This probably isn’t going to be good.
San Francisco’s Mayor, Daniel Lurie, who ran as a kind of get-things-done moderate in America’s most liberal city, just declared a “rent emergency.” Here he is on Instagram:
San Francisco definitely has high rent compared to other parts of the country.
In San Francisco, the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment is more than $4,300, up more than $1,000 from last year, according to Zillow.
But what exactly is a “rent emergency”? There’s no law in California or in the city that recognizes such a declaration. This is just another PR stunt someone has cooked up. The real question is what actual policies will fall under this declaration. From the sound of it, this is going to be a grab bag of bad progressive ideas.
The emergency declaration itself is largely a symbolic gesture. But it could establish Lurie’s housing agenda as a priority…
Among the ideas the mayor supports is a proposal by Supervisor Jackie Fielder to block landlords from evicting tenants who owe less than a month’s rent. He also wants $3 million to pay for lawyers to represent 400 households facing eviction proceedings, an additional $3,000 to be paid to tenants displaced by the Ellis Act, and other protective measures.
More than 1,000 eviction notices have been filed this year in San Francisco, putting it on pace for the most in nearly a decade, Lurie’s office said.
Rent increases in rent-controlled apartments would be capped at 10% per year under proposed legislation from Supervisor Danny Sauter that Lurie supports. Tenants would get annual reminders about the annual rent increase maximum and rules regarding evictions under legislation sponsored by Supervisor Matt Dorsey.
Not exactly a rent freeze like the one promised by Mamdani but something close to it. The underlying problem here is that Lurie has been trying to get the city back on track by catering to all the AI expansion he can get. But the people in that field are making high salaries and can afford to pay high rents. People working regular service jobs in the city cannot.
He has been credited with bringing vibrancy and optimism back to San Francisco.
But the renewal has coincided with a huge injection of tech wealth, and rents are spiking more than anywhere else in the country, according to the mayor’s office. In the past year alone, the median rent has soared more than 25 percent…
But paying lawyers to keep people in their homes when they don’t pay the rent isn’t going to solve anything in the long term. The only real solution is to build more apartments for all those new tech workers coming to town. That would keep the prices lower.
But regular readers know it’s almost impossible to build anything in San Francisco. The number of city agencies and regulations involved ensure that the cost is always higher than anywhere else. It cost the city $1.7 million to install a public toilet in a location that already had underground plumbing. That’s what builders are up against.
The most direct way for cities to rein in housing prices, though, is to build a lot more housing, said Alex Horowitz, who studies housing policy for the Pew Charitable Trusts. Cities such as Minneapolis, Nashville and Austin, Texas, that have made it easier and cheaper to build more units have kept rents down, he said.
San Francisco, however, has not. Decades of resistance to new housing has finally given way to some changes in zoning and permitting laws, but only 489 housing units, or about 10 per square mile, have been built in the entire city so far this year.
“There are cities that have tried to regulate their way out of the problem,” Mr. Horowitz said. “None of those cities have seen big affordability improvements.”
Oz Erickson, a local developer and a member of the San Francisco Apartment Association board of directors, disputed that there was a rent emergency in the city. He said that San Francisco’s rents were only climbing fast now because they fell so far in the early part of the pandemic.
He said that the cost of building one unit of affordable housing, which he pegged at $1.1 million, was the real crisis.
What Lurie is doing is a stunt designed to make it look like he’s addressing the problem, but he’s not. In reality this is just another lousy way to avoid dealing with the real problem and in the long run the delay in focusing on new construction will only make things worse.
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