A new housing program in San Francisco has won the vote of the supervisors which will allow the city to raise $310 million to fund their affordable housing units' development.
According to sfagte.com, the winning program, Proposition A, will make way for the city to be able to sell affordable housing- bonds worth $310 million which will be allotted for the housing of the city's middle and low- income families. The program also covers the housing for veterans, seniors, disabled and working families. Mayor Ed Lee hopes that the program will be able to go hand in hand with his own proposal of repairing or building 30,000 affordable housing units by the year 2020.
The program's opposition, Green Party, said that Prop. A is "a fake affordable-housing bond, citing lack of oversight on how the money will be used." However, 11 supervisors and Mayor Lee himself supported the proposition but supervisor John Avalos said that need to raise $500 million in bonds. Mayor Lee didn't approve the suggestion the city "couldn't afford a bond measure of that size without substantially raising taxes."
Despite of Prop. A's good clauses for the affordable housing project, the housing crisis is still proliferate and analysts fear that it might stay for a long time or never end at all.
In a report by washingtonpost.com, studying the trend of the housing market in the past few years, it can somehow predict the possible scenarios that can happen in the city. The report said "From 1980 to 2010, the median value of owner-occupied housing in San Francisco rose 175 percent, more than triple the national rate. If costs in the city were to keep pace with the rest of the country, San Francisco would have needed to build 459,000 new housing units over those 30 years, according to a state analysis. Instead, the city built 60,334."
If the new housing program is not able to keep up with the current housing crisis, it might not be a great help after all and many are still going to be stuck in the middle of the city's crisis.
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