By Laura Waxman : sfchronicle – excerpt
Over the past year, San Francisco has slashed its building fees and cut its affordable housing requirements almost in half. The city has also come up with a plan that promises to produce thousands of new homes in the coming years.
Now, a supervisor who is running for mayor is working to create a permanent funding source for a section of the housing market that’s challenging to finance: the “missing middle.”
Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin — who earlier this month promised a “Marshall plan for middle-class housing” after starting his candidacy in the November mayoral race — announced legislation Tuesday to create a way to pay for workforce housing using tax-exempt bonds…
Peskin’s proposal, called the “Missing Middle Workforce Housing Act,” aims to “produce and protect” thousands of affordable units using “little to no public funds,” kick-start stalled housing projects and “bring people to live downtown and other opportunity sites.”…
If adopted, the ordinance would authorize the city to issue two new types of tax-exempt housing revenue bonds that, according to Peskin, would not impact the city’s general fund: government bonds for publicly owned but privately developed and managed facilities and 501(c)(3) bonds to finance projects owned by nonprofits that serve a governmental purpose.
Revenue bonds are already issued by city entities to finance projects such as roads, schools and sewers.
The city would own the properties and hire nonprofits to manage them or would work with for-profit developers to build and manage them
Peskin said that the new “tools” that the proposed program provides to developers can be applied to a variety of projects. These include acquiring distressed or foreclosed rental housing portfolios, funding office-to-housing conversions and public surplus sites as well as for new construction…(more)