Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Affordable Housing Timeline topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Hearing on affordable-housing timelines highlights five‑year norm, streamlining tools and remaining bottlenecks
Summary
Deputy Director Dan Adams and city planning and building staff described a typical five-year affordable-housing development timeline and priority-processing steps; public commenters and supervisors urged clearer department liaisons and faster, coordinated action to reduce delays to projects that could house vulnerable residents.
Supervisor Jane Kim (introducing) and Supervisor Hillary Ronen convened a detailed hearing on accelerating the pipeline for affordable housing. Deputy Director Dan Adams of the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development said the office currently sees a typical five-year timeline for projects — site acquisition and predevelopment in year one, entitlements and zoning work in year two, permits and final financing in year three, and roughly two years for construction — and said the office would like to shorten that timeline. “We generally look at about a 5 year timeline,” Adams said.
Adams and other staff described challenges that lengthen timelines, including volatility in tax-credit equity markets, the need to pause projects to apply for state financing streams (for which projects can compete for up to $10 million), high construction costs, and coordination issues when utility ownership or requirements change. Planning Department staff described priority-processing measures under mayoral directives that place 100%-affordable projects at the top of review queues, and DBI representatives outlined color-coded intake and parallel plan-review steps intended to accelerate prioritized projects.
Committee members pressed for clarity on whether priority-processing is delivering measurable time savings. Planning Department staff said priority projects can move through entitlement faster and estimated — cautiously — that affordable projects may be advanced “at about twice the clip” of similar market-rate projects in some cases, though timelines still vary project to project. DBI staff said priority intake is in place, but that backlog and limited reviewer capacity mean even prioritized projects can face several weeks before active review begins.
The hearing included extensive public comment from nonprofit developers and community groups (including Mission Housing Development Corporation and Meta) who described both progress and lingering unpredictability in approval processes. Several commenters urged clearer liaisons in each department so developers know whom to contact to expedite 100%-affordable projects; one developer said a project was about to break ground in weeks while another long-entitled site remained stalled. Committee members asked staff to produce more transparent contact and process maps so developers and community partners can schedule and synchronize work across agencies.
The committee filed the item for follow-up, and staff said they would continue to work with departments and developers to identify concrete changes and possible legislative fixes (including state-level clarifications to allow broader use of SB 35 streamlining for some publicly assisted affordable projects).
