Housing, public transit, accessible childcare and healthcare facilities…this is the infrastructure that makes a city thrive when it’s affordable. A progressive San Francisco is one that is planning for and investing in affordable neighborhoods. 

San Francisco can and must invest in affordable housing as a public good and vital infrastructure. Investment means creative and significant public financing for a range of low-income, workforce and middle-income housing, developing public land for affordable housing and putting San Franciscans to work building it. It means returning to proven community planning with the “THR33 P’s of Housing: Protection, Preservation and Production”, expanding rent control and tenant protections, and acquiring and rehabbing affordable buildings (protecting and stabilizing the rent controlled housing we already have.)

Affordable neighborhoods aren’t just about housing, though. Community plans that built out the eastern neighborhoods all recognized that equitable development meant infrastructure that anticipated the needs of growing families and service workforce. Community planning helped identify the direct nexus between the increase in private development and the impact fees necessary to fund everything from libraries, transit and parks to neighborhood health clinics and childcare centers.