After repeated warnings that went unheeded, CalHDF is taking San Francisco to court. Here’s why we had no choice.
Yesterday, the California Housing Defense Fund, alongside our partners Californians for Homeownership and YIMBY Law, filed a lawsuit against San Francisco. This wasn’t a decision we made lightly. For over a year, we and other housing advocates have raised concerns about the city’s housing plan through letters, public comments, and meetings with city officials. At every turn, the City has rebuffed us.
Now we’re taking our fight to court because San Francisco’s failure to honor its housing commitments doesn’t just break the law—it perpetuates a crisis that’s displacing families and strangling our region’s future.
San Francisco Made a Promise, Then Broke It
In 2022, San Francisco adopted a housing plan that made a groundbreaking commitment. The city didn’t just promise to zone enough land to theoretically accommodate housing. It went further, pledging to create a rezoning program that would actually produce more than 36,000 new homes by 2031, using a sophisticated analytical model to ensure the plan would work in the real world.
This was exactly the kind of honest, accountable planning California needs. For once, a city was acknowledging that just allowing housing on paper isn’t enough—we need to create conditions where housing will actually get built.
But when it came time to deliver, San Francisco failed spectacularly.
The city’s so-called “Family Zoning Plan” doesn’t come close to meeting this commitment. The City’s own models show that the rezoning will produce less than half the housing the city promised. That’s not a rounding error—it’s a wholesale abandonment of the city’s legal obligations.
A Scheme to Evade State Housing Protections
San Francisco’s failure doesn’t stop there. The city has also created a local program designed to circumvent California’s State Density Bonus Law, one of the most important tools we have for building affordable housing.
Here’s what you need to know: California’s Density Bonus Law has been a lifeline for housing production, especially in San Francisco. When developers include affordable units in their projects, state law requires cities to allow additional density and grants crucial protections that help projects navigate San Francisco’s notoriously hostile approval process. The state housing agency, HCD, has confirmed that this law is “critical” for getting housing built in San Francisco.
San Francisco’s response? Create a local program that forces developers to forfeit those state law protections or lose access to the rezoning’s promised capacity.
This is illegal, plain and simple. California law is clear: local bonus programs must be stacked on top of state protections, not offered as replacements. Cities cannot create “alternative” programs that undermine state housing law. HCD has told other cities exactly this when they’ve tried similar schemes.
But San Francisco thought it could get away with it anyway.
Why We’re Suing
This lawsuit has been a long time coming. What we’re seeing from San Francisco here is nothing new. San Francisco and its nominally progressive politicians like to claim it’s doing enough while families continue to be priced out, while teachers and nurses face impossible commutes, while the housing crisis deepens year after year.
CalHDF will not let this continue. Every day this inadequate plan remains in place is another day that housing that should be getting built isn’t. Every month that passes makes the crisis worse.
There’s an even bigger issue at stake: accountability. If San Francisco can make binding commitments in its state-approved housing plan, then simply ignore those commitments without consequence, it sets a catastrophic precedent. Every city in California will know they can promise housing to get state approval, then deliver far less once the cameras are off.
We refuse to let that happen.
What We’re Demanding
Our lawsuit asks the court to do what San Francisco should have done from the start: follow the law.
We’re demanding that San Francisco go back and create a rezoning that actually delivers on its promise of 36,000 units. We’re demanding that the city produce the analytical model it committed to using, and prove that its plan works. We’re demanding that San Francisco remove the illegal provisions that force developers to choose between state protections and the local rezoning.
We’re also demanding that the city eliminate the new constraints it added to the rezoning—requirements that make housing harder and more expensive to build, in direct violation of the city’s housing element commitments.
The Path Forward
We warned San Francisco about these problems repeatedly. The city ignored every warning. Now it’s up to the courts to enforce what the law requires and what San Francisco promised. We’re confident in our case because the law is on our side, because the facts are on our side, and because the housing crisis demands that we hold cities accountable.
We didn’t want this fight. But San Francisco left us no choice.