State housing audit of San Francisco returns “no more leniency” report

California to San Francisco: Either build more homes or cede local control to the state.

State housing regulators warned the city that its glacial approval of new housing projects would make it fall short of its housing goal and force it to give up control of development if action isn’t taken, the San Francisco Standard reported, citing an “absolutely scathing” audit.

“This audit puts cities across California on notice: There will be no more leniency for illegally obstructing housing construction,” state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, said in a statement. 

The first-of-its-kind audit by the California Department of Housing & Community Development listed 28 actions San Francisco must take to streamline approvals and comply with its “Housing Element” plan to build 82,000 homes by 2031.

Failure to take action could lead the state to “revoke housing element compliance and may result in additional enforcement action,” officials concluded in the long-awaited probe into the city’s approval process. Some of the steps have deadlines as short as 30 days.

The report pointed to a study by UC Berkeley that found San Francisco last year took an average 523 days to approve a housing project — nearly 140 days longer than the next-slowest city or county.

And that doesn’t include the average 605 days it takes San Francisco to issue a building permit for an already approved project — nearly 200 days longer than the second-worst jurisdiction in the state.

Local developers blamed much of the high cost to build in San Francisco on red tape and other unneeded reviews and delays, state housing officials said.

San Francisco must now scrub parts of its discretion and subjectivity in planning review, according to the audit.  It must also reform how environmental reviews are applied to projects,  standardize and speed up its permitting process, plus increase accountability and transparency.

The city needs to create 10,259 homes a year, including 5,825 affordable homes, on average, to meet its housing needs through 2031, state officials said. 

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development found the city had permitted only 179 new homes in the first six months of the year — a rate of less than one unit per day.

State officials credited Wiener’s bill SB 35, enacted in 2018, for creating a ministerial process to improve the city’s planning approvals. But the audit also says “post-entitlement decisions” made by local officials haven’t complied with state laws.

“San Francisco has added layer upon layer of unnecessary discretion and bureaucracy for decades, and certain members of the Board of Supervisors have refused to enact the mayor’s reforms, even those they agreed to in certifying the city’s Housing Element earlier this year,” Wiener said.

“I applaud the California Department of Housing & Community Development for this bold enforcement.”

— Dana Bartholomew

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