Fee reductions alone haven't translated into a meaningful wave of new housing permits or groundbreakings. And if you're a fiscal conservative who believed this was the silver bullet, it's worth asking an uncomfortable question: what else is broken?
The answer, of course, is everything else. Developer fees are just one line item in a sprawling cost structure that includes byzantine permitting timelines, discretionary review processes that let anyone with a grudge delay a project for years, labor costs inflated by the very housing crisis we're trying to solve, and environmental review requirements that treat a six-story apartment building like a proposed uranium mine. Cutting fees while leaving the rest of this bureaucratic jungle intact is like giving someone a coupon for running shoes and then asking them to sprint through quicksand.
As one local put it bluntly: "The cost of living in SF continues to skyrocket. Nothing involving manual labor can function sustainably under these conditions and things are starting to crack under the pressure. We need to build housing."
They're right. Construction workers need to live somewhere too, and when "somewhere" costs $3,000 a month for a studio, your labor costs go vertical before you've poured the foundation.
Here's the uncomfortable truth for City Hall: fee cuts were the easy part. They let politicians claim they were "pro-housing" without touching the real structural barriers — the ones that involve stripping power from entrenched neighborhood groups, streamlining approvals, and telling the planning department that a 24-month permitting timeline is not, in fact, acceptable.
We're not against fee reductions. Lower costs for builders are good. But San Francisco's housing crisis isn't a fee problem. It's a permission problem. Until the city gets serious about letting people build — quickly, predictably, and without a Kafkaesque obstacle course — no amount of fee-cutting will move the needle.
The market is ready to build housing. The city just needs to get out of the way.
