Three Ways to Actually Address the Housing Crisis

If you live in San Francisco, or any major city, you’ve heard it before: “Just build more housing.” That’s the rallying cry of private developers and the market-housing crowd, and on paper it sounds simple: build enough luxury condos and someday the price of rent will fall for working people.

This is what’s called trickle-down housing theory. That’s the belief that if we cater to investors and developers and create unaffordable housing, somehow the benefits will eventually reach everyone. In the real world, it hasn’t worked out like that. Developers don’t build when rents fall – their financial models rely on increasing rents, not falling rents. What we’re getting is luxury units, sky-high prices, and entire buildings sitting empty. That’s because the market doesn’t build for need -- it builds for profit. In the increasingly commodified, global real estate market, luxury condos in big cities are like shares of stock to be bought and sold for profit, not homes for people who need them.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. There are real solutions to the housing crisis, and solutions that cut through market failure and deliver results for working people now. 

1. Expand Rent Control

The fastest way to lower rent? Lower the rent. We can do that by expanding rent control.

In California, there’s one thing standing in the way of this: a state law written by the real estate industry that bans cities like San Francisco from passing modern, common-sense rent control. This ban prevents protections on any building constructed after 1979 -- meaning not a single unit of housing built after 1979 in San Francisco has rent control. Landlords of all of those luxury new highrises can raise rents by hundreds of dollars a month whenever they want. 

The state law also bans “vacancy control” which is regulating the initial rent that a tenant pays. Many cities used to regulate the initial rents and that kept cities more affordable. If we had vacancy control, cities like San Francisco could just legislate lower rents – not in a decade, but now. There’s no good reason that a landlord who rents out a necessity like housing should be able to set the rent at any amount, instead of having rent regulated at reasonable levels people can afford. 

It’s no wonder the real estate lobby wants us to focus only on rezoning and developer subsidies -- they’ll do anything to avoid real rent control. Repealing this outdated state law that bans strong rent control, and we could stabilize rent for thousands of families – millions across the state – starting immediately.

2. Create Social Housing

Imagine a city where housing is treated the same as parks or libraries: a public good.

Cities like Vienna, Amsterdam, and Copenhagen handle housing like this, with government-owned or subsidized social housing that serves everyone, not just the poor. Residents pay a fixed, affordable percentage of their income. No speculation, no price-gouging -- just homes people can actually afford and where they can stay as long as they want without fear of displacement.

San Francisco voters already approved a social housing fund in 2020, paid for by taxing the ultra-rich. But two mayors in a row, London Breed and Daniel Lurie, have refused to use those funds to actually build the housing voters demanded.

We could be five years into a new era of stable, dignified homes. Instead, despite some against-the-odds successes like our acquisitions of land and investments in community land trusts, top City leaders obstruct what the people want, refusing to scale up a major social housing program to meet the need. We’re stuck waiting while developers price-gouge and politicians drag their feet.

3. Fill Vacant Homes

Did you know that over 40,000 homes in San Francisco are sitting empty? Many are investment properties being kept vacant on purpose, off the market in hopes of selling for a higher profit later. Others are just empty because corporate landlords refuse to lower rents to reasonable levels and are just waiting to flip the building one day.

That’s why we passed a vacancy tax in 2022. The idea is simple: if landlords want to leave units empty during a housing crisis, they should pay a steep tax. It’s an incentive to make greed cost more than fairness.

But corporate landlords sued to block the tax, and the law is now tied up in court. Why? Because they’d rather hold our neighborhoods hostage than collect one dollar less in rent.

What You Can Do

Rent control, social housing, and vacancy taxes are popular, effective, and ready to go. Along with being common-sense reforms, these policies keep working-class people in their homes, and are tools to take power back from landlords, speculators, and developers who treat housing as a commodity instead of a human right. That’s why powerful interests do everything they can to block them. 

But as we saw this week with Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City, we can win policies that serve everyday people. It just takes organizing. We need to organize block by block, building by building, and through conversations with your neighbors to build power from below.

Join a group like the San Francisco chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, the Housing Rights Committee, or the San Francisco Tenants Union. These aren’t just advocacy groups, they’re people-powered organizations, rooted in solidarity and class struggle.

San Francisco’s housing crisis isn’t an accident. It’s a feature of a system that puts profits before people. But if we organize together, we can build a city where there is housing for everyone.