If you live in San Francisco, you’ve got local elections coming up next month; are you planning on voting? Last year, only about a third of eligible San Franciscans made it out to the polls. This year you might want to.
The ballot is full of proposals for dealing with the city’s number one issue: housing. Decisions in San Francisco will have big consequences for the housing situation across the greater Bay Area. There’s a lot of money at stake, and a lot of neighborhoods going through changes.
One of the most controversial initiatives is Prop I, or the Mission Moratorium. The initiative calls for an 18-month pause on market rate development in the Mission. Supporters say the neighborhood has been overrun by the market and demand that the city take time to develop a strategy for funding affordable housing. Opponents say, in this housing shortage, the city cannot afford the 18 month delay on construction. Reporter Liza Veale has been covering housing issues for Crosscurrents, she spoke with host Hana Baba about the ballot and Prop I in particular.
Yeah, people are definitely scared this is the new Manhattan. It’s hard to predict what will happen. There’s a new report out of the city controller’s office that said if we were to stop building market rate development indefinitely—which no one’s proposing just hypothetically—prices would ultimately rise a lot faster than if we were to keep building. But it also said, (a) that 18 months won't affect the market much and (b) we can’t possibly build enough to actually bring prices down from where they are now. In order to bring prices down, the chief economist said we’d have to build 100 thousand units.
