Barcelona Has Created San Francisco's Affordable Housing Solution

Please read this article in Bloomberg about Barcelona and how landlords are being reprimanded for keeping rental homes vacant. It's a fantastic strategy: San Francisco's affordable housing problem has extended over a very long eight years since the tech industry flooded into our city and residents were given notice, a great number of those due to illegal evictions by landlords using the Ellis Act as bait/switch. With two thirds of the city's residents being tenants, the number of evictions rocketed and landlords bumped up rental prices that only the wealthy could afford. This ultimately led to the groundbreaking, first city ever adoption of Proposition F (free legal representation for all tenants) being passed in 2018 because the eviction epidemic required stabilizing.

Even though Prop F has been a relief booster for tenants, by the time the proposition came into effect, it was too late. The number of homeless in San Francisco hit the stratosphere in 2013 and continued to rise year on year. With the flood of tenants now leaving our great City by the Bay for cheaper homes, due to shelter in place validating working from home can mean any geographical location, empty apartments are adorning our 7 miles x 7 miles region and property prices have plummeted over 15% in the past month alone. It's a renters market once again.

Landlords are obviously waiting for shelter in place to lift, jack up rental rates and wait for the demand flood to inject our city...yet this time, it may not happen or so fast. Barcelona, on the other hand, has taken the helm providing a pressure cooker solution:

"This week, the city’s housing department wrote to 14 companies that collectively own 194 empty apartments, warning that if they haven’t found a tenant within the next month, the city could take possession of these properties, with compensation at half their market value. These units would then be rented out by the city as public housing to lower-income tenants, while the companies in question could also face possible fines of between €90,000 and €900,000 ($103,000 and $1,003,000), according to Spanish news outlets."

It'd be a wonderful plan if San Francisco follows this Spanish city's rule of thumb. People that were evicted years ago tried to source affordable housing yet this became a massive problem, because affordable housing was given the back seat to luxury condos being built at record speed. Therefore, there just hasn't been enough affordable homes for residents and it's certainly resulted in a thorn in the city's side for nearly a decade. This time though, no one's being evicted thanks to 2020 laws stopping residents from being evicted if they're unable to pay rent due to Covid-19. This blog post is focusing solely on residents that are packing up from their own free will so apartments are sitting ducks, waiting to be occupied once again.

If our leaders could adopt Barcelona's blueprint and put pressure on landlords to rent empty apartments or face being converted into affordable homes, the number of homeless could easily drop by 15% within a month. Please share this blog post and @ tag your district supervisor, along with the @sfbos. The more we spread the word, the greater the chance that this tremendous problem of affordable housing is fixed and diversity leaps in abundance, once again. Please rise above the noise and help create more affordable homes with this incredibly simple yet effective innovation that Barcelona cooked up.