A proposal by Supervisor David Campos to temporarily freeze development of market-rate residential housing in the Mission District has already brought calls from the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment to expand the moratorium to the Bayview neighborhood. Meanwhile, Campos’ Board of Supervisors colleagues Mark Farrell and Scott Wiener have asked San Francisco’s Controller’s Office and the city’s chief economist to produce an analysis of the proposed market-rate moratorium.
Calling a moratorium on new housing “exactly the wrong approach” to dealing with the housing shortage and crisis, Farrell said, “We need to produce more new housing at a faster rate at all income levels in order to make San Francisco more affordable. A moratorium on new housing will have disastrous effects for our city.”
Wiener concurred: “When you have a severe housing shortage, the last thing you should do is put a moratorium on housing production. A housing moratorium will only increase pressure on our existing housing stock, which will incentivize more evictions and rent hikes, while decreasing funding for new affordable housing construction.”
Campos’ moratorium, which is supported by four other supervisors, would put on hold 1,100 housing units currently in the pipeline, and a majority of those units would also meet or exceed the legal requirement to provide additional permanently affordable housing units. Farrell and Wiener are asking the city’s chief economist to report on the effects of the moratorium on housing and rental prices in the Mission and citywide, the city’s efforts to produce new housing at all income levels, eviction and buy-out pressures, and any resources the city would lose for affordable housing production.
