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Housing Reform Now
By Eric Quezada

The Chamber of Commerce and the Tenants Union agree. The Chronicle and the Bay Guardian agree. So do the polls in each Supervisorial District, the San Francisco Planning Department, The State of California Department of Housing and Community Development, the Symphony and your local garage band. San Francisco has an acute housing crisis.

How big is the problem ? We all know stories about the enormous human costs of San Francisco's housing crisis - the dozens of people forced out of their homes and neighborhoods each year by evictions, the families separated by the generations, neighborhoods overturned and become unsafe, and the loss of working people, artists, and diversity. But there are also concrete numbers to describe our dismal predicament.

The numbers published by the San Francisco Planning Department and approved by the California Department of Housing and Community Development show:

At current prices and incomes, less than 8% of San Franciscans can afford to buy a home here, and only about 20% can afford to rent without cutting into their budget for other essentials - like food.

San Francisco's middle-class has shrunk by 8% over the last 30 years, and we can expect it to shrink still further soon Many middle-class San Franciscans are still holding on to the houses they bought years ago, because middle-class neighborhoods themselves have shrunk by 14%. In fact, the Planning Department estimates that we are currently supplying only 10% of the new housing needed by middle income San Franciscans

To avoid disaster - and, incidentally, to comply with State and City Law -- 64% of all new housing units built or rehabilitated in the City over the next 5 years must cost no more than $ 125,00 to $ 290,000 to buy, or less than $ 875 per month per bedroom to rent. Obviously, San Francisco cannot even begin to meet its housing requirements without a Board of Supervisors which is knowledgeable, sophisticated, and forceful about affordable housing.

Why is the failure to insure the supply of affordable housing a disaster ? A disaster for all of us, even those of us who comfortably own our own homes ?

There are, of course, the human, social, and political costs: the human tragedies of 2000 individuals and families who are forced out of their homes and communities each year, of people who know that their children can never live in the city where they grew up; the social tragedies of unstable and unaffordable neighborhoods, breeding crime and homelessness, of neighborhoods shutting down the diversity and energy that make San Francisco not only livable but also attractive; and the political tragedy of the loss of respect for government as it fails to represent the people who sustain it, who vote for it and pay taxes to it, and instead sacrifices them to the interests of people who want to live here, but don't live here yet.

Over all of this is the possibility of economic disaster for all of us - the possibility that, without vastly increased affordable housing, the San Francisco economy could collapse.

The Jobs-Housing Balance