The clock is ticking. San Francisco was already under pressure to meet a state mandated goal to accommodate 82,000 new housing units by 2031. The screw was tightened Oct. 25 when the state set a deadline of 30 days for the city to streamline its building policies. That deadline passed on Saturday.  

The California Department of Housing and Community Development is expected to issue a warning letter to the city at any time. Upon receipt, the city has 30 days to comply with the state’s requirements or else it will move to decertify San Francisco’s permitting policy outlined in its Housing Element and install its own processes.

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.