Not a single San Francisco resident alive right now will see the town repair its housing disaster, a brand new research urged.
The research mentioned the town will take so long as 124 years to resolve its housing disaster regardless of sweeping YIMBY initiatives.
That’s even when the town will increase it’s housing provide by 1.5% yearly, a lot faster than the town’s present price. It could take a minimal of 18 years for a median one-bedroom residence to change into inexpensive for an individual incomes the median wage of a non-college graduate.
“Each eventualities require monumental, localized shocks to the housing inventory,” the report says. “This easy train clearly illustrates that interventions centered on market-race provide alone are unlikely to generate widespread affordability in any significant timeframe.”
YIMBYs, hopeful that their strategy to weakening zoning legal guidelines and slicing crimson tape will assist the world’s housing issues, have been stymied by the research. The chief director of YIMBY Motion, Laura Foote, waxed poetic in quoting a proverb in a press release to the San Francisco Normal.
“A society grows nice when outdated males plant timber whose shade they know they may by no means sit in,” she mentioned.
Opposite to the YIMBY focus, the difficulty isn’t housing provide, the research’s authors say, it’s wage disparity. The tech increase has drawn in high-earners to the Bay Space, who’re competing with lower-wage staff for housing. Tech firms themselves leased a report quantity of area in 2025: 10.2 million sq. ft value.
One instance of the surge in high-earners is that the median family revenue in San Francisco County practically doubled from $69,354 in 2011 to $137,184 in 2024, based on census bureau information. For comparability, the median family revenue in Los Angeles County, additionally an costly housing space, elevated from $52,239 to $90,757 in the identical time interval.
Others have additionally redirected the difficulty away from zoning and again to prices.
“The difficulty shouldn’t be zoning,” developer Bora Ozturk informed the San Francisco Normal. “No person is beginning building till the prices come down.”
Max Buchholz of UC Berkeley, the lead researcher of the research, mentioned the YIMBY motion’s success is as a result of it’s straightforward to grasp.
“The enchantment is that it provides a very easy clarification and an answer that doesn’t require any on-budget spending,” Buchholz informed the San Francisco Normal. “My view is that it’s way more complicated than that, and it in all probability would require some public financing and intervening in numerous different methods.”
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie has sought to modernize the town’s allowing system, which till not too long ago required in-person visits for permits.
“This launch builds on a yr of reforms to modernize our allowing system—saving San Franciscans worthwhile money and time. In a metropolis recognized for innovation, interacting with Metropolis Corridor ought to really feel simply as trendy, and PermitSF is a vital step towards a completely digital allowing system and extra responsive authorities,” he mentioned in a press release.
The research was carried out by researchers from UC Berkeley, UCLA, the Georgia Institute of Expertise and the College of Toronto.
