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.