Our San Francisco is a place of renters, where an estimated 65 percent of households rent homes. Yet the city itself has no solid grasp of how many homes are actually for rent in SF, nor how many people are really living in them.
At City Hall, lawmakers who craft housing policy fight over density and affordability, the Rent Board enforces the rules, and the public spends hours making comments, but no one has up-to-date information on basic matters such as how many rental units citywide are vacant or occupied, or how much the average renter pays every month.
Sup. Matt Haney complained in December that not having accurate data on rents and vacancies “and [that] we have to look to Zillow and Craigslist for this information is ridiculous.”
The world is watching a supposed “exodus” from SF right now, but it will take demographers years to calculate how many people actually left for good; if the city had a database of rental vacancies, it could provide concrete indicators about the volume of departures immediately.
There’s a clear need for such information. Five years ago, City Hall was gnashing its teeth over how to regulate short-term rentals, driven by companies like Airbnb, but had almost no public data about how many vacant units there were in SF or when they were cleared out. In fact, the question of just how many homes are not occupied in the Bay Area is an incredibly touchy political issue — and when hard data is hard to come by, agitprop takes over the policy debates.
Some of that will now change, after the Board of Supervisors voted at the end of last year to create the city’s very first rental registry. But even this new measure leaves some curious blind spots in the city’s field of vision.
(Editor’s note: City lawmakers intentionally do not use the term “rental registry” for the new program, preferring to call it “housing inventory.” We’re calling it a registry anyway to avoid confusion with the Planning Department’s annual Housing Inventory report.)
The new law will require all SF homeowners to report annually whether their homes are owner-occupied. For those that aren’t, landlords must also report contact information for themselves or their property manager, along with data like the square footage of the home, vacancies and occupancies for the past year, and “the base rent, reported in $250 increments” for whomever might be living there.
The registry won’t be ready until July 2022. Those who don’t report will be denied a license to raise rents. (Oh yeah, you’ll need a license to raise the rent now.) Sup. Sandra Lee Fewer, whose term on the board ended earlier this month, spearheaded the proposal, calling it “long overdue.”
The then-supervisor claimed that such a registry will help the city “better administer the rent ordinance” and guard rent-controlled housing against illegal price hikes. Other cities use similar databases to keep tabs on which buildings are up for code inspections, and also to enforce violations; to keep track of housing trends and costs at a neighborhood level; or simply to reinforce the idea that being a landlord is a business that requires oversight.
The U.S. Census does estimate median rents in San Francisco, and the Planning Department uses census data to get a rough estimate of how many rental units the city has. (That’s where the 65 percent figure we cited comes from.) But that data set is updated once per year at most, and isn’t very granular. Online rental platforms often report median rents for cities like SF, but based only on homes listed on their own sites. For a more specific idea of what’s happening with housing, tech-savvy San Francisco has long had to guess.
It didn’t have to be this way: Plenty of other Bay Area cities have run rent registries for years, including Berkeley, East Palo Alto, and Richmond. San Jose started one up in 2018, and Concord voted last year to adopt a registry as well. “This has been the way we’ve always done business,” Matt Brown, an attorney for the Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board, tells The Frisc. “There’s always some resistance to regulation, but it’s not controversial.”
Alan Mallach, a fellow at the nonprofit Center For Community Progress, which revitalizes abandoned or neglected properties, says that countless cities outside of California treat rent registration as an everyday matter. “In New Jersey, where I live, any municipality beyond a small village has a registry. It’s normal,” he adds. “You think of California as a progressive state interested in tenant concerns, but I guess it’s not really overwhelmingly so.” (Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, who represents Berkeley and Richmond in Sacramento, has been pushing for a statewide rent registry for years, to no avail.)
The data and the details
Even SF’s new plan is modest by several standards: Although it’s slated to cover the entire year, the data will only be updated annually. And rather than a specific rent figure, landlords will round off to the nearest $250.
According to the legislation, landlords with 10 units or more must begin reporting their data to the Rent Board by July 1, 2022 and by March 1 in subsequent years. Those who own rental properties with under 10 units will first report the data by March 1, 2023. The requirement is expected to apply to approximately 233,518 units, or about 57.4 percent of total housing units in SF. That’s much less comprehensive than some advocates have sought.
Cynthia Fong, an organizer for the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco, says that while the group is happy about the new measure, it had hoped for a real-time resource that landlords would update whenever the status of a unit changes (all the better to be watchful of potentially abusive rent hikes or evictions).
Other Bay Area cities have run rent registries for years, including Berkeley, East Palo Alto, and Richmond. San Jose started one up in 2018, and Concord’s voted to adopt a registry as well. But tech-savvy SF has long had to guess.
So how has a supposedly world-class city like SF gone without this for so long, and why adopt a half measure now? “The administrative challenges of having to enforce it were difficult for the Rent Board to imagine,” Fong says of the real-time reporting plan. A more basic system makes for less work on enforcement, and “after all, if you pass a law and nobody [cares], did it really pass at all?”
Fong suggests that historically, rent registries were a way to enforce vacancy controls, which SF has never had. The idea of registration simply as a way of collecting critical data somehow just never seemed as important.
The program may cost up to $3.6 million per year, a small sum relative to the city’s mammoth $13 billion budget, but it’s enough for spending hawks to have something to carp about. Naturally, landlord lobbies hate the whole thing, which could have kept it out of the picture in the past.
“I just don’t see any reason” for the registry, says Noni Richen, president of the Small Property Owners of San Francisco Institute, calling such data collection an invasion of privacy. “It’s our property we’ve worked all our lives for, but sometimes I think [the city] would rather have nonprofits run all rentals.”
“The ordinance doesn’t bring any tangible, additional benefits for either landlords or tenants,” Charley Goss, spokesperson for the San Francisco Apartment Association, says via email, adding that landlords are skeptical that the Rent Board has the staff or funding to execute the plan.
Sign of the times
With the city firmly in the grips of multiple crises—not just housing, but homelessness and the collapse of small businesses amid a national pandemic, among others—the municipal proposal to pin down numbers on rentals doesn’t seem so intrusive anymore. “Sometimes there does need to be a critical mass of stakeholders asking for the same thing, or a particular politician getting excited about something,” says Sarah Karlinsky, an adviser with the urbanist think tank SPUR, pointing to the predicament we’re in and how it plays a part. “In psychology they call it the Overton Window.”
Perhaps the new law will open everyone’s eyes to a more informed, data-centric perspective about housing in San Francisco. As it stands, some claim that SF’s housing crisis is just an illusion, and if there is one that it’s the result of tens of thousands of needlessly vacant homes — which again is not accurate, but defining what exactly is meant by “vacant” and crunching the numbers from there is no small task. Our city’s camps are so far apart on housing issues that it’s not always possible for everyone to agree on what the problem looks like and how to address it.
In a perfect world, the new rental database would spotlight situations of true need — where renters are paying thousands per month for tiny rooms, crammed into decaying buildings teeming with code violations, and one or two rent hikes away from living on the streets — and empower advocates to make pointed arguments about policy and relief, backed by clear and reliable information. Maybe then City Hall could be better positioned to support its majority constituency navigating the rough terrain of renting a place in SF.
Adam Brinklow has lived in and written about San Francisco for 13 years, covering local communities for outlets like Curbed SF, SFGate, Eaters SF, San Francisco magazine, SF Weekly, and EDGE SF.
