The San Francisco Housing Authority is a local public housing authority for the

City and County of San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

that was established in 1938 after the Housing Act of 1937 was enacted by the U.S. Federal Government. The agency is responsible for the management of

public housing Public housing is a form of housing tenure in which the property is usually owned by a government authority, either central or local. Although the common goal of public housing is to provide affordable housing, the details, terminology, de ...

and Section 8 vouchers for primarily low-income housing. While the agency is based in and has jurisdiction over San Francisco, it is operated independent of the city's government and is chartered by the state government of

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

History

The agency was established in 1938, a year after the federal Housing Act of 1937, in order to build and run public housing developments in San Francisco. Due to lobbying from local residents, the agency primarily built its public housing buildings in low-income neighborhoods. For example, proposed public housing in the city's Richmond District was protested, with residents claiming they wished to keep their neighborhood a "first-class residential district, rather than a ‘slum housing project.’". By 2012, the San Francisco Housing Authority was considered a "troubled" agency by HUD, the federal agency that oversees local housing authorities, with a backlog of deferred maintenance on its properties. In 2013, Mayor Ed Lee pushed to reorganize the failing agency. Among the measures adopted was to enter all of the 29 of the Authority's public housing buildings into the

Rental Assistance Demonstration The Rental Assistance Demonstration is a federal housing program that was enacted as part of the Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act, 2012, and is administered by thU.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development(HUD). Broadly, the ...

program, which would privatize the buildings by transferring their management to non-profit housing organizations In 2018, the Authority came under scrutiny for discovering that it had a $29.5 million shortfall in its budget due to poor accounting practices. The agency plans to bridge the budget gap with the help of the federal HUD agency and with financial assistance from the San Francisco government. Due to the agency's failures in accounting and administration, HUD sent a letter in March 2019 ordering the Authority to cede the administration of its programs either to the federal government or to the municipal government of San Francisco. The agency was ultimately taken over by the municipal government, and after spending two years restructuring the agency's operations and finances, was able to receive concurrence from HUD that its finances were in better shape.

References

{{US housing by state Government of San Francisco 1938 establishments in California Public housing in California