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)
SACRAMENTO — In nationally televised interviews and viral social media posts, Gov. Gavin Newsom has aggressively criticized President Donald Trump’s decision to send federal troops into Los Angeles and other Democratic-led cities. Less publicized have been Newsom’s own initiatives to clear homeless encampments and deploy state police to deal with high crime rates — a continuation of work that began before Trump took office.
The dynamic illustrates a tightrope that Newsom is walking as he eviscerates Trump’s policies even as he highlights his own, fundamentally similar approach to crime and homelessness.
Both Newsom and Trump are calling for widespread homeless encampment sweeps and deploying law enforcement to local communities to crack down on crime, though neither man acknowledges the similarities. Trump argues that Newsom is doing nothing to address problems in California, while Newsom contends it’s Trump’s approach that won’t produce results and lacks compassion.“We are trying to be responsive to the people we serve,” Newsom told reporters at a news conference last month. “As it relates to the president in particular, he’s doing things to people, not with people. It’s a point of profound, consequential contrast.”
The moves by Trump and Newsom reflect a yearslong shift in California politics and across the country toward pro-law enforcement, punitive criminal justice policies.
“There’s definitely been a swing toward harsher penalties and lots of resources, lots of dollars going toward law enforcement strategies,” said Tinisch Hollins, who leads the nonprofit Californians for Safety and Justice, which advocates for crime victims.
Sending police into communities: Newsom, who declined to be interviewed for this story, says his recent actions are not in reaction to Trump, but are rather the latest iteration of long-standing policies the governor has embraced. But they are happening in the wake of Trump’s deployment of thousands of federal troops to Los Angeles over the summer, repeated warnings from Newsom and other Democratic politicians about the president’s authoritarian moves, and Trump’s actions this weekend to deploy federal troops to Portland, Ore… (more)
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By Herbert F. Mintz II :48hills – excerpt
Lurie wants more density in an area that has fallen behind in a key public safety area
To the editor:
This is testimony I submitted to the Land Use and Transportation Committee on Mayor Daniel Lurie’s new zoning plan:
I am here to tell you about a serious public safety concern that I and my neighbors have that needs your immediate attention.
I am talking about the fact that the city’s high pressure Emergency Firefighting Water System does not extend much into the city’s westside and southern neighborhoods. Without this vital life-saving infrastructure in place, the westside, in particular, with its hundreds of blocks of wood-frame buildings, will likely succumb to firestorms of unimaginable proportions immediately following the next great earthquake.
Fire hydrants with white caps are not ‘hardened’ for an emergency. Investigating further we find:
The color codes are complicated and that goes to show just how complicated the entire fire protection system is. Different colors indicate different water source sand different water pressure, and in some cases, using the hydrant requires a special truck attached to be effective. What we do no is that the West Side Auxiliary system was never completed.
My particular neighborhood is at great risk due to the lack of this vital infrastructure. I am reminded practically every day of the fact of the absence of the city’s fire protection infrastructure. Right outside my living room window is a fire hydrant with a white cap. This piece of infrastructure will be useless in suppressing the conflagration expected after gas mains burst and the westside neighborhoods are a blaze as that type of fire hydrant isn’t “hardened.”… (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.
A decade ago, Shola Olatoye was asked by New York City’s mayor to help turn around the city’s beleaguered public housing system. Now, the former affordable housing executive has been pulled into another high-stakes mission: steering millions of dollars in private investment toward projects aimed at bringing San Francisco’s downtown back to life.
The East Coast native has been tapped to serve as the CEO of the San Francisco Downtown Development Corporation, a new privately funded nonprofit tasked with raising the necessary capital to help boost Mayor Daniel Lurie’s vision for revitalizing the city’s faltering downtown core.
Olatoye, who served as the CEO of New York City’s Housing Authority prior to the pandemic before becoming chief operating officer of East Bay affordable housing developer Eden Housing, will start her term at DDC on Oct. 1.
Though quietly formed earlier this year, the organization was given a spotlight last week when Lurie announced that it had raised $40 million from unidentified sources. The announcement left many wondering about the forces shaping downtown’s next chapter — and any potential conflicts. Olatoye promised transparency moving forward: As a private nonprofit, DDC is beholden to bylaws and annual reporting requirements, she said, adding that its backers will be made public in the coming months…(more)
Makes sense if you want to turn SF into NYC to hire someone who already did it.
