S.F. Mayor's Proposal Would Eliminate Some City Fees For Affordable Housing
One of the challenges to building more affordable housing in the Bay Area is the high costs of building any multifamily property, including that earmarked as affordable.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed plans to bring an ordinance before the Board of Supervisors as early as Tuesday that would eliminate some city fees for 100% affordable housing projects and accessory dwelling units, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
Affordable housing has been a key platform for Breed since even before she ran for mayor, and she has taken steps since entering office to move those efforts forward, including creating a new housing delivery department. In September, she made a commitment for the city to buy $100M worth of affordable housing that would come out of a new modular housing factory San Francisco hopes to entice a firm to establish in town.
Her State of the City address in January focused on making it easier and faster to build affordable and teacher housing.
Breed told the Chronicle that the city needs to streamline the process for building housing and cut fees so that more money goes toward building more affordable housing.
The proposal has support from affordable housing developers, who note they receive funding from one city department to support building affordable housing, but then have to pay fees to another city department for reviews or inspections.
The ordinance would also make it easier to build accessory dwelling units, or ADUs, and remove certain permit fees for those as well.
