The San Francisco housing disaster, in contrast with different main cities.
Housing costs for San Francisco residents are among the highest in the world. Similar-size cities such as Seattle, Denver and Austin, Texas, have approved construction for three to four times as many residential units as San Francisco since 2015, according to US census building permit data.
From 2015 to 2021, the city permitted 24,600 units to be built, a little over 3,500 units annually. The Chronicle looked at six years worth of building permit data for 15 cities with populations between 600,000 and 1.1 million people and found that San Francisco ranked in the bottom half. (The US census uses new housing units permitted to measure local housing construction because most permitted housing gets built.)
In the late 60s, the California government issued a mandate requiring local governments to identify and meet the housing needs of residents. Known as the Regional Housing Needs Allocation, the mandate requires local governments to determine how much housing needs to be built to house its projected population. The final assessment is an eight-year plan called the Housing Element.
According to the latest 2014 Housing Element, SF needs to build 82,000 new units from 2023 to 2030, which means building more than 10,000 units per year starting in 2023. That’s almost triple the city’s recent pace.
