cutting red tape to make development easier and quicker.

The city also recently passed a rezoning plan that now allows for taller and more dense building construction, particularly in residential neighborhoods like the Sunset and Richmond, where previous zoning laws restricted height limits.

The city’s plan aims to create capacity for at least 36,000 units, just a portion of the overall total, since the city has already approved roughly 43,000 units that have yet to be developed. But critics of the plan have pointed out that there are few mechanisms in the plan itself to ensure that low-income housing is prioritized.

Preserving rent-controlled units was one of the most controversial elements of the rezoning plan. In order to make way for new and larger housing, developers can demolish existing properties. Supervisor Myrna Melgar proposed an amendment that was adopted into the plan to remove buildings with three or more rent-controlled units from demolition; however, efforts from Supervisor Connie Chan to remove all of the city’s rent-controlled units from the plan did not pass.

While the demolition of rent-controlled buildings in the city is rare, it is still possible under the new plan, if the Planning Commission approves such proposals.

Supporters of the Community Land Trust effort say their approach offers an additional model for the city to preserve affordable housing by keeping residents in the homes they can afford.

“Just as we’re trying to build more affordable housing, we’re losing affordable housing units either through demolitions or repositioning of properties being sold and rehabbed and becoming a lot more expensive to new residents,” said Aboubacar Ndiaye, executive director of the Northern California Land Trust, a land trust formed in 1973 that owns affordable properties throughout the Bay Area. “[The land trust model] allows us to create an incentive for cities to consider equity rehab as part of an all-of-the-above strategy to address the affordable housing need.”

Assemblywoman Sharon Quirk-Silva (D-La Palma) authored AB 670 with the intention of growing affordable housing stock across the state by encouraging preservation of existing homes. The idea is to allow jurisdictions to make units that are up for sale permanently affordable by giving residents and land trusts the first opportunity to buy, rather than sell to market-rate developers and lose rent-controlled housing stock.

The model has seen an uptick in interest across the Bay Area, state and country as housing needs grow more pressing, and places like New York City just recently passed their own version, the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act, giving tenants the first chance to purchase rental buildings if they go up for sale.

“While every project is different, acquisitions by Community Land Trusts, such as those happening in San Francisco, reflect the type of preservation-focused approach AB 670 is designed to support, helping cities meet housing goals while keeping existing residents in their communities,” Quirk-Silva said in a statement.

San Francisco’s Small Sites Program launched in 2014 and provides loans for acquisition and preservation projects like the recent project in the Mission District at 16th and Guerrero streets.

The program, overseen by the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, focuses on smaller, rent-controlled buildings and helps convert the property into permanently affordable housing to combat gentrification.

“San Francisco’s culture is rooted in the people who have built their lives here over decades. When long-term residents, artists and families are displaced, our neighborhoods lose the social and cultural fabric that makes them unique,” said Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, who represents the neighborhood for the building at 16th and Guerrero. “SFCLT’s acquisition of this building is the kind of proactive, community-centered housing strategy we need to stabilize residents, prevent displacement and ensure that the people who create San Francisco’s cultural legacy can remain in the neighborhoods that shaped their work.”

As part of the new ownership with the land trust, residents will see a slight increase in rent over several years, but that’s projected to be far less than if the building were sold and converted to market-rate housing.

“There will be a modest rent increase, but it’s still going to be extremely affordable for us,” said Robert Geller, Herron’s husband.

He said having rent control allowed his family to keep their beloved Victorian apartment as prices around them skyrocketed. A musician and former city worker, he’s relieved to have a place where he can continue to grow older.

“San Francisco has an aging population,” he said. “It means a lot that we can stay in our building and not have to find a new place to live.”