San Francisco Social Housing: A Brief History

San Francisco like many US cities is faced with a severe housing shortage amidst a widespread conviction that market forces alone cannot solve. This article traces the history of public support for housing in the City, starting with the Earthquake Cabins that were built by the thousand after the 1906 Earthquake and Fire; the first projects under the New Deal; the disastrous legacies of Urban Freeways and Urban Renewal; and the more recent efforts to reconstruct the most distressed public housing in the City. San Francisco has some of the nation’s most celebrated non-profit housing developers and a storied collection of infill projects that have aimed to integrate low-income families and individuals into existing neighborhoods.

Thousands of Earthquake Cottages were built to house the homeless in the aftermath of the 1906 Earthquake and Fire, one of the first examples of a very basic form of public housing in San Francisco.

Holly Courts, Bernal Heights, 1940. One of the earliest public housing projects in San Francisco, designed by Arthur Brown Jr as a result of the 1937 Housing Act, part of the New Deal.

Potrero Hill, 1943, one of the largest New Deal housing projects, built to house war workers for the Hunters Point Naval Shipyards and subsequently turned into public housing. The design segregated the largely Black residents in the urban form by rupturing with the traditional street and block pattern as well as creating a social stigma of being different from the rest of the City.

Sunnydale, San Francisco. One of the City’s most distressed public housing projects in the process of being rebuilt as a mixed-income neighborhood with a combination of public, affordable and market rate housing.

Compared with cities such as Vienna, San Francisco and San Jose are woefully behind in their provision of affordable housing.

Establishing a California Social Housing Authority is being explored as a way to address the State’s severe housing shortage.