Vol. I, No. 24 · San Francisco — FRIDAY, AUGUST 14, 2026 · Price: two percent of the budget
BY GWEN OKAFOR, HOUSING
In Haight-Ashbury, no subsidized apartment building has ever entered San Francisco's affordable-housing pipeline. The Mayor's Office of Housing and Community Development tracks every project working its way toward opening in the city, and this neighborhood's file has never had one.
The pipeline now carries 190 projects and 10,100 income-restricted units toward completion, and four neighborhoods hold more than half of them, 5,377 units, 53 percent of the citywide total: Bayview Hunters Point, the Mission, Mission Bay, and the Financial District/South Beach (one line in the city's neighborhood file, not two). Seven residential neighborhoods, Haight-Ashbury among them, have never had a single project enter the file. The file tracks projects moving through city financing or the inclusionary program, not a lifetime record of every subsidized unit a neighborhood has ever had, so an older building that already finished construction and rolled off city monitoring years ago would not appear here either way. Even allowing for that, the four leader neighborhoods, a tenth of the city's 41, hold more than half the pipeline between them, while a San Franciscan in one of the seven zero-pipeline neighborhoods finds nothing at all.
Three of the four leaders got there through a small number of large decisions. Bayview Hunters Point's 1,533 units run mostly through two areas once run by the city's Office of Community Investment and Infrastructure (OCII), Candlestick Point and the Hunters Point Shipyard, which together hold 1,205 of them, 79 percent. The Financial District and South Beach's 1,358 units are dominated by the Transbay redevelopment area, 1,084 units across six projects, 80 percent. Mission Bay's 1,186 units run 60 percent, 710 units, through the Mission Bay project area, the neighborhood the city built on former rail yards. All three areas were designated for large-scale, mixed-income construction years before this pipeline snapshot existed, and units from those decisions are still arriving.
The Mission got to 1,300 units a different way. Spread across 29 separate projects, none of them carries a redevelopment-area label. Every one came through MOHCD financing or the inclusionary program that requires developers to build or fund affordable units alongside market-rate ones. The other three leaders are the legacy of a handful of decisions made decades ago; the Mission's total is the sum of a much larger number of smaller, ongoing ones.
Eleven of the city's 41 analysis neighborhoods have no projects in the file at all. Four are parkland: Golden Gate Park, Lincoln Park, McLaren Park, and the Presidio, where the absence needs no explanation. The other seven are residential: Glen Park, Haight-Ashbury, Inner Richmond, Inner Sunset, Lone Mountain/USF, Oceanview/Merced/Ingleside, and Seacliff. None has had a project financed through MOHCD, built through OCII, or delivered through the inclusionary program in the 31 years of entitlement dates this file records, current through the city's most recent refresh in May 2026, though the file's own description string still names September 2023.
That does not change the shape of the file as it stands: a handful of designated project areas and one high-production neighborhood carry more than half the pipeline, and eleven of the city's neighborhoods, four of them parkland, are not in it at all.
Ninety-one of San Francisco's public artworks hang inside two hospitals
The city's Civic Art Collection counts 159 of its 1,038 works as not on public display; 91 of those are inside San Francisco General and Laguna Honda hospitals, reachable only by patients, staff, and visitors.
BY CONSTANCE FEENEY, CITY HALL
Tom Otterness's bronze figures of children and hearts line a pedestrian walkway inside Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital's Acute Care Unit, a corridor the public can enter only as a patient, a visitor, or an employee.
The city's Civic Art Collection holds 1,038 works, most of them acquired through the requirement that public construction spend roughly 2 percent of its budget on art. The file counts 719 of those works as on public display and 159 as held by a city agency instead, alongside a separate count of 158 at the airport. Ninety-one of the 159 hang inside two hospitals, San Francisco General and Laguna Honda, on wards and walkways open to patients, staff, and visitors but not to a stranger who wants to see the art the city bought. Laguna Honda, which nearly lost its federal Medicare and Medicaid certification in 2022 and spent two years fighting to reopen, holds 31 of them.
The 2 Percent for Art ordinance puts the art wherever the construction happens. When the construction is a hospital, the art stays in the hospital. Rupert Garcia's glass mosaic "Nature of Medicine" covers the entrance lobby floor of San Francisco General's Acute Care Unit; Alan Masaoka's stained glass "River of Time" hangs on the seventh floor. Both were commissioned for the hospital's 2015 rebuild and have never hung anywhere else.
The smaller clusters read differently. Eleven works sit inside the Bayview branch of the public library, open to anyone during library hours, a gentler restriction than a hospital ward. At least one work hangs in each of five police stations, including a 1988 cast-concrete relief by Horace Washington on the Turk Street facade of Northern Station, technically outdoors and visible from the sidewalk despite carrying the same "city agency" label as the hospital pieces.
The distinction the file draws is administrative. "Public display" means a location the Arts Commission considers openly accessible; "city agency" means it does not, with no finer grain than that, so a library branch and a hospital ward are filed the same way. Most of the 159 are exactly where the city's construction dollars put them, and a stranger's access to them tracks a stranger's access to the building around them: high at a library, effectively zero on a hospital ward. The collection file is a snapshot, not a trend: it does not record how long a work has sat in a given location or whether the count has moved, so this is a portrait of where the city's art sits today, not a claim about how it got there.
SOURCES & RECEIPTS
1. Mayor's Office of Housing and Community Development, Affordable Housing Pipeline (data.sfgov.org/resource/aaxw-2cb8), 190 projects, pulled August 14, 2026; the file was last refreshed by the city May 21, 2026, though its own description string still reads September 30, 2023. Neighborhood universe: DataSF Analysis Neighborhoods boundary file (j2bu-swwd), 41 features. Figures behind every number in receipts.json.
2. San Francisco Arts Commission, Civic Art Collection (data.sfgov.org/resource/r7bn-7v9c), 1,038 records, pulled August 14, 2026. Figures behind every number in receipts.json.
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