SF mayor pledges more efforts on affordable housing

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee pledged that providing affordable housing is his top priority for the city during his second four-year term, which started this year.

"We've heard it from every corner of the city from every economic level, particularly working-class people as well as low-income people," Lee said at a roundtable meeting with Chinese media in his office on Tuesday. "We need to build, rehabilitate and preserve more of the affordable housing, and we need to make sure that the houses can respond to the crisis that people, who are teachers, essential workforce people, are experiencing."

Lee said he and his administration had spent more time and resources on reducing housing costs and that the affordable housing project would bring "direct positive impact" on thousands of people.

San Francisco has become increasingly unaffordable for many of its longtime residents and working-class people as an influx of Silicon Valley wealth floods the city.

The median home value in San Francisco is above $1.1 million. San Francisco home values have gone up 13.6 percent over the past year, and Zillow predicts that they will rise 3.7 percent within the next year.

A recent report by Zumper also revealed that San Francisco is the most expensive city in the US when it comes to renting homes. The average cost for a one-bedroom apartment reached a record $3,530 in the city in August 2015.

In November 2015, Lee announced his intention to use Proposition A, a $310 million bond for affordable housing, to construct and renovate 30,000 units of affordable housing over the next four-year mayoral term. He won re-election on Nov 3, and the proposition was approved, handing the city its biggest single pool of funds to build and preserve subsidized apartments.

"I'm very confident that in the next four years, I will complete 30,000 new homes in San Francisco and guarantee that over 50 percent of them will be affordable to middle-income as well as lower-income people," he told the reporters.

He said that affordable housing is connected to his next priority: getting more homeless people to leave the streets. An experimental "navigation center" has helped 250 homeless people move into permanent housing with support services since March 2015.

liazhu@chinadailyusa.com