With new proposals having been submitted to the City for roughly the same number of units that finished construction in the fourth quarter of 2016, the overall pipeline of apartments and condos under development in San Francisco has slipped by a hundred: from a record 63,700 in the third quarter to 63,600 at the end of the year.
While that’s still 1,100 more units in the pipeline than at the same time last year, the quarter-over-quarter slip of 100 is compared to an increase of 3,500 in the fourth quarter of last year. The year-over-year gain is the smallest since the fourth quarter of 2014. And as we reported in December, newly proposed development in San Francisco has dropped to a four-year low.
In terms of the state of the current pipeline, there are now 6,200 units of housing under construction across the city which should be ready for occupancy within the next year or two. And there are 13,300 net-new units of housing for which building permits have either been issued, approved or requested, and another 30,700 units in projects that have already been approved but not yet permitted (which includes the majority of the 10,500 units by Candlestick, 7,800 units on Treasure Island and 5,680 units at Parkmerced, projects which have overall timelines measured in decades, not years).
And with proposals for another 13,430 units of housing under review by the City’s Planning Department, which is the fewest since the second quarter of 2015 and trending down, San Francisco’s Housing Pipeline now totals 63,600, including 9,000 new “affordable” units which are to be offered at below market rates, according to our accounting of Planning’s database.
At the same time, sales of new construction condos on the market in San Francisco were down 25 percent last year, at least one index suggests that new condo prices have dropped over 12 percent from peak, and rents in the city are down 8 percent.