State Approves San Francisco Law Speeding Housing Approval

The California Department of Housing and Community Development, which had threatened to rescind its blessing of San Francisco’s housing plan, has approved a new city ordinance designed to streamline the city’s approval process for building new housing.

On October 25, the state housing agency. Known as the HCD, gave San Francisco a 30-day deadline to pass a “constraints reduction ordinance” proposed by Mayor London Breed.

The city missed the 30-day deadline, but was given an extension, which it met on December 5, when the Board of Supervisors adopted Breed’s proposal, which exempts certain projects from the lengthy process of hearings before the city’s Planning Commission.

David Zisser, an assistant deputy director at HCD, said in a statement this week that the new ordinance is “consistent” with state law. Zisser noted that the city still needs to respond to a Nov. 28 “corrective action letter” requiring it to explain how it is implementing “overdue required actions” to streamline the housing process, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

When it imposed the deadline on Oct. 25, HCD was threatening to decertify San Francisco’s Housing Element plan to build 82,000 new homes by 2031.

Rescinding HCD approval of the eight-year Housing Element plan would have imposed Builder’s Remedy on San Francisco, allowing housing developers to proceed with affordable housing projects without getting zoning changes from local officials. It also could have made San Francisco ineligible to receive hundreds of millions of dollars in state funding for affordable housing and transportation.

Before it was passed, the ordinance put forward by Mayor Breed was amended to include protections for rent-controlled units and historic buildings. The measures protected single-family homes built before 1923 and rent-controlled housing units from being demolished for market-rate projects, the Chronicle reported.

Under its Housing Element plan, 46,000 of the 82,000 housing units the city will build in the next eight years are designated as affordable to low- and moderate-income families.

“We have been focused on making sure our policies not only meet the standards of HCD but also meet the standards of what we have committed to in our housing element. We have a lot of work to do, we can’t lose focus,” Jeff Cretan, a spokesperson for Mayor Breed, told the newspaper.

Breed initially proposed her plan to cut red tape, reduce fees and accelerate approvals for housing projects in an executive directive issued in February. The plan called for a rezoning that would increase heights and cut density limitations for housing projects in transit corridors on the west side of the city.