March 2024: Vote Yes on Proposition C to Revitalize Downtown
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Dense, thriving cities where people live close to their work, schools, shops and other amenities are an essential way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and ensure a sustainable and equitable future for our planet. Prop C is a significant step in the right direction to help achieve that vision.
San Francisco’s downtown, the once bustling hub of our City, has become a ghost town since the pandemic, due to the shift to work from home and the outsize reliance on offices in the downtown mix. Prop C is part of an effort to revitalize our downtown and address our housing shortage by incentivizing the conversion of vacant office buildings to housing. Doing so could help our downtown to rebound, make it more diversified and thus resilient to such shocks in the future, and create more badly needed housing.
Prop C will temporarily eliminate the transfer tax on buildings when they are converted from office uses to housing, thus making it more attractive for building owners to make such conversions. This elimination of the tax will sunset by 2030, allowing the restoration of transfer tax revenue after conditions in downtown begin to improve.
In addition to eliminating the transfer tax for office-to-housing conversions, Prop C will
Allow the Board of Supervisors the ability to reduce or otherwise change the transfer tax without voter approval, but not to increase it (as that would violate the state’s Prop 13 measure).
Allow the City to adjust how much office development is allowed, to compensate for office space lost by such conversions.
SFLCV urges you to vote Yes on C.