Political momentum to make homes easier to build in San Francisco seemed to hit a high-water mark with the June election. Housing wasn’t the only issue on the ballot, but it was perhaps the most obvious.
But action at City Hall, mirroring years of lawmaking in Sacramento, hasn’t yet resulted in many new homes.
Meanwhile, San Francisco has more than 37,000 homes in its planning and permitting pipeline, according to the Planning Department. About 25 percent of them are meant to be affordable — reserved for residents making roughly average wages, or often quite less than average.
These numbers do not include neighborhood-sized projects such as Treasure Island and the Hunters Point Shipyard, which make up a large part of the pipeline but proceed at different speeds than apartment buildings. (State housing regulators have also warned SF not to rely too much on these “major multiphase” projects to prop up the pipeline data.)
Sounding an upbeat note, Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development director Daniel Adams told supervisors last month that the city has 2,000 affordable homes under construction right now. SF only produced some 1,750 affordable homes in all of 2025.
All that, plus a new tech boom and freshly upzoned neighborhoods from the Family Zoning Plan would also seem to invite housing optimism. But a deeper dive shows a more dismal story.
Those pipeline homes aren’t as close to the horizon as the raw numbers might indicate. Like a python that’s only recently swallowed its oversized prey, an enormous number of units are piled up in the early stages. They could take years to fully realize; many might not make the finish line.
At the same time, the number of projects under construction, with a near-term promise of completion, continues to shrink. (See chart.)
That’s why Mayor Daniel Lurie and his allies on the Board of Supervisors are pushing for more changes to encourage development and pare SF’s approval process, which in 2023 state regulators deemed the most onerous in California.
It’s one thing to turn recent electoral wins into political capital. It’s another to turn that capital, like alchemy, into steel, concrete, and roofs over heads.
Take a number
To understand how the current pipeline is less promising than at first blush, it’s important to break down its six stages.
The first stage is Under Review, where city planners make sure proposals are legal and following proper procedure.
If they get that first thumbs-up, plans go through Building Permits Not Yet Filed, then Permits Filed, Permits Approved, Permits Issued, and finally Construction.
In the Construction phase, buildings aren’t necessarily under construction. But they have permission to start anytime.
Most of these classifications might sound similar, but a plan’s status can make a big difference in the developer’s ability to attract investors and get construction underway.
Almost all the pipeline growth since 2021 is in the Permits Not Yet Filed step — still early in the process where many things, from design changes to funding, can go wrong. These 9,477 units now make up about 25 percent of the pipeline.
Five years ago, there were only 448 units in this very early category, about 1 percent of the pipeline.
At the Under Construction end of the pipeline, where much-needed homes are far closer to reality, there are now about 3,300 units. Five years ago, there were 4,545.
When you look at actual housing production in the first half of 2026, you might have to squint not to miss it: The number of new units ready for occupancy was just 405.
There’s even reason to temper the optimism that MOHCD director Adams conveyed about affordable homes last month. When asked about his report, MOHCD spokesperson Anne Stanley called the 2,000 number “a general estimation.”
Those are units that have received “first construction documents” — essentially green lights to build. Of those, only 1,139 have a projected completion date this year.
In other words, SF has tens of thousands of homes in the pipeline but no way to tell how many will come to fruition or even break ground. “It’s like that Magic 8-Ball toy we used to play with when we were kids: ‘Reply hazy, try again,’” says SF Planning chief of staff Dan Sider.
‘The right conditions’
So what can the city do about the current imbalance, with so few units close to becoming actual homes?
It’s one thing to approve the “ton of units” in the pipeline, says Sider, but “unlocking them requires the right financial and market conditions.”
Various economic keys include the cost of construction, the price of rents and condominiums, and especially interest rates on construction loans. “If interest rates bottomed out, those pipeline numbers might become radically more real,” says Sider.
SF’s chief economist Ted Egan says don’t hold your breath. “Fed-watchers are not expecting rates to come down much in the next 18 months,” Egan tells The Frisc. “There is a decent case to be made that rates are currently too low.”
