The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to reduce the rate after the city controller warned new housing was too difficult to build.
Two-bedroom apartments hit $6K for the first time in SF. The same apartment in Oakland is less than half that, but the clock is ticking.
While Oakland has long been a more affordable alternative, the rental gap between SF and Oakland is now at a staggering 128%. We break down why the East Bay deal might be changing as vacancy rates tighten.
Almost nowhere in California is building enough, according to the state. Here’s why
California ordered cities and counties to plan for 2.5 million new homes by 2030. Only five jurisdictions are on track to hit their numbers.
San Francisco Progressives Declare War on Affordable Housing
Opposition to high-density housing is the ultimate in misguided Nimbyism.
The Folk Economics of Housing
Why is housing supply so severely restricted in US cities and suburbs? Urban economists offer two primary hypotheses: homeowner self-interest and political fragmentation. Homeowners, who outnumber and have organizational advantages over renters, are said to lobby against development to protect their property values. The fragmentation hypothesis emphasizes that development's negative externalities are borne locally while most of the benefits accrue regionally or nationally, leading localities to block housing. This paper offers another explanation: ordinary people simply do not believe that adding more housing to the regional stock would reduce housing prices. Across three original surveys of urban and suburban residents, only a minority of respondents say that a large, positive, regional housing supply shock would reduce prices or rents. These beliefs are weakly held and unstable (suggesting people have given the issue little thought), but respondents do have stable views about who is to blame for high housing prices: developers and landlords. Large, bipartisan supermajorities support price controls, demand subsidies, and restrictions on putative bad actors, policies which they believe would be more effective than supply liberalization for widespread affordability. We discuss the implications of these findings for efforts to expand the supply of housing.
New housing reforms could save more than $40,000 per home
Under Governor Gavin Newsom's new housing affordability reforms, several state housing financing programs will now be brought together under one roof.
San Francisco Tech Firms See Workers Flee From $4,500 Rents
When automation-software company executive David Nichols and his wife were preparing to start a family last year, he learned that the rent on his San Francisco office was set to jump 50 percent. So he picked up and moved to Portland, Oregon.
More Housing is Possible: a National Town Hall · Burhan for State Senate
Join Vice Mayor Burhan Azeem and the people behind the Montana Miracle, California’s SB79, and the ROAD to Housing Act to discuss recent wins and what comes next for the housing movement. Speakers will dig into the policy that's moving the needle, the campaigns and organizing that got us here, and how local leadership can turn big ideas into more homes. Expect sharp takes, lively panels, and the collective brainpower of the country's most effective housing advocates in one (virtual) room.
The Housing Shortage Is a Major Driver of Poverty
Housing costs are usually the largest item in a household’s budget and can determine a family’s financial stability.
From Redlining to Greenlining: The Political Ecology of Race, Class, and Access to Green Space in Oakland, California from 1937-2020
Author(s): Corbin, Chryl Natasha Elaine | Advisor(s): Morelli-Frosch, Rachel | Abstract: Since the 1960s, Oakland, California, has been represented as a predominantly African American, low-income, and high crime urbanity. In the 2000s, the municipality started to become recognized as a top green city, and by the 2010s the city began to emerge as a gentrification hot spot. This dissertation elucidates how the relationships between race, class, housing, and access to green spaces have changed from redlining—prior to the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, 1965, and 1968—to 2020, after Oakland adopted an environmental agenda and began to establish itself as a green city starting in the 1990s. I question how Oakland’s urban environmental “sustainable development” agenda has impacted residents’ access to green spaces, and to what extent and how are these policies and practices creating, exacerbating, and/or mitigating urban environmental (in)justice issues. I examine both sides of environmental (in)justice, uneven distribution of environmental harms and the uneven development of environmental goods in which low-income residents and communities of color are disproportionally exposed to environmental hazards while also being prevented from benefiting from environmental amenities. I interrogate Oakland as a 21st century sustainable green city while also examining the historical urban policies and practices embedded in legal residential segregation and the current green gentrification processes which influence and contribute to the environmental (in)justices being (re)produced today.
Communities Across the Nation Want to Add Housing. Which Metropolitan Areas Are Adding the Most?
Between 2020 and 2025, four Texas metropolitan areas—Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio—accounted for 13.3 percent of total US housing supply growth.
Housing ladder spillovers
Rich newcomers can raise low-end rents, and adding high-end homes can lower them
A City for Children — Oakland Public Library
A City for Children — Gutman, Marta, — American cities are constantly being built and rebuilt, resulting in ever-changing skylines and neighborhoods. While the dynamic urban landscapes of New York, Boston, and Chicago have been widely studied, there is much to be gleaned from West Coast cities, especially in California, where the migration boom at the end of the nineteenth century permanently changed the urban fabric of these newly diverse, plural metropolises. In A City for Children Marta Gutman focuses on the use and reuse of everyday buildings in Oakland, California, to make the city a better place for children. She introduces us to the women who were determined to mitigate the burdens placed on working-class families by an indifferent industrial capitalist economy. Often without the financial means to build from scratch, women did not tend to conceive of urban land as a blank slate to be wiped clean for development. Gutman shows how, over and over, women instead turned private houses and even a saloon in Oakland into orphanages, kindergartens, settlement houses, and day care centers, and in the process built the charitable landscape--a network of places that was critical for the betterment of children, families, and public life. The industrial landscape of Oakland, riddled with the effects of social inequality and racial prejudice, is not a neutral backdrop in Gutman's story but an active player. Spanning one hundred years of history, A City for Children provides a compelling model for building urban institutions, and it demonstrates that children, women, charity, and reform, along with incremental construction, renovations, alterations, additions, and repurposed structures, are central to the understanding of modern cities.
S.F. is building housing for artists. Now it has to decide who gets it
San Francisco is creating a formal process to determine who qualifies as an artist, a new certification required for city residents hoping to live in this affordable housing development.
The Artist Loft: Affordable Housing (for White People)
Do these tax-subsidized apartments perpetuate segregation by excluding some low-income households?
In 1977, Disabled activists occupied the Federal Building in San Francisco to demand the passage of Section 504— legislation to protect against disability discrimination.When the building was cordoned off, in an effort to starve activists out, The Black Panthers *Broke In* to deliver them hot meals.
The 504 Protests and the Black Panther Party – Disability Social History Project
disabilityhistory.org