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San Francisco plan aims to accelerate housing construction

Wally Gobetz
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Flickr/Creative Commons

San Francisco Mayor London Breed and Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin introduced a housing fee reform plan Tuesday to jumpstart housing construction. The plan would temporarily decrease the number of affordable units the city requires developers to include in new buildings and cut development impact fees — which developers pay to fund offsite capital improvements — by one-third for the next three years.

In a press release, Mayor Breed said, quote, “We are fundamentally changing how we approve and build housing in San Francisco.”

There are currently thousands of projects that the city has approved, but that contractors will not build because costs are too high. Breed and Peskin’s plan to cut permitting costs and lower affordable unit requirements aims to make housing construction pencil out — in other words, to ensure that developers profit from new housing construction. They hope this will spark a building boom.

Proponents of the plan say it could unlock 8,000 already-approved projects citywide, including 2,500 downtown.

The plan comes as San Francisco’s state-mandated deadline to construct 82,000 new homes by 2031 draws nearer.

Max Harrison-Caldwell is a summer intern at KALW and a student at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where he is studying audio reporting and photojournalism. Before going back to school, he covered streets and public space for The Frisc. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Thrasher Magazine.