City Hall Digest: Two Developments With Mixed Implications For San Francisco’s Homelessness Crisis

City Hall Digest is TogetherSF Action’s weekly dispatch from San Francisco’s City Hall, broken into bite-sized pieces—because understanding local government is your fundamental right.

San Francisco Tiny Home Factory Nearing Reality, But Still Faces Roadblocks

Efforts to build the first San Francisco factory that will produce prefabricated tiny homes are picking up steam. But FullStack Modular, the company trying to build the factory, is struggling to find a suitable location. 

Space is hard to come by in San Francisco. Whether it’s space to live, space to grow a family, or space to build new housing developments, it’s one of our most precious resources. Space for homeless shelters and permanent supportive housing is even more difficult to find. With an unsheltered population of over 4,000 people, the city needs to explore every option it can when it comes to getting people indoors. 

This is where FullStack Modular’s proposed prefabricated tiny home factory comes into play. The small, modular units of housing the factory will produce are meant for temporary use by unhoused people, where they can stabilize and find more permanent housing. Smaller, movable units means more housing can fit into the smaller spaces that exist in San Francisco, which doesn’t have many large, open parcels of land. And at about $350,000 per unit, these premade tiny homes are far less expensive than the average unit of housing, which currently costs approximately $1 million to develop in San Francisco.

But in addition to a lack of available space to build this factory, prefabricated housing has also run into opposition from special interest groups in San Francisco. 

In November 2020, as a new, prefabricated, 100% affordable housing project was under construction in SoMa, organized labor leaders raised objections that the project was taking work away from San Franciscans. San Francisco Building & Construction Trades Council President Larry Mazzola stated that he would block the use of prefabricated housing pieces, unless they were made in San Francisco with union labor (the factory for this specific project, in Vallejo, used union labor). 

While it makes sense for organized labor groups to look out for their workers’ job security, this is effectively another roadblock to affordable housing in San Francisco. Instead of using prefabricated housing from the existing factory in Vallejo for the past three years to quickly house our unsheltered homeless population, San Francisco now needs to build a new factory within city limits. 

San Francisco is facing a crisis on its streets and it’s going to take a large-scale, coordinated effort to solve the decades-old problem of homelessness. When dealing with this emergency, San Francisco cannot allow special interests to block progress on our city’s largest social issue.

City Approves Incredibly Expensive Measure to Keep Unhoused People in a Parking Lot

Last week, the Board of Supervisors approved an extension of a sublease agreement that would allow the Bayview Vehicle Triage Center to continue for another two years, from January 2024 to January 2026. The Triage Center is a parking lot in Candlestick Point with approximately 35 RVs that house people who would otherwise be homeless. Because the land sits on a state-owned park, the city has to rent it at a cost of approximately $312,000 per year.

So why is the Board of Supervisors’ own budget staff calling this the “most expensive homelessness response intervention” ever? As it turns out, this 35-space RV parking lot will cost the city a total of $12.2 million between now and January 2026—in addition to rent, the city will pay Urban Alchemy almost $8 million to staff the site over that time. And while the site is supposed to be served by PG&E, the city failed to get proper equipment and paperwork done on time, so they’ve had to rely on diesel generators, which limits site capacity. All told, the cost breaks down to approximately $140,000 per year for each person served at the Bayview Vehicle Triage Center.

While the center is labeled a “triage” site, meaning people are meant to stay there for a short time before being housed permanently or moved into shelter space, the average stay time at this site is 218 days according to the budget and legislative analyst. Furthermore, though the site has served 115 people since it opened in January 2022, it has made just 13 placements from vehicles into permanent housing. 

This is just not sustainable. With the scale of the homelessness crisis, San Francisco can’t continue to pay such exorbitant sums of money to do so little. Spending over $12 million for a parking lot to park 35 RVs and serve so few people shouldn't be shrugged off by anybody, much less the elected officials tasked with solving homelessness. For $12 million across two years, we would need far more people to get services and be placed into shelter or given subsidized rental assistance for this to make sense. The city needs to prioritize larger-scale shelter projects—at the very least, San Francisco needs to be better at placing people into permanent housing when it does bring them into temporary shelter.