Spring 2021 Issue - 63

DANIEL SIMONS AND JONAS WEBER

Modular housing is on the way for San Francisco's unhoused residents.
to seven years or even longer from site acquisibion
to move-in, with total development costs (excluding land acquisition) ranging from $500,000 to
$740,000 per unit. On the recommendation of a
mayoral working group, the city in 2017 launched a
public/private partnership called the San Francisco
Housing Accelerator Fund (HAF) to more efficiently
develop affordable housing. HAF operates as an
independent nonprofit organization committed to
reducing project costs and speeding up the preservation and production of affordable homes in
partnership with the public sector. Funds from the
city, philanthropic organizations, and financial institutions are central to its efforts.
When one such local philanthropic antipoverty
organization, Tipping Point Community, reached out
to HAF to create a new model for building housing
for homeless families, the idea of Tahanan Supportive Housing emerged.
Tipping Point secured a $50 million commitment
to back the effort, enabling HAF to purchase a parking lot from a private owner in October 2018, thus
avoiding the often lengthy process of developing on a
publicly owned site. An amendment to the city planning code, passed just after the site was purchased,
rezoned the property to make 100 percent affordable

The building,
scheduled to open
in August, will
supply 145 new
apartments for
formerly homeless
adults.

DAV I D B A K E R A R C H I T E C T S

DAV I D B A K E R A R C H I T E C T S

This August, if things go as planned, 145
new apartments for formerly homeless adults will
open in San Francisco, one of the country's most
expensive housing markets.
Tahanan Supportive Housing, located in San Francisco's South of Market (SoMa) neighborhood at 833
Bryant Street, will be opening only three years after
initial acquisition of the site. The project not only had
a compressed timeline, but also aggressive budget
goals. The solution was found in an innovative combination of philanthropic funding, new regulatory
streamlining, and modular construction.
While modular construction has long lurked at
the edges of real estate development with the tantalizing promise of a time- and cost-efficient housing
solution, Tahanan has made it clear that simply
accelerating construction is not sufficient to achieve
the ambitious goal of solving California's homelessness crisis. Drawn-out bureaucratic processes and
rigid financing structures also need to change (or be
circumvented) in order to realize the full advantage
of modular construction's speed and efficiency.
According to a recent report from the Terner
Center for Housing Innovation at the University of
California, Berkeley, building affordable multifamily housing in San Francisco typically can take five

SPRING 2021

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U R B A N LA N D

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3/30/21 2:20 PM
Spring 2021 Issue

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Spring 2021 Issue