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.
Tonight at the PAR meeting in the Richmond, I learned that people had not received the notices regarding upzoning and they were hearing about it for the first time the day before the Planning Commisioners are considering approving the over 400 pages of legal writings and maps that supposedly define the new zoning parameters.We also learned a bit more about the only options that are so far offered to mitigate some of the negative effects the rezoning map may have on existing residents and businesses. People are concerned and angry people when they learn about the plan. They are really upset with Senator Wiener who has been relentless in his efforts to usurp control over the entire state by removing single family zoning. Trust in government is at an all time low for a reason.
Tenants, neighborhood groups, and some supes are saying the plan will hurt renters and small businesses—and needs more environmental review
Opposition to Mayor Daniel Lurie’s plan to upzone much of the city is emerging on several fronts, from tenants, small businesses, and a neighborhood group that argues the sweeping plan never got a valid environmental review. There’s also a serious problem with providing transit service to the new residents.
Meanwhile, two supervisors are pushing legislation to address some of the displacement concerns, and Lurie has already said he will support one of those bills…
At Question Time today, Sup. Myrna Melgar told Lurie that a lot of people are worried about the displacement of small businesses and rent-controlled housing units.
Lurie said “we will not leave rent-controlled units and small businesses behind.” He insisted that “most new housing is built on vacant land,” which may be the case now—but there’s no way to build the tens of thousands of units his plan envisions without demolishing existing residential and commercial structures.
Melgar has introduced legislation that provides incentives to developers and landlords to protect housing and small business:..
Meanwhile, Sup. Chyanne Chen has introduced a broader bill. The Race and Equity in All Planning Coalition issued a statement saying that it will work with Chen to make sure the bill:
Requires disclosure of plans to demolish and early noticing of rights to tenants;
Prevents wrongful evictions and holds landlords accountable for bad behavior;
Guarantees the maximum possible relocation assistance allowed under the law; and
Enforces tenants’ rights to return to a comparable unit should their building be redeveloped…
The answer won’t be known for months, but an inflection point will arrive Thursday, when the planning commission takes up what Lurie calls his “family zoning” plan. It’s a far-reaching proposal that seeks to expand the city’s housing supply by allowing taller residential buildings from Fisherman’s Wharf to the west edges of the Richmond and Sunset districts.
Commissioners are expected to approve the plan, but they don’t have the final word. The plan will be taken up next by the Board of Supervisors, where some members are pushing for changes amid an outcry from critics who fear the rezoning would lead to the displacement of small businesses and allow rent-controlled housing and historic buildings to be demolished.
Lurie will have to balance competing interests as he works to ensure supervisors approve the plan by a state-mandated January deadline.
San Francisco is legally required to permit 82,000 new homes by 2031, though it will take far longer for all those units to get built. More than half the total will come from development that’s already approved; the remainder would come from the zoning plan. The stakes are high: If San Francisco doesn’t show it’s making a good-faith effort toward meeting the 82,000-home goal, the state will take control of the city’s housing approval process.
While Lurie tries to avoid a state takeover on housing, he must also grapple with political considerations…
A coalition representing organizations with concerns about the plan met with Lurie last week and sent him a letter afterward saying that the rezoning “risks fueling speculation, inflating land costs, driving demolitions, and making it harder for mission‑driven developers to build.”…
Separately, small business leaders have signed onto another letter to Lurie warning that the plan could “force closures of businesses that have served San Francisco for generations.” That letter asked the mayor to work with neighborhood groups to identify locations for denser development “without destroying existing corridors.”
At a news conference last week, Lurie told reporters that his administration was “always happy to discuss” the plan with critics. He promised to “work tirelessly to protect our small businesses,” and his planning director, Sarah Dennis Phillips, said the administration was receptive to “helpful modifications” embraced by the San Francisco Small Business Commission…
Mandelman said he wants Lurie’s administration to commit to a plan for preserving some of the city’s older buildings, either by creating new historic districts or designating individual landmarks…
Some of the same people pushing for the recall are also outraged about Lurie’s zoning plan — a fact that may weigh on the mayor if he is tasked with appointing a replacement for Engardio…(more)
