By Keith Menconi : sfexaminer – excerpt
San Francisco’s housing growth remained sluggish in 2024, with the number of newly completed homes likely the lowest of any year in at least the past 10 years, according to preliminary figures from city housing officials.
Those numbers seem to continue a yearslong trend of declining housing construction that has persisted despite a furious effort to reform San Francisco’s housing rules and make The City — infamous for its marathon permitting processes that can leave developments in limbo for years — a more hospitable place to build homes.
In the face of continued anemic housing growth, city housing officials, developers and advocates say that they will continue to push for further measures to support new construction…
As for when those efforts will spur the long-hoped for development boom, they acknowledged, it remains impossible to say.
“I think I’m going to be cautiously pessimistic” of what 2025 might bring, said Corey Smith, executive director of the San Francisco-based Housing Action Coalition. It’s one of many pro-development groups that have been making the case that The City must dramatically ramp up its home building efforts if it ever hopes to turn the corner on its affordability crisis.
That measured pessimism is a stark turnaround from Smith’s outlook at the start of 2024, when he said he had hoped new streamlining laws would be enough to help San Francisco’s flagging housing sector overcome the economic disruptions unleashed by the pandemic, including spiraling construction costs and stubbornly high interest rates…
“It costs more to build the building than the building is then worth when it’s completed,” Babsin said.…(more)
This is old news for the most part. Did not realize the value of the finished building is not worth the cost to build it No wonder insurance companies are fleeing. There is no reason to build when businesses are closing and thousands of recently constructed units sit empty. Add the high cost of capital, labor and materials and you have no reason to invest in San Francisco development projects at the moment. No reason for Smith or anyone else to be too hopeful that things will turn around any time soon. Now if people would just quit pretending and lying we could put the constant pressure to produce more housing that no one wants to live in.
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