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.
San Francisco Designated 14 Landmarks in a Day, Busiest Year Since 1981
One April 21 vote by the Board of Supervisors added 14 sites at once, more than the city designated in any full year since 1981. One of them is the Castro-district house where Bob Ross lived while running what is reportedly the country’s oldest surviving gay newspaper.
BY CONSTANCE FEENEY, CITY HALL
A three-story house at the corner of 20th and Castro Streets hosted campaign meetings and political fundraisers for sixteen years, from 1977 to 1993. All of them were thrown by the man who lived there. On April 21, 2026, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors made that house, and thirteen others, official city landmarks in a single vote.
The house belonged to Bob Ross, who co-founded the Bay Area Reporter in 1971 and ran it as publisher until his death in 2003. The paper is reportedly the oldest LGBTQ weekly still publishing in the United States. The vote that landmarked his house also did something the city’s own landmarks file had not recorded in 45 years. It pushed 2026 past every full year since 1981 for new San Francisco landmarks, with four months of the year still to come.
San Francisco has designated 327 individual landmarks since adopting the law, Article 10 of the Planning Code, in 1967. The pace was fastest in the law’s first two decades: 84 landmarks in the 1970s, 88 in the 1980s, years when the city worked through its oldest buildings first. It slowed hard after that: 23 in the 1990s, 37 in the 2000s, just 27 across the entire 2010s, fewer than three a year.
The 2020s have already reversed that slide. Forty-seven landmarks have been designated since 2020, more than the entire 2010s, with more than three years of the decade still left. Fourteen of those 47 arrived in one vote, the April 21 batch that included Bob Ross’s house. A single Board of Supervisors action, not a steady year-round pace, produced most of 2026’s total.
The other thirteen buildings named the same day include the former Sha’ar Zahav synagogue on Danvers Street, the Castro Rock Steam Baths, and the San Francisco AIDS Foundation’s longtime building, both on Castro Street. The batch also includes two churches, two firehouses and a Guerrero Street corner store.
Confidence is high on the counts: they come from the Planning Department’s own landmark file and a Clerk of the Board memo confirming the April 21 vote and its enactment date. Confidence is lower on why now. This desk found no public statement explaining why fourteen sites moved together, beyond the ordinary machinery of a Historic Preservation Commission recommendation and a Board vote.
Bob Ross ran the newspaper itself from rented offices that moved five times over four decades, never from the house. The house the city just landmarked is simply where he lived and, according to the city’s own designation report, where he threw the fundraisers that helped elect Harvey Milk.
SOURCES & RECEIPTS
1. MOHCD/OCII Affordable Housing Portfolio, DataSF pyxv-n29e, queried August 28, 2026: 850 developments citywide, 36,395 total project units, 5,628 units (15.5%) recorded homeless_units_rollup, 2,658 losp_units_rollup, 356 vash_units_rollup. 24 developments have homeless_units_rollup equal to their full total_project_units (1,929 units, 34.3% of all homeless-designated units, 2.8% of all 850 developments); ranked by size, Jazzie Collins Apartments (96 units) is seventh among the 24 that are built and open (two more, at 835 Turk St and 629 Post St, carry future 2027 completion dates and are excluded as not yet built). Jazzie Collins Apartments record: 53 Colton St, MOHCD ID 2017-055, part of the Brady Block/Plumber’s Union development, supervisor district 6, 96 total units, 96 studios, 96 homeless-designated, 96 LOSP, estimated/actual construction 2022-10-05. This desk did not independently audit individual tenant files behind these designations. 2. San Francisco Mayor’s Office, sf.gov, “City Celebrates Progress of Homeless Recovery Efforts with Opening of Jazzie Collins Apartments,” fetched August 28, 2026: total project cost $52.5 million ($4 million from MOHCD); financed by federal/state low-income housing tax credits and a state HCD Multifamily Housing Program loan; construction began March 2021, completed June 2022, two months ahead of schedule; grand opening July 13, 2022, with Mayor London Breed; quote from District 6 Supervisor Matt Dorsey. 3. San Francisco Board of Supervisors, resolutions 76-06 (passed February 10, 2006) and 469-07 (passed August 17, 2007), appointing Jazzie Collins to the SOMA Community Stabilization Fund Community Advisory Committee, via the Legistar frozen-archive API (webapi.legistar.com/v1/sfgov), queried August 28, 2026. 4. SFGate, “Jazzie Collins, S.F. transgender activist, dies,” and the California Legislative LGBTQ Caucus’s statement on Collins’s life, both fetched August 28, 2026: born 1958, moved to San Francisco 1988, organizer for tenant/disability/transgender rights, vice chair of the SF LGBT Aging Policy Task Force, five years on the SF Trans March board, died July 11, 2013 at a Kaiser Permanente hospital in San Francisco at age 54, honored on the California Legislature floor the previous month. Full queries and raw responses in receipts.json.
2. San Francisco Planning Department, Landmarks Listed in Article 10 of the Planning Code, DataSF 97yj-54sx, queried August 28, 2026: 370 rows, 327 distinct landmarks (by landmarkno); by distinct landmark and first recorded year: 20 in the 1960s, 84 in the 1970s, 88 in the 1980s, 23 in the 1990s, 37 in the 2000s, 27 in the 2010s, 47 from 2020 through August 2026 (1 in 2020, 6 in 2021, 12 in 2022, 4 in 2023, 9 in 2024, 1 in 2025, 14 in 2026). No year from 1982 through 2025 reached 14; only 1981 (25), 1977 (17), 1970 (16) and 1975 (15) exceed 2026’s total so far, and 1980 also recorded 14. One distinct landmark has no recorded year and is excluded from the decade counts. 2. San Francisco Board of Supervisors / Planning Department, Article 10 Landmark Designation Ordinance No. 60-26 and Landmark Designation Fact Sheet for the Bob Ross House (Planning Dept Record Docket No. 2025-010443DES, File No. 260151), plus a Clerk of the Board memo dated May 15, 2026 confirming all 14 April 21, 2026 designations (File Nos. 260151–260164, Ordinance Nos. 60-26 through 73-26, enacted April 30, 2026), downloaded via the designationdocument link on the dataset’s own record for landmark 322 and read with pdftotext, August 28, 2026. 3. Wikipedia, “Bob Ross (publisher),” fetched August 28, 2026, cross-checked against note 2 only, not used as a primary source for any figure. 4. San Francisco Planning Department, Historic Preservation FAQs (sfplanning.org), fetched August 28, 2026: Article 10 of the Planning Code, establishing the city’s landmarks process, was adopted in 1967. Full queries and raw responses in receipts.json.
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