Vol. I, No. 30 · San Francisco — Friday, August 28, 2026 · Price: fourteen ordinances, one vote

BY GWEN OKAFOR, HOUSING DESK

Every one of the 96 apartments at 53 Colton Street, a short lane in South of Market, is recorded by the city as reserved for a tenant who was homeless before moving in. The four-year-old building is named for Jazzie Collins, a Black transgender activist who organized around tenant and disability rights in San Francisco until her death in 2013.

This is one entry in a much larger, mostly invisible project. The city’s Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development has financed 850 developments citywide, holding 36,395 income-restricted units. Of those units, 5,628 (15.5 percent) are recorded as reserved for people who were homeless when they moved in. A reader picturing “affordable housing” as apartments priced for a teacher or a line cook has most of the portfolio right. A meaningful and growing slice of it is something else: a permanent address for a population the city used to only shelter.

Twenty-four of the portfolio’s 850 developments are entirely reserved for previously homeless tenants. Together they hold 1,929 units, more than a third of every homeless-designated unit in the city’s file. Jazzie Collins Apartments, at 96 units, is the seventh-largest of the 24.

The building cost $52.5 million, financed mainly through federal and state low-income housing tax credits, with $4 million from the city’s own housing fund. Construction began in March 2021 and finished in June 2022, two months ahead of schedule. Mayor London Breed and District 6 Supervisor Matt Dorsey marked its grand opening on July 13, 2022. “We must continue to build affordable homes across the City that help keep our residents off the streets and provide services for some of our most vulnerable populations,” Dorsey said.

Collins moved to San Francisco in 1988 and spent her final years organizing for tenant, disability and transgender rights. The Board of Supervisors appointed her twice to a South of Market tenant advisory committee, in 2006 and again in 2007. She later served as vice chair of the city’s LGBT Aging Policy Task Force and on the board of the San Francisco Trans March. She died at a Kaiser Permanente hospital in San Francisco on July 11, 2013, at 54, a month after being honored on the floor of the California Legislature.

Confidence is high throughout: the unit counts and homeless designations come from the city’s own portfolio file. Collins’s biography comes from primary Board of Supervisors resolutions and her own contemporaneous obituaries, checked directly by this desk.

Nothing in the public record connects Collins to this specific address; she died nine years before it opened. The city named the building for her anyway. It is one of 24 addresses in its own affordable-housing file where every apartment, on paper, is for someone the city once counted as homeless.