By Madeline Medina : sfgate – excerpt (audio) CVS Pharmacy plans to close another one of its San Francisco locations next month. CVS Pharmacy plans to shutter one of its San Francisco locations next month, further shrinking its presence in a city already grappling with widespread pharmacy closures. The store at 701 Van Ness Ave. is slated to close on Feb. 24, the company said in a statement shared with SFGATE, leaving just eight CVS stores in San Francisco. Patient prescriptions will be transferred to the pharmacy located at 1059 Hyde St., which is about 1 mile away from the Van Ness location. Employees at the closing location are also being offered “comparable roles within the company,” CVS said in its statement. CVS did not cite an exact reason for the closure, but the company said some of the factors it considers are “market dynamics, population shifts and a community’s store density.”
The closure comes as San Francisco has been facing a worsening pharmacy shortage in recent years, affecting major chains like Walgreens and CVS alongside longtime neighborhood pharmacies…(more)
SB 6777 (Wiener rider on SB 79) passed with no opposition. We could use a little help with sending some opposition letters. It might be short and sweet and posted as a NO to have some effect.
One of the few projects Wiener supports against the will of SF City Mayor Lurie that may bring him down when he runs to replace Pelosi this year. Media is not ignoring the opposition on this one of four Safeways targeted for demolition in SF. How many other cities or states are losing grocery stores?
Anyone concerned about expanding on the allowances in SB 79, through a Wiener Rider bill, may want to follow the debate tonight and see if this is covered. They may also want to consider writing a letter in opposition to SB 677, the rider bill. You may just look at the attached explanation (16 pages) to figure out what he is doing now or go through the rest of the message if you have more time. Dr. Wahab’s summary of the bill is attached. https://csfn.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/SB6777.pdf
We have murals and books and movies celebrating the opponents of demolitions like the I-Hotel and redevelopment. What will we look back on 20 years from now?… (more)
When all is said and done a lot of what should not be built is not, often because the market doesn’t support it. The threats are real, but the reality does not back up the claims. The is the real reason these behemoths are on hold. How many large projects can you name that are sitting on the entitlement shelf?
Looks like Safeway wants to convert their business from groceries to real estate. Three Safeways are already closed or in the process of closing. They want to add the marina Safeway to the list. This is provably one of the worst site to building a tower. The Marina is sitting on landfill. This is where the houses fell and fires burned during the Loma Prieta earthquake. Fortunately Lurie doesn’t like this plan. What can be done to protect our grocery stores, pharmacies and banks when the land owners want to tear them down?
…
Arquitectonica architects said the unique design of this Marina District tower will allow it to preserve more “view corridors.” Whose views are they protecting?
Perhaps we should ask the candidates who are running for office what their plan is for protecting what we need to survive?
Richmond residents want mayor’s upzoning plan to change. Lurie says time for change is over.
Is Lurie succumbing to Wiener’s Whip:
It was Mayor Daniel Lurie’s first town hall to discuss his plan to upzone the low-slung Richmond District, among several other neighborhoods, mostly in the west and north of the city.
As the night wore on, the crowd was tough, and the normally even-keeled mayor grew increasingly feisty.
Residents asked repeatedly how he would protect the district’s rent-controlled housing from being demolished and replaced with new, market-rate units, and keep tenants from being displaced…
Why couldn’t the mayor’s zoning plan be changed to provide more protections for the local businesses and residents of the Richmond? Surely, there must be alternatives?
Lurie’s response was, essentially, that protections against these kinds of demolitions doexist: The city has some of the strongest rent-control protections in the state, he said, and that will continue under the new plan.
Due to these protections, for the past decade when the city’s eastern neighborhoods have already been upzoned, demolition of rent controlled units was “extremely rare.” On average, only seven units of multifamily housing were demolished every year, added Rachael Tanner, director of citywide planning…
Any more compromises, Lurie added, and the state could impose the “builder’s remedy,” and completely remove San Francisco’s ability to approve or reject future housing projects within city boundaries… (more)
If we hear this excuse one more time… There is a good possibility that the state laws recently enacted for a small percentage of cities, will not be on the books for long. SB 79 only won by 1 vote in both houses after the bill was exempted from a lot of the communities that voted to oppose it. As we know quite well, no law is written in stone. Our next round of state representatives and our next governor may vote to reverse a lot of the damage our the current lineup of state reps has done.
