City Insider: Huge affordable housing bill to go before voters in November.
San Francisco voters will be asked to weigh in on the biggest affordable housing bond in city history this November, a measure that could lead to the construction of about 2,800 new affordable housing units in the next four years.
The Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to place the bond — originally proposed by Mayor London
Breed in January — on the Nov. 5 ballot. The measure will need to pass by a twothirds majority.
“This bond will allow us to create more affordable homes for seniors, continue rebuilding our public housing throughout the city, begin construction on projects for lowincome residents that are ready to be built today, and keep current tenants housed,” Breed said in a statement after the vote. “Building more housing requires a wide range of solutions, and this bond is a key part of that effort.” Breed and board President
Norman Yee, who cosponsored the measure with the mayor, spent months hashing out the details and rallying their colleagues around it. A $300 million bond was originally proposed, but the measure grew to $600 million over the past few months after the City Controller’s Office found that the city could take on a bigger debt without having to raise property taxes.
San Francisco officials rallied in support of the bond on the City Hall steps Tuesday alongside dozens of representatives from the building and construction trades unions and community groups.
“We know we need to do something big. We needed to come together,” Breed said. “We’re here united to make sure that voters pass this bond in November!”
If voters pass the bond in November, the money will be used to repair and reconstruct dilapidated publichousing developments, upgrade rental housing for lowincome individuals and families, and create new affordable housing for seniors and teachers. Despite its size, the measure will deliver only a tiny fraction of what the city needs to build to meet the tsunami of demand for subsidized homes. It costs $700,000 per unit to build affordable housing in San Francisco, according to the Mayor's Office of Housing and Community Development.
Labor unions were initially reticent to back the bond out of concern that the housing funded by the measure wouldn’t be covered by the city’s project labor agreement, which lays out the employment terms and conditions for work on public projects, including worker protection and pay guarantees.
Because the city hires private contractors to build and nonprofits to operate affordable housing projects, they’re not “public” jobs, and not covered under the project labor agreement. Unions were concerned that their laborers would lose out on work, or not be as protected on the job without the labor agreement.
But tensions were smoothed over after city officials showed labor groups that the last time the city passed a $310 million affordable housing bond, in 2015, almost 100% of the work went to unionized workers.
Before the vote, Yee praised his colleagues for unanimously supporting the measure. But, he said, more work still needs to be done to make San Francisco more affordable for lower and middleincome residents.
“If we want to keep our workforce and new families in San Francisco, we must do more to support these residents, too,” Yee said. “The need will continue to be there after this bond.” — Trisha Thadani and Dominic Fracassa
San Francisco has been a known hub for childsex trafficking for over a decade, according to the FBI. But a new, coordinated effort by city officials and service organizations is sprouting up to curb that.
San Francisco received a $9.3 million state grant to create a new program that will provide housing and social services to young survivors of sex trafficking or those at risk of becoming victims of it.
The grant was awarded to the city’s Department on the Status of Women, which will oversee partnerships with 10 different social services organizations, including Huckleberry Youth Programs, Larkin Street Youth Services and the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center.
Together, the city and the service organizations will spend the next three years operating a pilot program to provide a range of housing placement and social services to sexually exploited youth. Teens and young adults experiencing homelessness and children wrapped up in the childwelfare or juvenile justice systems are particularly vulnerable to predation and sexual exploitation.
“Any young person who is homeless or experiencing exploitation in our streets is one too many. We must do better in San Francisco,” Mayor Lon
don Breed said in a statement. “This funding will allow us to develop programs and provide services that help our most vulnerable residents and survivors of commercial sexual exploitation, and prevent chronic homelessness in our city.”
The city envisions creating a range of services, including a coordinated, roundtheclock response team for survivors or atrisk youth, mental health services and shortterm residential therapeutic program beds.
In a report released last year, San Francisco agencies identified 208 victims of sex trafficking under age 25. Of that total, 77 were under the age of 18.
The report examined reports from 2016, the most recent year when data were available. Efforts to keep the identities of victims anonymous can mean that cases get reported multiple times and, as the report points out, many cases never get reported at all.
“It’s very much an invisible problem. People don’t get it — they think it only happens overseas. They don’t know that San Francisco is one of the top destinations for this,” said
Emily Murase, director of the Department on the Status of Women.
Young people “fall into this because of their lack of stable housing and a lack of protection . ... The focus of the grant is on ... creating a family environment for these youth. They have not come across trusted adults and don’t have the support of a family environment,” she said. — Dominic Fracassa
Some lastminute amendments slipped into a major state bill intended to reform the way the state’s investorowned utility companies respond to wildfires — and pay for the damage they inflict — have San Francisco officials concerned about the future of the city’s energy independence.
The bill, AB1054, would, among other things, create at least a $21 billion fund to cover future wildfire damage claims. The bill passed the state Senate easily Monday and is now headed to the Assembly. Gov.
Gavin Newsom wants the legislation passed by the end of the week — ahead of the Legislature’s summer recess.
But amendments introduced late Friday have stirred concern among San Francisco officials. On Tuesday, Supervisor Aar
on Peskin introduced a resolution supporting the bill — but only if the amendments are removed.
Given the speed at which the bill is moving, the Board of Supervisors took the unusual step of voting on the resolution the same day it was introduced. The vote was unanimous, with the entire board signed on as cosponsors, save Supervisor
Catherine Stefani, who is out of the country.
The amendments in question would grant the California Public Utilities Commission sweeping new powers to review and impose conditions on any sale of an electrical or gas company to a public entity, like a city government. They could, officials fear, stifle the city’s ability to buy up assets from Pacific Gas & Electric Co.
In light of the company’s bankruptcy, San Francisco in particular is seriously considering buying some of PG&E’s infrastructure in order to reduce the city’s reliance on the utility. State Sen. Scott Wie
ner, DSan Francisco, opposed the bill in large part because it would constrain the ability of local governments to create or grow municipal utilities, he said.
The amendments also stipulate that the city would have to get the approval of the CPUC to reduce the wages and hours of any PG&E employees the city hires as part of a sale. If passed into law, that provision could conflict with the city’s collective bargaining agreements, which lay out the ways in which the city interacts with unionized workforces. On Monday, Mayor London Breed in San Francisco, Libby Schaaf in Oakland and Sam
Liccardo of San Jose sent a joint letter to Newsom and the top leadership of the state Senate and Assembly questioning the relevance of the amendments to the bill’s broader goals and urging their removal.
The amendments, the mayors wrote, “would expand CPUC authority and impinge on local governments’ ability to provide utility service, something (local governments) are empowered to do by the California Constitution.”