5 Things Mayor Daniel Lurie Could Do If He Were Actually Serious About Lowering Rents in San Francisco
Last week, Mayor Daniel Lurie broke his silence about the City’s rapidly rising rents, nearly halfway through his term and only after the median rent shot up 36% since he took office. Lurie took to the podium and declared a “rent emergency,” along with a legislative package of sorts.
Missing from the “package” was any effort to lower rents. Despite declaring an emergency, nothing in the package even uses emergency powers. Instead, he has largely repackaged existing rent relief and the legislation of others into a PR push.
Still, I welcome his “rent emergency” declaration, largely because it breaks his silence about the impacts of his policies and leadership and finally talks about the struggles working people face as a result. For his entire term, Lurie has celebrated rising rents and real estate speculation. He celebrated Blackstone buying up San Francisco real estate. He has celebrated and embraced the AI boom that is driving rents and evictions through the roof. He refused to allocate a dollar of Proposition I revenue to housing or rent relief in his two budgets so far. He refused to increase the eviction defense budget despite rising evictions. He has rejected calls to freeze rents or expand rent control.
Declaring a “rent emergency” is a positive first step. But this is a crisis, and there is far more he can do. We need bold solutions.
Here are 5 things Mayor Daniel Lurie could do right now to lower the rents in San Francisco.
1. Freeze the Rent
The City controls the allowable annual rent increase. It would be even easier for Mayor Lurie to freeze the rent than it was for Mayor Mamdani. That’s because Lurie doesn’t need independent Rent Board commissioners to do it. As the SF Standard acknowledges, the Mayor and BOS can simply introduce an ordinance freezing rents on rent controlled units.
This will not stop evictions or high rents, but it will provide some temporary relief for hundreds of thousands of tenants, and communicate to the public that in the midst of a rental emergency, San Francisco will take action.
2. Fund Emergency Rent Relief
The last time we banned evictions and stood up a robust local rent relief program, we stopped at least 20,000 people from losing their homes. In fact, we created the biggest local rent-relief program in the country during the pandemic, which paid tenants’ rents in emergencies and helped them avoid eviction, crushing debt, and homelessness.
The money came from a $42m commitment from 2020’s Prop. I, the transfer tax on the sale of buildings valued more than $10m. This tax brings in millions of dollars to the city each year to fund housing and tenant protections. Revenue is collected whenever one of these skyscrapers are sold. This year, Prop. I is projected to bring in another $120 million, and the Mayor and Board of Supervisors could immediately introduce a budget supplemental to allocate some of that revenue to rent relief. This is what we did unanimously in 2021, and there’s no reason this Mayor and Board of Supervisors couldn’t do the same.
3. Support Prop. I -- The Affordable Housing Guarantee Act
Mayor Lurie has had two budgets since taking office to listen to voters and use Prop. I funds for rent relief and affordable housing. Instead, he’s refused to allocate the revenue for its intended purpose, and has gone even further by trying to repeal the tax entirely, which would lose the city over $100 million in revenue each year. San Francisco has the opportunity to protect the existing tax and force City Hall to spend the money on helping people pay back rents and creating affordable housing by voting yes on the new Prop. I, also known as the Affordable Housing Guarantee Act. To date, the Mayor has actively opposed the ballot measure, continuing to push for tax breaks for real estate billionaires instead of using their tax payments to fund rent relief and housing. In light of the rent emergency he just announced, he should pivot and fully support this year’s Prop. I and make clear that he intends to work with affordable housing advocates and tenant groups to deliver these funds.
4. Remove Barriers to Lower Rents
If you listen to the crop of corporate Democrats running San Francisco in the current moment, you would believe that only mass production of luxury housing units will, somehow, eventually lower the rents. What they don’t want people to know is that California cities could set lower rents if we remove a real estate industry-created state law called the Costa Hawkins Rental Housing Act.
Strong rent control – that’s rent control with vacancy control – is the most direct and immediate way to lower the rents. Vacancy control would mean that San Francisco could limit how much a landlord can charge when a tenant moves into an apartment, not just how much rent can be raised annually. The reason we can’t do this right now is because of Costa Hawkins.
The City of San Francisco is already on record calling for the repeal of Costa Hawkins, as set forth in a 2024 resolution overwhelmingly passed by the Board of Supervisors, specifically pointing out Costa Hawkins’ interference in the power of the city to address rising rents. But Mayor Lurie opposes repealing Costa Hawkins, and stated in a recent interview that he does not support expanding rent control.
The declared rental emergency is a perfect time for the Mayor to reconsider his position. Part of acknowledging the emergency must be dismantling the state barriers that prevent the City from having tools to address the crisis. The Mayor should call for the repeal of Costa Hawkins and direct the City’s lobbyist to prioritize this. In the meantime, the Board of Supervisors could pass an ordinance, conditional on Costa Hawkins reform/repeal, to implement vacancy control the minute the state barrier is lifted.
5. Create New Affordable Housing
We need to urgently scale up affordable housing construction in the city. San Francisco has committed on record to building 46,000 affordable homes by 2031.We aren’t on track to do that, and the Mayor has offered no plan to get us there. There are many affordable housing projects in the pipeline that will help us meet that commitment, including the publicly-owned sites at the Fell Street DMV lot and Parcel K in Hayes Valley. We need to break ground on these projects as soon as possible, and there are state and local revenue measures that will help us move forward.
Prop. I is the only ballot measure that will immediately provide funds to build new affordable housing. It’s projected to bring in at least $120m a year, and has already brought in $500m to the city. There is another measure on the ballot that will help, Proposition C to increase the Housing Trust Fund, but doesn’t start to kick in until 2029 and isn't nearly enough on its own. Together, Prop. I, Prop. C, and the state housing bond (Proposition 1), will let us make real progress on our affordable housing goals, and the Mayor should support all three to ensure they pass in November.
In addition, San Francisco should acquire as many properties as possible to convert to affordable housing. New housing, no matter how streamlined, takes time to build. Acquiring unaffordable housing and making it affordable is cheaper per door than new construction, and immediate.
San Francisco already knows how to do this, at least at a small scale. Under the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (COPA), nonprofits can acquire apartment buildings when they go on the market and turn them into permanently affordable housing. In 2021, we moved $64 million from Prop. I funds into the program, by far the biggest city investment in land trusts ever. With city subsidy, many buildings have been acquired and turned into community land trusts where the tenants and a nonprofit own the building.
San Francisco can and should also acquire available real estate portfolios and convert them to affordable housing. There have been numerous opportunities for this in the past, most notably when Veritas’s portfolio of thousands of units was up for sale. Tenants pushed hard for the City to act, but no mayor has seriously pursued these cost-effective opportunities to increase our City’s housing portfolio.
This is just a partial list, and doesn’t touch on the actions that the Mayor and city leaders could be doing right now to stop evictions and keep San Franciscans in their homes. There is an acute affordability crisis hitting the working class. Press releases and instagram reels won’t pay the rent or defend people from evictions. We need bold solutions immediately to address this crisis.