San Francisco mayor declares rent emergency amid AI housing frenzy - The Business Times

[SAN FRANCISCO] Mayor Daniel Lurie of San Francisco on Thursday (Sep 10) declared a rent emergency and proposed several actions to combat evictions as residents face a deepening housing crisis amid the artificial intelligence boom.

Lurie’s emergency declaration will not allow him to bypass laws and regulations the way a disaster declaration might. But Lurie told The New York Times that it was a way to focus city leaders’ attention on the matter, similar to how he declared a fentanyl emergency on his first day in office in 2025.

Lurie said that he will throw his support behind several legislative actions that forestall evictions by an extra month, limit the size of allowable rent increases and increase funding for nonprofit lawyers working on eviction cases. He said in an interview that San Francisco cannot thrive without lower-earning residents.

“There are too many people who are asking if they can still afford to live here,” he added. “Our city is finally moving in the right direction, but we need to build a recovery that reaches everyone, including the working-class people who make San Francisco run.”

Lurie, an heir to the Levi Strauss clothing fortune, was elected two years ago on a promise to clean up a city that had been walloped by open-air fentanyl markets, car break-ins and burglaries. He has been credited with bringing vibrancy and optimism back to San Francisco.

But the renewal has coincided with a huge injection of tech wealth, and rents are spiking more than anywhere else in the country, according to the mayor’s office. In the past year alone, the median rent has soared more than 25 per cent, and an average one-bedroom unit now tops more than US$4,000 per month.

San Francisco has long had high housing costs, but the current atmosphere has been unusually difficult for residents to navigate. The housing frenzy has become so extreme that some landlords and apartment owners have offered tens of thousands of dollars to encourage long-time residents to leave their rent-controlled apartments.

Landlords have initiated more than 2,400 evictions since January, according to the Eviction Defense Collaborative, a tenants rights group, putting the city on pace to see more renters cast out this year than during any year in the past decade.

Lurie, a moderate Democrat, has strong ties to the city’s business community and to tech titans, some of whom vouched for his turnaround efforts last year when President Donald Trump considered sending federal agents to the city. But he has fewer ties with progressives and activists in the city who have raised alarms that the housing crisis could drive out lower- and middle-class residents for good.

That same worry has gripped large cities around the country, and some have responded in more dramatic fashion than others.

In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani this year froze rents for one million residents in rent-stabilised apartments. Santa Fe, New Mexico, last year became the first city in the country to factor in rent prices when calculating its local minimum wage. Last month, Seattle banned rental “junk fees”, such as extra charges for pets or package deliveries, requiring one upfront price instead.

The most direct way for cities to rein in housing prices, though, is to build a lot more housing, said Alex Horowitz, who studies housing policy for the Pew Charitable Trusts. Cities such as Minneapolis; Nashville, Tennessee; and Austin, Texas, that have made it easier and cheaper to build more units have kept rents down, he said.

San Francisco, however, has not. Decades of resistance to new housing has finally given way to some changes in zoning and permitting laws, but only 489 housing units have been built in the entire city so far this year.

“There are cities that have tried to regulate their way out of the problem,” Horowitz said. “None of those cities have seen big affordability improvements.”

Oz Erickson, a local developer and a member of the San Francisco Apartment Association board of directors, disputed that there was a rent emergency in the city. He said that San Francisco’s rents were only climbing fast now because they fell so far in the early part of the pandemic. He felt that the cost of building one unit of affordable housing, which he pegged at US$1.1 million, was the real crisis.

Lurie argues that both more construction and more rent regulations are needed. He has teamed up with elected members of the Board of Supervisors on legislation related to rent.

Currently, landlords can evict tenants for any nonpayment of rent, but a new proposal from supervisor Jackie Fielder would prevent evictions until tenants fall behind more than one month.

Fielder, who represents the city’s Mission District, said the rent crisis was important to her politically, as well as personally. She said in an interview that she pays US$2,200 for a studio and recently received a notice from her landlord that she needed to move out by July so that the landlord’s family can move in.

She makes about US$180,000 as a supervisor, but said she still found apartment hunting in the city “insane”. The pickings are either total scams or apartments that are out of her price range, she added. “We haven’t seen this in a long time,” Fielder noted. “And it’s scary.” NYTIMES

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