SF's Affordable Housing Fight Stalls Trans Residents

The email arrived in Jasmine Martinez's inbox on a Tuesday afternoon in October, formatted in the clinical language of corporate real estate: her rent was increasing by $400 a month, effective January 1st. Martinez, a trans woman who works part-time at a nonprofit in the Mission, had been in her two-bedroom apartment for six years. The increase would consume nearly a third of her monthly income. She is not alone. Across San Francisco, trans residents—particularly trans people of color—face displacement at rates that outpace their cisgender counterparts, according to data compiled by the San Francisco Transgender Resilience Project. Yet a supervisorial ordinance that could have provided additional protections for residents in Martinez's position has stalled in committee for nearly eight months, caught in the kind of bureaucratic gridlock that transforms good intentions into eviction notices. The ordinance, introduced by a supervisor focused on tenant protections, would have expanded the definition of "just cause" eviction to include provisions preventing landlords from raising rents beyond a certain threshold for vulnerable populations—a category that would explicitly include trans tenants. Under current San Francisco law, landlords can raise rent at will on month-to-month tenancies, provided they give proper notice. For trans residents who often lack access to stable employment and face discrimination in both hiring and housing, this creates a precarious existence. "When you're trans and you lose your housing, you don't just lose an apartment," Martinez said, speaking in her living room while organizing documents related to her eviction fight. "You lose your stability. You lose your ability to access healthcare. You lose your community. For a lot of trans women I know, homelessness means survival sex work. It's not abstract." She has lived in San Francisco for fourteen years and has watched the city transform around her—watched neighborhoods where she once knew dozens of trans people get gentrified into invisibility. The ordinance's stall reflects a broader pattern in San Francisco politics: good policy proposals get tangled in committee review, supervisor negotiations, and competing priorities, while the people most affected by inaction continue to experience concrete harm. The measure was first introduced in February. It's now December, and it hasn't advanced past the initial supervisorial committee. When contacted about the delay, a spokesman for the supervisor's office attributed the hold-up to "ongoing conversations with stakeholders, including the San Francisco Apartment Association and community organizations, to ensure the ordinance reflects input from all sides." Translation: landlord lobbying is working. The Apartment Association has consistently opposed tenant protection expansions, arguing they create market distortions and reduce housing supply. There is no evidence this argument is true. Cities from New York to Berlin have implemented strong tenant protections without seeing the housing collapse landlords predict. But in San Francisco, where the real estate industry wields significant political power, the conversation moves slowly. Meanwhile, trans residents move faster—out of the city, usually to cheaper regions or back to families who may or may not accept them. The housing crisis has a particular cruelty for trans people: it doesn't just displace you; it displaces you from the communities and support networks that make survival possible. Martinez has been searching for a new apartment for three months. She's looked at studios in the Tenderloin, in the outer Sunset, in neighborhoods that require forty-five-minute commutes to her job. Everything is either unaffordable or unavailable. She's considered moving to Oakland, or further inland. She hasn't told her extended family yet—her mother still doesn't know she's trans—so she can't ask for help with a deposit. The supervisor's office claims the ordinance will be reviewed in committee in January. January is two months away. Martinez's rent increase takes effect in six weeks. She will likely have to move or find roommates, or she will have to leave San Francisco entirely. This is how local politics fails: not with dramatic votes or public scandal, but with delays and stakeholder conversations and committee schedules that don't align with the speed of human need. The ordinance, if passed, wouldn't solve San Francisco's housing crisis. It wouldn't make rent affordable. But it would provide a small protection for people with the fewest resources to fight back against displacement. It would say, officially, that trans residents matter enough to protect. That the city sees them. Meanwhile, the real estate industry sends representatives to supervisorial offices and the conversations continue. Martinez updates her resume and calls landlords who won't call her back. The gap between San Francisco's progressive rhetoric and its actual policy on housing has always been wide. For trans residents, it's the distance between staying and leaving, between community and isolation, between the city they've built a life in and the city that's pricing them out. The ordinance will probably pass eventually. These things usually do, after enough delay and enough modifications that the original intent gets softened. By then, the people who needed protection most will have already left.