Mayors Matt Mahan of San Jose, London Breed of San Francisco and Jesse Arreguin of Berkeley appear together in support of placing a Regional Housing Measure on the Nov. 2024 ballot, Thursday, June 20, 2024, in San Francisco, Calif. This November, Bay Area voters could decide on an unprecedented bond measure to raise up to $20 billion for as many as 90,000 desperately needed affordable homes across the nine-county region.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed and Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguín were also at the event, held at an affordable housing complex near the Chase Center arena in San Francisco’s Mission Bay neighborhood. The bond would be funded by a new tax on businesses and homes. For a $20 billion bond, the tax would come to $19 per $100,000, or about $190 a year for a home with an assessed value of $1 million.by 2031, a roughly 15% increase in the region’s total housing stock. More than half of the new homes must be affordable to low- and middle-income residents.
Some mayors also pointed to the shrinking role the federal government has played in subsidizing affordable housing in recent decades as a reason the measure is needed. If approved, a $20 billion bond measure would allocate $4 billion to creating a regional fund to finance affordable projects. The rest would be split among the Bay Area’s nine counties and five of its largest cities to determine how to boost affordable housing.