Family outside of apartment building enjoying playing on the grass
Credit: MOHCD / Bruce Damonte

Affordable Housing Funding and Strategies

Part of the Housing for All initiative

Meeting required affordable housing targets will take substantial coordination and funding commitments from government, private, non-profit, and philanthropic sources.

 Achieving San Francisco’s housing targets will require immense new funding streams and innovative approaches to produce and preserve housing affordable to people with low and moderate incomes. To develop this funding plan, the Housing Element calls for many actions that together are called the “Affordable Housing Funding and Strategies”. Through this body of work, San Francisco will develop the innovative resources and new strategies necessary to produce or preserve 46,000 affordable homes for families at very low, low and moderate incomes.

SF Planning is working with the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development (MOHCD), fellow City agencies, and other public, private, and philanthropic partners to identify existing and new funding and financing strategies to produce and preserve affordable housing.

Funding advocacy and affordable housing finance and development strategies are needed at the local, regional, state, and federal levels. As a first step, the City is convening the Affordable Housing Leadership Council. The Leadership Council will develop recommendations to expand affordable housing funding and financing tools with input from community organizations, philanthropy, private and non-profit development, and business sectors.

In addition to funding and financing strategies, San Francisco will need to strategically plan for: 

  • How to ensure the development of sites already in the pipeline for affordable housing

  • Strategies to identify and/ or acquire new sites for affordable housing

  • Implementing existing and new tools to preserve existing rental housing

  • Growing homeownership opportunities affordable to low and moderate income families

  • Supporting other housing priorities, as identified by equity communities

Affordable Housing Funding and Financing Recommendations Report

Recommendations from the Affordable Housing Leadership Council convened as part of implementation of San Francisco’s 2022 Housing Element Update

Affordable Housing Funding and Financing Recommendations Report

The Office of the Mayor, Mayor’s Office of Housing and Development (MOHCD), and San Francisco Planning will be supporting the Leadership Council deliberations by providing financial and policy analysis of possible funding and financing sources and related tools. 

The final deliverable of the Leadership Council is the recommendations from the Executive Committee - with input from the Technical Working Group. Based on these recommendations, Planning, MOHCD, and Enterprise Community Partners have produced Affordable Housing Funding and Financing Recommendations documents that provide context and explain the recommendations and actions with greater detail.

The work of the Leadership Council will help bring cross-sector investment, insights, and alliances. Only through working with other local, regional and state governments, advocacy organizations, and other sectors will San Francisco be able to address the needs of our diverse communities. 

Affordable Housing Leadership Council

Solving the housing affordability crisis requires insight and perspective from a range of community and industry experts. The Planning Department is convening individuals from community-based organizations, housing development, academia, business, and philanthropy to explore new and expanded affordable housing funding and financing tools to create the Affordable Housing Leadership Council.

The Affordable Housing Leadership Council is made up of two groups, the Executive Committee and the Technical Working Group.

Executive Committee

Seven leaders to identify new funding opportunities and direct recommendations:

Technical Working Group

Approximately 20 experts to advise on specific topics including local and regional funding sources, new funding tools, state and federal policies, and cost reduction. The Technical Working Group provide additional perspectives and insights on approaches proposed by the Executive Committee and will meet as-needed.   

Some of the key Leadership Council tasks for 2023 include: 

  • Evaluate available funding across all levels of government relative to needs, including recent changes and growing competition for funds; 
  • Improve funding deployment and reduce housing production costs for greater impact; 
  • Explore new funding sources including BAHFA (Bay Area Housing Finance Authority) and potential 2024 regional bond; 
  • Identify priorities for federal & state advocacy for affordable housing funding; and 
  • Consider and recommend renewal and expansion of local funding sources. 

Affordable Housing Sites Analysis and Strategy

The Affordable Housing Sites Analysis and Strategy is a key initiative of the City and County of San Francisco for achieving the City's affordable housing goals, led by the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Development (MOHCD) and San Francisco Planning.

This effort will recommend strategies for identifying, acquiring, and maintaining the most suitable locations for affordable housing, informed by community needs, financial feasibility, and programmatic realities. The analysis also explores best practices and strategies for developing specific types of sites, such as public lands and properties owned by religious and non-profit organizations, to affordable housing.

The Affordable Housing Sites Analysis and Strategy will advance the goals of the 2022 Housing Element (HE) and Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) by informing land acquisition for affordable housing citywide, in both the Housing Opportunity Areas in the western and northern neighborhoods as well as in Priority Equity Geographies (PEGs). The project will also complement on-going, related efforts to identify funding sources and ensure San Francisco can provide more affordable housing for everyone, such as the recommendations for affordable housing funding and financing developed by the Affordable Housing Leadership Council, and the Expanding Housing Choice Project.

Affordable Housing Pipeline Overview

This resource provides a visual overview of San Francisco's Affordable Housing Pipeline, highlighting existing project locations, number of units, funding needs, and ways to support housing production and access. The Affordable Housing "Pipeline" refers to the planned projects awaiting funding for construction or preservation on sites the City has already acquired.

Key takeaways:  

  • Much more funding is needed to build and rehabilitate the thousands of affordable units in the existing affordable housing pipeline. The City has several years’ worth of sites for affordable housing production waiting for funding, though these sites are not geographically spread evenly across the city.
  • Inclusionary housing units, which are affordable units funded by market-rate developments, contribute significantly to the City's total affordable housing stock.

Building on requests from the Equity Council and community organizations for a tool to describe the existing affordable housing pipeline and funding needs to their networks, this resource aims to enhance transparency, support community planning, and promote informed participation in the Affordable Housing Sites Analysis and Strategy. 

Analysis and Strategy Timeline

Phase 1: Project Scoping – Summer 2024

  • Develop the project purpose, key questions, and scope with City Agencies and key stakeholders including the Equity Council, affordable housing developers, and community housing advocates

Phase 2: Research and Analysis – Summer through Fall 2024

  • Assess the projects in the affordable housing “pipeline” and create a graphic for the community that describes the pipeline and challenges with implementation
  • Conduct key stakeholder interviews with key organizations, community developers, nonprofits, and religious institutions, with deeper outreach to enhance collaboration and understanding of the opportunities, challenges, and factors in acquiring and developing sites for affordable housing
  • Review local and state housing laws and research incentives and best practices for site acquisition, rezoning, public land use, and public/private partnerships

Phase 3: Analysis – Fall 2024

  • Identify and analyze parcels that meet affordable housing criteria, describing and highlighting subsets of sites that may meet criteria for various programs  
  • Synthesize best practices for site acquisition, rezoning, public land use, and public/private partnerships.

Phase 4: Reporting – Winter 2024/25

  • Develop acquisition strategy recommendations
  • Draft, review, finalize, and share the findings

The Affordable Housing Leadership Council will meet from May 2023 to January 2024.

The City will publish recommendations and analysis in a report in the Winter of 2024.

For questions on the project, please contact:  

James Pappas 
Acting Principal Planner
Project Manager
james.pappas@sfgov.org