What is All the fuss about SB 79
Reading materials on SB 79: You don’t have to read them all, just look at the headlines and the number of articles being published about the growing opposition to Wiener and SB 79 from all over the state of California. Find out why the bill barely passed, after exempting most of the state from the bill.
The California real estate empire of Mosser Living, a company that owns 61 buildings in San Francisco but has been selling off parts of its portfolio, could lose another 428 housing units in the coming months, according to documents obtained by Mission Local.
Mosser is one of the largest corporate landlords in San Francisco. The company, founded in 1955, received receivership orders for 14 of its San Francisco buildings — 13 residential and one commercial — between June 5 and Oct. 15.
Receivership typically occurs when two parties, like a landlord and a lender, are in disagreement. The affected buildings are in the Tenderloin, Nob Hill, Pacific Heights, SoMa and Hayes Valley, and house 428 units.
While receivership does not, on its own, mean buildings are for sale, many have already received notices for public auction.
“Notices of trustee sale,” which indicate a default on a loan and a subsequent sale, were sent to six Mosser buildings between August and October that house 141 units. Those face imminent foreclosure if Mosser doesn’t come to an agreement with its lender, JP Morgan Chase.
The rest of the buildings could soon follow. If Mosser offloads them, the sales would continue a trend in which the firm is shedding properties. The real-estate company, which owns 3,500 units in California, has struggled to recover from the pandemic…
Steven Edrington, a real estate broker and real estate expert, suspected that Mosser may not be meeting its debt-service coverage ratio — the ratio between a business’ revenue and the debt it has to pay back. That, he said, may be leading them to sell of units.
“I think that’s the issue,” said Edrington. “They have too many vacancies. They’ve had to lower the rent and there’s also higher operating costs.”
Attached map indicates that most of the properties are located in the up-zoned Market and Van Ness area and around Marina Cow Hollow. If one were to hazard a guess, it appears that the REIT-profits are not paying off as expected. This should further tame to high-end real estate speculation by the gullible public. There is also a lack of competent real estate managers or appears to be. Somehow the business model is failing to work as promised.
The Yimby champion is now attacking planners who supposedly don’t know economics—but it appears that this law professor doesn’t either.
Chris Elmendorf—UC Davis law professor, prominent Yimby enabler, and de facto Chronicle staff columnist—is a scourge of economic illiteracy. Usually he trains his contempt on “folk economics” —what he and his colleagues call the economics of “a mass public befuddled by the relationship between housing supply and prices.”
In an October 30 op-ed for the Chronicle, Elmendorf cast a withering eye on a new target: city planners—specifically the staff of the San Francisco Planning Department. For evidence of their cluelessness, he cited the “Family Zoning Plan: Economic Impact Report” released on October 29 and authored by SF City Economist Ted Egan.
The report shows that San Francisco will not meet the state’s demand that the city zone to “produce”—both Egan and Elmendorf use that term—82,000 homes by 2031. Instead, Egan found that under the best-scenario/high-growth forecast, the upzoning mandated by Lurie’s proposed plan is likely to generate only 14,646 additional homes by 2045.
Elmendorf warned that by next February, the shortfall could trigger the dreaded Builder’s Remedy, which gives developers wide leeway to build whatever they want.
The basic problem, he argued, is that the models behind the Family Zoning Plan and the state’s own housing framework were devised by planners, which is to say, “crafted without economic expertise…. [T]here is not a single staff economist at the state’s housing agency. Nor does the state Legislature have economists vet housing bills.” The upshot: “the state tells cities to make realistic plans but doesn’t furnish reasonable modeling tools that they may use to evaluate their plans’ sufficiency.”…
The basic framework of the Regional Housing Needs Allocations was established by AB 2853. Contrary to Elmendorf’s claim, the state did not intend that framework “to fix” the housing affordability crisis. Nor did it penalize cities if the amount of housing built within their boundaries fell short of their Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA—sounds like ree-nuh).
Indeed, AB 2853 stated: “It is recognized that the total housing needs…may exceed available resources and the community’s ability to satisfy this need…. Under these circumstances, the quantified objectives need not be identical to the identified existing housing needs, but should establish the maximum number of housing units that can be constructed, rehabilitated, and conserved over a five-year time frame. [California Government Code, Section 65583(b)(2)]”
This was a major concession to both home rule and reality. It acknowledged that planning for housing and producing it are different things. Accordingly, the state qualified its expectation that housing production would equal each jurisdiction’s RHNA.
