Homeownership in San Francisco – “Hope Springs Eternal”
Why San Francisco Has the Lowest Homeownership Rate — And How the HOPE Program Could Change It
• • • • • • • • • • March 2026 • • • • • • • • • •
Hope is a word often used in political discourse, yet its power lies in its promise of constructive change. For everyday residents of San Francisco, hope means access to opportunity — and few opportunities are more foundational than homeownership.
The American Dream and Homeownership
The American Dream has long been defined by owning a home: building equity, creating security, a better life for our children, and investing in the future. According to HUD, over 75% of renters aspire to home ownership. Yet San Francisco’s homeownership rate remains among the lowest in the nation at approximately 32%.
San Francisco’s Housing Crisis: The Disappearing Middle Class
As one of our tabloids recently reported, San Francisco has become a place for the richest of the rich and the poorest of the poor. Shut out are the many people who make the City great—average, ordinary working people with nondescript jobs. City Hall has had an ongoing war against the middle class for years. Because of the high cost of housing and an anti-family attitude, many of these hardworking people have had to choose between continuing to live in the City they love and their desire for economic and emotional security as homeowners. As a result, we are losing our blue-collar community, and the backbone of this marvelous City is weakened.
The HOPE Proposal: Origins and Intent
To combat City Hall’s war against the middle class, in 2002, I introduced a legislative package to the Board of Supervisors, the Home Ownership Program for Everyone (HOPE).
HOPE was introduced to provide a voluntary pathway for tenants to purchase their rental units as condominiums. Under the proposal, property owners and a set percentage of tenants could mutually agree to subdivide and sell units directly to existing renters.
The Board declined to pass the legislation, instead responding with a barrage of controls that increased rent subsidies, imposed new building requirements, and restricted land use, thereby strengthening its voter base and preventing tenants from moving up the economic ladder.
Subsequently, a citizen’s group called “Renters for Homeownership” began circulating a petition to place HOPE, or Proposition R, on the November 2002 ballot. I want to take this opportunity to explain the merits of the HOPE proposal, as I believe it has at least as much relevance today as it did in 2002.
How HOPE Works: A Voluntary Solution
If a multi-unit-building owner and a pre-set percentage of tenants in that building voluntarily agree, the property owner would be allowed to sell their individual rental units to the current tenants, who would be able to buy their apartments as individually deeded properties (aka condominiums).
Participation would be voluntary, and tenants who chose not to purchase would retain full rent ordinance protections.
Tenants who did not wish to buy or were unable to purchase their units would be granted leases providing them with the same protections they currently enjoy under the Rent Ordinance. HOPE is voluntary for both landlords and tenants, and both must agree on the price.
The HOPE proposal, if in effect today, would provide a harmonious and positive solution to the age-old battle between tenants and property owners in San Francisco. It would offer tenants not only a genuine opportunity for affordable homeownership, but also an opportunity to accumulate equity and join the middle class by acquiring a “piece of the rock” so to speak. At the same time, apartment owners, who today are extremely burdened by punitive rent control laws, would get a chance to subdivide their buildings and sell a portion of those buildings as condominium units, thereby adding value to their assets, or the opportunity to use their equity for other investments.
Expanding homeownership could strengthen neighborhoods, increase civic engagement, stabilize communities, and broaden the City’s tax base without raising tax rates.
Between 2023 and 2025, rental units sold at an average of approximately $340,000, compared to an average condominium price of $1.3 million. HOPE aimed to narrow that gap and make ownership attainable for working families.
HOPE was a win-win-win measure that is certainly worth revisiting. Tenants win a new, affordable means of homeownership, property owners gain a new means of investing, and the City benefits from a higher quality of life resulting from more rooted, concerned homeowners.”
Benefits for Tenants and Landlords
The HOPE proposal, if enacted today, would provide a harmonious, positive solution to the age-old battle between tenants and property owners in San Francisco. It would offer tenants not only a genuine opportunity for affordable homeownership, but also the chance to build equity and join the middle class by acquiring a “piece of the rock,” so to speak.
At the same time, apartment owners, who are today extremely burdened by punitive rent control laws, would have the opportunity to subdivide their buildings and sell a portion as condominium units, thereby adding value to their assets, or to use their equity for other investments.
Under HOPE, tenants would have the option of exchanging the security of a rent-controlled apartment for the far superior security of homeownership. HOPE would eventually transform the voter demographic by replacing current renters with homeowners with a far greater stake and commitment to the community.
Political Barriers and the Battle Over HOPE
For obvious reasons, this would have far-reaching effects on the electoral landscape of San Francisco (not to mention introduce reality to the far-left anti-property zealots that dominate our political establishment today).
Keeping voters impoverished is a strategy to maintain political control over ever-increasing civic budgets, with funds often granted to politically connected associates of the politicians who vote for the grants. It could be considered money laundering.
Not surprisingly, “tenant advocacy” nonprofits are the most vociferous opponents of home ownership for tenants, which would increase security and financial opportunity for the tenants whose interests they supposedly protect. They are actually fighting to protect their own funding and raison d'être. But actual tenants would like nothing better than to become homeowners!
Research has repeatedly shown that homeownership is the most important priority for tenants. This is true in San Francisco, where 350,000 tenants live in 220,000 households. San Francisco&rsqu;s 32% homeownership rate, comparesto 69% in Phoenix, 67% in Atlanta, 52% in San Diego, and 52% in Seattle. Nationwide, the homeownership rate is 68 %. San Francisco has the lowest homeownership rate of any city in the country!
