by Jordan Wasilewski
In San Francisco, the lion’s share of permanent supportive housing (PSH) stock is single room occupancy hotels (SRO). I was placed in one in 2015, and upon moving in realized the room did not include a refrigerator, cooking appliances or adequate food storage. When I inquired about it, a case manager informed me that tenants aged 60 and over were eligible to receive a fridge, and if I wanted one, I would have to purchase it myself. I could not afford a fridge, but did manage to schlep a $30 thrift store microwave to my place—a cost that broke me both financially and emotionally.
I lived without dependable cold food storage for the next few years, which meant making frequent trips to the grocery store, feeding ice into my portable camping cooler and constantly inspecting food to ensure it hadn’t gone bad. The process was exhausting, annoying and anxiety-including, which was only made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic. To ensure my food was safe through the lockdown period, I was consistently breaking shelter in place.
In October 2021, I moved into a newer SRO building near Civic Center. I was relieved to see my room was equipped with both a refrigerator and microwave, but just last December, I learned from the housing manager that if those appliances were to break or become non-functional, they would not be replaced.
Meanwhile, in Sacramento, state legislators have been busy discussing tenants’ rights to a proper kitchen. Assembly Bill (AB) 628, a new law that went into effect January 1, 2026, now requires landlords to provide a “stove and refrigerator that are maintained in good working order.”
According to the bill’s sponsor, Tina McKinnor (D-Inglewood), “A working stove and a working fridge are not luxuries—they are a necessary part of modern life. By making these necessary appliances standard in rental homes, California can provide all of its residents with a safer, more affordable and more dignified place to call home.”
But the language of AB 628—a bill that is neatly framed within the zeitgeist of housing, access and affordability—a specific subset of housing has been cooked out: PSH and SROs.
I find it puzzling that PSH is excluded for a few reasons. It should be assumed that unhoused people moving into PSH cannot afford to buy their own kitchen appliances, and what’s now considered a protected necessity on the rental market will remain a luxury for those who need it most. Furthermore, the designation of PSH is a matter of funding and eligibility, and does not relate to specific types of housing that fall under the PSH umbrella.
According to state law, PSH is defined as “housing for people who are homeless, with no limit on length of stay, and…linked to onsite or offsite services.” This can be attributed to different types of housing, whether that’s SROs, “site-based” properties such as city-owned hotels or “scattered-site” housing, in which PSH units are located in buildings that also serve private-market tenants.
AB 628 attempts to justify is exclusion of PSH due to space constraints and shared cooking facilities at sites such SROs, but still falls short of providing cold storage and microwaves that could easily fit inside individual units. It also fails to address that landlords of scattered-site properties—what is otherwise just a normal apartment building with no shared amentities—would not be required to provide refrigerators and stoves for their PSH units. But it’s no longer an issue of what would or would not be required—AB 628 is now the law and will impact PSH tenants across the state.
Beyond the SROs of San Francisco, the material impacts of AB 628 are also taking shape in the East Bay. Take the saga of the Mandela House, a former hotel near the Oakland-Emeryville border that was purchased by the City of Oakland and opened in May 2025. The site is currently being used to temporarily house people swept from three large encampments, and as previously reported in Street Spirit, interim residents raised concern that refrigerators and stoves had been removed from the units prior to their arrival. The site is expected to be converted into PSH starting in May 2026, and the housing developer in charge of the project told Street Spirit that the appliances would be reinstalled during the PSH process. But with AB 628 going into effect six months after that statement, there is no legal obligation for the developer to provide appliances for the newly converted units.
It begs the question—why was AB 628 written this way, and who was involved? Assemblymember McKinnor clearly took heed from the California Housing Partnership Corporation, who sent in a letter opposing the legislation unless PSH and SROs were carved out in their entirety.
According to a March 2025 legislative analysis of AB 628:
“The California Housing Partnership Corporation and Housing California, in their joint letter…argue that the bill should be amended to exempt certain kinds of housing. Specifically, they write that ‘some affordable housing units, namely permanent supportive housing units and single-room occupancy units serving the formerly homeless, have communal cooking facilities due to space constraints of older buildings and the safety of residents. It would be impractical,
expensive and unsafe to mandate the inclusion of stoves in these units.’”
Another major stakeholder, All Home California, also opposed PSH’s inclusion in AB 628, stating in their letter of support that the legislation “recognizes the practical limitations of certain housing types by exempting permanent supportive housing,” and that state lawmakers’ “thoughtful exemptions ensure the bill’s requirements are targeted, enforceable and aligned with real-world housing models that serve specific populations.”
When I reached out to All Home California, I received a response from the Director of Policy and Legislation, Susannah Parsons, who stated, “We appreciated the PSH exemption because our understanding is that PSH habitability is already covered by state and federal program funding guidelines and did not need to be included here.”
Over the past decade, my work as a PSH/SRO advocate has uncovered a troubling pattern—the conflation of what’s required by law with the basic needs of people living in supportive housing. While AB 628 does “cover” California landlords who do not want to provide refrigerators for their PSH tenants, federally funded PSH does in fact require a refrigerator and “cooking appliance” in each unit.
According to Shanti Singh, the Legislative & Communications Director at Tenants Together, tenants’ rights advocates were involved in early stages of the legislative process, and had raised concerns about the scope of protections afforded to PSH tenants. Singh said that advocates were less involved when PSH exemptions were added to AB 628, but now that it has passed through the state legislature, advocacy will likely pivot to city council chambers.
“Even if state law excluded PSH and SRO tenants from a hard requirement, I see no reason why we can’t—or shouldn’t—pursue this policy on a local level,” Singh said.
So, where do we go from here? When the state fails us, it’s time to act locally. I think it would be prudent for advocates in San Francisco and Oakland to call for legislation that:
1.) Requires refrigerators in all PSH and SRO units, and
2.) Requires in-unit cooking facilities in PSH and SROs to the extent allowed by space
Setting uniform standards for permanent supportive housing—standards that truly support its residents—is possible, it can be done. When I was advocating for rents to be no higher than 30 percent of income in all San Francisco PSH, I ran into naysayers that believed that standing contract issues would be a major impediment, but we overcame that and won.
It is time for us PSH and SRO tenants to rise and demand common sense requirements for refrigerators and cooking facilities. It begins with a simple question: What is the purpose of affordability legislation if those most impacted cannot afford it?
Jordan Wasilewski (she/they) is a permanent supportive housing and SRO tenant activist in San Francisco. Her previous writings can be found on Linktree. You may follow her on Instagram at @sfpshsro.
