SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Federal housing officials approved a preference plan that advocates said Thursday will help low-income minorities stay in increasingly unaffordable San Francisco.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development will allow San Francisco to set aside 40 percent of affordable units at a new senior complex for low-income applicants who live in certain districts. The agency informed the city of its decision on Wednesday.
San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee and other city officials had sought permission to reserve 40 percent of the units for people in the neighborhood where the new complex is located, but HUD officials rejected the plan as limiting equal access to housing in violation of fair housing law.
The rejection disheartened city leaders struggling to keep San Francisco affordable for residents, especially for dwindling numbers of African Americans who have left historically black neighborhoods for lower-cost suburbs.
In 1970, there were 100,000 African Americans in San Francisco. There are fewer than half that today even as the population has increased.
The new plan gives preference to low-income people living in five rapidly gentrifying districts, including the Mission and Western Addition, where the new senior complex is located. The Western Addition once housed a thriving black community called the “Harlem of the West” before it was destroyed by redevelopment starting in the 1950s.