That qualification was eliminated in 2018 by Wiener’s SB 828. Besides absurdly inflating the RHNAs (for a rundown of Wiener’s legislative antics, see Michael Barnes’ primer), SB 828 erased the distinction between planning for housing and producing it, by amending the passage cited above so that it reads: “It is the intent of the Legislature that cities, counties, and cities and counties should undertake all necessary actions to encourage, promote, and facilitate the development of housing to accommodate the entire regional housing need, and reasonable actions should be taken by local and regional governments to ensure that future housing production meet, at a minimum, the regional housing need established for planning purposes. [California Government Code, Section 65584(a)(2)]”… (more)
SF Rec & Park GM Phil Ginsburg should answer that… where is Sen. Howard Baker when you need him?
Yesterday I reported on the Order from Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California — The Parks Belong to the People — which requires that San Francisco address the city’s systemic failure to ensure that all San Franciscans, including those with disabilities, have access to the city’s parks, playgrounds, outdoor recreational facilities, and pedestrian rights of way.
This was a massive victory for the class of plaintiffs and for advocates for persons with disabilities. Judge Martinez-Olguin, in no uncertain terms, found SF Rec & Park to be fundamentally deficient in addressing access issues for disabled persons to Rec & Park sites and facilities. She issued a systemic injunction, in full recognition of the systemwide failures in both policy and practice that led to “dozens of violations at 10 facilities throughout San Francisco…” according to U.S. District Court Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin in Kirola, et. al. v. San Francisco...(more)
Houses in San Francisco’s Sunset District on July 12, 2023. Photo by Semantha Norris, CalMatters
This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.
Imagine you’ve finally taken your car to the mechanic to investigate that mysterious warning light that’s been flashing on your dashboard for the past week and a half.
The mechanic informs you that your car’s brake fluid is too low. Dangerously low. Your brake fluid supply, he says, has reached “crisis” levels, which sounds both scary and very expensive.
Naturally, you would prefer that your car have a non-critical amount of brake fluid. “How much more do I need?” you ask.
“A quart,” the mechanic responds. “No, actually, three quarts. Or maybe seven gallons — but only routed to your rear brakes. Actually, let’s settle on half an ounce.”
Such is the situation with California’s housing shortage.
For nearly a decade now, the Legislature has been churning out bills, Attorney General Rob Bonta has been filing lawsuits and Gov. Gavin Newsom has been revamping agencies, dashing off executive orders and quoting Ezra Klein with the explicit goal of easing the state’s chronic undersupply of places to live.
California simply doesn’t have enough housing and this shortage is the leading cause of our housing affordability concerns — virtually everyone in and around the state government, along with the vast majority of academics who have studied the issue, seems now to agree on this point.
This consensus was on display this year when lawmakers passed two sweeping changes to state housing law, one that shields apartment developments from environmental litigation and the other that would permit denser development near major public transit stops in big cities. Both were legislative non-starters just a few years ago. These days even the opponents of these bills have accepted the premise that the state faces a “housing shortage,” a term evoked at least 30 times in committee hearings and floor speeches this year.
Now, if only anyone could agree on how big the housing shortage actually is.
Plenty of people have tried to put a number on the problem.
In 2015, the Legislative Analyst’s Office, which serves as a policy analysis shop and think tank for the Legislature, took an early crack at quantifying the state’s shortage by calculating how many additional units major metro areas would have had to build over the prior three decades to keep housing cost inflation on par with that of the rest of the country.
It came up with 2.7 million missing units.
A year later, consulting giant McKinsey one-upped the LAO, putting the state’s “housing shortfall” at 3.5 million houses, apartments and condos, a number Newsom campaigned on.
Not all estimates hit seven digits. In 2024, the housing policy nonprofit Up For Growth published the more modest estimated shortfall of 840,000 units, which comes pretty close to the 820,000 Freddie Mac put forward a few years earlier.
California Housing Partnership, a nonprofit that advocates for affordable housing, has counted the deficit at 1.3 million units — but not just any units. That’s how many homes the state needs to add that are affordable to people making under a certain income.
