Mayor Daniel Lurie last week declared a “rent emergency” in San Francisco, as the median market-rate rent has shot up 25 percent to nearly $4,500 per month over the past year.
It’s the latest acknowledgment that last year’s Family Zoning Plan (FZP), Lurie’s signature housing plan, needs reinforcement. Before Lurie made his emergency declaration, both supporters and foes of the sweeping FZP, which became law last December, were already lining up new housing proposals for the fall and beyond.
Those plans tend to come from one camp or the other. The emergency plan is different. It includes a proposal from Sup. Jackie Fielder that aims to shield tenants from eviction for falling behind on just one month’s rent. It also includes an extra $3 million for the city fund that provides free legal help to anyone facing eviction, and it adds $3,000 to the mandatory $11,110 fee landlords must pay tenants displaced by an owner move-in, also known as an Ellis Act eviction.
Fielder and Sup. Chyanne Chen, who also endorsed the emergency plan, rarely see eye-to-eye with Lurie on housing matters. They were two of the four supervisors who voted against the Family Zoning Plan, alleging it would pose a risk to low-income renters.
The FZP was the city’s most sweeping and meaningful piece of housing legislation in 50 years, opening up large swaths of the city to taller buildings and new homes.
Builders might eventually take advantage of looser rules, but in the FZP’s nine months of existence, development has mirrored recent years — less tsunami, more leaky hydrant, with only a few hundred units completed so far in 2026.
That’s no surprise. Housing development takes years rather than months. Homes planned today might not be ready for half a decade or more.
In the meantime, demand driven by the city’s resurgence is outstripping supply, even beyond the city’s typical imbalance. Those who can afford it are offering wild amounts of money for the relatively few homes for sale or rent.
Beyond the emergency tenant protections, the underlying disagreement remains: how best to protect renters from being pushed out of San Francisco.
The gap is apparent in the other proposals each side is queuing up and, more broadly, in the political shift of recent years that, for now, seems to favor one side over the other.
Build more
After passing the Family Zoning Plan, Lurie and allies have stuck with a simple message: San Francisco must make it easier to build new homes, and the faster the better, because more supply (even market-rate homes) is a key to blunting or even reversing skyrocketing housing costs.
This analysis has broad support among economists, including SF’s chief economist Ted Egan. In a 2025 report, Egan projected that building even a fraction of the homes that the FZP promised would rein in costs.
Those who voted for the FZP want more laws to encourage housing construction. Four supervisors have signed on to the mayor’s legislative package that includes a big change to the city’s affordable housing rules. Instead of requiring new buildings with 10 or more units to include affordable housing, the bill raises the threshold to 25 units.
One sponsor of the bill, Sup. Stephen Sherrill, highlights the bill’s reduction or deferral of certain fees as an incentive to build. “What are the costs of construction in SF today, and what are units selling at or renting at, and does that math add up?” Sherrill says.
Housing prices are up — also an incentive to build — but that incentive is blunted by construction costs, escalated by Trump tariffs, high interest rates, international wars, and labor shortages. Sherrill says the building industry needs more help to boost its bottom line.
Sup. Alan Wong agrees: “If housing doesn’t pencil out, then it won’t be built.” Wong tells The Frisc he’s planning new rules to build and legalize ADUs — the often-illegal “granny flat” units in backyards and hidden behind garages. (Wong’s first bill will aim to lower legal ceiling heights in ADUs.)
Sherrill and Wong represent a big electoral litmus test of City Hall’s pro-housing shift. Both were Lurie appointees and had to defend their seats in special June 2026 elections. Instead of suffering blowback against their 2025 housing votes, they cruised to victory and are expected to do the same this November.
Board president Rafael Mandelman, termed out at the end of the year, advises whomever wins his seat to support the mayor’s efforts to disentangle the city’s Byzantine permitting process. “That’s all very much a work in progress, but they’ve gotten some things done,” Mandelman tells The Frisc.
Protect more
Chen, who represents the Excelsior and other southern neighborhoods, has a different idea. She, Fielder, and Sup. Shamann Walton — who also voted against the FZP — are floating new rules about the demolition of affordable housing, which they worry the FZP will encourage.
Chen’s legislation says if a developer knocks down rent-subsidized homes, it must replace them with the same number of units and charge the same rent. This rule would only apply within zones known as equity priority neighborhoods, which the city’s housing blueprint defines as areas “with a higher density of vulnerable populations,” such as low-income renters.
The Mission, Bayview, Tenderloin, and Chinatown are among the largely priority equity neighborhoods; other neighborhoods have pockets marked with the designation.
The Family Zoning Plan’s looser rules mostly avoid these areas, instead focusing on richer areas in the middle, west, and north of the city. But as Chen’s aide Charlie Sciammas notes, there are some exceptions.
The board’s two flanks represent what Mandelman calls the basic tension of SF housing politics: The drive to build versus the desire to preserve.
He represents both. Mandelman voted for the FZP, but only after a promise to embrace the protection of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of buildings judged to have historic or architectural merit. That effort, slowly making its way district by district, recently got a boost from Lurie.
The 20th century demolition of neighborhoods still drives political discourse in the city. Before the board voted the FZP through, opponents circulated flyers with wrecking-ball images, and Lurie lamented at a tense Sunset District town hall last year that “I have been told I am a bulldozer.”
The G word
Past urban renewal like the razing of the Fillmore couldn’t happen today, but development opponents now raise a specter that’s harder to pin down. “I know how gentrification starts, and this upzoning plan is not in service of the people,” one critical resident wrote to the board during last year’s FZP debates.
Gentrification, a term used in housing discourse since the 1970s, refers to low-income residents being driven out of neighborhoods or cities in favor of higher-income earners.
But the word is used to fit all kinds of viewpoints. A 1985 Chronicle story about the rising cost of living warned of “upscale video stores” coming to your block and “a wave of Asians and white-collar professionals” driving up home prices. In 2023, a Chronicle food critic lambasted a Mexican restaurant in Oakland for serving up “the bitter taste of gentrification.” (The eatery later closed, although the owner told The Frisc he didn’t think the review was the reason.)
In its specific definition, gentrification — that is, a San Francisco tilted ever more toward those with money — is indeed happening. In July, the median single-family home was more than $2 million, up more than 25 percent from the same time a year ago. Since 2010, the median gross rent is up more than 78 percent, per the Census.
Even during the pandemic, when a temporary exodus slowed SF’s prices, a 2021 Federal Reserve report found that “many [San Francisco] residents are struggling to afford housing” due to “growing inequality and wages that have not kept pace with rising costs.”
“It’s a good time to be affluent or have a job at an AI startup,” says real estate analyst Patrick Carlisle, “but for the less affluent times are more difficult, and the city will probably only get more expensive to live in.”
Call it gentrification, call it unaffordability; San Francisco will continue to debate how to reverse it. If the city and its Bay Area neighbors had committed years ago to building a lot more housing, today’s rents and prices might not be setting off as many alarms.
Elected officials like Chen and Fielder say building market-rate homes will only push out lower-income San Franciscans. The mayor and board allies disagree. During last year’s FZP debate Sup. Danny Sauter said, “This very body has a similar question before them in 1978,” referring to the vote that constricted development across much of the city.
Critics at the time warned it would dry up housing supply and push low-income San Franciscans out of the city. “All those warnings came true,” said Sauter.
The Family Zoning Plan has shifted the foundation of SF’s housing rules. While lawmakers keep adding floors, fine-tuning details, and making repairs, the benefits from all these changes will take years to shake out.
