Seniors are San Francisco’s fastest growing age group. Many are financially comfortable, even set for life, but many others are living precariously.
The city is responding with a wave of affordable housing for seniors, like the recently opened 98 homes on 6th Avenue, the first development of its kind in its neighborhood. But as The Frisc has reported recently, new rules to ease development can’t shield projects from delays due to neighbors or political and economic uncertainty.
San Francisco’s next big project for lower-income seniors is slated for a former union hall just steps away from the old Mint building on Market Street. The developer Mercy Housing and the city’s housing agency have an even more specific aim in mind: homes for LGBTQ seniors. The plans even include a proposed shimmering rainbow art installation on one side of the 15-story building.
“Older adults are the fastest-growing demographic at risk of homelessness in San Francisco,” says Connie Rule, Mercy’s chief of strategic partnerships. “For LGBTQ seniors, that risk is often compounded by disparities in economic security and, for many, the absence of traditional family support systems.”
Mercy hopes to break ground on the building at 1939 Market by the end of this year and have residents move in by 2029. There will be 187 units, and the nonprofit Openhouse, a senior LGBTQ service provider, will manage the building.
It’s not the partners’ first rodeo together. Mercy and Openhouse teamed up on two buildings on Laguna Street with 120 units combined, but 1939 Market is their first development at a larger scale. “This development reflects what we’ve learned through the Laguna communities,” Rule says via email.
While some older LGBTQ residents are sitting pretty, perhaps as part of a double-income-no-kids couple, others live on fixed incomes and rely on social security and rent control. They might also lack traditional support structures, perhaps having fled their families decades earlier and now without children of their own.
According to city records, more than 16 percent of affordable housing applicants and tenants self-identified as LGBTQ in the 2023-2024 fiscal year, the most recent data available.
Retirement homes can be fraught, even in a gay mecca like San Francisco. “I’ve heard stories of even married couples who chose to hide that they’re couples and get separate rooms” to avoid abuse from staff, even if it’s just one caretaker with a bad attitude, says Bren Cole, spokesperson for LGBTQ senior nonprofit SAGE USA.
Advocates say affordable housing isn’t enough; these seniors benefit from places that openly welcome them. Tenant attorney and former Eureka Valley Neighborhood Association president Alexis Levy says that this queer-centric approach to housing can be effective: “Gay men tend to want to live in community with other gay men, and they want to stay close to the Castro if they can.”
But there’s a problem. Reserving homes for LGBTQ people isn’t possible. It’s also not legal.
A welcoming environment
In San Francisco, the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development (MOHCD) operates the affordable housing lottery. Demand is fierce — Mercy’s building in the Transbay development drew more than 9,000 applicants for 184 units — and leases are awarded randomly.
Fair housing laws apply, well, fairly. Senior-only housing is legal, but San Francisco can no sooner reserve a building for LGBTQ people than it could for straight people.
“Neither the city nor the developer can consider sexual orientation or gender identity in leasing,” says MOHCD spokesperson Anne Stanley, adding “all leasing will follow standard fair-housing and lottery requirements.”
So when Mercy says it has a goal of 75 percent LGBTQ tenants at 1939 Market, which a company official did in a recent presentation before the Hayes Valley Neighborhood Association, it’s only that: a goal.
MOHCD collects some demographic information about tenants of subsidized housing; it cannot be used to qualify (or disqualify) them. But it’s no secret, right down to the giant rainbow on the side, who 1939 Market is meant to appeal to. The developer has two words to make this concept work: targeted outreach. Another word for it is marketing.
“Targeted outreach is allowed” under the law, says MOHCD’s Stanley, so Openhouse and Mercy plan to advertise 1939 Market as a welcoming environment for LGBTQ seniors and get the word out within SF’s queer circles to apply.
We have two [LGBTQ-focused] buildings in New York and it’s worked quite well. We have a huge mix of people — a lot of them are straights.
Bren Cole of lgbtq services and housing provider sage usa
Mercy could not immediately furnish examples of LGBTQ-focused outreach materials, but officials said examples such as words like “inclusive” and “accepting,” testimonials from queer seniors in other Mercy buildings, and imagery emphasizing Pride, the Castro, and SF gay history would be “consistent with” their approach to such campaigns.
“That’s how it’s been done across the country,” says SAGE’s Cole. “We have two of these in New York and it’s worked quite well. We have a huge mix of people who live in the buildings,” Cole says, noting “a lot of them are straights.”
(Mercy’s Rule estimates that nearly two-thirds of residents in their other LGBTQ-focused buildings are queer, but she stressed that for privacy reasons it’s only an estimate.)
Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman, whose district includes the Castro and Upper Market, acknowledges the limitations but defends the concept. “You could call the glass half-empty and say, ‘Is it really queer senior housing if only half the people there are queer,’” he says, but he lauds Mercy for providing “a lot of housing for LGBT seniors” at its other locations “without running afoul of civil rights laws.”
The affordable math
For the new project, Mandelman says the city first eyed the old Pottery Barn site at Market and Castro, which has sat empty since 2018. When negotiations fell through, 1939 Market was the next target. Mandelman says he “encouraged London” — that is, former mayor Breed — “to acquire it.” The city bought the lot in 2020 for $12 million and is leasing it to Mercy at $15,000 a month for at least 75 years.
Mercy is building about 100 studio apartments and another 80 one-bedrooms. Rents should not exceed 30 percent of a tenant’s income level. Those income levels determine their eligibility, ranging from a low of $16,350 a year — the lowest bracket on the official chart — to $65,450, which is 60 percent of the city’s median income.
While the new building seems on course, there’s still final financing to wrangle. In the best of times, affordable housing is often a highwire act to fund, relying on time-sensitive grants and loans from a variety of public and private sources.
These days, there’s also federal uncertainty. A long-anticipated affordable senior residence on SF’s western edge is now on pause because the developer says “changes at HUD have created uncertainty,” referring to the federal housing department. Other Bay Area developers say federal agencies have become so unpredictable they can’t do business with them anymore.
And in 2023, congressional Republicans blocked federal funds for a queer housing facility in Boston, forcing developers to find money elsewhere. (Says Cole of SAGE USA, “I sometimes think they just do a word search for proposals that say LGBTQ and say no.”)
The final cost to build 1939 Market isn’t clear, although it’s almost sure to be at least $117 million. That’s the “hard cost” estimate in a 2023 budget document. But “soft costs” such as marketing, permitting, and fees could add as much as $38.5 million more.
Mercy says $57 million will come from federal tax credits. The good news is tax credits are harder to meddle with than the direct funding that waylaid the Boston project. When asked about the risks, Rule says that Mercy “does not speculate on hypothetical political scenarios” and would only say that the funding for 1939 Market is “layered.”
Private right-wing groups are also filing lawsuits to attack DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) programs. San Francisco and others have counterpunched in court, at least against the federal government. “We’re not seeking out new lawsuits,” says Mandelman, but he also asks rhetorically, “How many lawsuits does [San Francisco City Attorney] David Chiu currently have going against the Trump administration?”
Yet amid all the rancor, Congress has just passed an unlikely bipartisan bill to create more affordable housing. It’s unclear how it will benefit SF. But as the city tries to meet promises of tens of thousands more homes for all income levels, anything that clears the path for buildings like 1939 Market will be welcome news.