YES ON PROP D,
NO ON PROP E

The Context

San Francisco is an incredibly expensive and complicated place to build housing. This is due to a complex web of factors perpetuated by stakeholders who stand to benefit from low levels of housing production. It keeps homeowners’ property values high and benefits community groups, but prevents new residents from finding secure and affordable housing. Supervisors have figured out a way to extract “concessions” from developers through a painful and prolonged public input process, in which supervisors’ allies in the nonprofit realm oppose (or threaten to oppose) a project until the developer pays enormous sums for “community benefit” packages. This process is unethical and legally questionable, but it keeps supervisors on the board because these nonprofits organize for them during campaign season. 

The gridlock in housing development is the crux of many of San Francisco’s other problems, so we believe this is the crucial area in which San Francisco must change. Mayor Breed has tried to reduce the complicated bureaucracy around housing approvals to speed them up since she took office. Every year, the Board of Supes puts forth a countermeasure to confuse voters that does nothing to improve housing production. In fact, it often adds another layer of bureaucracy. This has happened three times since 2020. This year’s Prop E is no different. 

Proposition D, the one we support, is the real deal. It makes it easier for builders to create housing units as long as they follow some simple rules. It’ll incentivize growth of our housing supply by removing years of mind-numbing bureaucratic obstacles from the process. How mind-numbing? Well, as it is now, it takes up to four years just for something to get approved and permitted. Under Proposition D, it could be as short as six to nine months.

Three types of projects would qualify for this streamlining under Proposition D:

• An apartment building that’s already 100 percent affordable

• An apartment building with at least 10 units, which has exceeded the city’s minimum 21.5 percent requirement for affordable units

• An apartment building or a building with both businesses and families living and working together, where the families are teachers 

Prop E, the supervisors’ decoy measure, won’t stimulate growth because it’s too restrictive, and is only on the ballot for political reasons. 

First of all, it requires an extreme standard for labor. Under Prop E, only about one seventh of the entire state’s labor union workforce would be approved to work on projects. Prop D still requires union labor, but allows a lot more people to work on projects.

Prop E also restricts renters to low-income San Franciscans. This sounds good, until you read the fine print. Prop E considers $97,000 per year for one person or up to $133,000 for two high-income. That may be true in the rest of the country, but in San Francisco a dual income household’s $133,000 doesn’t go very far. A first-year teacher making around $64,000 per year living with a firefighter making a little above average at $75,000 per year wouldn’t qualify to live in a home built under Prop E. Prop D allows people who are low-income and middle class to qualify for housing in one of these units.

Lastly, Prop E requires an unreasonable number of below-market rate units, which makes projects infeasible for developers. Prop D still has a very high standard of affordable units in order to qualify for streamlining, but it’s not so high that developers won’t want to go through with a project.

Support & Opposition

Prop D is being put forth by supporters of affordable housing and backed by Mayor Breed, Supervisor Matt Dorsey, State Senator Scott Wiener, GrowSF, and YIMBY. 52,000 people signed a petition to get it on the ballot—about five times more than were needed.
Supervisor Connie Chan is the driving force behind Prop E, and she’s got Supervisors Shamann Walton, Aaron Peskin, Dean Preston, Hillary Ronen, Gordon Mar behind her. She also has the support of progressive unions and the SF Democratic Party. But since Proposition D is so clearly going to lead to more housing production than E, one is forced to conclude that this slate of support is purely political.

Paid for by TogetherSF Action. Not authorized by any candidate or a committee controlled by a candidate. Financial disclosures are available at sfethics.org.

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