Immigrants, minorities, and those at the lower end of the economic scale are especially hurt by the City’s restrictive subdivision laws, which make homeownership near impossible for lower and middle-income working families. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, homeownership is the primary way people accumulate wealth. Homeowner households have an average household wealth of 42 times that of the average tenant household, and the principal source of that wealth is homeownership equity!
HOPE subdivisions would prevent evictions, as non-buying tenants would obtain legal, enforceable leases. Similar programs have been successful for many years in New York, Washington DC, and other cities. Why not in San Francisco?
The Broader Impact: Community, Economy, and Quality of Life
HOPE is as eminently workable for tenants today as it was in 2002. They would be able to take advantage of a variety of affordable, low-down-payment mortgage options offered by various government agencies and private institutions for first-time homeowners.
Since the value of an apartment as a rental unit is so much less than its value as a condominium, the renter could buy it, under HOPE, at a greatly discounted price from its market condo value, but would still be much greater than its value as a rental unit, providing an incentive for landlords to sell to their tenants. The underlying principle is that only when the existing tenant is allowed to purchase the unit they are now renting and the owner wishes to sell it, will the price be substantially lower than the market price the unit would sell for if it were a condo in the open market.
The average price of all 5,685 rental units sold in San Francisco between 2023 and 2025 was around $340,000. The average condominium price was $1.3 million. Even if the average sale price for each HOPE unit is just $500,000, which is less than half the median price of SF condominiums today, both landlords and tenants would benefit and have good reason to cooperate for mutual gain.
Why would an owner want to sell a unit to a tenant at a below-market price? Prop R provided property owners with greater flexibility in their investments than they currently have under draconian rent-control laws. Since it is a totally voluntary proposal, they do not have to sell.
For the tenant, the reality is that, in most cases, the mortgage under HOPE would be lower than the rent they are currently paying.
As a result of HOPE, the quality of Life in San Francisco would greatly increase. Consider the following:
Safer Streets: When renters become owners, they gain a powerful incentive to keep their neighborhoods clean and their streets safe. Homelessness, litter, graffiti, and drug dealing destroy neighborhoods. Homeowners have a stake in getting involved.
Better Schools: San Francisco has the lowest percentage of eligible children enrolled in its public schools among California cities. When families buy homes and put down roots in San Francisco, they take on a powerful incentive to work for better schools for their children.
Lower Taxes: Homeowners and property owners shoulder the burden of City property taxes. Tenants don’t pay property taxes. When tenants become homeowners, they reap not only the financial benefits of property ownership, but they also share in the responsibility of paying property taxes that fund vital City services. By creating more taxpayers, the burden per homeowner is reduced. The City would gain a larger tax base and much higher property tax revenue without increasing tax rates.
Working people from diverse backgrounds built San Francisco. Unless we can provide housing opportunities for the next generation without new taxes or increased bureaucracy, we would be ignoring a large part of our heritage that makes us what we are.
Middle-income working families and other members of the aspiring middle class, as well as service communities like teachers, firefighters, waiters, carpenters, shop owners, and, indeed, our own children who grew up in the City, are now forced to leave the City to find homes they can afford to own.
Many of the single men and women who have chosen to make San Francisco their permanent home will spend their last years in a retirement or assisted living facility. The profit from the sale of a home in the City can mean the difference between a quality facility and a marginal one. HOPE is the last opportunity for those who can afford a $200,000 condo mortgage but not a $750,000 single-family home.
Lessons from the Past and the Path Forward
HOPE was a win-win-win measure that is certainly worth revisiting. Tenants win a new, affordable means of homeownership, property owners gain a new means of investing, and the City benefits from a higher quality of life resulting from more rooted, concerned homeowners.
Now, for you political aficionados who ask why the HOPE initiative did not pass in 2002, despite over 24,000 signatures and some $580,000 in support. The answer is very simple, yet obscured in the political mire and deception that are so uniquely San Francisco. I mistakenly and unknowingly trusted the execution of that campaign to the very same people who were running Newsom’s Care Not Cash campaign.
We all know now what a colossal failure the Care not Cash program is, as it has resulted in over 2.5 billion dollars being spent annually out of our general fund to provide services for the same number of homeless people that we were providing aid to in 2004 at a cost, then, of only 200 million! The homeless industrial complex has become a financial juggernaut around the country, with zero accountability and dismal results – a money-pit which funds all kinds of contractors, consultants and any number of political campaigns.
Unbeknownst to proponents at the time, the treasurer for both campaigns diverted the majority of the money raised for HOPE into the Care Not Cash program. (This is the same person who incidentally filed an anonymous and bogus ethics charge against me, causing the City to waste a million dollars investigating me and then dismissing the case because their star witness committed perjury and falsified evidence!).
What a Town, what an experience, and what a loss for San Francisco! Fortunately, the truth always comes out, and in the case of HOPE, it wasn’t the anti-private property poverty pimps or tenant activists that killed the measure, as the tenants could easily see that they had so much to gain. It was undermined by those who placed a competing measure on the ballot, designed for political expediency in their quest for higher office, over the common good of all San Francisco residents.
Revisiting HOPE for San Francisco
Now that we have had the benefit of time to review and relive our past mistakes, we must re-examine a program like HOPE. There is so much to gain by its implementation. As I said at the beginning of this article, Hope is a fascinating word. In my particular experience, trust and naiveté may have been my folly in the political arena, but hope is what keeps you alive.
All the best for the upcoming Holidays!
Tony Hall is a former Supervisor for the City and County of San Francisco. He has held executive and administrative positions in seven City departments across all three branches, with 35 years of experience. His columns regularly appear in the Epoch Times and can be accessed at:
Tony Hall ARCHIVES - WordPress.com
March 2026
