By Rebecca Foster.
With rent exceeding $4,500 a month for a two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco, housing is unaffordable for 73 percent of the city’s residents. We are losing teachers, artists, bus drivers, police officers, nonprofit workers and families every single day. The high cost of housing affects the very fabric of our neighborhoods and character of our iconic city, and impacts households across the income spectrum, directly connecting to many of the city’s challenges, from homelessness, to health, to education. Now more than ever we must apply our collective brainpower and resources — private and public — to housing.
Affordable housing in a high-cost city like San Francisco — and the Bay Area as a whole — can’t be built without the substantial investment of the public sector. But accessing government money is, by nature, a bureaucratic process that can be too slow to be competitive. Financing bottlenecks are one of several reasons that housing development is both costly and slow. The San Francisco Housing Accelerator Fund, where I’m executive director, is an example of a solution that coordinates public, private and philanthropic capital to remedy this particular contributor to our affordability crisis. The public-private model can be scaled up and is replicable — and just became even more relevant in California.
In September, the state legislature passed several bills that could generate billions for affordable housing, and more local governments are passing bond measures to support similar development. Cities around California that are concerned about affordability, and how to enable mission-driven developers to compete to secure sites for preservation or new affordable housing, can look to the San Francisco Housing Accelerator Fundwhile considering how to best leverage this money.
Two types of capital are critical for housing development. Acquisition capital buys land or buildings, and needs to be nimble, efficient and tolerant of the higher risk of early-stage development. Permanent capital, which subsidizes the most significant long-term costs of the housing, ensures affordability into the future.
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