San Francisco has only agreed to build 16 homes so far this year

City authorities permitted the construction of only 16 housing units in San Francisco, one of the most expensive markets in the country, in 2024 as of June—a far cry from what demand would require and what Mayor London Breed has promised.

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Preliminary 2024 data from the States of the Cities Data Systems (SOCDS) Building Permits Database shows that the total housing unit building permits for San Francisco between January and now was 16, split between seven single-family homes, six 2-unit and multi-family homes and three 3- and 4-unit multi-family homes. Among all types of units, six permits were given in January, one in February, seven in March and two in April.

Joseph Politano, an independent writer at Apricitas Economics who first shared the data on X, commented on the data saying that “it’d be hilarious if it weren’t such a nightmare.” Newsweek contacted Politano for comment by direct message on X on Tuesday morning.

The data will be subject to revision throughout the rest of the year and might change, but as they are now, they present quite a bleak picture for San Francisco.

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Home prices have been spiraling upward in San Francisco since the Great Recession of 2008-2009 followed the bursting of the U.S. housing bubble, making buying a home in the City by the Bay unaffordable for many. While home prices in the city dropped during the U.S. housing market correction of late summer 2022 and spring 2023, a chronic shortage of homes has kept them from totally plummeting.

As of April, according to the latest Redfin data, the median sale price of a home in San Francisco was $1,400,000, up 3.7 percent compared to a year earlier. It was considerably higher than the national median sale price, which in April was $432,903, up 6.1 percent year-over-year, according to Redfin.

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Last June, Breed introduced legislation boosting the building of new homes in the city by cutting fees and removing laborious requirements for conditional use permits and mandatory public hearings, among other moves. The legislation was designed to help the city meet the state-mandated goal of building 82,000 homes by 2031 to meet the serious need for housing in the city.

But in 2023, the city issued permits for the building of only 1,823 new units, according to the data from San Francisco Planning Department mentioned by the San Francisco Standard. That was about 1,000 short of the units authorized the year before, for a total of 2,701 in 2022.

The number of total new units completed in 2023 was slightly higher, at 1,983, down from 2,893 a year earlier.

In an update in April, Breed didn’t provide concrete details about how many housing units have been authorized in the city, but said that she was “proud to say that over the last year, we’ve started to move San Francisco in the right direction on housing.”

The mayor admitted that “we are not where we need to be, and there is much more work to be done,” adding that her administration continues “to encounter obstruction and delay as we push these solutions forward, but we have made progress. We will continue to make progress.”

Newsweek contacted Breed’s office and the San Francisco Planning Department for comment by email on Tuesday morning.

But the slow pace at which the city has approved new housing units permits this year doesn’t mean that it won’t pick up later in the year. In an article published in April, the SF Standard highlighted how in 2023, the city had approved only 12 units in the first two months of the year—but the number spiked later in the year.

Time will tell whether something similar will happen again this year.