Seven months after San Francisco's biggest rezoning in a generation took effect, the pipeline it was meant to fill holds seven projects and fewer than 40 housing units — and the Planning Commission has cancelled its next two hearings for lack of business.

Mayor Daniel Lurie's Family Zoning Plan — rebranded "Housing Choice San Francisco" by the Planning Department — took effect Jan. 12, unlocking height and density across the western and northern neighborhoods that spent decades resisting it. It is the city's central tool for meeting a state mandate to plan for roughly 36,000 homes by 2031. But the early returns, first tallied by the San Francisco Chronicle, suggest the mandate and the market are moving at very different speeds: builders are filing a trickle of small infill projects, not the corridor towers the plan envisioned.

The plan's public face so far is a single svelte tower. Last week the Planning Commission approved eight condos in an eight-story sliver at 230 Anza St., replacing a boarded-up duplex on a Richmond District block of two- and three-story homes. Commission President Amy Campbell called it a "poster child" for the rezoning. Neighbors called it jarring and incompatible.

"The Richmond is getting height. The Sunset is getting height. We put it off for years. Every other district has had to house San Franciscans. … Now it's our turn," Commissioner Sean McGarry said at the hearing, according to the Chronicle.

The trouble is how little is behind it. Since the rules took effect on Jan. 12, the Chronicle reported, just seven projects have been submitted under the new zoning — the Anza Street building, a pair of nine-unit buildings near Twin Peaks, and a handful of others — adding up to fewer than 40 units. For a plan sold as the answer to San Francisco's housing drought, that is closer to a rounding error than a wave.

The city's own calendar tells the same story. The Planning Commission cancelled its hearings scheduled for Aug. 13 and Aug. 20, according to the department's public agenda listings — two consecutive meetings with too little to decide.

None of this is a surprise to the people who wrote the plan, who spent more than three years building it through community meetings, a Planning Commission vote, and Board of Supervisors amendments before Lurie signed it in December. The rezoning was designed to steer growth onto transit and commercial corridors — six- to eight-story buildings on streets like Geary, California and Van Ness, nine stories and up at the busiest intersections — while quietly stripping density caps off the residential blocks in between. What it can't do is make the numbers work. Construction costs, interest rates and soft condo demand decide whether a project "pencils," and right now most don't.

That gap between zoning capacity and actual construction is the throughline of San Francisco's housing story. The city is on pace to approve well under 100 new units of housing citywide this year, and the developments that are moving — the 562-home redevelopment of the Outer Richmond Safeway, large affordable projects in the eastern neighborhoods — largely predate Family Zoning or run on other tracks. Rezoning a corridor grants permission; it does not summon a builder.

For the western neighborhoods, the political significance may outrun the unit count. For the first time, the Richmond and the Sunset are legally on the hook to grow, and the Anza Street tower is proof the door is open. Whether anyone walks through it in volume depends less on the Planning Commission than on the spreadsheets — and, eventually, on whether the city is willing to admit that permission alone has never been enough to build housing here.