Mayor London Breed, SF officials vow to ease pain of housing prices
SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- Newly inaugurated San Francisco Mayor London Breed has identified housing as a top priority. She spoke to ABC7 news about her plan to ease the pain for all residents.
San Francisco's planning department presented a data-driven report at San Francisco City Hall on Thursday about the city's housing needs and trends. The hope is that the report provides a foundation of information so that City Hall can be strategic about how to ease the city's housing crisis. "We have, between 2010 and 2015, created like one unit of housing for every eight jobs," said Breed, who says she will take at a multi-prong approach to build more housing in a city suffering with unsustainable rents and real estate prices. State and federal housing subsidies are on her list, as well as local solutions. "I'm looking at capital planning for a bond that we can look at building modular housing. We want to look at a building factory here, we could produce modular housing. There's no one way to get and build more housing production. We just got to cut back on some of the red tape."
VIDEO: Mayor London Breed shares passion for improving housing in SF
After more than a year of research, San Francisco's planning department released a housing needs and trend report. It indicates that new housing is being built, but most are market rate units. Some new units, affordable to low or moderate income residents, are being produced at a much lower rate.
"It's going to get worse before we have a solution to make it better," said Dennis Richards, the vice president of the San Francisco Planning Commission, who adds that the report shows many longtime San Francisco residents can afford their housing. "If you're new to the city, you're paying market rate so basically the newcomers are actually shouldering the housing burden more than the existing residents have been."
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When asked if he could afford to live in San Francisco without rent control, Richards replied, "No! We'd probably pay like $5,000 for where we live."
But with rent control, Francisco Cardona says his family pays less than $2,000 a month for their home in Mission District where they've lived for 14 years. But, once he graduates from City College, he's not sure he'll be able to afford his own place. "To stay in San Francisco, you have to get like, roommates," he said. "So let's see how things go."
For more on San Francisco Mayor London Breed, visit this page.
