(a) The economic and social disparities associated with homeownership access and housing instability in San Francisco are well-established and well-documented, as reflected in the Planning Department’s General Plan demographic data on persons experiencing homelessness, rent burdens, evictions, and exposure to environmental pollutants, and low homeownership rates.
(b) The history of disparate access to homeownership in San Francisco generally mirrors that of the United States. Discriminatory practices of limiting access to wealth accumulation through home purchasing have greatly contributed to wealth gaps. These practices were sustained primarily through residential redlining and restrictive covenants.
(c) Residential redlining refers to the discriminatory real estate practices of public and private institutions that identified non-white communities as financially high-risk areas of investment, leading to the withholding of financial services necessary to acquire real estate in communities of color. Racially restrictive covenants were included in property deeds to restrict the racial composition of potential homebuyers. These practices were pervasive and longstanding in San Francisco as well as other areas of the country.
(d) The Planning Department’s 2023 General Plan, in Objective 2.B, identifies access to homeownership for communities that have been harmed through targeted economic disruption, displacement, and manufactured barriers to accumulating intergenerational wealth.
(e) This ordinance intends to provide down payment assistance to communities that have been harmed through targeted economic disruption, displacement, and manufactured barriers to accumulating intergenerational wealth so that San Francisco can address multigenerational inequities in access to homeownership and to narrow and ultimately close homeownership wealth gaps.
(Added by Ord. 56-24, File No. 230864, App. 3/22/2024, Eff. 4/22/2024, Oper. 5/22/2024)