Instead, Egan thinks rising home prices and rents, spurred by jobs and demand, will be the main carrot that lures developers to build.
But some at City Hall don’t want to wait for market forces to kick in. Fresh off resounding victories in the June election, pro-housing elected officials say they have the political capital to cut more red tape.
Votes not pitchforks
San Francisco can’t lower the cost of debt or the price of construction, says Sup. Stephen Sherrill, but it can approve new homes faster.
“There’s a lot of land in SF that could be used to build new housing,” Sherrill tells The Frisc, but “the cost of construction is still too high for a developer.”
Sherrill’s housing views were the main reason his June election opponent, Lori Brooke, ran against him. Brooke also was one of the most vocal opponents of the mayor’s Family Zoning Plan, which Sherrill backed.
The outcome was decisive. Sherrill won nearly 70 percent of the ballots in District 2, San Francisco’s wealthiest and historically one of the most averse to new housing.
A similar vote took place in the Sunset District. Incumbent Alan Wong, a Lurie appointee whose first act in office was to approve the Family Zoning Plan, won an easy victory. Stumping aggressively for more housing drew votes, not pitchforks.
Sherrill now says the city should slash two kinds of fees that the city requires from developers of market-rate projects. The first are so-called impact fees that pay for things like infrastructure and transit.
The second are inclusionary fees that help fund affordable housing. The amount of affordable units developers must include in market-rate projects, currently between 12 and 15 percent, is in frequent flux; an advisory board recommends an adjustment every three years.
A proposed November ballot measure from Lurie and allies would cap that inclusionary rate at 5 percent. In exchange, the city would commit to triple its annual spending on affordable housing to $152 million.
If interest rates bottomed out, those pipeline numbers might become radically more real.
sf planning chief of staff dan sider
The business-forward faction in City Hall is betting that SF can get more bang for its buck by increasing the volume of homes, even if each home nets the city less in fees.
“We are indeed in a challenging economic climate, and yet we also know that San Francisco can do more to kickstart construction,” says Sup. Danny Sauter, who also cast an enthusiastic vote for the mayor’s zoning plan.
The recent election and Lurie’s approval rating suggest there’s political capital to pursue these changes and others, such as Lurie’s proposal to merge the Planning Department and the Department of Building Inspection, which is supposed to speed up the permit process. State lawmakers are likely to continue favoring a “streamlining” approach as well.
There are political limits on cutting fees and red tape. During budget negotiations last month, the mayor and Sup. Bilal Mahmood shelved their own proposal to slash the city’s transfer tax. They had hoped to put it on the November ballot. The tax, levied on sales of multimillion-dollar properties, could bring $400 million a year to city coffers by decade’s end, according to the city controller.
Neighborhood-level activists like Brooke will continue to rally against that kind of thinking. “I don’t think this is the time to reduce fees, [which] pay for infrastructure and services that make growth possible,” Brooke tells The Frisc. But without a seat on the board, the power to affect policy is limited.
If Lurie and allies can unstick the tens of thousands of homes in the housing pipeline, they could gain even more leverage. But the Magic 8-Ball still doesn’t have an answer about that potential future.
Oh, for goodness sakes, you talk about the pipeline and include a series of links, but you don’t link to the pipeline so that readers can directly inform themselves! Here is the pipeline link: https://sfplanning.org/project/pipeline-report#quarterly-report. And I’m also perturbed that without citation you glibly assert that “State housing regulators have also warned SF not to rely too much on these “major multiphase” projects to prop up the pipeline data.” That’s nonsense — those projects fully conform to the Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) mandate. And fundamentally, it is abjectly stupid for RHNA to require San Francisco — without opportunity to appeal! — to plan 82,000 housing units by 2031 — a number pulled utterly out of some Sacramento bureaucrat’s ass. Yet, here we are in 2026, and there are 75,000 units in pipeline. If anyone cared to actually deal with the problem, it would be to remove the “affordable” (meaning, below-market rate) mandate, which is what economically stops builders from building — how would you like it if someone told you that there’s a law (Inclusionary Affordable Housing Program) requiring you to lose money on 23% of everything you make?