Then, this summer, a group of housing analysts including an economist at Moody’s Analytics, came up with the strikingly low figure of just 56,000 — though the authors acknowledged that it’s probably an underestimate.
Estimates of the nation’s overall housing supply are similarly all over the place: From as high as 8.2 million to 1.5 million (and, in one controversial paper, zero).
What even is a housing shortage?
The concept of a “housing shortage” is, in theory, pretty simple, said Anjali Kolachalam, an analyst at Up For Growth.
“It’s basically just the gap between the housing you have and the housing you need,” she said.
In practice, defining and then setting out to quantify the “housing you need” is an exercise fraught with messy data, guestimation and an inconvenient need for judgement calls.
Most estimates begin with a target vacancy rate. In any reasonably well-functioning housing market, the logic goes, some houses and apartments sit empty, either because they’re between renters, they’ve just been built or sold, they’re being fixed or renovated or they’re someone’s second home. A modest vacancy rate is what allows you to pull up Zillow or Craigslist and not get a “No Results Found” error. A very low one suggests there aren’t enough homes to go around.
But choosing a “healthy” vacancy rate — one that reflects a functional housing market — and then backing out the number of additional homes needed to hit it, is more art than science. Most estimates turn to historical data to find some level when supply and demand weren’t completely out of whack. Whether that halcyon period of relative affordability is 2015 or 2006 or 2000 or 1980 varies by researcher and, likely, by the region being considered.
“This notion of ‘pent up demand’ is necessarily in an economist’s judgment call.”
Elena Patel, fellow, Brookings Institution
Beyond that, many researchers have tried to put a value on what is sometimes called “pent up” demand or “missing households.” Those are all the people who would have gone off and gotten their own apartment or bought their own place, but, because of the unavailability of affordable places to live, have opted to keep living with housemates, with parents or, in more extreme cases, without shelter of any kind.
Absent a survey of every living person, there’s no way to precisely measure how many people fall into this camp.
“This notion of ‘pent up demand’ is necessarily in an economist’s judgment call,” said Elena Patel, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who helped put together a nationwide shortage estimate last year (4.9 million).
These variations in methods help explain some of the differences in the shortage estimates. Other differences pop-up thanks to the vagaries of data.
The Moody’s Analytics-led report, for example, calculated a national shortage of roughly 2 million units by adding together both the number of new units needed to raise the overall vacancy rate and the homes needed to backfill their measure of “pent up” demand. But for its California-specific estimate, the data wasn’t available to do the latter, potentially leaving out a big chunk of the statewide shortage.
Then some estimates differ because the analysts are defining the shortage in a completely different way.
The California Housing Partnership looks at the difference between the number of households deemed by federal housing guidelines to have “very” or “extremely” low incomes and the number of units that those households could conceivably rent with less than 30% of their incomes.
That gap of 1.3 million gets at a problem totally distinct from an overall shortage of homes.
Finally, there’s the question of scale. Housing markets are, on the whole, local. A national shortage is going to add together San Francisco and Detroit, masking the extremes of both. A shortage estimate for a state as large and diverse as California may have the same problem.
“It is like looking for a weather forecast for a trip to the beach and being told that the average temperature nationwide is likely to be 67 degrees,” the authors of the Moody’s-led analysis wrote.
Why estimate a shortage?
What might be more valuable than fixating on any one shortage estimate, said Daniel McCue, a researcher at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, is to look at all the estimates together and appreciate that, by and large, they’re all huge.
“Whether it’s one-and-a-half million or five-and-a-half million, these are big numbers,” he said. That leads to an inescapable takeaway, he said. “There’s so much to do. There’s so far to go.”
Patel, from Brookings, said trying to put a precise tally on what is ultimately the somewhat nebulous concept of a “housing shortage” is still a worthwhile exercise because it gives lawmakers and planners a benchmark against which to measure progress.
How much additional taxpayer money should a state throw at affordable housing development? How aggressive should a locality be in pursuing changes to local zoning? “The more concrete you can be in policy making land, the better,” she said.
The State of California does in fact have its own set of concrete numbers.
Every eight years, the Department of Housing and Community Development issues planning goals to regions across the state — a number of additional homes, broken down by affordability level, that every municipality should plan for. These are, effectively, California government’s official estimates of the state shortage.
