May 26, 2016 Tim Colen

SFHAC’s 2016 Housing Index: A Snapshot of the Housing Outlook

The SFHAC’s development and construction members have watched and tried to make sense of the many bewildering current features of the City’s housing market. This includes stratospheric construction costs, boggling land prices, housing demand that may or may not be cooling and big political changes in the City’s land use policies, like the upcoming Prop C. What do they all mean for the future production of housing? Given these factors, are the folks who build housing becoming bearish about the market or, like most developers, are they innately bullish?

We thought it would be useful to start a members-only survey of our developers and contractors to gage the confidence they have about current business conditions. We received enthusiastic feedback from our members, but what does it show?

Perhaps an overall theme is that the survey’s respondents are generally okay with the market and don’t expect too many changes. Is that confidence in the market itself or just a same-old, same-old attitude?

The SF Housing Action Coalition plans to repeat this survey twice a year, spring and fall. Before then, we’ll work on refining the specificity of the questions. As always, we’d welcome our member’s feedback on how to improve this survey.

Here are some of the most revealing results:

Tim Colen

Tim is a Senior Advisor to SFHAC and the former Executive Director. His passions, in no particular order, include urban environmental issues, politics and baseball. A really cool future job would be comparative studies of cities around the world. He can be reached at tim@sfhac.org.

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