By Annika Hom : missionlocal – excerpt
Developments in Development is a weekly-ish column recapping news about real estate, housing, planning, and neighborhood changes.
Small Sites, a city program that promises to combat displacement, was dubbed by policymakers as fundamentally good, but “broken,” just a few weeks ago. Not long after, its fate was swept into drama and so-called “political games.” Good thing I love both! Let the games begin!…
San Francisco, we have a problem
The Small Sites Program is a city loan program that helps nonprofits acquire and rehabilitate residential buildings with fewer than 25 units. Since its inception, advocates championed it as a powerful anti-displacement tool that kept low-income tenants in place, and magically kept units affordable forever…
According to multiple nonprofit organizations acquiring these sites, two obstacles prevent filling vacancies quickly: a policy we’ll dive into later, and DAHLIA, the city’s affordable-housing lottery system…
Housing advocates brainstormed some solutions:
- Allow more flexibility with the 80 percent average rent policy;
- Speed up marketing and leasing;
- Create a program-wide or a nonprofit waitlist to use when vacancies open;
- Pull Small Sites from DAHLIA altogether
“These are not new issues, and the solutions are not big revelations,” Cohen said. Still, the mayor’s office politely resists, he said. “This is a policy decision of MOHCD. What’s broken is their attitude.”…
Buildings are amassing debt — and affordable units, dust…(more)
Thanks for the explanation on part of why the affordable housing system is broken. Take a closer look at AMI as that is another can of worms. Put AMI and DHLIA together and you have a failed system. Why pretend it works when it doesn’t? Who benefits from failure?