San Francisco has an affordable #housing crisis; few people would disagree. Voters weighed on how the city should handle that crisis when they approved Proposition K in 2020. This historic ballot measure was meant to pave the way for local government to "own, develop, construct, acquire, or rehabilitate" 10,000 new low-rent social housing units. Historically, the federal government has a long track record of undertaking public housing in the United States. 

Advocates for Proposition K have stated that the federal government has largely failed in that role by defunding public housing programs. They said that passing the proposition was necessary to circumvent racist articles in the California Constitution requiring voters to approve the development of affordable housing. The municipal authority that is created, they say, will offer a financially-sustainable model for providing affordable housing for people within a broad range of incomes.

Critics of Proposition K said that it had nothing to do with reducing rents or creating more affordable housing units. It was simply a way for the city government to gain more control by adding a new city housing bureaucracy and shifting money away from the nonprofit housing sector. They believed that the newly created Mayor's Office of Housing and Community Development lacked property management expertise and would divert funds away from the construction to pay for administrators' salaries. 

The question up for debate: Should the city of San Francisco have been given the authorization to create and operate 10,000 affordable housing units?