Blanca Torres contributed this interesting Business Times article about the difficulty of creating affordable housing in San Francisco and the role of market-rate housing developers, who either include affordable housing in their projects, build it off-site, or contribute a fee to fund affordable housing.
Market-rate developers, including BUILD, completed over 1,000 affordable units between 2013-2018. Non-profit developers completed 1,576 units during that same time.
The article goes on to discuss how all developers are struggling with increased construction costs and arduous entitlement processes that make it hard to finance and complete projects. BUILD’s Lou Vasquez is quoted talking about how the city isn’t doing enough to speed up market-rate projects and in the process it’s missing out on affordable units as well. SPUR’s Adhi Nagraj also discusses the difficulty that non-profit developers face and how increasing costs limit affordable housing.