San Francisco

When we study a city, county, or town, we examine its zoning, its development review processes, and how often approvals face opposition through local administrative appeals or litigation. We also study the development approvals to understand how local governments apply their own law, and state law. We map the approvals to examine what the community is allowing to be built and where. The following reflects data on approvals issued in 2014-2017.

San Francisco

Approvals (2014-2017)
140 multi-family housing projects approved
14,269 units total
2,168 units (15%) were affordable units

Zoning (as a percentage of all zoned land)
34% all income levels
25% single-family

Prior Use (of land approved for new multi-family housing development)
4% already residential (1,381 units demolished, 102 market rate units built, 287 affordable units built)
89% commercial
0% agricultural
6% vacant
Less than 1% unknown

Median Timeframe for Approval (entitlements)
26.6 months, two and a half times as long as the study’s median for urban areas of 10.8 months.
No projects approved during our study years were single-family.

Review Process
San Francisco’s charter makes all approvals discretionary.

Opposition to Development
Three projects faced litigation. The median timeframe for the entitlement process plus lawsuit completion in San Francisco was 88 months.
20 projects faced administrative appeal.

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San Francisco has comparatively more land zoned for dense housing, but it is not evenly distributed throughout the City.

Unlike many of the cities we studied, more than a third of all zoned land in San Francisco is zoned for all income levels. That's far more than some of the other cities we studied in the region (like Oakland, or San Jose). Most of the San Francisco's zoned land area also has comparatively good access to high quality public transportation, as well. This base zoning is good for increasing walkable communities and transit-oriented development. It is also a necessary (but insufficient) condition for affordable housing.

One issue, however, that challenges the City's goals for housing equity is not only how much land area is zoned for all income levels, but where that zoning for all income levels is located. Dense zoning in neighborhoods of higher opportunity is limited to about 5 square miles citywide. That type of zoning is also mostly concentrated on one side of the City. Very little of this zoning is located in higher or highest opportunity areas. This likely contributes to why so few of the entitled deed-restricted affordable housing units in our study years are sited in higher opportunity areas.

When compared with other cities, San Francisco's housing development process takes a remarkably long time to navigate.

One of the most significant findings out of our research in San Francisco is that this city has the longest timeframes to approval, by far, among all of the places we have studied. The median timeframe for 2014-2017 multi-family housing approvals was 26.6 months--which is two and a half times as long as the study’s median for urban cities of 10.8 months. San Francisco’s timeframes represent an outlier even within the cities we have studied in the same metropolitan region, which had median time frames ranging from ~5 months (Oakland) to ~19 months (Palo Alto), but also across all our study cities. Also notable, even when the City applied exemptions from the California Environmental Quality Act to proposed development that conformed to all zoning and planning requirements, the median timeframes to entitlement exceeded two years.

Process timeframes in San Francisco are lengthy even when development conforms to the City's zoning and planning.

Sometimes developers may ask a city to make an exception to the city's existing local law and planning in order to develop their parcels. Those requests typically involve multiple steps during the planning review stage, and they may require multiple local bodies to review and approve the requests to develop. Those kinds of request might theoretically invite more review (and potentially time) into the development approval process. Relatedly, when a developer seeks to build condominiums, that involves a state mapping law that adds another approval step (and potentially more time) to the process.

What we found significant in San Francisco, however, was that even when a proposed development conforms to all local zoning and planning requirements the approval process still takes a really long time.

We think San Francisco's local law likely contributes to these comparatively long timeframes to approval. As a starting point, the City's law makes all development discretionary, requiring the City's Planning Department review everything (even developments that require only building permits under the local law). This also means that local law triggers application of the California Environmental Quality Act to development applications.

We found and studied 23 instances of "discretionary building permit" approvals in San Francisco. Sometimes those permits would eventually lead to condominiums (triggering approvals and hearings under the state's mapping law). But there were also "discretionary building permits" issued to build apartments--apartments that conformed to all local law and planning--and the median timeframe for this group was still 24 months.

Also notable is the City Charter's provision allows interested parties to request hearings before the Planning Commission even if the development application conforms to all law and planning and would not otherwise require approval from the Planning Commission. In other words, the City Charter allows interested parties to add a process step and approval body that zoning and planning do not otherwise require. Five of the "discretionary building permit" processes we identified involved a party requesting review before the Planning Commission.

Approved housing almost always proposed housing where there was no housing before.

The housing approvals we studied would primarily lead to housing being built where there was no housing before. This is because most of the approvals (89%) we studied in San Francisco involved proposing housing on land that was previously commercial. There were a few development approvals that would lead to demolition (totaling 1,381 units demolished, 102 market-rate units built, 287 affordable units built).

Very few deed-restricted affordable units are approved in higher opportunity areas.

Critical to fair housing policy is the distribution of deed-restricted units across the city—relative to access to opportunity. The state classifies areas of the City in terms of opportunity (based on education, environmental, and economic factors). When we mapped our approvals data over the state's opportunity classifications, we found that only 2% of approved affordable units would be built in Highest and High Resource areas. In contrast, 60% would be built in Low Resource or High Segregation & Poverty areas.

More approvals faced local level challenges than challenges in court.

We found three approvals that faced litigation. Certainly, litigation extended an already lengthy entitlement process--the median timeframe for the entitlement process plus lawsuit completion in San Francisco was 88 months.

More proposed developments (20) faced opposition through local level administrative appeals. We also examined where opposition through administrative appeals was most likely. 22% of all dense developments sited in Highest and High Resource neighborhoods faced opposition through an administrative appeal, a share of projects considerably lower than the 44% of projects that faced opposition in Low Resource and High Segregation and Poverty neighborhoods. By contrast, in Los Angeles, the percent of all dense developments sited in Highest and High Resource neighborhoods that faced opposition through an administrative appeal was greater than those sited in Low Resource and High Segregation and Poverty neighborhoods: 36% and 19% respectively.