To cobble together these numbers, state regulators look at projections of population growth to accommodate the need for future homes and then tack on adjustments to account for all the homes that weren’t built in prior periods, but perhaps ought to have been. If a region has an excess number of households deemed overcrowded, it gets more units. If vacancy rates are below a predetermined level, it gets more units. If there is a bevy of people spending more than 30% of their incomes on rent, more (affordable) units.
It’s a process that the state regulators have come to take somewhat more seriously in recent years, engendering an ongoing political backlash from density-averse local governments and neighborhood activists.
In the state’s last estimate, the topline total was 2.5 million units.
This coming cycle, which has already begun in the rural north and will slowly roll out across the state in the coming years, will produce yet another number. That will be one more estimate for state lawmakers of how much brake fluid the car needs.
Neighborhoods United San Francisco – westsideobserver – excerpt
Not Compliant with the City’s State-Approved Housing Element or General Plan
This week, Neighborhoods United SF (NUSF) has put the City of San Francisco on notice that Mayor Daniel Lurie’s “Family Zoning Plan” is not compliant with the City’s own 2022 Housing Element or its General Plan.
In its letter to Planning Commission President Lydia So, attorney Richard Drury, of Lozeau Drury, LLP, on behalf of NUSF states:
“The Rezone is flatly inconsistent with the General Plan. The 2022 Housing Element Amended the General Plan.The Rezone creates new building heights, density and development intensity that is flatly inconsistent with the 2022 Housing Element. Since zoning must be consistent with the General Plan, the Rezone creates an unlawful General Plan inconsistency.”
Further, Drury adeptly points out that:
“The proposed Rezone is vastly different from the zoning studied in the 2022 Housing Element and its associated 2022 EIR. Nevertheless, the Planning Department proposes to rely on the 2022 EIR. A rezoning of this magnitude requires thorough environmental review under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) so that the City’s residents and decision-makers can be aware of its impacts, can consider all feasible mitigation measures and alternatives, and can have a robust and open discussion prior to making irreversible changes to San Francisco’s landscape for all time.”
This plan would reshape San Francisco for generations without clear predictability on what gets built or where. San Franciscans deserve full transparency about the land‑use decisions that will shape every neighborhood.”
NUSF contends that the Rezone includes significant additional areas of the city, including areas within the so-called protected “Priority Equity Geographies,” vastly taller height allowances, density decontrol and excessive development that was not envisioned in the 2022 Housing Element or its associated EIR. The City has not thoroughly assessed the impacts of these actions on key environmental factors such as Air Quality, Wind, Historic Resources, and Biological Resources. Further, in its limited Addendum, the City has not fully analyzed how its Rezone would greatly increase tenant and small business displacement. Lastly, the Rezone would significantly impact transit lines and this has not been given enough credence in the minimal EIR Addendum issued by the City.
Lurie’s proposed Rezone would change the face of our city forever and thanks to 2019 legislation SB-330 supported by State Senator Scott Wiener, the so-called “Housing Crisis Act” once San Francisco upzones, it can’t downzone. The Rezone would be permanent and irreversible. NUSF is asking the Planning Commission and Mayor Lurie to listen to our over 60 neighborhood and community groups and organizations. The Mayor should pull back on the proposed extreme heights and density that would be allowed in the Rezone. Additionally, a vast number of San Franciscan’s are not aware of this proposal. Unfortunately, the proposed Rezone has no guarantees of affordability and will in fact only fuel speculative, luxury development that will not solve our affordability crisis.
“This plan would reshape San Francisco for generations without clear predictability on what gets built or where. San Franciscans deserve full transparency about the land‑use decisions that will shape every neighborhood.” says Lori Brooke, Co-founder of NUSF… (more)
NUSF Supports:
Context-fit housing: Build new homes at a reasonable, human scale that complements surrounding blocks.
Real height limits: Set reasonable, enforceable caps, no routine waivers. Extreme increases would erode neighborhood livability and fabric.
Responsible density decontrol: Allow added units only where height limits remain unchanged and the State Density Bonus does not apply.
True affordability plan: SF Planning must publish a realistic, fundable plan with timelines to meet affordable housing goals.
Protect historic resources: Safeguard designated landmarks and surveyed-eligible sites.
Impact first: Require a comprehensive infrastructure and environmental analysis for the projected 20–25% population growth tied to the mandate.
