by Lukas Illa
In San Francisco, the richest and most powerful industries in the world are spurring a devastating affordability crisis, where a median one-bedroom apartment is going for $4,000 per month and pre-IPO stock is being used as a bartering chip when touring rental units. We are in desperate need of affordable housing for the working people of this city that are consistently at the whims of the ever-greedy speculative real estate market.
In comes Proposition I, Affordable Housing Guaranteed, a companion proposition to November 2020’s Prop. I, which doubled the existing transfer tax on luxury real estate sales; for properties valued at $10 million to $25 million, the tax increased to 5.5.%, and for properties valued at $25 million or more, the tax increased to 6%. The measure from 2020 argued for the revenue collected from that tax to be used to fund the construction of affordable housing. But its proponents were unable to require that this fund be spent on affordable housing, instead relying on the good will of the Mayor and the Board of Supervisors to allocate the tax’s revenue in the way the voters intended.
And lo and behold, of the $500 million that has been collected since 2020 Prop. I passed, only $200 million has been actually spent on creating affordable housing; the rest has been diverted by the conservative forces of the City to be used on inappropriate uses, like police funding. In his opposition to 2026 Prop. I, Mayor Daniel Lurie has claimed its passing could undermine expanding the Police Department’s budget, effectively admitting that he’s raided the fund for the police state.
With its passage, this year’s Prop. I will classify the transfer tax as a “special tax,” mandating the collected revenue be used to fund affordable housing construction and insulating it from Mayor Lurie’s political ploys. It will also prevent the promise made by Supervisors Stephen Sherrill and Bilal Mahmood to repeal the 2020 Prop. I tax after this November’s election.
This effort comes at an incredibly important time, as the mayor has put Prop. D on November’s ballot, an attempt to raise the signature threshold to get a citizen initiative on the ballot from 2% to 8% of registered San Franciscan voters. This four-times increase will make it immensely difficult for people-powered campaigns to get political initiatives to a popular vote and protect corporate interests that flood our elections with cash.
To further emphasize that the time is nigh is the Howard Jarvis Tax Association’s move to place Prop. 43 on the state ballot, an aggressive move to force special taxes—like this year’s Prop. I—to secure a two-thirds majority vote, dooming many future citizen-led efforts.
Apart from being a vital political salve to the techno-fascist right, a core component of Prop. I is the funding for social housing, a form of permanently affordable, community-owned, mixed-income housing. As evidence the world over, social housing maintains rents by what residents can afford to pay and its residents have control of how it operates and is maintained. Its covenants would be protected by Prop. I, ensuring they do not expire and return to market-rate rents.
We have an opportunity to protect funding for affordable housing, spur the creation of social housing, and prevent a power grab by the oligarchic forces of our city—all in one. Vote YES on Prop. I.
