Acquisition & Rehab of SROs & Hotels

The featured image depicts residents at 937 Clay Street, the first large SRO acquisition financed by the Housing Accelerator Fund. Learn more about how residents worked with Chinatown CDC and HAF to acquire 937 Clay in this blog post (featured image by Ling Woo Liu / San Francisco Foundation).

Challenge

Many of the city’s most vulnerable residents – seniors, immigrants, people with disabilities – are currently living in Single Room Occupancy (SRO) and studio apartments within large buildings and residential hotels. These small, older apartments serve as the last line of defense for extremely low-income San Franciscans facing eviction, displacement, and homelessness. While SROs held no market appeal for decades, San Francisco’s acute housing pressures have now put SROs increasingly at risk of speculative purchases and conversion to market-rate housing. We cannot afford to lose this critical housing stock, since homelessness is a very likely alternative for most SRO residents.

Solution

HAF partners with community-based organizations that have years of experience successfully operating large residential buildings serving low-income residents. Our flexible model allows us to closely collaborate with these CBOs to acquire and rehabilitate large, dense properties, so they can permanently serve their communities as critically needed affordable homes.  While traditionally more complicated to finance, we use a combination of different types of public, private, and philanthropic capital to preserve these projects.

Impact

By providing financing for SROs and apartments in SF’s large buildings, we have helped to keep hundreds of residents in their affordable homes, including seniors, immigrants, and people living with disabilities.