PROP G: Ensure housing for seniors, working families, and people with disabilities

Shockingly, most of our city’s lowest income residents don’t qualify for affordable housing. Every year, thousands of San Francisco’s seniors, working families, and people with disabilities try to apply for affordable housing and are rejected because their incomes are too low. That’s because the vast majority of San Francisco’s affordable housing sets the lowest rents according to incomes of “very low income” households but thousands of San Franciscans’ incomes fall below that standard, into a category called “extremely low income.” There are 66,000 extremely low income residents in San Francisco who are disproportionately seniors and people with disabilities. After waiting for years on waitlists to apply for affordable housing, many people who have extremely low incomes are either told they don’t qualify or, if they do, they end up having to pay a disproportionate amount of their income on rent.

To address this, the Board of Supervisors created a pilot program in 2019 called the Senior Operating Subsidies Program Fund (SOS), which successfully provided affordable housing at extremely-low income rent levels to more than one hundred senior households who would have never qualified for affordable housing without the program. Despite the clear need for SOS funding to address housing inequities in San Francisco, it has not been built into the city’s annual budgets and the remaining funding for SOS is being depleted.

Prop G would establish a Housing Opportunity Fund to ensure that there is continuous funding for the SOS program and expand it to working families and people with disabilities who are currently shut out of San Francisco’s affordable housing system. If passed, Prop G would put aside $8.2 million a year starting in 2026 to subsidize units of housing that are affordable to extremely low income households. The money would come from the City Budget and not raise taxes on individuals. 

We are urging a YES on Prop G to ensure residents with extremely low incomes are able to access housing in San Francisco.